Sourcemap is a social network built around supply chains, enabling collective engagement with where things come from and what they are made of.

How might communities use it?
An open-source project, Sourcemap provides resources for calculating the carbon footprint and geographic spread of various products and services, including consumer electronics, travel, and food.

At what stage of development is it?
We are deploying Sourcemap through in-depth case studies with designers and business owners in product design, hospitality, and food and drink. The Sourcemap team is actively seeking collaborators and pilot study participants to develop the tool for general use.

Other collaborators: David Zwarg and Hiroshi Ishii

ExtrAct, a set of Internet-based, databasing, mapping and communications technologies for communities impacted by natural gas development, is a novel platform for community education and civic action.

Its objective is to create and distribute open-source, web-based tools for mapping, analyzing, and intervening in this industry based on supplementing data obtained from state and federal agencies with user generated reports, complaints, and experiences.

All of these tools, though accessible individually, will share information through a unified database. Given that these tools will be serving both urban and rural populations, we are also developing innovative paper and phone interfaces to the web-services. To develop these tools we are working with a network of lawyers, citizen’s alliances, national activist organizations and environmental health experts in Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Texas.

How might communities use it?
By geographically displaying the data, ExtrAct tools provide a textured sense of how issues related to oil and gas differ among the legal, social, and physical landscapes of various communities. Regional views and rates of complaints might differ significantly, or a company may behave differently depending on the legal, social and physical place. The ExtrAct system will hopefully illustrate those differences and provide the means for geographic communities to generate information about their own particular conditions as well as allow them to connect with, learn from, and act in concert with other geographic communities that share similar issues or engage with similar companies. Through the ExtrAct tools users will be able to contact other users with issues related to theirs as well as experts who may be able to assist them. Likewise experts interested in oil and gas will be able to contact community groups and individuals reporting information potentially useful to them.

The tools’ source-code will be licensed with a Creative Commons or an alternative free and open source software license to encourage continued adaptation and optimization of the tools themselves. Eventually we aim that the tools will be adopted, served and adapted by the community groups that use them rather than require any long-term support from MIT. We have code repository that is currently accessible upon request.

At what stage of development is it?
As part of the tools’ structure and to speed development to meet the emerging needs of communities in the booming Marcellus Shale region (including parts of Ohio, New York, West Virginia and Pennsylvania), we are staggering the rollout of the tools. First, we are deploying the primarily web-based tool, Landman Report Card, to the urban group we are working with in Cleveland; we hope to then spread the tool to other citizen’s groups in the Marcellus Shale area. We have also begun testing of LRC in community groups in Texas, New Mexico and Colorado. We are currently working with communities in Ohio, New Mexico and Texas to develop a moderation system for LRC based on feed back received during testing. Once that moderation system is in place we will be going live with the site.

While rolling out LRC we are iteratively developing functions for another tool, Drill Well.

Selectricity is "voting machinery for the masses." It consists of a suite of tools to allow groups of people to make decisions using cutting-edge voting technologies. While most voting technology projects are geared to government-based decision-making, Selectricity aims to apply decades of voting research created for governments toward everyday decisions. The system emphasizes preferential decision-making, cryptographic means of voter verifiability, and algorithmically complex election methods.

How might communities use it?
It helps groups make better decisions, more easily. It allows voting, usually in form of ranking a list of choices in order of preference. It has been used for electing the boards of non-profit organizations and or choosing the officers of student groups. It is simple and fast enough to help a group decide where to go to dinner or when to have a meeting. It's flexible enough to be integrated into an outside website or used from a mobile phone.

At what stage of development is it?
Selectricity is under active development and new features are added each month. That said, currently released features have already seen thousands of users of a variety of types and are well tested. We understand that we're building election software and, as a result, we're very conservative about releasing new features. Everything on the "live" site is tested in a large number of real world environments over weeks or months. Additional testing of new features including kiosk mode and structured roll out of other new features developed in the first half of the year.

Code is available, under a free software and open source license, in our source code repository.

Comm.unity is a platform implementing a wireless, device-to-device information system that bypasses the need for centralized servers, coordination, or administration. A key feature of this platform is the fact that it combines knowledge, awareness and learning of the user's social relationships and integrates this information into the communication protocols and network services. Comm.unity is designed to work on as many devices as possible, and with as many different radios as possible (WiFi, Bluetooth, IR, etc.).

How might communities use it?
People could go on a trip and createan ad-hoc group with those they happen to be traveling with. Any picture anyone takes could be immediately distributed to all of the group’s devices.

Strangers could chat on the plane, or a friend sitting ten rows in front of them in a lecture hall.

People could be notified when friends and family are nearby.

More globally, it could act a communication system for emergencies and disaster scenarios, which allows news and critical information to be distributed among people in the area without the need for existing infrastructure (which is likely to be down...).

It could be a system for professional or civic journalists operating under oppressive regimes.

All of this would be done for free, no service charges, over an open platform that would allow any developer to enhance and add new features and applications.

At what stage of development is it?
Comm.unity is in development and is perhaps the most technically challenging project at the Center, involving complete rewrites of low-level communications technology. Next steps include releasing an open source toolkit API for rapid development of close proximity communication and social applications; expanding the number and types of devices that can run Comm.unity. Currrently working to get full functionality on Nokia S60 phones; creating a fully usable end-user application on top of comm.unity; and testing it around MIT campus.

backchan.nl is tool for involving audiences in presentations by letting them suggest questions and vote on each other's questions. backchan.nl is intended for conference or event organizers who want a new way to solicit questions from the audience and make better use of question and answer time.

How might communities use it?
While people attend presentations, panels, and lectures to learn something from the people at the front of the room, there's a lot of potential for creating spaces where audience members can interact with each other and the people presenting. This project focuses on augmenting the physical space of the auditorium to provide a venue for the audience to ask (and filter) questions for presenters. This approach also makes it easy to engage audience-members who might not be in the auditorium, but who are participating on the web, in an overflow space, or in an environment like Second Life.

At what stage of development is it?
backchan.nl has been used at many events including Futures of Entertainment 3, ROFLCON 2008, Free Culture 2008, Mixed Realities Symposium. It is still being developed and can be activated for specific events by request.