Center for Future Civic Media Blog, News, and Events

Earlier this fall, the French cultural theory magazine, Poli, ran an extensive interview with me conducted by Maxime Cervulle. The interview explored a range of topics surrounding the cultural politics of participatory culture and web 2.0, specifically addressing concerns raised by European intellectuals about some of the themes I explored in Convergence Culture.

Our friends at Neighbors for Neighbors have officially teamed up with the Boston city government to launch a social networking website, allowing city personnel to better communicate with residents and hopefully address problems more quickly.

From the Neighbors for Neighbors press release:

“By providing these social networks, Neighbors for Neighbors is providing our residents yet another way to stay in touch with each other and their neighborhood officials,” said Mayor [Thomas] Menino. “We continue to use the latest technology to make government even more accessible and more responsive to our constituents. Just this week we launched the City’s first-ever iPhone application to send constituent requests to the Mayor’s 24-Hour Hotline and now we’re providing them another way to connect with city officials.”

On the networks, users create profiles and post information about themselves (and organizations they represent), and can find and communicate with neighbors. Users can also post blogs and events, participate in forums, add videos, photos, music, and create and join interest groups.

Coordinators from the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services as well as District Police Captains and Community Service Officers will all have a presence on the website to answer any questions users may have about their neighborhoods from broken street lights and trash pickup to various public safety issues.

Neighbors for Neighbors also held a kick-off this past week, announcing their partnership with the city:

[If the video is not embedded above, go here]

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". Here's the deal:

In the Pony Diving phase (see Episode #1), you're trying to put together an idea with funders, users, and a development team. But each one of these key groups is going to need to see a certain amount of proof about the viability of the project, i.e. validation, before they sign on. Of course, the killer is that these same people are going to help you establish validation, so you've got the makings of a brutal chicken-and-egg problem. The solution is a workable validation trajectory: The first key player you sign on has a low validation "buy-in". That player then produces some validation "benefit", and now you have more validation to recruit the next player. A workable validation trajectory moves you from where it's just you waving your arms to where you've got all the key players on board. A broken one leaves you needing some high-validation-buyin player without any way to get the validation to bring him/her on.

Here are pointers to a few things I called out in the video.

• Here's where Vinod Khosla discusses the Ethanol Trajectory
• Here's the LostInBoston.org project I talk about
• Here's George Eberstadt's Blog. He's my colleague who would always say "How do we get there from here?"

So now you tell me. Is this obvious? Is this useful? Is this obviously useful? I need feedback. Post it below.

Hey, the FTC just made it illegal for bloggers to accept kickbacks for writing puff pieces about products on the internet. Good. Maybe the discussion about this will make people call out for independent, non-profit, verifiable product information. I put puff journalism and greenwashing in the same sentence. Hey bloggers, if [...]

Welcome to Episode #2 of Rick's Startup Whiteboard (the video is at http://techtv.mit.edu/videos/4106-ricks-startup-whiteboard-episode-2-ear... if it's not showing up above). This one focuses on the importance of working with partners -- not employees, not contractors -- when you're the pony-diving stage of a startup project, still trying to figure out the key pieces of the puzzle (see episode #1 on pony diving). Personally, I learned this one the hard way in a start-up. We contracted out the design of our next generation product and wound up on the rocks. There were a lot of accusations and alibis, and a distressing lack of "we're going to keep at this until it works". Lesson learned: when the project is in the early stages, and still involves as much problem-finding as problem-solving, you need to work with people who have as much at stake as you do.

When have you been on the right or wrong side of this?

A few days ago the Iranian government completed the process of “privatizing” the Iranian national telecommunications company.

Sounds great right? Less state control, more public sector involvement, free market and all that jazz.

However, a closer looks shows that the majority stake (50% + 1 share), purchased for $7.8 billion, were bought by a consortium that is directly connected to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Out of the 3 groups contending, one was disqualified by the government for not having the necessary security credentials (read: probably not affiliated with the Guard).

If you are not that familiar with the Guard, here’s some background: The Revolutionary Guard, or in its full name, “Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution”, was founded right after the revolution in 1979 as an independent force loyal to Khomeini, but later became a full military force alongside the regular army.
Here’s what AP describes in their article (link below):

With the exception of the beleaguered Atlanta Journal-Constitution, no major papers are covering the flooding currently ravaging Atlanta, Georgia. I only know about it because my mother and step-father live there---they're fine, but my mother nearly couldn't get home last night because of so many downed trees, washed-out roads, and police barricades. My step-father, being ex-Special Forces, was ridiculously well-prepared (hurricane lamps, a universal charger for multiple cell phones that hooks up to his car's cigarette lighter), but their neighbors aren't so lucky: good friends of theirs have seen their house so damaged that they expect to live in a hotel for months.

Can someone explain how this isn't a news story? Where's the coverage? Atlanta received 14 inches of rain in a few days, which all goes on hard-packed clay (it's a very dry part of the country) and thousands of miles of roadway. There's nowhere for the rain to go except into people's houses. Police are rescuing people by boat. The three interstates are shut. Every school in the city is closed. And the best the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe can do is stick the same A.P. link at the bottom of their national news subsections: "Toddler Among 6 Killed as Storms Drench Southeast". And that story is 12 hours old.

