Recent news from the Center for Civic Media

Why InterTwinkles

Submitted by cfd on April 9, 2013 - 11:38am

I've been working on online tools for consensus for the last 2 years. Here's what motivates me to work on this.

1. The water heater

For my first five years in Boston, I lived in a housing co-op in Dorchester. It's a classic Boston triple-decker, which the 13 residents own collectively. That means that we didn't have a landlord, but we were in charge of the mortgage, maintenance, utilities, and everything else. The house operated by consensus, and all decisions happened at weekly house meetings.

At one point, one of the three water heaters that serviced the house died, which left our main kitchen without any hot water. One of the residents (a well meaning, competent, and all around good person) took on the task of fixing this, and called up a plumber for an emergency job. The plumber charged us the emergency rate; almost $2000 to install a new water heater, very similar to this model here, which rings in at $358 at Home Depot:

How to make phone services fast and easy to design

Submitted by rodrigodavies on April 8, 2013 - 1:24pm

We've reached the alpha stage of the design interface of Call to Action, a platform that will allow community groups to design and host phone-based services. I wrote last year about why enabling community groups and individuals to design these services is important, and about the New Day New Standard project that inspired us to build Call to Action.

Right now Call to Action is a front-end design tool that allows you to visualize a voice tree via a drag and drop interface. I'd love you all to play around with it and tell us how we can improve it.

81 Ways Humanitarian Aid has Become Participatory

Submitted by mstem on April 8, 2013 - 11:53am

My Media Lab Master's thesis argues that information and communication technologies, and particularly the web, have expanded the range of ways the public can help in times of crisis, even (or especially) if we're nowhere near said crisis. Or, to be more formal about it, participatory aid is mutual, peer-to-peer aid mediated or powered by information and communication technology. We're building a platform to help coordinate participatory aid projects, but first, I wanted to share some examples.

Organizing the Internet to Protect the Open Internet #NCMR13

Submitted by mstem on April 5, 2013 - 5:03pm

Future of the Internet panel

Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, introduces the topic. The SOPA protest was the biggest online protest we've seen. Millions of people participated and made a real impact. For organizers who have been fighting on open internet issues, it was exciting to see so many people take action and recognize that the internet is something you have to proactively protect, or else the openess that you know and love and maybe didn't think about before could go away.

An alphabet soup of bills and meetings have followed in SOPA's wake (CISPA, ECPA, CFAA, WCIT and FISA). We've had to learn what they mean and figure out how to leverage this newly engaged network to beat back the bad bills and support the good bills and educate the public on why the open internet is so important.

Panelists:

Exploring Video Advocacy, Impact and Social Change

Submitted by cheekay5 on April 4, 2013 - 9:06pm

[Cross-posted from v4c.org]

Over the past few months, the video4change network has been busy starting the 'video4change Impact Research'. Through this research, we are looking to come up with a preliminary set of impact indicators by conducting a literature review, and interviewing video4change network members on how they assess the impact of their work.

At the end of this of this prelimary research, we expect to have the following results and output:

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