Future of News/Future Civic Media DEMOs

This page is home to the list of proposed demos for the Future of Civic Media Conference in July 2009.

Copy this template and add your proposal to the bottom of the list.

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Comix News Network
Comix News Network is an open source web tool that combines a content management system with a custom application that allows people to create their own web comics easily and simply as a complement to regular student reporting and a platform for discussions about issues that concern them. It’s designed to enable and encourage artistic engagement, civic journalism, and social networking.

Abhimanyu Das, Matt Hockenberry

Presentation format: One presenter, laptop demo

Say What!?
In this project, we explore perspective-taking, programming and storytelling as a path to youth civic engagement. We developed a seven-part workshop that focuses on the relationship between empathy and civic engagement. The workshop fosters mutual understanding, collaborative problem-solving, and self-expression through Scratch storytelling. We have tested the workshop in Boston, Birmingham, and Mongolia.

Karen Brennan, Shaundra Daily, Colleen Kaman

Presentation format: (a monitor?), one laptop, one presenter

Open Park
Open Park is a news-reporting tool for professional journalists, journalism students and other news media content producers to cover the news collaboratively and share resources in a non-competitive way using new civic media formats such as online social networks and services, print/electronic and audio formats, and new smart interfaces and technologies for co-located and remote collaboration. It is also a new practice that will elaborate and introduce a Code of Ethics for collaborative journalism for use in both physical and virtual newsrooms. Finally, Open Park seeks to establish a new business model for sustainable, quality-consistent news-reporting. I will be demo-ing the initial version of the OP website, with its current functionalities, case studies, discussion forums, and related collaborative projects.

Florence Gallez

Presentation format: one presenter, one laptop, one large projection screen

Awareness Mapping
Problem

Many people aren’t aware of:


 * things that are happening in their local communities
 * perspectives of other members of their communities
 * impacts that their actions have (or could have) in their communities
 * ways to communicate their ideas to other members of their communities

Abstract

We are exploring how the creation of interactive maps can cultivate awareness about local environments, supporting civic engagement by helping community members communicate new perspectives. To this end, we are developing a set of technologies and strategies that help people create, share, and discuss “awareness-maps” – nonliteral, interactive representations of places, people, and experiences that help the creators (and their audiences) express and understand their environments in new and unanticipated ways.

We are considering three categories of environments:


 * micro-geographies: hyper-local spaces, like a rooftop, a bedroom, or a street corner
 * micro-events: short periods of time, like a carnival, a flash mob, or a forest excursion
 * micro-reactions: sets of contextualized emotions, like a joyful occasion, a frustrating meeting, or a playful gathering

Innovation

There are many other community-mapping projects, but our Awareness Mapping project is innovative along several dimensions:
 * Ability to create dynamic, interactive maps (using our Scratch software)
 * Encouraging sharing microgeographic experiences and cross-visitation of each others' maps sites

Civic Engagement

For people to become engaged in their local communities, they need ways to observe and understand what’s happening in the communities – and ways of sharing their ideas and perspectives with other members of the communities. The Awareness Mapping project makes that possible. Moreover, the Awareness Mapping project focuses especially on young people, helping young people develop a foundation of community understanding and participation that will prepare them to become increasingly active members of the community as they grow up.

Jay Silver, Karen Brennan, John Maloney, Mitchel Resnick

Format: Poster and Laptop Demo

Printcasting
Printcasting is an experiment in democratized print publishing that is fueled by blogs and sustained by self-serve advertising. It makes it easy for anyone to create an ad-supported, customized publication that carries content create by themselves, or participating news providers and bloggers. Editions are generated automatically as PDFs, making an easy way to turn any blog or Web site into an instant newsletter that can be delivered by e-mail, or printed and distributed at local events and venues. Business place and pay for ads using a self-serve tool, and revenue will soon be shared with publishers and content contributors. For example, a publication for reef-diving photographers could include ads for nearby dive shops or underwater cameras. The idea is to pair localized ads and content to create targeted publications.

