From the community

This is a project of the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), part of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Dayna Cunningham is Executive Director.

Black civic engagement: there is very little independent black press, no networks among black policy thinkers, and even fewer links between them and local community organizations. The black church have come under attack. What are the venues now for developing and disseminating a distinct black voice in politics and the larger society? Why does it matter?

The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) provides legal assistance, education, and resources for individuals and organizations involved in online and citizen media. The CMLP also provides research and advocacy on free speech, newsgathering, intellectual property, and other legal issues related to online speech.

The CMLP is jointly affiliated with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a research center founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development, and the Center for Citizen Media, an initiative to enhance and expand grassroots media.

The CMLP seeks to build a community of lawyers, academics, journalists, and others who are interested in facilitating citizen participation in online media and in protecting the legal rights of those engaged in speech on the Internet.

For more information, please visit our website at http://www.citmedialaw.org/.

Our Mission: “To provide access to collaborative tools for educational discovery and communication about the real world impact of product supply chains.”

Without knowing the socially responsible impact of purchasing a product, we’re all still shopping in the dark.

Together we are modeling how specific companies perform on a variety of socially responsible interests. Buy It Like You Mean It helps students and volunteers cooperate to review and rate the real world effects of industry supply chains. We provide these ratings, free of charge, to help shoppers decide which products support their own unique values. Our users will soon be able to find a chocolate product scores through text messaging.

Many Eyes is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. Our goal is to "democratize" visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis. Jump right to our visualizations now, take a tour, or read on for a leisurely explanation of the project.

Crossroads Charlotte provides opportunities for organizations, institutions and individuals to examine four plausible possible futures for the Charlotte community and then to take action to steer the community towards positive aspects of those futures.

A new "best practice" web-based IT and communication tool for complex disaster management

Corridor Recovery is a collaberative new media response to the Flood of 2008 in Cedar Rapids. As the flood surge reached its peak on June 13, 2008, a former McKinsey consultant (Christian Fong) was called to the Linn County Emergency Operations Center to design a volunteer management system for 5000+ local volunteers.

Populous Project is an open-source newspaper platform that aims to give college and small town newspapers the tools they need to survive in a web 2.0 environment. The project consists of three parts; a content management system that includes audio, photo, video and text, a "digital newsroom" to allow editors and staffers to communicate with each other through mobile and online technologies and the "community news network" that will allow the community members to connect personally with their news in meaningful ways. The platform will allow community members to also publish content to the site, and is funded by the Knight News Challenge.

In a project funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service, students (and others) are invited to put nodes and links on a graphical map of Boston's organizations, issues, and people. This map becomes a resource for research, volunteering, recruitment, and activism. It will also be accessible via Facebook and MySpace applications.

Kings Cross Environment is a suite of simple blog-based civic websites run by volunteers in a deprived area of North London. We have a team of about six writers and 20 or so contributors. We use the blogs as information and campaigning platforms in an area overlooked by trad. media. The sites have coalesced social action by better information sharing and acting as a rallying point. Two examples: a campaign against Network Rail extracted £1million for the community, A campaign using youtube video against Cemex the world's biggest concrete company forced them to capitulate and change their operations.

DOTCOM is a program for media-savvy and civically-engaged youth, designed to offer training and opportunities for young people to create socially conscious media that will impact communities across the U.S. and the Caucasus. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, and supported