beckyh

Recent blog posts by beckyh

A simple idea, a well-crafted prompt, a beautiful collaborative storytelling project

Submitted by beckyh on May 13, 2013 - 8:03pm

What are the elements of an appealing invitation to participate in a collaborative storytelling piece? What would motivate you to share a personal story with an unknown audience? How do we prompt people in a way that elicits contributions of a kind we are imagining?

olga_slider from http://olganunes.com/

 

My dear friend Olga Nunes recently ran a beautiful and enormously successful campaign, a simple call for memories relating to smell to which people responded with touching and deep memories. She says, “We are all made of stories” and underlying all of her artwork is some expression of this sentiment. She’s an artist who draws you into semi-fictitious lives that she spins through songs, poems, visual art, experiences. In this project, she helps draw stories from you through your memories, making apparent the fabric of stories that weave us together.

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.

Vozmob/Vojo merge sprint

Submitted by beckyh on February 21, 2013 - 12:19pm

In late Jan, the Vozmob and Vojo teams gathered in Oakland and LA for a work sprint.
Link to notes from the sprint: http://brownbag.me:9001/p/vozmob-sprint-january2013

Who:
The Vozmob team of IDEPSCA (http://vozmob.net/) are based in LA were part of the original codesign team for Vozmob and continue to be codesigners as well as media makers and trainers. Pedro Joel, Luis Valentin, and _, from IDEPSCA joined via hangout periodically through the week.

Mirabot is a tech co-op based in Oakland and we are working closely with Squiggy Rubio and Matt Olenick on development.

From Civic, Civic Technologist Ed Platt and I joined in person, and Sasha Costanza Chock joined from LA with the IDEPSCA team.

Codesign, inclusion, and the hackathon: Codesign Studio 2013 is underway

Submitted by beckyh on February 20, 2013 - 8:48am

Course poster, made by Denise.
[poster designed by Denise Cheng]

The Spring 2013 Codesign Studio is underway. Inspired by the profusion of hackathons, the frame of this semester’s course is to collaboratively design an inclusive pop-up event with our community partners. We meet weekly and both enrolled students and our partners participate in each class meeting. See our syllabus and growing resource list here: http://bit.ly/codesignstudio2013.

Our goals are:

New Tactics Dialogue: Sustaining well-being and security of defenders

Submitted by beckyh on January 8, 2013 - 9:01am

I've participated in a few New Tactics in Human Rights dialogues. New Tactics is a program of the Center for Victims of Torture that is committed to training, community building, and skill and experience sharing. Dialogues are online conversations held for about a week at a time on a specific topic. Kristin Antin has been at the helm of the dialogues I've been involved with. She curates a group of people who can speak to a certain topic and works with that group to discuss key issues and to propose prompt questions for dialogues.

While the dialogue is active, these members of the group participate in ongoing conversation, posting written thoughts about the prompts and responses to one another's posts. I've found participating in these to be very engaging and that people involved seem to really take time to read each other's posts and to respond, so a conversation does develop.

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