I sincerely hope that it's my familial proximity to people at Atlanta that has me seeing this story all out of proportion. But if it's not, are we seeing the news industry's Katrina? Is this evidence that newspapers are unable or unwilling to expend the resources to help inform people during a natural disaster?

Welcome to the first video webisode of "Rick's Startup Whiteboard" (it's at http://bit.ly/eqeAX if you don't see it above for some reason)

It's a sharper-than-broken-glass-and-every-bit-as-dangerous look at what's involved in getting a new social technology project started. The first clip is about "Pony Diving" -- the very early stages where you're trying to put together an idea with a technology that can implement it with a group of people who will use it, another group of people who can an build it, and a third group of people will fund it. Here's the feedback so far:

• "Your head is too shiny" -- Totally true
• "It's too long" -- Also true.
• "Good ideas. Loved it" -- Thanks, Mom.

So give me 7 minutes on this one, and give me some feedback, and I'll make the next ones shorter and better.

And if you're wondering what I know about this: I co-founded a startup in 2002 based on my Media Lab Ph.D. work on technology for face-to-face community building (check out http://ntag.com). On top of that, I've gotten many social technology-oriented projects off the ground, and have thought a lot about the process.

Rick Borovoy
Visiting Researcher, Center for Future Civic Media, MIT

Something that characterizes everyone I've met in my year at the Center for Future Civic Media is a visceral frustration with tools and schemes that chip away at community ties or shut down communication between friends and neighbors---contrasted with an earnest desire to use technology to engender trust, heal rifts, and collectively build a better future. For every soul-crushing "See Something, Say Something" campaign, someone's working on a Hero Reports to counteract it.

On this, the eighth anniversary of 9/11, it's worth reflecting on this frustration and this desire to reestablish trust.

My in-laws are New Yorkers, and for many years my father-in-law worked in the World Trade Center. He was further uptown that morning, but, when the attacks happened, he made his way downtown to search for his nephew---who at that moment was escaping the WTC subway station through train tunnels. He was on the last train to leave before the towers fell. Together they walked up Manhattan island. They crossed a bridge into Brooklyn, turned back a moment, and recognized that their lives and their city were irreparably different.

So if anyone should want their government to guarantee safety at any cost, it's New Yorkers like them.

But as these eight years have gone by (admittedly perhaps because of a lack of new attacks), they have come to resent the breakdown in community particularly in contrast to the camaraderie felt in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, camaraderie despite fear of that next attack that we were all sure was coming. Sadly, it's human nature, and in the nature of government, to be influenced more by fear than by trust, and it's an old story. To act with perfect rationality in the wake of 9/11 would have been like Achilles not flipping out after Hector slays Patroclus. But Achilles, distraught, is who led us in our day to confused wars, sacrificed liberties, and, worst, a loss of trust in one another.

On this anniversary, I look with quite a bit of pride at our Center's long list of impressive projects in the context of reanimating that trust. It's the practice at MIT that we develop technologies to address really specific puzzles, but each of those technologies can be and are expanded to other contexts, ones that build up relationships between and within geographic communities:

• The aforementioned Hero Reports helps people praise acts of civic courage before they're forgotten.
• Extract organizes landowners---both urban and rural---so that they can represent their best interests to oil and gas companies.
• The technology behind VirtualGaza, though focused on Palestinians, can be adapted to help communities in the midst of crisis when mapping and storytelling is most critical.
• Newer projects, like Between the Bars, exemplify how a narrow cause---building a system that allows prisoners to blog---establishes a template for mutually beneficial relationships between groups that are usually adversarial.
• And even ostensibly geek-centric work, like GoodApp, a cloud-computing environment to collaboratively develop web applications, means that a tool now exists for anyone---citizen, company, government---to build and share code, easily and transparently.

None of those projects works without a high level of trust, even between complete strangers. It's not a naive trust. Not one, childishly, where you renounce responsibility. It's one where you respect your neighbor, acknowledge his or her worth and talents, and know that you're stronger together than apart.

It's the lesson we learned eight years ago, and it's one to which the Center stays true.

I had not planned on attending the O'Reilly conference Gov2.0 , an exposition and dialog about new forms of government and information technology. But at last week's Foo Camp (another O'Reilly conference) I met a great number of people in the area, and I became pretty excited with what I heard. For instance, I was in a session on government and data, sitting next to a deputy CTO from the White House, and was surprised by the sincere and urgent dialog that was taking place with information activists and coders. The White House and geeks? What is not to like? So now I am sitting in a huge room in the third sub-basement of the Grand Hyatt in D.C. Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy officer is speaking, so it is a good chance for me to reflect on what I have seen so far.

The following account will appear later this month in an issue of In Media Res, the newsletter of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. It was written by Audubon Dogherty, one of the graduate students I am working with this year. She is affiliated with the Center for Future Civic Media, which is funded by the Knight Foundation.