From our Center

Lost in Boston is a general-purpose web tool that cities can use to get citizens involved in civic improvement projects.

How might communities use it?
Citizens can submit their ideas for the most poorly marked intersections in Boston. Their submissions can contain photographs, video, and other supporting media. Citizens vote on what intersections are in most need of attention. They contribute suggestions for improving the signage at intersections in the form of drawings, etc. and can vote on those suggestions as well. Sponsors sign on to pay for improving the intersections voted most in need, in exchange for placement on signs and/or on the web, and using sponsor funds, the city, perhaps in partnership with other groups, fabricates the new signs and puts them in place.

At what stage of development is it?
Recently proposed, we are currently in meetings with the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and local government officials. The first sign was recently installed on the grounds of MassArt, at 821 Huntington Ave.

Cartagen is a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. Today's mapping software is largely based on static data sets, and neither incorporates the time dimension in its display nor provides for real-time data streams.

How might communities use it?
Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response. Cartagen, built in HTML5, and viewable on mobile devices such as the iPhone and Android platforms, helps users to analyze and view shared geodata from multiple sources. Cartagen is a dynamic map renderer which employs Geographic Style Sheets (GSS), a cascading stylesheet specification for geospatial information—a decision which leverages literacy in CSS to make map styling more accessible. However, GSS is a scripting language as well, making Cartagen an ideal framework for mapping dynamic data.

At what stage of development is it?
Cartagen is being tested and is available for testing: http://wiki.cartagen.org/wiki/show/HomePage

Other collaborators: David Small

Newsflow is a dynamic, real-time map of news reporting, which displays both the latest top stories as well as the news organizations which covered them. All articles are from the last few minutes.

Viewing news in this way lets us see how the choice of 'top stories' by news bureaus is geographically unequal, or rather, what areas of the world are neglected by various national news sources.

Arcs link the location of the news organizations' headquarters to the places mentioned in a given article.

Built with HTML5 on the dynamic mapping framework Cartagen, Newsflow draws on real-time data from over 200 news organizations as well as Google, Yahoo, and other sources.

How might communities use it?
The ability to view such data in real time offers viewers a chance to see how journalists shape national attention as stories unfolds.

Additional collaborators: David Small

Sourcemap is a social network built around supply chains, enabling collective engagement with where things come from and what they are made of.

How might communities use it?
An open-source project, Sourcemap provides resources for calculating the carbon footprint and geographic spread of various products and services, including consumer electronics, travel, and food.

At what stage of development is it?
We are deploying Sourcemap through in-depth case studies with designers and business owners in product design, hospitality, and food and drink. The Sourcemap team is actively seeking collaborators and pilot study participants to develop the tool for general use.

Other collaborators: David Zwarg and Hiroshi Ishii

RedInk is personal finance software with a social conscience.

How might communities use it?
The website (in development) provides constituencies with tools to collectively measure the effect of their economic power as it relates to specific industries and businesses, while maintaining privacy for individual users. Up until now, accounting of this nature has been vague or unavailable. More accurate spending data will be a valuable lever for organizations involved in collective action, collective bargaining, and fundraising.

At what stage of development is it?
Redink is in early development.

Speakeasy is a community-based telephone service that connects people with a network of language translation volunteers.

How might communities use it?
It was developed to connect new immigrants with volunteer "Guides" who give advice and agency referrals and offer language interpretation services. In practice, Speakeasy is not a new concept as many multilingual individuals are already serving as informal interpreters for their family members and friends, but often with uneven results and compromising privacy. Speakeasy leverages the widespread use of cell phones and connects non-English speakers to guides promptly, reducing the undue burdens placed on callers' families and friends. It provides individuals access to critical social services and resources while they learn English and acclimate to their new society.

At what stage of development is it?
Speakeasy received a $2000 prize from the MIT Ideas Competition. It was piloted in Boston's Chinatown neighborhood. The City of Boston and the Center are working together to expand its use to other languages in the city.

Developed by Tad Hirsch, Media Lab, and Jeremy Liu, Asian Community Development Corporation

Between the Bars is a blogging platform for one out of every 142 Americans---prisoners---that makes it easy to blog on paper, using standard postal mail. It consists of software tools to make it easy to upload PDF scans of letters, crowd-sourced transcriptions of the scanned images, and the usual full-featured blogging tools including comments, tagging, RSS feeds, and notifications for friends and family when new posts are available.

