Rick Borovoy's new project Lost in Boston, community-sponsored improvements to signage around town, got its first dose of media love last night.
Local CBS affiliate WBZ and reporter Karen Anderson featured Lost in Boston in their November 19 broadcast. Video is available http://wbztv.com/video/?id=83492 (though not embeddable).
New Signs To Help Get You Around Boston
Karen Anderson
BOSTON (WBZ) ―
We all know getting around Boston isn't easy.
Whether it's the confusing signs, a one way street, and lack of a grid system, it's tough to navigate.
It's especially tough if you're not familiar with the area, and are searching for the cities cultural and historical treasures.
But instead of turning to the government to help, now some MIT researchers are working with neighborhoods as part of a project called "Lost in Boston." The idea is for neighborhoods to design signs to direct people to gems in their area, but to put these signs on private property so they don't have to deal with the bureaucratic red tape of the city.
Rick Borovoy, a researcher at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media came to Boston 15 years ago, "And news flash, it wasn't the most user friendly place." He says he didn't like that people accepted that part of the city's charm is that it's tough to get around.
Ken Edelstein, media columnist for Mother Nature Network, spoke to our Matt Hockenberry this week, both of them trying to figure out what the future of information holds for kids growing up today. Edelstein wrote his column from the point of view of his own newborn son:
That’s kind of like something a man from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told Daddy. Matthew Hockenberry is a visiting scientist as the Center for Future Civic Media there. He says everybody’s going to end up being both an information source and an information consumer.
“So where is your son going to get information from? My sense is that he is going to have to be a more collaborative partner in creating, disseminating and shaping information and news than we have been up until now. He's going to feel like the sharing of information and the redistribution is a natural part of his existence. He'll get his information from colleagues and friends physically present and virtually available. He'll be not just a more involved consumer, but an equal partner in the creation and absorption of media. The only part I'm pretty unclear on is what the medium will look like through which he participates in this process.”
The bottom line question for me is what kind of homework Mommy and Daddy will make me do when I get older.
This Thursday: C4FCM featured at MIT Communications Forum
LostInBoston.org unveiled
Rick's Startup Whiteboard, Ep. 3
In the News: Sourcemap
Welcoming new fellow: Jeff Warren
Want C4FCM news as it happens? Follow us on Twitter (@c4fcm) and provide feedback on our projects at civic.mit.edu. This Thursday: C4FCM Featured at MIT Communications Forum
MIT Center for Future Civic Media Director Chris Csikszentmihalyi presents the Center's most recent projects. Our researchers will demonstrate their projects in a lightning-round format, with time for discussion and questions following each presentation--from community mapping to news tracking, from collective action to rural empowerment, from cultural mixing to carbon consciousness.
Rick Borovoy, Visiting Scientist at the MIT Media Lab and the Center for Future Civic Media, proudly unveiled the first Lost in Boston sign last week.
It's about helping Bostonians work together to make their neighborhoods more visitor-friendly. Community groups are partnering with local businesses and institutions to design signs that call out the key spots in their area. Signs are placed on private land.
LostInBoston.org is a collaboration between the Urban Arts Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. To get involved, contact info[at]lostinboston.org.
Rick's Startup Whiteboard Ep. 3
Rick Borovoy has also been busy with a series of how-to videos on launching a civic media product:
Everyone knows that creating a startup involves a carefully-ordered sequence of steps -- eg, don't start selling your product until you have a product (actually, that's surprisingly easy to screw up). However, there's a guiding principle about designing the right sequence that doesn't get talked about enough. You need to think about designing your "Validation Trajectory".
Sourcemap is "a collective tool for transparency and sustainability": it maps the sources of all the stuff that ends up in consumer goods and helps calculate those goods' total carbon footprints. And it's potential has people talking. The BBC reports that businesses in Scotland are piloting the program:
Several businesses have already volunteered to get involved.
They include Connage Farm Dairy in Ardersier, Cairngorm Brewery, The Lovat Hotel in Fort Augustus, the Spa Soap Company in Strathpeffer, Plexus Media in Cromarty along with Forres-based Tuminds, Macbeaths Butchers and Open Brolly.
The Lovat said it already offered price reductions to guests who travel to the hotel by public transport, walking or cycling.
Sourcemap developer Leo Bonnani told the BBC that Scotland was an ideal testing ground, because local really means local. "Local sourcing in the US might mean 1,000 miles while here in the Highlands people are hesitant to get something from out with Scotland."
Welcoming new fellow: Jeff Warren
We'd also like to welcome new fellow Jeff Warren from the Media Lab's Design Ecology group.
Jeff is developing an exciting set of mobile mapping tools called Cartagen. Cartagen, using Geographic Style Sheets, can help people map dynamic data--in turn helping augment everything from air polution data to disaster response.
