What is Civic Media?

Civic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting.

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Featured Project from the Center

Backchan.nl

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What is it?
backchan.nl is tool for involving audiences in presentations by letting them suggest questions and vote on each other's questions. backchan.nl is intended for conference or event organizers who want a new way to solicit questions from the audience and make better use of question and answer time.

How might communities use it?
While people attend presentations, panels, and lectures to learn something from the people at the front of the room, there's a lot of potential for creating spaces where audience members can interact with each other and the people presenting. This project focuses on augmenting the physical space of the auditorium to provide a venue for the audience to ask (and filter) questions for presenters. This approach also makes it easy to engage audience-members who might not be in the auditorium, but who are participating on the web, in an overflow space, or in an environment like Second Life.

At what stage of development is it?
backchan.nl has been used at many events including Futures of Entertainment 3, ROFLCON 2008, Free Culture 2008, Mixed Realities Symposium. It is still being developed and can be activated for specific events by request.

Project team: 
Drew Harry

Featured Community Project

Citizen Media Law Project

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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/.

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