 All right, OK. Good afternoon. I'm happy to see you here. I'm David Forber, the director of the Communications Forum at MIT. And I'm very pleased to introduce today's program. Chris Czikszentmihaj, I can't pronounce his name. I always screw it up, but he always forgives me because he knows it's an unpronounceable and unreadable name. Czikszentmihaj is going to moderate the program and will introduce his team for what we hope will be a very exciting lightning round of demos and discussion about new developments in Chris's shop. But I want to say a word about Chris, who's been a very creative and nourishing influence at MIT and specifically in the media lab since his arrival here. Chris is co-founded and directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which is dedicated to developing technologies that strengthen communities. He also founded the MIT Media Labs Computing Culture Group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural and political applications. He's trained as an artist and has worked at the intersection of new technologies, media, and the arts for 16 years. He's given lectures, shown new media work, and presented installations on five continents and one subcontinent, which is that? India, right? In 2005, he was a Rockefeller New Media Fellow. And in 2007, 2008, he was a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He's taught at the University of California at San Diego, Rensselaer Polytechnic Academy, at Turku University in Finland, and most wonderfully for us at MIT. Chris. Thanks so much, David. And thanks to the entire communications forum infrastructure, which we're very happy to have at our disposal. So Center for Future Civic Media is just starting its third year in operation. And what we're going to do is a set of lightning rounds, so about five minutes per speaker. So I guarantee that no one will be sated after each pin show or top us, but hopefully by the end of the day, you'll feel completely full. And this is sort of a door opener. It's basically us, lots of researchers being able to show you very quickly, a bite, a taste of a project, but we encourage you to come up afterwards, introduce yourself to the researcher as we're milling around after the event, and ask them for more information for contact details, et cetera. Of course, all of these projects, or most of them, are on the civic.mit.edu site. If they're not there yet, there's a reason for it, but they will be there soon. And I would be remiss in, David introduced me. I'm one of three PIs at the center, and the others are William Arikio sitting right there from Comparative Media Studies, also the director of Comparative Media Studies this year, and Mitch Resnick, director of Lifelong Kindergarten. And between the three of us, loads of grad students, undergrads, research scientists, staff, we kind of are the center, who we are. We're Media Lab in Comparative Media Studies, and the Knight Foundation, who I'll talk about a little bit later. And we're basically working on civic media, which are socio-technical systems for strengthening local communities. So what does that mean? It means that we're developing both social and technical approaches towards strengthening local communities, geographic communities. We take as kind of a premise that the communities have much of the information and skills and knowledge and ability already that they need to solve their problems, but just as print or video can help record, disseminate information, help communicate, we imagine that there are lots and lots of technical solutions, which can help the community to gather, deploy, and communicate that knowledge. So we really see it as distributing civic knowledge, but with an emphasis on the knowledge that can cause transformational action. So how can a community leverage its own knowledge to create the kinds of changes the community needs? And we really take in contrast the typical technology approach, which is strengthening an individual. So when I use my cell phone, when I get my Hummer in the morning to drive a mile and a half to MIT, I'm using products and services that are primarily designed for me, a consuming individual. What we really see is that many of those products are sold with the goal of empowering an individual, which is great, but often without any consideration for what it does to the people around that individual, to the environment, to the community, to the family. And so we're really trying to take a step back and imagine not just what are the media technologies that can help a community, but how to reimagine technologies so that they're built on the level of community rather than just on the level of individual consumer. And in the process, we imagine these technologies will strengthen social bonds and strengthen those communities. So how we do it, what we do, is we look at the principles and best practices. I'd say that these first two years have been a process of exploration, of taking core samples in a very broad area, and trying to assess what are the kind of boundaries of what we imagine a civic media project to be. And at this point, this is a great time for us to summarize, because what we're increasingly finding out is that we've learned a bunch of things along that process. We've extrapolated points between those core samples, and we understand much better what the terrain looks like. We develop new tools and processes that address the needs of communities and implement and monitor those tools within local communities. And that last, that third part is something that we've been doing quite actively. I'll talk about it in a second. The background for this center is the Knight Foundation, which many of you know, formed by the Knight Brothers, a couple of journalists who had a string of newspapers. Knight Ritter, when I was growing up, was a byline on many, many stories. And the foundation was primarily there to fund journalism education from what I understand. But the problem with educating a lot of journalists is that there's not a lot of places for them to work these days. And a lot of the kinds of ethics and lessons that journalists are supposed to learn in journalism school aren't necessarily things that they can practice professionally at the moment. So Knight decided a couple of years ago to rethink their funding strategy and created the Knight News Challenge. This isn't much noticed, but I think December 12th, what's it? December 15th is this year's deadline for the Knight News Challenge. And they're basically going to be giving out millions of dollars to people like you who are interested in solving information needs of communities and democracies, looking at what the next generation of information technology and journalism are gonna look like. But it's also built on some other backgrounds. So one of the things that we've noticed working with undergraduates and graduate students is that things like the Iraq War really reduced a lot of the student's interest in pursuing this idea of a neutral detached media, a neutral detached journalism that's ostensibly reporting the truth. And of course it's a really bad sign for an industry when the onion every week has another brutal, brutal headline deriding your business model. So there's a lot of background to this and what we asked Knight when we were talking to them, we said, look, we're really interested in solving the problem of what journalism did for democracy in the last couple hundred years. The idea of a free press, the idea of passing information around of speaking truth to power, of doing systematic investigation, of enabling a community to understand things about itself and take action on that. But we're not necessarily gonna follow the model of traditional journalism or the journalism industry that everyone's so worried about right now. And so one of the ways we do that is we think historically. So this is Elijah Lovejoy who was a journalist in Illinois who was so interested in publishing papers, anti-slavery papers that he survived not one, not two, but three attacks on his printing press where