Dan Pacheco

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Sochi Olympics Project
The people of Sochi, the Russian resort city hosting the 2014 Winter Olympics, will be able to use the latest online tools to both discuss and influence the impact of the games. A web site and database will allow the community to track and debate how the plans are changing life there over a five-year period. The idea is to help residents better prepare for the Olympics, to inform the media about the city’s issues and to use discussions about the games as a way to improve life in Sochi.

Alexander Zolotarev

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Tools for Public Access TV
This project will enable public access TV stations and community technology centers to use common tools to create web sites that enable the transfer of video between the web site and the TV station. Together, public access TV and community technology centers can engage disadvantaged communities in new media platforms. While there are thousands of public access stations and community technology centers country-wide that provide media education and equipment, they don’t share a tool-set enabling them to become part of a collective, user-driven, online media network.

Tony Shawcross

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Spot Journalism
Spot Journalism will provide a new way to pay for local investigative reporting by soliciting financial support from the public. Through this project, independent journalists and residents will propose stories, while Spot Journalism uses the Web to seek “micro-payments” to cover the costs. If enough donors contribute the amount needed, a journalist will be hired to do the reporting. The money has to come from a variety of sources, though. Each project will need many small contributions before being approved in order to avoid personal crusades. In addition to offering a new model for investigative work, Spot Journalism will provide a way to discover the issues important to a community while giving a voice to those who wonder why a given problem is not being investigated.

David Cohn

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RadioEngage (RadioDrupal)
Drupal, one of the popular open-source software platforms that publish web sites, will be used to create a turnkey web site for radio news organizations. This content management and publishing system will address the needs of radio news sites, such as creating and archiving audio and text, producing podcasts and playlists and streaming live audio and video. KUSP, a public radio station on California’s Central Coast, will test the project.

Margaret Rosas

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News on Cellphones
While computers can readily access news feeds through the Internet, only the more expensive cell phones have the same capability. This project will make it easy for significantly cheaper models to select and receive news feeds, expanding the news universe for those whose only digital device is a cell phone. Users, particularly in areas where Internet access isn’t affordable, will be able to receive news via text messaging. They also will be able to rate top stories in lists to be shared with friends. The project will be tested in the rural area of a developing country.

Joel Selanikio

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Video Volunteers
Video Volunteers, a New York-based nonprofit, will train 100 people in rural India as Community Video Producers. These citizen journalists will produce magazine- style video news reports, typically on local social issues, and show them on widescreen projectors in poor communities. The idea is to distribute public interest information to the poor – without having to provide the entire population with digital tools. To date, Video Volunteers’ screenings in India have reached 140,000 people in 150 communities. The video technology is not new. The innovation is to do citizen journalism on a significant scale in a poor, rural area.

Jessica Mayberry

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Community News Network
Student editors at the UCLA Bruin will create online publishing software geared to mobile editing. College journalists then will be able to use the content management system to remotely assign and edit stories, videos and photos for online college sites. Also, readers will use it to submit their own content and communicate with one another.

Dharmishta Rood and Anthony Pesce

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Community Radio in India
http://gramvaani.org

We are designing a voice and video based multiplanar platform that will leverage existing radio, television, and cellular networks in rural India to enable rich multimodal community media applications. We are able to keep infrastructure costs low by using community hardware, and at the same time we are also able to create novel user experiences. We are focusing on community radio in our first phase, and have been able to reduce the costs of setting up a radio station to hardly $1000.

Aaditeshwar Seth, Gram Vaani Community Media

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Beanstockd
Beanstockd is a developing idea to encourage green living through an interactive game. Using social networking tools and real-time news and information, players would be able to track their environmental impact, discover how they stack up against neighbors and team up in a friendly competition to leave the smallest imprint on their community. The game revolves around a virtual stock market, where each player receives an amount of personal stock based on their environmental footprint. Players can increase their stock value by reducing their footprint, or invest in other teams who are predicted to do the same. The project is tailored for a small community, such as a university campus, and aims to unite its members around reducing the area’s demand on natural resources.

