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).
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About My Dot Tour
My Dot Tour is a multimedia, youth-led walking tour of Fields Corner in Dorchester that presents a narrative of the past, the present, and the future of this diverse and exciting neighborhood.
Theatrical in nature, the tour performances aim to enrich public life and foster youth leadership in Dorchester, celebrate the recent history and current amenities of Fields Corner, and provide a platform for sharing ideas about future improvements. Tours feature select notable sites identified and researched by area teens with help from archives, residents, and local institutions.
To enhance the tour experience, each My Dot Tour stop hosts a street sign with unique location information accessible by phone at 617-300-0368, and via quick response (QR) code, an information-rich code that can be scanned using a smart phone. The tour website, http://www.mydottour.org, features audio, images, and text about each site.
My Dot Tour emphasizes participatory involvement in the creation of a living archive of Fields Corner sites – public comments about the past, present, or future of each location can be phoned in or sent via SMS and through a variety of ways on the website – and provides information to the public well beyond scheduled tour dates.
Program Partners: Dorchester Environmental Health Coalition, Dorchester Historical Society, Fields Corner Main Street, Historic Boston Incorporated, MIT Center for Civic Media, SCI Dorchester / Dotwell
Program Sponsors: Dorchester Environmental Health Coalition, Dorchester Historical Society, Boston Foundation for Architecture, Massachusetts Convention Center Authority, Eastern Bank