the printing presses were destroyed and thrown into the Mississippi, at which point he ordered a fourth one, probably from the Sears catalog. And it was sitting in a warehouse when the angry mob attacked the warehouse and destroyed his printing press and shot him in the face and killed him. And that's the kind of journalism that a lot of the journalists who are worried about their future aren't really talking about. In the words of Lisa Williams, they're more worried about their dental plan. You know, in the US it's not really an issue so much of being shot in the face anymore, but it is internationally. I've recently been doing work in Mexico where it's presumably right now the most dangerous country in the world for a journalist to work and journalists are routinely being killed for the stories that they write. So we can look either historically or across the country and realize that 20th century journalism in the United States was a unique historical moment. It might be an aspirational moment. It might be a great exemplar that we can hold up, but it's not the only way that journalism happens and it's not the only way that we should be looking for solutions. And it's also important to remember that what we're after is a free and just society. Journalism is one way to get there. Government transparency is one way to get there. But there might be multiple ways to get there and we shouldn't preclude chances. So what you're gonna see doesn't always look like what the Knight Foundation typically funds. Some of it looks quite odd, as you'll see. But central to a lot of it is the idea of fieldwork and working with direct communities. To the degree that we've spent almost, we've generated almost a million pounds of carbon dioxide in our fieldwork to date, which is causing some ethical issues. Within the center, this includes work in Mexico, trying to work with the State Department and with other groups to try to help develop stronger civil society in the Narco War and on the US-Mexico border, where the Narco traffic hose are able to do tremendous work with new media. They're on MySpace, they're on Twitter, they're issuing death threats on YouTube. How can communities be using new media to respond? Josh Levinger, who's been developing work in Palestine, trying to get stories and both opinion and facts out of Palestine and doing work with kids in Palestine to understand how they construct, in the West Bank and Gaza, how they construct a sense of place. Work on supply chain management so that people can understand better where the goods and services that are coming into their neighborhood and their community and how to work more locally. Working on communities that are under threat from forces outside of them like big oil and gas and how they can assert their community strength in that. Looking at how new technologies entering communities that didn't have them before, this is in rural Peru, where they're installing internet in many villages and just trying to understand analytically what effects technology is having there, what people are actually using it for and how that should work. Also bringing communities together. So this is the work of another researcher who is in Framingham, Massachusetts, where there's been a lot of ethnic-oriented hate crimes recently, and he's working on kind of intra-community tourism, getting people to travel and understand what's going on within the community. So a lot of projects like that, I don't wanna preempt any of them by showing them ahead of time, but lots of different work, all of it with this kind of approach of thinking that the community has the knowledge and how do you help percolate that knowledge up, share it between the community and with other communities. And so I said that we've learned a lot over the last couple of years. It's really come to me recently as I've been traveling and being in rooms full of people addressing some kind of community challenge and thinking, hey, we've got an app for that. It's been a strange process where the knowledge has kind of snuck up on us to some degree. First we felt we were bringing some things to the table, but I think at this point, we have a kind of a set of lessons learned, especially through this interaction with communities. And one of them is this idea of allowing local knowledge to percolate up, but also local creativity in how the systems that we're being built are being used. So in many cases, we'll do work with an ethnographer, work with one of the many kind of disciplinary backgrounds that we bring to the problem to address issues in a community, talk to them about what's necessary. But in this process of very quick rapid prototyping, we get back to the community with something and they'll suggest very quickly, oh, we could reuse it in this way or this way. And being involved in that kind of tight cycle of development has led us to think of applications together, co-create in ways that we didn't expect. So it's not just about what kind of local knowledge needs to be expressed through information technology, but also how the immediate misuse of what we expected the technology to be used for can feed back into the next generation of design. One of the things that we thought as we went ahead was that the internet would take care of itself. The internet, of course, is incredibly good at global communications. It doesn't know whether you're next to someone in the room or 3,000 miles away from someone. And much of the internet has really strengthened groups of interest, international communities of scholars or fans, but it hasn't really worked at the local level. So when we started, we thought we would just concentrate on the local level, but what we realized is that the internet is way too powerful to ignore, that we need to be able to switch back and forth between local and global very, very fluidly. It's true that most people working on the internet are working on the global level, but it turns out that it matters very much to geographic communities to be in touch with similar communities around the world, to be in touch with data sources at a federal or international level. And so we really need to blend those two together in seamless, agile ways. If you involve the community early on in the design process, you're much more likely to be able to design something that's sustainable in the long term. So one of the things that we learned is if we start involving community members early on in what should be built, we serve the interests of many of the important people within the community, many of the change makers, whether they're activists or lawyers or policemen or whatever, if we integrate them early in the design process, we're more likely to build something that's useful to them, and then they're more likely to bring their intelligence, their professional skills to the deployment of the system. New technologies, I could go on with these, but I guess the last point maybe I'll skip to is one of the most important ones, which is that people are only interested in using the sorts of tools and systems that we've been developing if they can see an ability to change their situation more or less immediately. And that's been a really interesting thing because one of the precepts of Web 2.0 is that you need a lot of people using it in order to get people to come to it. How do you get those people using it to begin with if they can't see an effect immediately, especially if you're working on a network effect later? And so that's a process that's been really interesting and another reason to involve people very literally in the design process. There are a variety of new faces who've joined the center, I'm not gonna go through each of these, but all excellent people, I mentioned William Muricchio already, if you haven't met him please come up and say hi to him, but you'll be hearing from most of these people over the course of the day. So that's it, last, or actually no, our calling card. Civic.mit.edu is the website, C4FCM, Center for Future Civic Media on Twitter. And we just started a dev