technology solutions

Technology solutions can be software or hardware or even new ways of using old processes. They are tools that assist individuals and communities to engage with each other, share information, and take action.

Hackathons don't solve problems

Submitted by cfd on May 16, 2013 - 2:09pm

Qualcomm, a company known for their manufacture of semiconductors, stopped by the Center for Civic Media a few weeks ago to interview people about hackathons. Today, they released the video, which features Nathan Matias and I:

Thankfully, all of the words that I say on the screen in the video are words that I actually said. But the edit and framing message that they present is literally the opposite of what I said in the interview.

How we celebrated Global Accessibilty Awareness Day! #GAAD

Submitted by beckyh on May 10, 2013 - 2:41pm

Ed and I met with the Accessibility and Usability team yesterday, part of MIT’s Information Services and Technology (IS&T), one of the departments on campus that makes the institute go. We met with Katherine Wahl and Chris LaRoche, usability consultants, and Stephani Roberts, accessibility consultant. They work as consultants with projects across the institute -- both department sites and smaller projects and we went to speak with them about Vojo.co. (http://ist.mit.edu/usability and http://ist.mit.edu/accessibility)

We had emailed before meeting, and when we arrived at the office, Katherine, Chris and Stephanie asked us what Vojo is. Question 1: Do people understand what Vojo is from the site? Answered.

What Baboon Notebooks, Monads, State Surveillance, and Network Diagrams Have in Common: Bruno Latour at CHI 2013

Submitted by natematias on May 2, 2013 - 7:41pm

I'm here at CHI 2013, a human computer interaction conference, for the third and final keynote, the sociologist of science and anthropologist Bruno Latour, on the topic, "From aggregation to navigation, a few challenges to social theory."

photo by @pstamara

Latour starts by explaining what he calls "the monadological principle," an alternative to the idea of collective phenomena. Latour offers "a strange argument," that "there is no collective phenomena... but there exist many collecting devices that generate collected phenomena." There is no upper level of collective experience or a lower level of individual experience. Instead, he argues, we aggregate experiences into something that we we call collective experience.

Building peace with technology in Sudan and Cyprus

Submitted by rodrigodavies on April 15, 2013 - 10:19am

Civic Media Lunch Liveblog: Helena Puig Larrauri, April 11, 2012

Blue Nile State, Sudan

Helena Puig Larrauri is a freelance peacebuilding consultant whose clients include the Open Society Foundation, Mercy Corps and UNDP. She visited the Center for Civic Media to talk about two projects she is working on that explore the use of technology in peacebuilding, in Cyprus and Sudan.

Automated SMS Testing for Co-Design

Submitted by elplatt on April 12, 2013 - 11:22am

Screenshot of Vojo test group

When we build tools at the Center for Civic Media, we often take a co-design approach by including users in the design process. While we’re developing Vojo (a hosted version of the Vozmob mobile blogging platform) we’ve put up an open beta, and support organizations like Sandy Storyline, CCTV, and Engage the Power, who in turn support us with real-world feedback and user stories. But co-design brings new challenges as well, like keeping our open beta working for community partners while we develop and test new features. To help achieve this balance for Vojo, we’ve added SMS capability to existing tools for testing web applications.

Encouraging Flexibility from Social Media Giants: How We Get Private Platforms to Support Public Speech

Submitted by mstem on April 11, 2013 - 2:47pm

There are many problems with using commercial technology platforms to host democratic, social, or activist content and communications. These problems came up in multiple sessions at the National Conference on Media Reform last weekend. There are also obvious reasons to continue using these platforms (audience reach, most notably), and so we do. Some activist efforts that silo communications on more open, but relatively unknown platforms strike me as irresponsible, if the goal is to reach as many people as possible (but this is a fine line). The more I think about this issue, though, the more I see potential solutions and a future in working with the platform providers to build some degree of flexibility into their products and policies.

soapbox at #ncmr13
The spot on the carpet reserved for public ranting at #NCMR13

Why InterTwinkles

Submitted by cfd on April 9, 2013 - 11:38am

I've been working on online tools for consensus for the last 2 years. Here's what motivates me to work on this.

1. The water heater

For my first five years in Boston, I lived in a housing co-op in Dorchester. It's a classic Boston triple-decker, which the 13 residents own collectively. That means that we didn't have a landlord, but we were in charge of the mortgage, maintenance, utilities, and everything else. The house operated by consensus, and all decisions happened at weekly house meetings.

At one point, one of the three water heaters that serviced the house died, which left our main kitchen without any hot water. One of the residents (a well meaning, competent, and all around good person) took on the task of fixing this, and called up a plumber for an emergency job. The plumber charged us the emergency rate; almost $2000 to install a new water heater, very similar to this model here, which rings in at $358 at Home Depot:

How to make phone services fast and easy to design

Submitted by rodrigodavies on April 8, 2013 - 1:24pm

We've reached the alpha stage of the design interface of Call to Action, a platform that will allow community groups to design and host phone-based services. I wrote last year about why enabling community groups and individuals to design these services is important, and about the New Day New Standard project that inspired us to build Call to Action.

Right now Call to Action is a front-end design tool that allows you to visualize a voice tree via a drag and drop interface. I'd love you all to play around with it and tell us how we can improve it.

81 Ways Humanitarian Aid has Become Participatory

Submitted by mstem on April 8, 2013 - 11:53am

My Media Lab Master's thesis argues that information and communication technologies, and particularly the web, have expanded the range of ways the public can help in times of crisis, even (or especially) if we're nowhere near said crisis. Or, to be more formal about it, participatory aid is mutual, peer-to-peer aid mediated or powered by information and communication technology. We're building a platform to help coordinate participatory aid projects, but first, I wanted to share some examples.

The wired monopoly and the future of broadband

Submitted by rodrigodavies on March 28, 2013 - 9:55pm

Media Lab Conversations: Susan Crawford
March 28, 2013 #MLTalks

Susan Crawford was at the Media Lab today to talk about her new book Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age. She is a highly-respected lawyer and professor and has taught at Cardozo Law School, University of Michigan, Yale, and now Harvard Law School. She was on Obama's transition team reviewing the FCC, and a special advisor to Obama Administration on Innovation and Tech policy. She is also a former board member of ICANN and founder of OneWebDay.

The live webcast of Susan's talk with Ethan Zuckerman andy Andy Lippman will be published here soon. The following is a liveblog of the Q&A session by Molly and Erhardt.

Q&A

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