Angela Antony and Sandra Ekong

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Reporting On
Reporters working on similar topics will be able to communicate and share ideas using a social networking tool and a web site created through this project. The site will indicate how many journalists across the country are working on the same issue, such as declining tax bases or water problems. Reporters then could exchange resources and approaches, or use one another’s communities as examples in their own stories. Journalists in small newsrooms often feel isolated. Given the opportunity to communicate with others, a reporter can add context to articles and, perhaps most importantly, know when a seemingly small local story is part of a larger regional, or national, trend.

Ryan Sholin

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SignCasts
Brein McNamara will blog about ways to empower deaf people to become citizen journalists. He will write about the digital information needs of deaf people, including his own proposal to integrate a web-based video capture system with the videophones popular among the hearing-impaired. The blog also will highlight the gaps not being filled by current technology.

Brein McNamara

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Open-Source Community News
To create an open-source version of VillageSoup’s successful community news software, combining professional journalism, blogs, citizen journalism, online advertising and “reverse publishing” from online to print.

Richard Anderson

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"Programmer-journalist" scholarships
Enabling programmer/developers to study journalism at Medill/Northwestern, team up on an innovation project, have impact on the future of journalism. (At the conference, we'll demo a sample of what results: the "News Mixer" concept (www.newsmixer.us) for enhanced conversations around local news.)

Rich Gordon

Format: one presenter, one laptop

Chi-Town Daily News
The Chi-Town Daily News will recruit and train a network of 75 citizen journalists – one in each Chicago neighborhood. The journalists will work with editors to produce a professional, comprehensive daily local news report.

Geoff Dougherty

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Citizen Journalist Resources
The Citizen Media Law Project, a joint venture between Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Center for Citizen Media, is creating a set of online resources for citizen journalists. This will include state and federal legal guides; advice on business formation; and a database of lawsuits, subpoenas and legal threats involving citizen media.

David Ardia

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NY News Games
Gotham Gazette will develop games to inform and engage players about key issues confronting New York City. Gotham Gazette will hold forums on the games’ issues, report on what solutions the players developed and relay those ideas to city officials.

Gail Robinson

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Playing the News
Playing the News is a news simulation environment which lets citizens play through a complex, evolving news story through interaction with the newsmakers.

Nora Paul and Kathleen Hansen

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Rising Voices
Over the past two years, Global Voices has introduced readers around the world to the brilliant, funny, insightful and touching voices of bloggers from developing nations. Rising Voices is our new effort to introduce thousands of new developing world bloggers to the world, helping students, journalists, activists and people from rural areas to the blogosphere.

Ethan Zuckerman

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Digital News Incubators
Create ‘incubators’ at seven academic institutions to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems. The schools are: Michigan State, University of Kansas, Kansas State, Western Kentucky University, Ithaca College, University of Nevada-Las Vegas and St. Michael’s College.

Angela Powers, Ann Brill, Diane Lynch, Ardyth Broadrick Sohn, Jane Briggs-Bunting, Kimberly Sultze, Pam McAllister Johnson

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Placeblogger
To make it easier for people to find hyperlocal news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of “universal geotagging” in blogs.

Lisa Williams

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Wireless Philadelphia
To develop online digital newscasts for Philadelphia’s immigrant community and to distribute them via the new citywide wireless platform.

Todd Wolfson

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Web Journalism
Create a citizen/professional journalism project using innovative web tools and citizen journalism practices to track Boulder, Colo.’s, implementation of a carbon tax.

Amy Gahran and Adam Glenn

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Oakland Jazz Scene Game
Re-creating Oakland’s once vibrant jazz and blues club scene as an online video game and virtual world. The game will allow players to experience the club scene as it was in its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, before it fell victim to redevelopment schemes and urban decay.

Paul Grabowicz

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Ideal Newsroom
To plan an “ideal newsroom” for the digital news era and create an online resource for student newspapers and other news organizations looking to bring their facilities up to date with new media trends.