blog, which is for the more code-oriented of you. If you know how to use your repository you should head over there. That's a kind of quick updates from individual researchers about what they're working on technically, so feel free to go to that. And with that, allow me to introduce the first of our speakers who's Ryan O'Toole, and yours is already open, is that right? Thanks to Chris for that great introduction, very coherent. Makes it all sound really nice. So my name is Ryan O'Toole, I'm a second year graduate student at the Media Lab, I'm in Chris's group, the Computing Culture Group, and I'm also a fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media. And I'm gonna tell you about my thesis research project this semester, which I'm working on with a fellow named Mike Norman over in the Sloan School and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the project's called Red Ink. So going to this idea of community knowledge or local knowledge, basically our project is looking at collective financial information. So I'm gonna define that space for you a little bit right now. Are you guys all familiar with Mint.com or Yodely or Wasabi or something like this? Yes, no, maybe. So basically these sites aggregate your financial information into a single view online. So if you have multiple bank accounts or financial institutions that manage your different profiles, you can consolidate them all into a single place and manage it centrally. Partly what this does is produce a sort of single stream of financial transaction data that consumers have access to. Prior to the existence of these companies, people like this had access to your financial data. So your bank, your credit card company, your investment company, and they didn't do such a great job of sharing it with you or people they shared it with or maybe people that would be pretty questionable whether you would actually want them to share it or not. So at the kind of bleeding edge of this space are information technologies which try to enable collective action or collective knowledge. So got the point or a group on or a carrot mob that try to use online tools to organize people to kind of take some collective action for against a company. You have like the Mary Meiser, which is a feedback your financial data to you to try to affect your consumer behavior. And by it like you mean it, which sort of crowdsources green ratings for companies. And so we sort of see ourselves in this space like a little bit like this guy. So what we'd like to be is the sort of metrics for quantifying collective economic power so that we can enable this sort of stuff. Because we think that that information is valuable. So the financial information that you generate is not just valuable because it's financial data. It's valuable in and of itself as data. So what are we talking about? It's a social financial platform. So this is a way for people to share their financial data in ways that are respectful of their consumer rights and respectful of their consumer rights and also of their privacy. So what sorts of data are we talking about here? This is, it's not super granular, but it's basically spending at regions in different industries. So food, merchandise, whatever, automobiles, or specific companies, Starbucks, Home Depot, whatever. So what could you use this data for as a community group? So one example is a boycott. If you are a large membership organization and you're performing some kind of collective action, this is a way for you to quantify the effect of the collective action. So Home Depot is probably not gonna tell you how much money you kept from them if you're boycotting them. But if all of the people that you have boycotting participate in a system like this, then you can actually produce some fairly specific numbers on what your impact to their bottom line has been. Same thing goes for local spending. You can get a constituency of people to basically report back to you where they're spending their money and then start to do some analysis on why they're spending their money. And you know, or you can just use it as a group of people to try to get a discount on your beer spending. We're 200 people. We spend this amount of money every week doing this, give us some kind of discount. So what is this actually gonna look like? Basically it's a web platform. There's pages, a place for people to create causes, to define some parameters around the types of transactions that they're interested in looking at to get people to join the cause by giving them access to their financial data. And then basically our service mediates that data, tries to anonymize it as best as possible, provides some views of it. Some kind of lamp stack and open source technical details. So what are we looking at addressing? Basically, why do people wanna give away this data? Will they even wanna give away it? Is it too private? You know, what sorts of incentives exist for people to participate in different communities? I see that Chris is about to blow dart me. So, isn't this hugely evil? Maybe, we're gonna try not to make it not evil. And thank you. Next we have Nadav Aharoni, who's gonna be presenting an extension of the work that he's been doing for last year. So is that one open, do you know? Is it? No, okay. So hi, I'm Nadav Aharoni. I'm a PhD student at the Media Lab. I'm part of the center and of the Human Dynamics Research Group. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about some of the things I've been working on in the last few years and about where we're going with this. So for the last few years, I've been really interested in, Chris, I said no. I should get these few seconds now. I'm really interested in close proximity communication and how do we pass data to people who are physically close to us? And we have a lot of good tools to transfer things to the other side of the world and we have many ways to do it, but we don't have too many good tools to transfer things to people here in this room if I want to give you a file. And most of these tools that today will probably go halfway around the world and back down to the same room that we're in rather than use the devices we already have in our pockets, our cell phones and similar devices that can directly talk to each other. So the community project which stands for communications unity with the social aspect into it is all about trying to connect devices to each other. And if two devices have Wi-Fi, they should be able to talk to each other no matter what device vendor they're from and what service provider you're using and without censorship or any other limit in the way. So what does it mean for me? And so if you're a developer, the idea is to allow very easy development of close proximity applications. The idea is that you don't need to understand networking very well and the idea you could develop these sort of applications with the same ease of developing a web application, for example. And there would be no need to do a separate code for different types of operating systems or different phones and things like this. And the idea that this toolbox gives you a lot of services like logging and using your device as a sensor so you can actually measure who is physically next to you and use that later and I'll talk about this in a second. If you're an activist, this is sort of a peer-to-peer device-to-device way to communicate off the grid. If you think of the Iranian situation or things in Myanmar, it's a way for you to spread information between activists or between journalists and then maybe get information out of a country because it doesn't go through the centralized points. If you are living in developing country or a grad student where you care about money, you can have free close proximity communication applications when you wanna talk to people in the village or in the same university or close by. And if you're just a general user, the idea is that there'll be a whole range of applications built on top of this which allow you to communicate, discover people around you, share