The MIT Center for Civic Media designs tailored civic media tools and jointly develops them with communities like yours. We want to showcase the possibilities for community-wide empowerment, so we are looking to partner with activists and non-profit organizations in the U.S. and around the world.
What you get
As a community partner, you will receive free open-source resources and technical support to address your most pressing civic media issues, whether it’s how to highlight local business, ways to engage kids in local issues, or even something seemingly too daunting for mere technology. You can be an early adopter of tools to support and foster local civic media and community action.
What we get
We get creative collaborators—communities that are willing to try out Center tools and practices, that are able to advocate for their use, and above all that are interested in helping us learn how well those tools and practices meet your civic media needs.
Our current resources focus on relevant social and environmental issues such as:
- Deepening youth engagement in civic programs
- Promoting positive financial behavior and literacy
- Visualizing opportunities to locally source more goods, materials and products
- Way-finding to promote tourism and strengthen walkable cities
- Creating new tools for exploring and defining local geography
Some of our featured projects:
- Between the Bars: A blogging platform for prisoners.
- Grassroots Mapping: Free tools to make and share your own maps.
- Lost in Boston: RealTime: Real-time bus location data in public/private spaces like shop windows.
- Hero Reports/Crónicas de Héroes: Building trusting communities by sharing acts of civic courage.
- VoIP Drupal: Spread local information by combining websites, landline phones, and mobile devices.
- Junkyard Jumbotron: Stitch small displays into a single large one, simply by taking a photograph.
- ExtrAct: Tools for landowners dealing with oil and natural gas extraction.
Transforming civic knowledge into civic action is an essential part of democracy. Together, by providing our communities with ways to process, evaluate, and act upon information, we can ensure the diversity and mutual respect necessary for democratic life.
Contact me today to speak about becoming a community partner:
Regan St. Pierre, Community Outreach Coordinator, Center for Civic Media
(617) 253-5182 | reganstp@mit.edu