youth

Youth are the future of our communities. How we educate them and help them to become good and productive citizens is critical as they grow to take their places as future voters, activists, and leaders. Their understanding of their identity in their communities is an important part of civic education. Many civic media projects work with youth towards these ends. See also <a href="/topics/education">education</a>.

Biko Baker talks Youth Voting and Organizing

Submitted by mstem on December 16, 2011 - 1:53am

We sat down for a Thursday Civic lunch with Biko Baker, Executive Director of the League of Young Voters.

Like any good organizer, Biko begins with his Story of Self. He grew up in Milwaukee, WI, with a father who was a machinist and construction worker, and a mother who worked at the grocery store. He was a jock, and didn't grow into being an academic until his sophomore year at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He did his graduate work at UCLA in History, and labor. He became a researcher for the SEIU, but was also into hip hop, and got started as a party promoter on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, working with many of hip hop's biggest West Coast names, like Snoop Dogg and Xzibit. He and his fellow promoters were essentially organizing online, developing massive email and text lists and relationships without realizing this practice had a name. Biko also wrote for The Source, one of hip hop's top magazines.

"Music is My Hot Hot: A Logic Model Analysis of ZUMIX"

Submitted by Andrew on December 8, 2011 - 10:25am

ZUMIX

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...

Free City

Status: 
Active

The Free City project aims to design new technologies and methods to transform cities into places that are more engaging, sustainable, accessible and connected for all.

leoburd

Civic Media Goes to London, Part One

Submitted by natematias on November 4, 2011 - 10:35pm

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.

What's Up

Status: 
Active

What's Up is a software platform designed to allow people in a small geographic community to share information, plan events and make decisions, using media that is as broadly inclusive as possible.

The web today does a tremendous job in terms of storing and aggregating information. However, people still need to have access to the Internet in order to benefit from what is available online. Instead, What’s Up provides alternative pathways to get information to people wherever they are, independently of the level of access that they might have to computers or the Internet.

The platform can aggregate data from online community calendars to make the information available via low cost LED signs that can be placed in public locations, or via things like customized paper flyers and posters to be posted and distributed in the area.

What’s Up also generates a simple, yet powerful community hotline that is usable with the lowest-end mobile and touchtone phones.

leoburd

Developing Aago

Submitted by audubon on September 30, 2011 - 12:28pm

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!

Check out the new My Dot Tour video!!

Submitted by leoburd on September 21, 2011 - 12:02pm

The My Dot Tour video is now live on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKpICauLQ9E or embedded at http://mydorchester.org/youth/mydottour. Have look:

Shot and edited by Igor Kharitonenkov in very short order, this 4-minute documentary gives an excellent summary of the My Dot Tour initiative. Props to Kate Balug (GSD alum, co-founder of the Dept. of Play, and a good friend of the Center) for all of her incredible work on this project!

The MIT Center for Civic Media contributed in the overall planning of the project and with the implementation of the technical infrastructure that supported the neighborhood tours. In particular, this project proved to be a good application of the Center's VoIP Drupal platform, an open source framework that makes it easier to build communication systems that integrate phone, SMS and web together (http://drupal.org/project/voipdrupal).

UROP position available with AAGO, "Mobile Media Diaries for Youth Citizen Journalists"

Submitted by Andrew on September 13, 2011 - 4:06pm

Are you an MIT undergrad with a coding background and interest in media? Check out this great opportunity with the AAGO project:

UROP Positions: MIT Center for Civic Media and the Comparative Media Studies Program
Faculty Supervisor: Prof. James Paradis

Project Title:
Aago: Mobile Media Diaries for Youth Citizen Journalists

AAGO

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