information, pictures, Facebook contacts that are physically next by and things like that. Some sample applications that I'll talk about are present two sample applications that we already have. One is called Snap and Share which is a content sharing application and one is called the social dashboard which is more of a privacy setting application which is a big concern in this sort of things. So the idea of Snap and Share just like the name says is you can create content in this example of picture. You tag it with different groups that you physically belong to and then as you physically pass by people from those groups, they can choose to accept it or automatically accept the information. For example, if it's a demonstration or there's a sort of activist group, you can set a group called Freedom Share and then it's enough for one picture, one person to take a picture, tag it with that group and then physically, just with the range of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, the picture will spread and be shared to the group and then you have copies of it all over. And then if you look at the interface of the user, it's actually a sort of a proximity based blog or a proximity Twitter. It only lives on the devices but you can have communication. People can comment on the pictures or any content and it's totally off the grid. The social dashboard application allows you to actually see the devices that are physically around you and with the distance actually doesn't show you physical distance but social distance from you and trust. So you can actually play with those icons and move them back and forth into these circles of trust and actually change the way your device treats them. So you won't get spanned by advertisers because they'll be in the outer circle. And the main question that I've been facing is will it blend? Will that actually work in the real world aside from the technical demos and making it feasible? And I've been really trying to think of how do we actually evaluate these sort of projects that we want to see how it changes community, how does it improve social interaction of people and can we actually quantify that? So what I'm working on now is this living lab approach where the idea is to combine community organization and civic media with a sort of experiment in the type of reality mining which is experiments that my group has been doing in the last few years where you give people cell phones and they measure, get a feed of the community. This sensible communities project, the idea is to go into a graduate family dorm or a community where and hand out about a hundred phones to people that will first will observe the community and then will actually put applications to see how it changes the behavior of the community. And the idea is that it'll run from four to months to a year depending on the funding that we have. And we have a lot of interesting questions that we can answer from social science questions about how communities work, what makes a good community. Can we actually improve that? And can we measure that? Then we can think of things from how can our friends affect our happiness and field test and thank you Chris. Thank you very much. I really can't believe he called my bluff. Next we have Leah Banani and Matthew Hockenberry showing source map. There are my notes. Okay, so I'm Matthew Hockenberry. Leo's sitting over there though just so he's here if you wanna ask him some questions. But I'm gonna be talking about source map which is sort of a software project that we've been working on for about a year trying to understand supply chains and we call it open supply chains because we wanna sort of open up this information, make it a little more transparent so we understand what's going on. You know it's great that we got these little bottles of water because it's a nice little visual prop. So we got some Poland Springs water I don't wanna sell the brand too hard but the nice thing about it is it actually does say where it is sourced and one of the springs it's sourced from is actually Poland Springs. It's on the water bottle. But I'm looking out and I see a lot of laptops not as many as I expected to see but a lot of laptops sitting out in the audience but I bet you don't know where those come from. I mean there's no sort of laptop spring where you just pick up laptops fully formed from the earth but it's actually a really complex thing where your laptop comes from. So this is a supply chain of a typical laptop computer and the amazing part about looking at this is not how complicated it is or all the materials that go into your laptop it's the fact that this information is so hard to get. You know we don't have this information as consumers a lot of businesses that are involved with laptop cell, laptop manufacturer they don't necessarily have this complete piece of information. And the interesting thing about starting to explore supply chains is you start to become appreciative of the different kinds of materials that go into the products that you're using and so we have things like this which is a beautiful sort of mining operation if you wanna say that to mine tin in Indonesia. So if you have a laptop out now it has some tin in it there's a good chance the tin came from a mine quite like this one in Indonesia. But understanding that, knowing that sort of changes how we look at these things which we view as sort of commodities. So that's the first little mini story I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna tell you three mini stories and I'm not gonna get darted. So, source map is essentially a calculator, right? We wanna do what's called life cycle assessment allow people to sort of start accounting for what goes into products, foods, even trips are things that we're dealing with in source map right now. And once we sort of have people enter this into source map we can do different kinds of accounting we can do things like carbon accounting we can do sort of monetary accounting or we can just sort of understand the supply chain and the sort of stories associated with each part in that supply chain. So this is my big text slide, first two but it has some of the stuff we're trying to do but it basically comes down to supply chain transparency in a collaborative web-based system that allows different people to tackle a problem that it's really unlikely one person has the answer to. So I'm gonna show you some screenshots of the not yet but almost released next iteration of source map. So if you go to sourcemap.org the site does not look like this quite yet but it will within a few days I promise. So this is kind of an interesting story for a consumer perspective. So here's someone comes in they wanna map something that they own. In this case a student in a class that my colleague Leonardo teaches mapped this Ikea-Solton All-Sart bed which is Ikea bed, right? So this student actually went out sort of found some information about where Ikea source is different woods from sort of constructed the map. They now have a perspective about all the different ingredients that goes into the Ikea product that they purchased, right? They can take a look at the different parts like cotton or galvanized steel that go into the Ikea product. And now anyone who searches for an Ikea All-Sart bed knows this is the supply chain these are the ingredients this is where they come from. This is a product that's shared across several continents. We can do things like understand a little more sophisticated counting. We can visualize this information in different ways. The last story I wanna tell you is sort of this story about culture and social understanding. So this is, we've been doing a lot of field work. This is a brewer number seven actually on the map here who these are all the breweries in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. And right now they ship all of their beer down to the north of England to have it bottled. But because of using a tool like SourceMap to sort of understand this large social supply chain problem this person was