C4FCM Blog

Last weekend, Cynthia and I drove up to San Francisco where I spoke about "Learning From and About Fandom" at Azkatraz, a Harry Potter fan convention. The key note speaker at this year's event was Andrew Slack of the HP Alliance. Slack is a thoughtful young activist whose work is exploring the intersection between politics and popular culture.

Anyone who's worked in the software industry is familiar with "the legacy problem" -- the fact that it's often easier to build something new from scratch than it is to overhaul and extend an existing system.

Our director Chris Csikszentmihályi recently described for the Washington Post what he calls "click-through activism", the propensity of people online, especially youth, to feel they are contributing to a cause simply by writing a tweet or adding their name to a Facebook cause page.

In some ways, [Csikszentmihályi] says, the ease of the medium "reminds me of dispensations the Catholic Church used to give." Worst-case scenario: If people feel they are doing good just by joining something -- or clicking on one of those become a fan of Audi and the company will offset your carbon emissions campaigns, "to what extent are you removing just enough pressure that they're not going to carry on the spark" in real life?

I was curious how click-through activism affects a national group whose organizing is done almost entirely online. So I approached Matthew Zachary---founder and CEO of I'm Too Young for This!, an online community and non-profit for young adult cancer survivors---for his thoughts.

One of the little gems that the Knight Foundation introduced at the Future of News and Civic Media conference last week was to award five grand to the best collaborative projects created at the conference. We thought it might be a tall order, what with everything else the attendees were doing, but boy did they ever respond.

Attendees pitched 19 brand-new projects, and three of them--TweetBill, Hacks and Hackers, and the WordPress Distributed Translation Plugin--won cold hard cash to develop the ideas further. And the creators can thank their fellow attendees, because everyone used Mako Hill's preferential voting tool Selectricity to vote on the spot.

About the winning projects...

"The pictures told the story of all of them, from different planets, representing different ethics, united by a common bond - the galactic Co-operation."

"Once you find your place in the galactic Co-operation - and I assure you that it is an important place - your fighting will stop. Why should you fight, which is an unnatural occupation, when you can push?"

"Specialist," Robert Sheckley

We've had to remain largely mum on the Future of News and Civic Media Conference, just held this week here at MIT--such is the reality of a popular-but-invitation-only conference and one whose big news, the announcement of the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners, was embargoed until the last minute.

The lucky and talented Knight News Challenge winners have joined us here at MIT this week to explore “The Future of News and Civic Media.” As they arrive, I am preparing to depart. This farewell post for C4FCM is inspired especially by them and by four experiences here this spring:

Via Mitch Resnick and others...

Scratch Day is a worldwide network of gatherings, where people will come together to meet other Scratchers, share projects and experiences, and learn more about Scratch.

Over the past few years, a great deal of effort has been invested by traditional news organizations in making their websites look and feel more "social."

"Now" meaning as of three minutes ago on Wednesday, May 13, 2009. This is pretty remarkable.