rahulb

Recent blog posts by rahulb

Realtime Community Signage Source Code

Submitted by rahulb on August 29, 2011 - 2:34pm

One of the underlying themes of a few projects here at the Center for Civic Media is the idea that we can increase awareness and engagement in local communities by bringing already-centralized public information to people when and where they need it. As part of this goal we've created a relatively cheap digital electronic signage platform, primarily to showcase realtime transit and community calendar information. I want to share some of the technical details behind our current solution - scrolling LED signs controlled by a re-purposed router running simple software on top of TomatoUSB.

Our goal was to test our some ideas quickly, so the code is definitely under construction. If you’re interested, read and/or fork our code on GitHub:

Data Therapy Workshop Followup

Submitted by rahulb on July 28, 2011 - 11:17am

As part of our Data Therapy project, we just ran two workshops to help build capacity within small community organizations to understand and creatively present their data. We were able to accommodate about 25 people in our training space, and hope to help more of those that were on the waitlist in the future. These workshops were run in collaboration with the Regional Center for Healthy Communities, whose training needs assessment has spurred these workshops and where I've run them for the last few years. This blog post includes some follow-up information for attendees to those workshops, but may be interesting for other people too!

For those of you that did attend, here are some references for the tools and ideas that we talked about.

Digital Signage on the Cheap in Union Sq

Submitted by rahulb on June 23, 2011 - 3:21pm


We are excited to be pilot testing a neighborhood installation of our Lost In Boston Realtime digital signage system with partners locally in Union Square, Somerville! Our main goal with these signs is to increase awareness of and engagement in community services by showcasing transit data and a community calendar on scrolling led signs located in local businesses. We've worked with our wonderful community partners to install three signs in local Union Square businesses, and have designed an assessment plan for the summer to measure their impact.

Opportunity

Link: 
Lost In Boston - Union Sq