Comments for Introduction to Civic Media

Comment on #CarryThatWeight: from the “mattress performance” to civic renewal by Sesión 19 y 20: Intervenciones Urbanas, Eve Mosher, HighWaterLine y las obras abiertas. | Teoría de las comunicaciones

Wed, 22 Apr 2015 15:32:52 +0000

[…] leer las obras de Eve Mosher con su intervención: A WighWaterLine y la obra de Emma Sulkowiks: The Matress Performance. Hicimos un mapa mental de las cosas o actividades que disfrutan cada uno de los estudiantes y los […]

Comment on The nature of the opening of a system by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:25:29 +0000

How do we make this more about creating civic media? Can you focus on specific civic media projects and their design processes which you can document as conforming to more idealized forms of participatory or collaborative design—and reflect how that changes the final product to being more inclusive, representative, and/or effective for its civic goals?

Comment on Monitoring municipal elections by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:25:04 +0000

You will want to study existing election monitoring and political profile sites and ask your questions of them: How did they attract participation? What were their most useful features according to news stories about the tools? What were their sources of data? Were they in a country or region that had a good open data available they could pull down or was it a lot of scraping they did on the quiet? Perhaps they ran surveys of politicians or citizens to get further data? What content presentation and data visualization strategies did they employ? What seems to work and what seems to make the information less accessible? Check out whether you might want to plug into or at least steal the principles at the heart of http://www.openingparliament.org/casestudies.

Comment on WebJD: Connecting People and Legal Expertise by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:24:32 +0000

What is the civic problem being solved here? How might WebJD contribute to civic renewal? There are people that need this kind of legal knowledge in order to fight for wrongful search and seizure or imprisonment in the case of activist activities. There is also the problem of civic exclusion for convicted felons who lack rights both inside and outside prison including loss of the right to vote and prejudicial terms around home ownership. What if we had a Between the Bars style prison blogging system (https://betweenthebars.org/) for legal advice requests so that inmates could receive access to this same web of knowledge across their digital divide (often lacking inexpensive and regular internet access)?

Comment on Protected: Delicious for Civic Coding by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:23:49 +0000

Comment on Civic Data Analysis by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:23:05 +0000

In some ways, this project is similar to what Yu is proposing around civic coding projects but instead (http://civicmediaclass.mit.edu/2015/03/17/delicious-for-civic-coding/) focuses on the aggregation and analysis of civic data. The Sunlight Foundation has a long history of working to open and generate datasets of public interest (http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/). My question for you would be too look closely at those projects and the documentation and news reports around them and try to understand what’s missing from their approach. I also want you to think deeply and look for evidence of your claim that their is a strong interest in citizens analyzing data for themselves to draw original conclusions. I would argue that one of the biggest challenges to the rhetoric of the open data movement has been that lack of interest in using that data. More efforts are trying to argue that this simply requires easier to use tools like Socrata, which sells open data portals to local governments. The other place you should investigate is the annotation community. This is still unsolved problem for texts broadly speaking. Look at tools like Annotation Studio from MIT (http://www.annotationstudio.org/) and hypothes.is (http://hypothes.is/). OpenCongress from Sunlight has some of these features though very rudimentary around congressional lawmaking.

Comment on The Private Nudge Unit: Using Psychology to Combat Denialism in the Networked Public Sphere by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:20:01 +0000

First off, you should definitely get ahold of Ethan’s book Rewired as it deals directly with these questions of combating echo chambers in favor of a cosmopolitan networked public sphere. Additionally, you should look at the “social wargaming” experiments using bots on Twitter carried about by my friends involved with Pacific Social Architecting Corporation; they tried to automatic this very process of connecting people from disparate subnetworks of Twitter:
– http://www.webecologyproject.org/category/competition/
– http://timhwang.org/2013/05/17/pacific-social-architecting-corporation/
– http://www.academia.edu/2169112/Pacific_social_architecting_corporation_Field_test_report
– https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2090161
On the topic of Denialism, I would love you to explain how this is related to the crises in civics we discussed at the beginning, and see how we might prompt civic renewal despite Ivan Kristen’s cynicism.