How might communities use it?
We are designing this system for prisoners in the US, a growing population that is routinely denied access to broadcast media. We hope that prisoners will be able to use this platform to tell their stories, to maintain social connections to the outside world, and to retain a sense of identity and humanity through the process of their incarceration.

Source code will be freely available in a public repository, as well as documentation on how to use the code.

At what stage of development is it?
Early code available on local server; networking with prisons still in early stages.

Next steps include:

* Finishing the core functionality of the code and to improve the visual presentation of the site
* Networking with local prisoner support organizations who can help evaluate the design and connect us to initial users (expected to be accomplished within 6 months)
* Bringing the site live to the general public (expected by year's end).

Virtual Gaza is a website where ordinary Palestinians under siege can describe their experiences in their own words, and where the destruction can be documented by those experiencing it directly. It was created as a response to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in January 2009.

How might communities use it?
It can be used by other communities to document crises, tell stories, and share experiences with other contributors and the world. It is designed to aggregate stories by neighborhood, using local geography as a guide.

Code is available on request.

We intend to expand to allow entry by SMS text message for more direct and immediate reporting. Additional data layers documenting the destruction and rebuilding of the Gaza Strip will be added over the summer after field research.

At what stage of development is it?
We currently have thirty authors (residents of Gaza, as well as international activists on the ground) contributing diary entries, photographs, and video testimony. It has been developed in collaboration with the Alliance for Justice in the Middle East at Harvard University.

ExtrAct, a set of Internet-based, databasing, mapping and communications technologies for communities impacted by natural gas development, is a novel platform for community education and civic action.

Its objective is to create and distribute open-source, web-based tools for mapping, analyzing, and intervening in this industry based on supplementing data obtained from state and federal agencies with user generated reports, complaints, and experiences.

All of these tools, though accessible individually, will share information through a unified database. Given that these tools will be serving both urban and rural populations, we are also developing innovative paper and phone interfaces to the web-services. To develop these tools we are working with a network of lawyers, citizen’s alliances, national activist organizations and environmental health experts in Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas.

How might communities use it?
By geographically displaying the data, ExtrAct tools provide a textured sense of how issues related to oil and gas differ among the legal, social, and physical landscapes of various communities. Regional views and rates of complaints might differ significantly, or a company may behave differently depending on the legal, social and physical place. The ExtrAct system will hopefully illustrate those differences and provide the means for geographic communities to generate information about their own particular conditions as well as allow them to connect with, learn from, and act in concert with other geographic communities that share similar issues or engage with similar companies. Through the ExtrAct tools users will be able to contact other users with issues related to theirs as well as experts who may be able to assist them. Likewise experts interested in oil and gas will be able to contact community groups and individuals reporting information potentially useful to them.

The tools’ source-code will be licensed with a Creative Commons or an alternative free and open source software license to encourage continued adaptation and optimization of the tools themselves. Eventually we aim that the tools will be adopted, served and adapted by the community groups that use them rather than require any long-term support from MIT. We have code repository that is currently accessible upon request.

At what stage of development is it?
As part of the tools’ structure and to speed development to meet the emerging needs of communities in the booming Marcellus Shale region (including parts of Ohio, New York, West Virginia and Pennsylvania), we are staggering the rollout of the tools. First, we are deploying the primarily web-based tool, Landman Report Card, to the urban group we are working with in Cleveland; we hope to then spread the tool to other citizen’s groups in the Marcellus Shale area. We have also begun testing of LRC in community groups in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. We are currently working with communities in Ohio, New Mexico and Texas to develop a moderation system for LRC based on feed back received during testing. Once that moderation system is in place we will be going live with the site.

While rolling out LRC we are iteratively developing functions for another tool, Drill Well.

Hero Reports, in the form of a website, is a security campaign that reports civic courage. It asks citizens to report moments when others make a difference. Acknowledge those stand up, not in fear, but in hope.

These can be small acts of kindness. Giving up a seat for a pregnant woman, holding the door for another. Or actions at times of crisis. The hero who picks up a fallen child, the bystander who assists in a car accident.

This is the civic courage that also keeps us safe.

How might communities use it?
Any community can adapt Hero Reports to document positive civic acts in their own back yard.

At what stage of development is it?
Hero Reports' vision is to build a system of hero maps that exist alongside crime counterparts. Inspired by the security campaigns of New York City, we are currently developing a scalable infrastructure for communities for Boston, Detroit, Saint Paul and Philadelphia. Prototyping work can be found at http://creativesynthesis.org/civic/heroreports/.