You can see Cartagen in action at Newsflow, a dynamic, real-time map of news reporting that Warren developed along with David Small.
Happy November!
Andrew Whitacre Communications Manager Comparative Media Studies & Center for Future Civic Media Massachusetts Institute of Technology (617) 324-0490 awhit@mit.edu
MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) is seeking a talented web application developer with experience working for educational audiences or developing games.
The STEP lab does research and development of new technologies for education, primarily educational games and simulations. Currently, the lab is developing the next generation of mobile educational games, called Ubiquitous Games. These games can be played on any computer with an AJAX compliant web browser, but are designed to be played on mobile devices with webkit browsers (i.e. Android, iPhone, etc). Currently, there is one prototype game built on the UbiqGames platform, and development is slated to begin shortly on four more games.
STEP is seeking a web application developer capable of working within the very general structure defined by the prototype game to develop the four new games. The games will likely be built on an existing Ruby on Rails framework. The programmer will work on a close-knit team with game designers and a project manager. This person will have the opportunity to, and should be excited to make substantial contribution to the overall design of the project/games. If you want only to take perfectly detailed specs and translate them to code, this job is not the right fit.
Required Experience/Characteristics Include:
coding database driven web applications
data modeling and implementation, preferably in MySQL
Object Oriented programming of some flavor
user interface design
excitement about educating students, particularly in science
experience with either educational product development or game development
development of the system architecture for web applications
good sense of humor
enthusiasm for innovative projects at the intersection of games, learning, and technology
The position is full time for 1.5 years. Salary $50-60K/year depending on experience.
Interested candidates should submit letter and resume to tep-jobs@mit.edu with "UbiqBio Programmer" in the subject line.
Sourcemap is "a collective tool for transparency and sustainability," but really the name says it all: it maps the sources of all the stuff that ends up in consumer goods and helps calculate those goods' total carbon footprints.
Despite being an early beta, Sourcemap's potential has people talking. The BBC reports that businesses in Scotland are piloting the program:
Several businesses have already volunteered to get involved.
They include Connage Farm Dairy in Ardersier, Cairngorm Brewery, The Lovat Hotel in Fort Augustus, the Spa Soap Company in Strathpeffer, Plexus Media in Cromarty along with Forres-based Tuminds, Macbeaths Butchers and Open Brolly.
The Lovat said it already offered price reductions to guests who travel to the hotel by public transport, walking or cycling.
Sourcemap developer Leo Bonnani told the BBC that Scotland was an ideal testing ground, because local really means local. "Local sourcing in the US might mean 1,000 miles while here in the Highlands people are hesitant to get something from out with Scotland."
Meanwhile, Kirstin Butler writes at Worldchanging that "the increased accessibility of online mapping tools and wiki-style collaborations have changed the cartography of consumption." She points out that though Sourcemap users could benefit from some coding experience, "product maps will look familiar to anyone who has called up a set of road trip directions."
“There’s a big difference between looking down at a device and reading, ‘Stand in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, face north, now turn to the right . . .’ and looking at the real world through a screen that augments reality by simply overlaying information on top of it."
Eric Klopfer (at left), developer of two C4FCM-funded projects Timelab 2100 and NOT::Boston spoke earlier this month with the Boston Globe about how to improve on reality, mainly through iPhones and phones running Google's Android operating system.
Lots of companies and researchers are working on so-called augmented reality, most commonly pitched to the public as a way of overlaying data on digital maps---think of being a tourist in Rome and being able to see an overlay of now-lost buildings.
But Klopfer pointed out to the Globe that augmented reality's potential has been accelerating lately into other uses:
"Over the last three months we seem to have reached the threshold of what was recently out of reach [. . .] We’re on the cusp of a whole new era in augmented reality." In fact, Ramesh Raskar of the Media Lab's Camera Culture group has been developing Bokode, a barcode-like method of making information available to anyone with a camera. If that camera is happens to be networked--as mobile phone cameras are--anyone could get tons more information about the object they happen to be standing in front of, whether it's a painting in a gallery, a person at a conference, or a house in a historical part of town.
Director Chris Csikszentmihályi spoke with the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Washington Post earlier this month about using the web for activism---and its both radically great and oddly superficial potential for effecting change.
Csikszentmihályi was featured as an expert in the Plain Dealer's blog post about lax Ohio drilling laws, where "natural gas companies drill wells 100 feet from homes." He leads the Center's ExtrACT project, which uses web-based and mobile tools to help landowners organize themselves against predatory drilling companies. From the article:
[Ohio] urges residents approached by gas companies to contact a lawyer, research drillers and check safety records. That's tough, since the state does not keep track of complaints or violations, and the technical jargon is difficult for most people to understand. So, the accountability group is working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create an online database that tracks citizens' experiences with the drilling industry.