able to make a fairly successful argument for a kind of transition. So not only does this save things like carbon but it also showcases a local argument for a community or for a culture. So I'll skip that last slide so I don't get darted and I'm Matthew Hockenberry but we're building a large team and we're looking for lots of different kinds of volunteers to help out so thank you. So last I'd like to introduce myself. So I'm speaking on behalf of the Extract team which is a fairly large group of people Christina Shee, Matt Hockenberry, Dan Ring and many, many more Sarah Wiley co-founded the project. And what we were really looking at was the question of what is local in the day and age where so many of the things that affect a local community are not from within that community aka globalism. What can we do as a community to assert our independence in the face of increasing financial, legal, commercial ties and how does one, if one isn't a community that's being affected by things outside the community, essentially unionize the community, establish a way of opposing outside forces which are causing changes in the community that they don't like. So we look at the work of sociologists like Manuel Castells, a student of globalism who makes the argument that the system of democracy of representational democracy that's based locally and then works its way up to a federal level is a system that's great but times have changed significantly with the kind of dense interpenetration of global capital, global markets, et cetera. It's much more difficult to imagine how a system like that would work. And so we're doing work in areas like this. This is North Texas. Each of those plots, it looks like a suburban subdivision but actually each of those is a well head. The entire landscape is being taken over by energy extraction and Texas is our future as a planet. And what we're looking at, if you read pro-public or the New York Times, you'll have seen articles about fracturing, hydraulic fracturing which is this very chemically intensive process that currently is not regulated by any federal law and very few regional and state laws. And it's causing such severe environmental damage and health damage to so many communities across the country that we're seeing a tremendous growth of civic groups who are basically trying to organize to protect their resources and their property and their health from the very dangerous effects of this fracturing. So working with anthropologist Sarah Wiley, we started working within these communities. Sarah did about two years of ethnography altogether, working with the communities. And just to give you a sense of the extent of the problem, this natural gas mining happens in 35 states in the US or so. And the density of the wells is so great that it more or less grinds Google Maps to a halt. That's just one eighth of Colorado and here we're now kind of at the block level. And you see this incredible infrastructure. So what we're doing is essentially trying to figure out what are the really key problem points for communities when they're running into interactions with this very, very strong industry and how can we kind of help them to organize around that. And we've identified a few problems that pretty much everyone in every one of these communities goes through. And the first one is the one that I'm gonna talk about now. It's a piece of software that we've released in about three communities. We're getting a lot of feedback from the communities. Sometimes feedback we don't like. Yesterday was rough. But this is one of the first things that happens if you're a landowner and a company wants the resources under your property. They send over a salesperson called a land man who basically comes and tries to convince you that you should sign a contract. And in the contract there are little things like waving your rights and they'll dig up your territory, but they want to replant the trees. And a lot of people sign those contracts because they don't know better and it's the first time they've heard of this and they're basically, oh crap. They're basically told that they have to sign. So we basically have been developing a land man review site, a little bit like Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes or one of these web 2.0 review sites where these land men are basically being reviewed by the community and it's a way of essentially fixing global capital. They basically use these land men as free agents who go from town to town, aren't accountable, never seen again after the contract gets signed. And by developing a sort of directory of these people we're hoping that those people will be made more accountable. Moreover, because they're free agents the companies that they work for will be made more accountable. And this is a way basically to figure out which companies are doing better so that you can positively reinforce them, proactively negotiate with them, which companies are doing worse so that you can try to, okay, let's have a question and answer session. So, here we go. So can all the speakers come back? Speakers come back to the stage and we've got about eight minutes for question and answer. If you're asking a question, please come up to one of the microphones. And if you have no questions then we can go faster and less people will be hurt. No questions? Yeah, could you come up to the mic? Thanks for the video audience, we need to move that. Chris, you mentioned that yesterday heard with the comments he got back for land men report card. Could you elaborate? Sure, yeah, so we're between versions and we made a pretty serious mistake of not updating and debugging the old version because we've been putting all of our energy into the new version. So basically it's a new release, it solves many of the problems. It's very hard to motivate yourself to debug something that will be replaced within a week or so. And some of the community said this is just too difficult to use. So, this is really critical because we've let the community down on some level. It's also really critical because really we've only released this in three communities. One of the people who was complaining was in one of the communities that we hadn't released it, but he'd stumbled across the site so he hasn't had any training or instruction. So, but, you know, his opinion matters and it also matters to a lot of people who've never seen the site who might be influenced to use it later. So, we're kind of doing PR damage control right now with a group of people who haven't even used the system. But, you know, the positive side is that we think actually the site's gonna be very usable and already many parts of it are quite usable, so. Other questions? These are really impressive. How are you doing outreach? I mean, how are people gonna know about these sites? You know, you're all in the very, in different developmental stages, but how are the people out in the country that really need it gonna know about it and then be able to use it? I mean, I can answer from a source mask perspective. You know, we've been doing a lot of field work. You know, it's hard to sort of get average people, consumers to go in and do this. So, we've been doing a lot of specialized work going to places like the Highlands and Islands of Scotland here in Boston, working locally. We've been finding people come to us. They wanna help out. This is an important problem that it seems to resonate with a lot of people. David's work was our first volunteer, and now, coincidentally, he's moved to Boston and now comes in every once in a while and works. So, it's been very fortunate for us. I know that's not... No, I mean, that actually is the case with our project too, that I mean, the needs of these communities is so great that they proactively approach us. So, before we had even made any public launch of the system, we had people from several states who had heard through the grapevine about the system and were requesting it. So, that actually has not been so much of a problem for us. Nadav has a captive audience also. Well, part