rahulb

Recent blog posts by rahulb

Dancing in the Public Square: Street Music as Activism (Civic Media Lunch Livenotes)

Submitted by rahulb on October 18, 2012 - 3:35pm

We were lucky to host two organizers of the HONK! Festival ofActivist Street Bands - John Bell and Reebee Garofolo. These collaborative livenotes were authored by myself, Denise Cheng, Nathan Matias, Matt Stempeck, and a few others I think.

Rahul introduced HONK! fest, which is an annual gathering of activist street bands that descends on Somerville, MA. It began seven years ago. Today’s speakers will explore what it means to take back the public space. One of the things about parading is that it’s breaking a lot of rules—you’re not allowed to walk down the streets, make so much noise in normal circumstances—and it’s fun!

First Data Mural Pilot

Submitted by rahulb on August 13, 2012 - 10:33pm

As you might have seen in my short talk earlier this year, I'm excited about taking Data Therapy in a more artistic direction. Towards this goal, my collaborator/wife Emily and I just facilitated a tiny Data Mural pilot at the Doctors for Global Health General Assembly. The idea of a Data Mural is to work with a community group to collaboratively tell a data story in visual form. Our primary goal for this pilot was to test out some of our facilitation techniques. I'm writing this blog post to share lessons from this pilot, and to get you excited about the idea! Email me if you have a Data Mural project in mind.

I'll start off by sharing the final mural. The participants liked it so much that they are taking it to display at a protest in New York City next month! Here are some more pictures.

Awesome Summit 2012 - Collaboration, not Calcification

Submitted by rahulb on July 24, 2012 - 11:10am

Live notes from the "Collaboration, not Calcification" session at the Awesome Summit, by Ellen Chisa, Nikki Lee, and Rahul Bhargava.

Last session! Thanks guys for sticking around. We're going to talk about collaboration, and do-away with the slides.

Panelists

Awesome Summit 2012 - The Age of Peak Guilt

Submitted by rahulb on July 23, 2012 - 4:16pm

Live notes from the "Age of Peak Guilt" session at the Awesome Summit, by Rahul Bhargava, Matt Stempeck, Ellen Chisa, and Willow Brugh.

Alexis Ohanian introduces the panel by explaining the problem. Currently, to do well we ask for money by showing a sad kid. This poverty porn just causes us to feel guilty. Have we reached the peak? What else can we do instead. The panelists all have experiences with using positive experiences to cause good.

Zach Walker - DonorsChoose.org"

Most people in the room are aware of Donor's Choose. While it's older than Kickstarter, it's frequently responded as "Kickstarter for Public Schools n America." Teachers can post projects they'd like to do in their classrooms, but that they don't have funding for. People around the world can contribute to fund their projects.A few examples:

Awesome Summit 2012 - Giving More Than Money

Submitted by rahulb on July 23, 2012 - 3:07pm

Live notes from the "Giving More Than Money" session at the Awesome Summit, by Rahul Bhargava, Ethan Zuckerman and Willow Brugh.

Matt Stempeck (@mstem) comes to the Center for Civic Media from the Washington activism world. The organizations he worked with always lacked money. When it became time to run a campaign, organizations always wanted to figure out what to ask for... and the obvious question is to ask for money. But people don't like to be asked for money. Now, more people do their jobs over the Internet - can we structure organizations so we can benefit from people's skills, not just from their ability to write checks.

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