That way, homeowners can compare promises and payouts, which depend on contracts and wells' productivity.
"Many, many people who have signed a lease often feel they didn't know enough about it at the outset," said Chris Csikszentmihályi, who is working on the [ExtrACT] project at MIT. "There's an information imbalance. . . . If you're an oil and gas company, you know exactly how much everyone in the neighborhood is settling for."
Meanwhile, Csikszentmihályi coined the phrase "click-through activism" to describe, for the Washington Post, those participants in an online cause "who might excitedly flit into an online group and then flutter away to something else."
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?
The Post asks how a Facebook group is supposed to overcome such short attention spans, ones where status messages switch in less than a week from mourning Neda to Farah Fawcett to Michael Jackson. "A better scenario for Internet activism, Csikszentmihályi says, would be if causes could break down their needs into discrete tasks, and then farm those tasks out to qualified and willing individuals connected by the power of the Internet." Which is exactly what Csikszentmihályi does for groups at the Center for Future Civic Media.
Well that was a heck of a month!We hosted, with your invaluable support, the Future of News and Civic Media conference along with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. And just in time for this here newsletter, videos from the conference's extraordinary plenaries are now available:
And a brilliant on-the-spot event: a $5,000 contest to see who could pitch the best brand-new collaborative civic media project. Definitely be sure to check out the pitches and the winners.
Thanks to everyone who made the conference such a great success.
Staff changes
It's a bummer to make it official, but we lose Henry Jenkins as one of our Principle Investigators, as Henry and his lovely wife Cynthia head west for their new life and work at the University of Southern California. We wish them the best of luck--and better than the best of luck to their moving company, which has to move Henry's ... let's see ... carry the 7 ... eleventy tons of books.
Henry, everyone wishes you all the success you have coming to you over the horizon.
Happy July to all, and to those in the know, happy Canada Day!
Good news for citizen journalists, and kudos to our News Challenge buddy Dan Pacheco. Snip...
“We’re excited to take what’s worked in Bakersfield and see how it plays out elsewhere,” said Dan Pacheco, Printcasting’s founder and Senior Product Manager at The Californian. The project has received interest by people in almost every continent, and especially from newspapers.
“We’ve known for some time that local readers and advertisers respond well to printed content as long as it speaks to their unique interests. This started with citizen-journalism pioneer The Bakersfield Voice in 2004, and was then proven with Bakotopia.com, which provides content for the ad-supported Bakotopia Magazine.”
MediaNews Group, which also has its own experiments with “Individuated News,” will be using Printcasting initially as an engine for its own staff to create niche magazines that use content from MediaNews Group writers, supplemented with content from local bloggers. “By using Printcasting, it’s easier and less expensive to create new magazines and see how they resonate with an audience before investing more time and money,” said Peter Vandevanter, MediaNews Group’s Vice President of Targeted Products.
MIAMI — Nine projects that use crowdsourcing, mobile technology and digital investigative journalism to bring news and information to communities in new ways have been named winners of the 2009 Knight News Challenge.
“The future of news is being tested, strengthened and advanced everyday by News Challenge experiments and the innovators behind them,” said Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation president and CEO.
The winners make up the third round of the five-year, $25 million News Challenge, an international contest to fund digital news experiments that transform community life.
The largest winner is DocumentCloud, a project conceived by journalists from The New York Times and ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. DocumentCloud will create an online database managed as an independent nonprofit where the media, watchdog groups and the public can find, share and analyze source documents.
Among other winning ideas:
Helping citizens around the world use cell phones to report and distribute news, using the wisdom of the crowd to accelerate investigative reporting and enhance breaking news reports;
Developing a mobile media toolkit where media organizations and citizen journalists worldwide can easily download mobile applications to create and broadcast local news;
Launching a digital space where the public can report errors in media reports and track the ensuing dialogue and possible results.
This year the Knight News Challenge is funding $5.1 million in news projects, including investments in 17 winners from 2007 and 2008 who continue to receive funding.
The winning projects were announced at the Future of News and Civic Media Conference at MIT in Boston. More than 45 past and present Knight News Challenge winners attended and participated in BarCamp workshops to help spur more news experiments and collaborative projects.
Several ongoing Knight News Challenge projects are about to launch their open-source software – including Everyblock.com and VillageSoup.com – and are working with media outlets considering adopting them for widespread use.
“With now more than 45 projects launched, Knight News Challenge winners aren’t just individuals with a prize, but a community of innovators working together on improving news and information for communities around the world,” said Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation journalism program director.
The Knight News Challenge will accept applications again beginning Sept. 1.
MIT Center for Future Civic Media
MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) is seeking a talented web application developer with experience working for educational audiences or developing games.