of my issue is also because I'm right now pretty much alone or with several random help every now and then, it's very hard to bring a project to an end user deployment stage. So, in talks like this and other forums, I have more than in my share, I guess, of potential communities and potential studies to do and it's more about trying to focus on one and bring it to a stage where we can actually launch it for people to download freely and install on their devices. I think that's kind of where... Because this project is very, very technical in the sense and do you have anything? Yeah, no, I just like to say, I think it's a good question because one thing that we do at the center is actually interact with real communities. So, it's not enough just to make a website and put it online and hope someone goes to it. So, for me, I have a partner that I'm developing the project with who's in more of the community development and organization, like activism community. And so, I'm kind of handling the technical parts, he's handling some of the deployment and strategy parts and so that's how we're hoping to go forward. And also, I think slightly different from these other projects, we're looking at a potential community, like an emerging community, one that maybe isn't quite as defined as the types of people that Chris and the other projects are trying to go after. Okay, well, if no one's jumping up, then let's save some pain later and move on to the next group. So, thanks guys so much. Currently, I'm introducing the next group. So, the next block will be called Rethinking News and these are sort of more traditionally news-based projects, except sort of for this one. My project is called News Positioning System and once I get my mouse to play nice, this is actually another tool in the extract suite that Chris was just talking about so we work on with the same communities. Yesterday was rough for me too. But News Positioning System, well let's just start with, we spent a lot of time at the center talking about the future of news, but I'm actually a historian by training so I'm gonna talk about the past for a little bit. When I was doing some research into this, I found that the interesting thing is that news was always meant to be shared. So, when the US Postal Service first started at the end of the 1700s, there was actually a discount for mailing newspapers. So, it was cheaper to mail a newspaper than it was to mail a normal letter. So, people started actually mailing around newspapers as if they were postcards. This was called transient newspapers and people would do things like send a newspaper as a memento from home to someone who was far away to remind them of what was going on in their town or when someone went to an exotic far away location, they would send a newspaper back home to prove that they were there or to prove a kidnapping date or whatever. But this was a really interesting practice that actually evolved beyond the control of the newspaper industry because people would start writing notes and sometimes this was commentary, underlining an important passage and writing notes about that. Other times, people were just taking advantage of the discount and writing letters. So, to the point where Congress actually had to pass a bunch of laws that said, underlining a sentence is okay but underlining individual letters in a sentence is not okay because that's cheating the system. And even today, we see the remnants of this social system of news in tools that we use all the time like Google Reader or Delicious where you can share news articles with your friends, provide commentary on them and it's sort of a group activity. So, in our travels for Extract, we work with all communities all over the country and we saw this a lot, this binder of crazy news clippings and it was interesting because this is a system that we sort of don't, we wouldn't think to use but was very, very important in a lot of communities. These clippings came from local newspapers and from the New York Times and they were clippings that were relevant to whatever issue the organizer was trying to get people excited about and they found that this was really an invaluable tool for getting people to realize the extent of the problem. But as you can tell, there are a lot of potential limitations with this sort of medium. For example, it's hard for one person to do all of the collection. It's also hard to search or browse this in any way other than chronological order. And most of all, it's easy to lose but it's really hard to share. So if another community, for example, if the Colorado organizers wanted to duplicate this for people in Ohio so that they could learn about some of the problems that have come up in their community, it's almost impossible to duplicate this easily. The people we work with have also adopted newer technology so this is a screenshot of my inbox with a mailing list that a lot of the organizers all over the country are on. As you can see, a lot of the subjects are just showed that the emails are just forwarded articles from the New York Times or so and so published a piece about this and discussion really is organized that way. But even though this is significantly more high tech looking, there are a lot of the same limitations. So it's still hard to get a new person caught up to date and it's still hard to search. So we decided to create a tool that would make this easier. Just so you know, as Matt said, there's a new version of the site. It will be up soon. It's not right now. The screenshots are from the newer version. So this is news positioning system and all it really is is delicious with a map but it's more significant than that we think because it provides a lot of the context that we think that has been stripped out of news. So with the map, there's geographic context but you can also look at it through a metopical or a social context. People can form groups. Those are obviously fake groups. People can form groups that can then share articles between each other with a different privacy setting. And the way you use it is easy. You can either go to the site to add an article or we made a bookmarklet that allows you to, you know, whatever page you're on to easily add relevant information and then it gets added to the site. So the next steps for our project are to release the code. We're hoping to do a big publicity push and code release in the next couple of weeks and then one of our UROPS is working on an automatic email scraper so that people can actually just continue their practice of mailing, emailing around links and that'll automatically get fed into the website. If you have any questions, you can use that email address. Thank you. Next up is Florence. And so do you have the website open? Yeah, the website is open here. I'm just gonna... How do I get to the website? You should just be open. Where is it? I'll just exit and then... Okay. I'm just gonna bring this up and then show. So I'll just click on this, okay? Suck. There we go. Wanna just escape? Just to play up here and then, yeah, you're gonna hit escape and... To play. Sorry, where is it? You can put on your play now. Almost there, almost there. Okay, so my name is Florence Gales. I'm a second year graduate student in comparative media studies and research assistant at the Center for Futuristic Media. And here at the center I have been looking at the news industry, which as you know, it's in dire condition, especially the print media. Lots of problems and challenges, the quality of news, how to integrate technologies, new technologies into the current models, sustainability, how to come up with a sustainable business model, free speech, cyber rights. So one of the big problems, I think the news industry is collaboration because the news content that we read now, it comes from very different news sources from professional journalists, reporters and editors, staff, non-staff, freelancers, citizen journalists, bloggers, Twitterers, Facebook dwellers, and so on. So how do we come up with high quality, original reporting? Very