Comment on Re-imagining Civic Livestreaming by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:19:29 +0000

This is a rich topic with a nice, systematic research plan. I think you want to assess the features of the esports tools like Twitch where they are building a business on engagement with live streaming content. There has been some predecessors at the lab like Drew Harry’s ROAR (http://web.media.mit.edu/~dharry/) that might be worth investigating. As for the question of curators, I think you need to wonder what you could give to an algorithm (like ROAR) and what you might want a direct community manager’s thoughtfulness to be in charge of. Where does that person derive their authority and what happens if the community feels they aren’t serving the community’s interest? You could think of examples like Wikipedia’s hierarchy to understand what the rules and norms are for that work in a networked public sphere. Lastly, I think the crisis response space is the place where this is most interesting right now. Reddit Live was created following the findbostonbomber subreddit’s problematic online vigilantism. But you should spend some time, perhaps talking to Willow, on the core idea that crisis focused attention can be used whether its from a livestream and participants tweet out information (like I did the night Occupy Boston was raided) or a police scanner and participants log things in GoogleDocs (as I did the day of the Boston Bombing). How does that sustain outside of crisis moments? Does livestreaming really only work well when its a crisis, when we are focusing on the event? Grisha Asmolov has them thoughts on this with regard to the Virtual Rynda system he created following the successful of the Russian Fires Map system: http://book.globaldigitalactivism.org/chapter/virtual-rynda-the-atlas-of-help-mutual-aid-as-a-form-of-social-activism/

Comment on The Sound of Music by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:19:16 +0000

There are some great examples of music in civic media. The most obvious are chants in activism which come from or beget slogans we see as hashtags now: BlackLivesMatter for instance. But on the humorous side we see YouTube projects like Songify the News (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL736C3116AD309B58), which is a brand that has been adopted by the NYTimes and others as a way to sort through complex debate material and focus in on the absurdity of political rhetoric in a style similar to the Daily Show or Colbert Report. I would argue that most activist-based music is not from popular artists at all, although they have a profound impact when they decide to go political. Underground artists are often freer to be more controversial in the politics they espouse. The one unusual example is Hip Hop, which has both popular and underground political impact. You should should definitely read Tommie Shelby’s Impure Dissent essay on this, which I can share with you. I think you need to bring your topic down to a much tighter focus for it to be accomplishable. I will want you to engage with the questions of the crisis in civics and/or the crisis in journalism (a lot of people being informed on issues where music can make a real impact). I think you will struggle to find existing surveys and other studies that get at the topic from the angle you are expecting. It’s okay to reflect on the theory where there is a lack of empirical evidence to guide your case study. But where do you want to go with it? Is there a way that we can use political music to make change that leverages the networked public sphere in some way? Is there an educational invention that you can imagine that addresses the “participation gap” that Henry Jenkins talked about, such that popular media is a gateway to engagement with larger issues as long as their is some scaffolding in the skills necessary to participate in that kind of participatory media conversation online?

Comment on Making Local Currencies Easy by erhardt

erhardt — Wed, 18 Mar 2015 21:18:19 +0000

Interesting question of how do we create the kind of infrastructure bitcoin has but for community currencies like BerkShares. One of my favorite examples of local currency used for civic revival was Macon Money (http://civictripod.com/games/macon-money/), a game which forced people from disparate parts of Macon, Georgia to find each other in order to redeem “bonds” worth $10–100. There was no complicated technology involved in the use of the money or play—anyone who receive a bond in the mail could play. How do you deal with the question of inclusivity that would make the electronic trade systems usable for folks? How would integrate into their everyday lives and how could the management of the currency be a civic process itself—something like participatory budgeting in which a portion of a city’s budget is offered to the citizens to determine how to spend it. I would love to see a categorization of the civic uses of these currencies too: the assisting the elderly example from Japan is a great start!