For a recent Civic Media Lunch, we welcomed the co-founder and radio coordinator from ZUMIX, Madeleine Steczynski and Elena Botkin-Levy. ZUMIX is a twenty-year-old East Boston-based nonprofit that builds community through music and the arts. Their core constituency is low-income youth -- picture a Boys and Girls Club filled with kids playing guitars and learning to use mixing boards...

As it happens, a week later, Sujata Singhal of the Harvard Graduate School of Education developed a logic model of ZUMIX for a GSE paper.

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Last Thursday at the Center for Civic Media, we heard a talk by Christina Xu, Chancellor of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, the non-profit wing of my favourite funding organisation, the Awesome Foundation. Christina formerly worked for the Center for Civic Media, and the Institute for Higher Awesome has been funded by the Knight Foundation to start the Awesome News Taskforce increasing awesomeness in communities and the world. Christina joined us to talk about the values of the Awesome Foundation, and to share an update on her work to bring Awesome to Detroit.

Greetings from London! Matt, Dan, and I from the Center for Civic Media are in the UK this week for the Mozilla Festival on Media, Freedom, and the Web. Matt and I arrived in London on Wednesday to meet up with interesting people in the UK before the conference. Here's a quick run-down on our trip thus far.

In Cambridge, we spoke with Matt Williams, social enterprise coordinator for the UK Youth Climate Coalition. Matt was the programme manager for PowerShift UK in 2008. We talked about organising climate campaigns as well as models of action around adaptive responses to the human impact of climate change.

Laura Kurgan, Pablo Rey

Maps, Geographic Information Systems, and spatial analysis are powerful tools that recently have become increasingly accessible to non-specialists. Dynamic maps with user created content are becoming part of daily life in the 1/3 world (developed countries and elites in the global South). There is a long history of maps as tools for civic engagement, with public participatory GIS and community engaged mapping playing key roles in (for example) indigenous land rights struggles, mapping health disparities, and the environmental justice movement's demonstration of the unequal spatial distribution of pollution. Most recently, new tools and platforms like Open Street Maps and Grassroots Mapping are democratizing maps even further.

What challenges still constrain the effective creation and use of Civic Maps? What tools and platforms are most promising? What steps can developers, practitioners, and researchers take to help build the field of civic mapping?

Download or watch below.

I'm going to try and make this quick, because I'm writing on borrowed time.

We've been reading a lot of long, dry media theory lately, so today Sasha rewarded our Intro to Civic Media class with a field trip to visit the Occupy Boston (#OccupyBoston) tent encampment (the trip was immediately relevant, because our final research projects in the class may focus on media functions within protest movements like this one).

Between the Bars has been busy in the last six months:

• We now have over 300 writers, and are regularly receiving 100 letters per week
• We've published over 1500 blog posts and profiles.
• We now have a paid part-time staff person, thanks to the Center for Civic Media's support, to help us with operations
• We've accrued a wait-list of over 500 additional writers in prison who want to blog - and we're working on growing our capacity to publish them as well.

This is still a far cry from the 2.3 million people in prison right now. So clearly, we have our work cut out for us!

So it is with this in mind that we're delighted to announce some major changes to the Between the Bars website! View them here: http://betweenthebars.org

Here's a quick summary of our progress on Aago, a mobile app for youth media creation and sharing. We are excited to start the fall term with new team members and engaged community partners!

Download!