Liveblog by @schock with help from two anonymous people on the etherpad. In this talk, Christine Gaspar, ED of the Center for Urban Pedagogy, provides an overview of their methodology, pedagogy, products, and project areas, drawing on key examples in areas including food, sanitation, telecommunications, education, policing, housing, development, participatory budgeting, and more. All errors: ours!

On Monday, November 19th, former NSA official William Binney gave a talk hosted by MIT's CIS Group, entitled The government is profiling you. The talk was cosponsored by the ACLU and attended by about 65 people. Binney talked about the history of social network analysis as used by government, military, and intelligence agencies, the NSA electronic surveillance systems he helped to build, the expansion of US surveillance systems to include warrantless domestic monitoring of US citizens; his own whistleblowing efforts around the Stellar Wind program and the resultant intimidation he and his family faced, and the need for people to organize, speak up, and hold Congress, the Executive, the military, the NSA, and other organs of the State accountable. Binney was joined by Carol Rose from the ACLU, who described the current state of law, key cases, and key policy initatives. I liveblogged the talk via a public etherpad, and bear full responsibility for all errors or omissions. - @schock.

Henry Jenkins gave the closing keynote at the International Communications Association Latin American Conference in Santiago de Chile two weeks ago. His talk was titled "From Participatory Culture to Participatory Politics by Way of Participatory Learning." This post contains live notes by @schock w/additional links by "mariel." If you'd like to see Jenkins speak IRL, he'll be in town this weekend for Futures of Entertainment 6.

What is participation?

Jenkins wants to take us on a trajectory of thinking about what we mean by participation. It's a term he's used throughout his career, but also has been shifting in its cultural and academic resonance over time. He'll link participatory politics, culture, and learning.

#ows

Last week was the first meeting of CMS.360/860: Introduction to Civic Media. This is the second time I'm teaching the course, this year with Becky Hurwitz on board as TA. We've been revising the syllabus, based on a combination of feedback from last year's students, a massive sticky-note brainstorm by the incoming class, new developments in the field, the wisdom of crowds, and whimsy. You can take a look at the syllabus here: http://bit.ly/introcivicmedia2012.

On Friday, Becky Hurwitz, Paolo Rogerio, and I had the opportunity to conduct mobile media-making workshops with two community based organizations (CBOs) that form part of Boston's large and vibrant Brazilian community. The first workshop was with staff from the Brazilian Immigrant Center (here's their new Vojo group), and the second was with about 20 members of the Vida Verde Co-Op (here's the Vida Verde Vojo group). It was an exciting moment, since these were the first real workshops to use the VoJo hosted mobile blogging platform in a community setting. This post provides a little bit of background about VoJo, then reflects on the two workshops and the lessons learned.

tl;dr: vojo.co is live! F2F workshops rock. People <3 mobile blogging via voice calls and MMS. Group creation and customization works nicely; new users are easily able to post and create accounts directly from phones. But: we need printed how-to materials; in big f2f workshops, we need to demo each feature before switching to hands-on; changing your username is still fairly difficult; calling in stories needs simpler UX; we have to make SMS broadcast to groups work.

Over at my Networked Social Movements: Media & Mobilization class, we've been discussing different approaches to understanding social movement outcomes. Thinking more carefully about movement outcomes helps us get beyond simplistic debates about the role of particular tools or tactics. In my own work, drawing from social movement theory, I find Suzanne Stagennborg's framework of mobilization, policy, and cultural outcomes useful.

Mobilization outcomes have to do with the scale of participation in a specific action - how many people turned out to your event, or took the action you requested.

Policy outcomes seem self explanatory - was there a concrete policy that the movement was able to pass (or block)? However, it gets complex when you start to look at how small shifts in policy language can come as the result of movement activity, even when it's not an entire bill.

Gabi has done a nice job summarizing last week's blog posts from the networked social movements seminar, which this week was focused on collective identity processes. Cross posting for the civic media crowd (or read the original post here):

The People's Mic: Dancing Between Collective and Personal Identities? - Amy

This is a crosspost from the Networked Social Movements course blog, where Vic has written an excellent summary of student posts about resource mobilization theory:

My name is Vic and the following is a brief overview of the posts for the week of Feb 20th: (Classical Theories), Resource Mobilization, Political Process. The most salient themes emerged loud and clear with many of the blog posts exploring both media exposure and the perception of social movements as "dumb angry mobs."

Resource Mobilization Theory - Huansun