Chris O'Brien

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Blog on connecting people, content and community
Blog: About giving all individuals a voice within their local and global communities through a centralized, user-maintained news system. The idea currently combines GPS (Global Positioning System) tagging, Internet technology, and community-oriented design to allow news media consumers to see the information that matters most to them.

Dan Schultz

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Blog on Diversity in Journalism
Blog: About creating and maintaining diversity in digital media.

Dori J. Maynard

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Beat Reporters & Social Networks
Blog: About how beat reporters can work with social networks to improve their reporting.

Jay Rosen

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Interactive Community Spaces
Blog: About the Interactive Community Spaces project, the use of GPS tracking to inform people through mobile media.

Paul Lamb and Leslie Rule

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The Ideas Factory
Blog: About The Ideas Factory, which will generate and share big ideas from the world of citizen engagement online via the Knight Foundation blog for innovators in online news and citizen media.

Steven Clift

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Document Cloud
To accelerate investigative reporting and boost transparency by creating an easily searchable online database of public records.

Eric Umansky, Scott Klein, Aron Pilhofer, Ben Koski

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Councilpedia
To engage and inform New Yorkers around local issues by creating a publicly assessable wiki devoted to local legislators’ voting records and campaign contributions.

Gail Robinson

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Data Visualization in Sarajevo
To spur the people of Sarajevo to help solve the city’s environmental problems by creating an online portal where professional and citizen journalists will contribute reports to be displayed on a visualization map.

Aaron Presnall

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The Mobile Media Toolkit
Mobile solutions and resources for citizen journalists around the world to easily find what they need to create, transmit, and broadcast media on their phones.

Katrin Verclas

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Media Bugs
To promote transparency by creating a place where the public can report, track and help resolve errors in news coverage.

Scott Rosenberg

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The Daily Phoenix
To help Phoenix residents connect with their city through a Web portal that will offer information, games and social networking to the city’s new light rail commuters.

Aleksandra Chojnacka and Adam Klowonn

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Virtual Street Corners
To connect and spur discussion among the residents of two disparate neighborhoods through video newscasts displayed on city corners.

John Ewing

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Crowdsourcing Crisis Information
To strengthen the reporting and understanding of breaking news events by creating a free Web map and timeline that combines and plots reports from citizens and journalists.

Ory Okolloh

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CMS Upload Utility
To save media organizations both time and resources by creating a quick way to convert and load multiple newspaper files to a Web site.

Joe Boydston

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VirtualGaza
Developed in response to the January assault on the Gaza Strip, VirtualGaza creates a space where ordinary Palestinians under siege can describe their experiences in their own words, and where the destruction of the Gaza strip can be documented by those experiencing it directly. The diary entries, photographs, and video material gathered have been contributed by residents of Gaza. Testimony is located on a map precise only to the neighborhood level to ensure personal safety and contributor anonymity, where desired.

Virtual Gaza invites you to help break the information blockade.

Josh Levinger

Format: 1 laptop, 1 presenter

No Park
No Park (http://no-park.net) is a collaborative map-wiki about the aesthetics, politics, and uses of public space. Users populate the wiki with subjective information about a space, community, or locale, then the wiki automatically generates a custom Google Map by culling its pages for location meta-data, like geo-location, canonical name, description, image, and categorization tags. The resulting map can be viewed on the wiki or syndicated via KML to other applications.

Map-wiki applications, like No Park, will benefit any community interested in quickly and easily generating highly customized media-rich maps.

Ryan O'Toole

Format: 1 laptop, 1 presenter

Selectricity
Selectricity is "voting machinery for the masses." It consists of a suite of tools to allow groups of people to make decisions through voting. While most voting projects are geared to government based decision-making, Selectricity aims to apply election method of voting research created for governments toward every day decisions (e.g., where should we go to dinner or who should be officers of a campus club). The system emphasizes preferential decision-making, cryptographic means of voter verifiability, and algorithmically complex election methods.