often you get these kinds of situations or even this, within even the same news organization. Maybe it's a little bit extreme, but so I came up with the idea of designing an open source, I mean, Open Park, it's an open source news reporting toolbox for collaborative, synchronized or simultaneous coverage of hyper-local, national and global news. So it's a new platform for collaborative online news production and you can find it here. That's where we are going to go right now to openparkmedia.media.mit.edu. So hopefully, and it doesn't show. So I still got to Safari probably. It was supposed to appear. Okay, I'm not going to do too much navigation because I'm kind of technologically challenged, but. So this is our homepage and basically the idea is that you have one national story, for instance, or issue and then reporters covering it from their state cities of their location. And at the end, you put all their reports together and you end up having one national or large scale story or issue covered from various local different perspectives. And it's, as you see at the top, it says it's an open source collaborative, one stop place for new media professionals, users and watchers, meaning that it's both for skilled and non-skilled people. So it's a kind of toolbox where you can actually learn how to report the news. So the citizens and people in the communities can learn how to report their news by using this. It has all the tools. There is a section. It's a code of ethics for collaborative journalism that I'm currently developing. How to deal with all the new media tools like Facebook and so on and when ethical issues come into play. It tells you what the good standards would be. There is the tools. If I can reach it, I'm not sure. I don't see the mouse. But anyway, the tools are actually proposed tools and how to use Facebook or social networks, Twitter to cover the news and maybe in new ways you can propose a new tool also to report the news. We have four case studies that we have started. The first one is international relations, the US-Russian relations. There's a local angle because we are looking at the Russian diaspora here in Boston when they think about it. So it's all out there. We have started this semester with journalism students from Boston University specifically. So it's all at openpark.media.mit.edu. So happy exploration and news production. Next we have Darmishta Rood with Populus. So I brought my own water. It's not Poland spring. This is complicated. That's not what I want. Oh yes it is. Okay, hi. So I'm here to talk to you guys about Populus, a project that's actually going on within student media at UCLA, which brings me to the first point of discussion, the world of college media, where there's a really fast turnover of students. It's very exciting that fast pace also transfers into the newsroom. You get a journalistic education at the fast paced speed of a college campus. But there's also, oh my slides didn't export well, just imagine it's crossing out the world of and making it problems of. It was queued on my computer anyway. Most college newspapers don't have the resources to innovate with the fast turnaround of students. It turns into a problem for using existing platforms and trying to even just facilitate simple customization of other platforms. And so it really, in three specific areas, this is a big problem. Web presence being very prominent as everything's moving online. Different newspapers have varying degrees of technical competency, making web presence a difficult challenge. Organization is also a difficult challenge internal to these newsrooms. I remember in my college newspaper, we had as photo editor, I had four whiteboards on the wall. And if I wanted to assign a photo to someone I would write it on the whiteboard, I couldn't access it on my iPhone or anything. And I had to physically go to the newsroom to see if it was there and print it out on a sheet of paper. It was terrible, I don't recommend it. And the third problem is sort of something looking forward into the future. How does the newsroom interact with the community? And how can we further that online? So, there goes my cute slide again. Luckily, we've thought this all through. So we have some answers. It's a Django-based solution in three parts. It's a basic content management platform, a digital newsroom, and a feature we're calling Campus Walk. So the content management system is easily facilitates blogs and categorization of content, seamless audio, video, and photo uploads and integrates with existing social media. The digital newsroom is an organized, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's really hard to say. Organizational tool with a newsroom in mind, where you can plan in assigned stories, view everything on a calendar, and you can access it from anywhere because it's online. And the possibly most exciting of the three solutions is Campus Walk, creating a community hub of information with things like group profiles, where anyone can form a group around content, interests, or activities. And we're currently in collaboration with within the UCLA community to create visualizations of all of the community-generated information to create this truly as a hub for the community. And so the problem is larger than student media, but the solution is too. Okay, next we have Lisa Williams with Place Blogger. Hi everybody, my name is Lisa Williams and I run Place Blogger, which is the largest searchable index of local web logs. And I'm probably the only person in the history of history to actually try and scan many thousands of these every day, but every day that I get up and do that looks more and more like a real wire service only with many, many more cat pictures. Now it's interesting that this is happening precisely at the time when the rest of the industry kind of looks like this. And there are so many of these, we can't even really keep track of them. And that leaves the rest of us who actually care about civic news and information with this decision. We can either do this or this. Now I think it's actually great news that thousands of people have decided to start their own online citizen journalism local community sites, but a lot of times that's not really in response to sort of shrinking newsroom capacity. It's in response to the communities that they live in which they feel are really bland, big box, it's the same everywhere. And so what can you blame that on? Well, let's take a look at Boston though first. I mean in Boston probably some of you recognize these buildings are right over, they're right over Staro Drive and they have this interesting gnomic sign over them that taunts the people who are stuck in traffic that says if you lived here you'd be home now. But this doesn't look particularly home like. I mean I've seen more homey cell blocks, right? 