An attempt to leverage digital media in order to explore critically citizen’s role amidst drug related violence in urban environments in Mexico. From resilience to resistance, to different levels of active political struggle from citizens and non-state actors has been slightly silent from the larger conversation on regards to drug-related violence. Issues like policy, international aid, experimental legal frameworks have been the visible patterns discussed in the public realm. A two-tone conversation from the politics of control of the state to the politics of intimidation and submission from organized crime seem to lead the public agenda. The overt portrayal of violence infused crisis creates, in my view, a false idea that there is a passive role the citizenship is playing in a two player struggle. This two player game also creates the impression that there is a clear distinction between the role the state, the non-state actors, the organized criminals and the citizens are playing in this struggle.

With the growth of social media and various forms of participatory media, the line between the traditional content generators and the content consumers is fading. As a result, conversations and comments from consumers as well as their posts on social media are starting to become considered content itself.

As media moves towards utilizing conversations and comments to provide more content and context, it’s important to think about the definition of having a “good” conversation, the motives and incentives to get people to contribute to a good conversation, and also how to get a diverse set of commenters to avoid bias.

How do Chinese NGOs integrate new technologies to their work? What are the biggest barriers for them to fully take advantage of new technologies? Are information communication technology(ICT) infrastructures still the barriers for grassroots NGOs? What type of assistance they might need to develop integrated practices of the internet to advance their causes? Aiming at answering these questions, NGO2.0 is launching our third ICT capacity survey!

(Scene of 2012 Chengdu Web2.0 Training Workshop, China)

Jigar Mehta is a documentary filmmaker and a journalist who came to address the MIT Open Doc Lab and the Center for Civic Media about the collaborative documentary project, #18 Days in Egypt. The project, which tells the story of the ongoing Egyptian revolution, is a collaborative web-native documentary project about the ongoing Egyptian revolution. For more information, see @18daysinegypt and @jigarmehta.

This is a liveblog of the event by rodrigodavies and schock - please let us know if you have corrections or additions.

Last week, Becky, Sasha, and I went to the Brazilian Independence Day Festival in Boston: a lot of Brazilian food, music and dance. I have been in the US since August after joining the CMS Program as a Master’s student and the Center of Civic Media as a research assistant. It was amazing to hear Brazilian Pop Music again and clap along the Capoeira rhythm. In Brazil, I had been working as a Science reporter for O Estado de S. Paulo since 2007. Before that, I was a computer programmer.

For Intro to Civic Media this week, we talked about and created a model for digital inequality. My group came up with a cute representation of digital inequality using a tree, where its roots represent components that add to digital equality, the leaves represent the fruit of digital equality, and falling fruit represents the idea that digital equality can fuel itself, just like a real ecosystem.

Before heading east to Cambridge, Massachusetts to come to MIT, I had never moved before — I hadn’t even moved out of the house I grew up in. I grew up in the fifth largest city in Iowa — Iowa City, a “metropolitan” college town with a population of just under 69,000.

"Join us, tell us your story" is the prompt given by the Kitchen Sisters for their most recent project, "The Hidden World of Girls." This is one of 3 storytelling projects I've been enjoying lately that center women as storytellers about their lives and histories.

The Hidden World of Girls

The Hidden World of Girls, is a recent project by NPR radio production duo, The Kitchen Sisters. It's a series of radio documentaries featuring women and stories about women that people called in responding to the full prompt, "Who are the women that inspire you? What are the rituals for girls in your community? Whose stories have yet to be told? Help us on our quest for tales of the extraordinary and everyday, from the past to the present" by calling into the Hidden World of Girls message line (202-408-9576) or leaving stories in writing, images, audio and video on the web form.

On Privacy:

I've wanted a blog since reading Ender's game, which surprisingly enough was
not that long ago. I've restrained though - I've been terrified to put my
thoughts out there so publically. It gives me nightmares. I had that nightmare
again last night - perhaps someday I will write it up properly into a short
story, but for now I'll settle for a quick summary:

It is the year 2040, I'm 28 years old, and I've just made what I thought was
the best decision of my life: moving away from my home town in Wyoming to the
East Coast. At first leaving my family and friends didn't seem so bad; I'm
Facebook friends and everything - we Skype each other rather often. It isn't
until a few months later that I come to the realization I don't believe in God
anymore.

This post was co-written by Aviva Hope Rutkin and Alexander Ho.

We gathered together this week to discuss the current struggles of modern media and to explore the concept of digital inequality.

First, we reviewed a 2011 report from The Economist on the news industry. The report argues that the very idea of a “crisis in media” is U.S.-centric. India, China, and Brazil are all experiencing a significant increase in newspaper subscriptions. Meanwhile, in the United States, newspaper subscriptions are dropping, TV continues to be many people’s dominant source of information, and new digital platforms are complicating the media landscape.