Today's Civic lunch featured the digital team from the Boston Globe, led by Jeff Moriarty, VP of Digital Products. He was joined by Chris Marstall, Marck Chang, and Grace Woo. They've just launched a new standalone site for the Globe, spinning off from the Boston.com portal and its ubiquitous popup ads. It's not a redesign -- they got to design a newspaper site from scratch in the year 2011, and the benefits of having a blank slate are evident in their award-winning design (here's more background on that design from some of its designers).

When we started telling people about our "nutrition label for the news" project, one question came up fairly frequently: “Do nutrition labels even work?”

Of course, when people ask if labels work, they implicitly mean, "Have nutritional labels prevented America from growing more obese each year?" In this case, the obvious answer is “No.”

This doesn't mean that labels don't serve their purpose, or that we don't need them to get healthier. Your political identity is shaped by many things other than where you get your news: your parents, your siblings, your childhood, your education, your workplace, or hey, maybe even your most basic morals or the type of bacteria in your belly.

(Download the full video or watch below.)

This week in Co-Design I'm looking at the field of Participatory Design. Participatory Design has a much more establish history than most of the other sub-genres of co-design I've been looking at. It had its start in Scandinavia in the 1970's, emerging from trade union movements. It shares an ideological lineage with Sociotechnical Design and Action research. Initially, the goal of Participatory Design was to shift the stance of technology from one which inherently favored management and entrenched power structures to one which favored and worked with the workers. Given the theory's avowedly political beginnings, a good question to keep in mind as we continue to think about participatory is whether or not it has kept its ideological commitment to the democratization of technology since its conception. In order to be called "participatory design," must a project undertake the political goals of the theory's founders? Is this political stance what is necessary to differentiate it from other theories of co-design?

Hackasaurus is a great project by Mozilla which makes it easy to see the structure of a web page and remix it. In education, it's a great way to combine learning about composition with learning about how to make.

Today in the Media Lab's class on Technologies for Creative Learning, we met with Andrew Slack of the Harry Potter Alliance, an organisation which mobilises Harry Potter fans for social good. We also had a great conversation on the ideas of Henry Jenkins about participatory culture and participatory learning (for more, see this report by Jenkins funded by the MacArthur Foundation).

I liveblogged a session on liveblogging, and the universe didn't implode! Giant disclaimer that the audio in the room wasn't great, so some of these thoughts and many of the words are my own, trying to capture Bilal's talk. I wouldn't quote him on any of this.

Thanks to Bilal Randeree for sharing with us. You can find him on Twitter @bilalr.

It's been a big year for liveblog-worthy news, which you can quickly see in a run-down of Al Jazeera's Live Blogs:

• Syria
• Libya
• Yemen
• Egypt
• Gaza
• Bahrain
• Tunisia Campaign Trail
• Occupy Protests

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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.