I will be demoing a set of newly released features for Selectricity including a "kiosk" mode that acts more like a voting machine, more flexible elections designed for small organizations, elections embeddable in third-party websites, and a new API.

http://selectricity.org

Benjamin Mako Hill

Between the Bars
"Between the Bars" is a weblog platform for prisoners. Despite having the world's largest per-capita prison population (and growing), American prisoners are routinely denied access to the Internet. While prisoners can communicate with friends and families through paper mail, they have little access to broadcast media of any type.

We will demo a working prototype version of our effort to bridge this gap by allowing prisoners to blog, giving them a voice, a platform to tell their stories, and an opportunity to build and maintain positive social relationships while in prison. Prisoners typically do not have Internet access, but they can write posts in paper letters, which we will subsequently scan and post to our web-based system. Transcriptions of the letters are then crowd-sourced from site visitors, and visitors' comments and responses to the posts can be mailed back to the prisoners.

Charlie DeTar and Benjamin Mako Hill

Old and New Media: Converging During the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007-February 2008)
This is a research paper that addresses the knowledge gap about new media and democracy in the developing world, examines how digital technologies – such as cellphones and live internet streams – and new media platforms – including blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and Facebook – were used to access information, organize political action, generate hyperlocal news reports, and promote citizen journalism during the "Pakistan Emergency," a period of heightened political instability between March 2007 and February 2008. http://civic.mit.edu/projects?page=1 Huma Yusuf

Presentation format: Skype phone call via laptop and printed copies

Mapping in a Participatory Culture: Boundaries
The second in our NML's Teachers' Strategy Guide series, Mapping in a Participatory Culture, addresses the intersection of geography and new media literacies and provides resources and techniques for social studies teachers and anyone else who is interested in applying and exploring the new media literacies in terms of cultural geography. This will introduce the strategy guide through one of its modules, "Boundaries." Boundaries of all kinds are literal and figurative sites of negotiation, where different nations, cultures, or social groups meet or clash– the difference between one side and the other is rarely as clear as one might think. This module consists of examples and activities that explore "boundaries" as they exist at the global, local, social, and metaphorical levels. The resources in this module are divided up in to three clusters-- Negotiating Boundaries in Everyday Life, Judgment and Representing Boundaries, and Simulating Boundaries--each highlighting a different set of new media literacies and modes of participation.

Lana Swartz, Project New Media Literacies

The Extraordinaires
To foster community engagement by allowing residents to use a mobile phone for volunteer activities.

Jacob Colker

ExtrAct: Landman Report Card (LRC)
LRC is a web-based system for communities across the US to research and evaluate oil and gas companies and their representatives or "landmen" based on report cards submitted by landowners. The oil and gas industry is booming within the United States. Landowners across the country are encountering this industry for the first time and have few resources to understand how this industry can transform their land and lives. LRC provides a way for landowners across the country learn from and educate each other through sharing their experiences with oil and gas companies and their representatives.

LRC video

ExtrAct Team: Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Sara Wylie, Dan Ring, Matt Hockenberry, Christina Xu

ExtrAct: News Positioning System (NPS)
NPS is web-based system to collaboratively geo-tag news according to where it was published, locations it mentions or locations to which it is relevant. NPS can be used to find and share news based on your geographic area and topics of interest. We have developed NPS so communities and consituencies anywhere can share news with members of their organizations and/or the public.

ExtrAct Team: Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Sara Wylie, Dan Ring, Matt Hockenberry, Christina Xu

ExtrAct: SyncScraper
SyncScraper enables nonprogrammers to collect data automatically from websites of their interest. Use SyncScraper to automatically gather information from news, state and other websites. This information can be automatically and routinely added to a shared database and served on your website based on your preferences. SyncScraper also helps you maintain the relationship between the database and these websites by alerting you to changes or breakdowns in the websites you scrape. SyncScraper was developed to enable non-programmers to sustain websites that gather and aggregate information from a variety of public sources such as state and federal websites.

ExtrAct Team: Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Sara Wylie, Dan Ring, Matt Hockenberry, Christina Xu

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