My name is Luis Capelo (http://www.luiscapelo.info/) and as a Master in Public Policy focusing on Science and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School, Intro to Civic Media could not be more stimulating – and challenging. My framework of analysis has been crafted to think of innovation, technology and development from the perspective of the policy-maker; from the side of big institutions or governments. In that framework the understood as ‘the public’ – the “civic” in civic media – is the end objective of policies or, at its best, a mass to be surveyed, that provides some sort of validation mechanism for the policies being designed – after all, if people do not make use of the policies so carefully planned, time and resources were wasted. Civic Media is not quite about that for a number of reasons.
We started our first class by defining Civic Media. Defining, in that regard, does not mean opening a book or looking for Ethan Zucherman’s definition of the term (http://goo.gl/1xsC1). Defining meant creating a meaning for that was shared by all those enrolled the class. The class is diverse as one can imagine, and finding that common ground required a bit of a negotiation, but we came up with some interesting principles. Here they are:
Some, however, are most important than others in my humble opinion. First of all, and this I share with most of my colleagues at Sacha’s class, Civic Media must be participatory. At some point some wonder how aspirational it should be. However, to me, being participatory is a necessary characteristic for anything Civic Media. In that regard, participation here is understood as a two-way communication between those who produce and those who consume. A good example of civic media will have those roles blurred, and both producers and consumers will share the equal title of participants. Here Wikipedia fits as the quintessential example.
It is well-know by now that Wikipedia (http://goo.gl/3vyJv) ranks among the most important (and most accessible) sources of human knowledge. Its constantly-changing content is the result of many, many, many hands at work at all times from virtually everywhere in the planet. What separates a Wikipedia consumer from a producer is the willing of that reader to click on the “edit” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing) link available in almost every section of almost every article (few exceptions apply) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing). That smoothness to change roles, to contribute with the media source, serves as quite a good definition of what participatory means.
The second most important principle is that Civic Media must be accessible for everyone involved with the consumption or production of its content. It might mean that coders from different groups have access to the source-code or for communities to have content delivered in its own language. The principle of accessibility goes beyond one interpretation or another, and evolves into something with the meta-objective of satisfying the needs and limitations of those involved with it. This, indeed, might turn into one of Civic Media’s greatest challenges, especially if we consider sustainability and continuity.
The third principle might sound confusing, particularly because it comes after participatory, but I will explain why it is not: collaborative.
Good civic media is collaborative. More than allowing participation, good civic media invites people to share their ideas and work in an open way, without the limitations of ownership. If used well, with the right tools, environment and people, collaboration can become one of the most valuable assets of civic media projects. For example, GitHub (https://github.com/), the most popular repository of code online, has allowed developers to use other peoples’ code, contribute to others’ creations and stimulate a huge amount of collaboration over the years (nowadays it counts with almost 4 million code repositories online). That level of collaboration could make projects robust and highly debugged, leaving less margin for error and making it easier to have a more widely accepted final product.
Two other principles are personal, but fundamental to my understanding of civic media: good civic media engages people and does no harm. Both of those are complicated to defend and more even to disseminate as founding principles of what civic media is yet to become. To me, however, good civic media has the role of affecting structures, of contributing to positive, lasting social change. It counts with the ability to stimulate participation and collaboration because it is accessible. If those are not used to engage people to do good, a great opportunity is missed.
I am currently working with a series of Volunteer and Technical Communities (to be explained in an upcoming post or else check this article http://goo.gl/oUvFs) to build a network-of-networks to assist humanitarian responders, the Digital Humanitarian Network (http://digitalhumanitarians.com/). In my end, I dream of improving that project every week at Sacha’s class. I dream to learn how to contribute to the challenges of information management in humanitarian crisis with civic media interventions. I dream of contributing to the creation of timely solutions that invite people to participate in the construction of a more dynamic humanitarian sector, more participatory, accessible and collaborative — because collaboration can save lives.