100 years ago this is what it looked like. So how do we get from here to here? Well, I can tell you who we can blame it on, we can blame it on Vegas. There's a really wonderful book called Learning from Las Vegas by Stephen Isenor and if you're interested in public spaces I really recommend that you read it. He basically makes I think a very convincing argument that the pioneers of public space in America in the last half of the 20th century was really Las Vegas. They made all these buildings that basically their purpose was keep the rain off you and hold up science on the outside. And in this time what happened in Las Vegas did not stay in Las Vegas. You know I kept creeping across the land like you know huge like nasty big box kudzu, right? And so in response to this people wanted to find out what was authentically theirs about the community that they lived in and just in the US alone we can find more than 5,500 of them. Now to give you some sense of scale there were only 19,000 named places in the United States. Okay, that's somebody getting to almost 25% penetration in what, five, six years? That's amazing but it's really kind of understudied and under looked at, right? So Place Blogger is sort of an astronomical observatory for these guys. Now the other reason why it's really good to have this distributed news core is that a lot of our problems are distributed. To give you an example of this you know think of the foreclosure crisis or global warming. I mean with global warming it's really hard for a conventional news room to cover this. I mean what are you gonna do? Interview every penguin. You know to give you an example of what happens when you can't do distributed news. I'll take a story like this. Some of you probably remember the package that the Washington Post did on the treatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. They want a very well deserved Pulitzer for it but they had to go in and make individual soldiers stand for all soldiers. And that always ends up with a scene like this. You have some weasel behind a podium saying this is just an isolated incident. And there's not a darn thing you can do about it. But now there actually might be. You know you might actually be able to ask the question and actually answer it. Well okay there are upwards of 6,000 returning U.S. service personnel who will be amputees as a result of battlefield injuries. I got a simple question. How many of them have been issued their prostheses by the VA? Simple question I'm asking you to go to the moon. But a conventional set of news gathering technologies finds that really hard to answer. So what we can do now is turn stories into signals. And before you start to think that that's impossible we do it all the time. Okay that's what box scores are about. That's what stock prices are about. Now ask yourself if I can know the stock price of Apple every single minute of every single day that the market is open. Why can't I know about other things that are important to me? Like about the environment or medical care or whether my neighbor is being turned out of their house. Yikes. And oh my God I'm not gonna get darted. So that'll be about it for me. And thanks very much. Jane Wang. Those are fascinating tools and concepts. And I'm wondering if you have ever considered moving in the direction of providing multi-lingual supports for the tools you are developing. And if you're thinking about doing that would it involve more than just quote unquote translations and what kind of barriers would you expect in moving that in moving that direction. This one? Okay when I actually started Place Blogger I really thought that it would be a US centric site. And then the first day that we opened it a very popular web log called Boing Boing link to it. And they happened to link to it at about midnight Eastern time which meant that all the people who were paying attention were on the Pacific Rim. So I went to sleep with a US site and I woke up with a site that really had a lot of sites in Chinese on it. Although I wasn't really sure if these were spammer if they were Chinese cause I couldn't read them. So I had to go out and get a lot of friends to help me and say is this spammer, is this a real site? So we'd love to do it. I need more collaborators to help me do it. It's really in the early stages. We just launched a website this summer. So we're not thinking of doing any translations on that level, on a formal level. But I think that the international stories, the one on US-Russian relations in the center at an informal level, it is involving some Russian language skills in a sense. I mean, I have a lot of contacts in Russia and I'm using them. The reporters can take interviews online or either by email also. But we do use sometimes Russian to cover that topic already. The nice thing about a lot of the tools that we're using, I know Darmish is using Django as well, is that a lot of these web frameworks have localization options built in. So it's really not that, and especially since all of our projects are open source, it's really not hard to, if somebody wanted to make a localized version, it would be very easy for them to do it. As for our system, it's totally content neutral. So if people were to link to a Spanish language or French or Chinese news article, they'd be more than welcome to do that and it would work just fine. Thanks a lot, Ian Connery, really interesting presentations. You know, it struck me that traditional journalism and news media is having such trouble and that there is such excitement around the blogging and the sort of independent journalism world. I'm wondering if there are similar concerns about sustainability though or how you see that going forward. You know, I guess my sense and I don't know enough about the world, it seems a large number of the bloggers are sort of on their free time or it's not really a career yet. There's a handful that have managed to transition to full-fledged news organizations and longer-term careers, but I'm wondering what you think about sort of post-classified ad models for this kind of journalism and what really can lead to sustainability of these really interesting projects. I think that's probably to me, but do you guys have, if you guys have two cents on that, I'd be interested in hearing it too. Many of the sites that Place Blogger looks at are passion sites. Passion is surprisingly durable. It's much more durable than I thought and one of the things that I was interested in when we did Place Blogger was mortality rates. The mortality rates of these sites are actually very small and it doesn't have to do with money. It has to do with the fact that at least in North America, people are very mobile. One of the main reasons for these sites to shut down is that the originator moves. Since I also ran a local site, one of the big problems is that existing ad networks really do very poorly for local sites. So the ones that do well tend to have population area of greater than 100,000 and an intact downtown, which isn't necessarily true of every community. If you don't have mom and pop businesses because they've been driven out by chains, then nobody's going to advertise with you because nationals aren't ready to advertise with small sites. They can't even, can't take the time to do it. So there are sustainability issues but there's also huge amounts of volume, right? I keep waiting for it to go away too and it's just not going away. I had a couple of thoughts just from the college media perspective. It's a little different than just a newspaper in a town because there's things very specific to schools like their sports teams or if their art program is big or even just events, big events on campus, that draws in a readership and there's also local businesses in the surrounding college area that obviously aren't all taken over by large corporations. So with those two specific audiences, it's obviously gonna be an experiment going forward with what happens online with college media but we're hoping that by generating a connection between the community, both for businesses to be able to access and be a part of and the student readership that's somehow a correct blend of that could at least help things a little going forward. Yeah, in relation to Open Park, I have to say that I agree with Professor Condry that to have a working business model is absolutely essential for these projects to work and actually Open Park doesn't have one yet because it's in its early stages. But I agree also with Lisa that passion really is a key driver. So I personally would promote, I mean, Open Park is worked on by volunteers. It's on a voluntary basis but I personally would support the, what you probably would call the freelance system when you pay per products, per news production. So you pay per story or, and I think it's the most probably motivating way to do it. I think the other thing that's important to remember is you're essentially looking at startups, right? Most startups fail, okay? That's true of these guys too. And I think that we could look at them and try to compare them to existing operations often that have been around like the Boston Globe that's been around for more than a century and they're just gonna look so tiny and so different. But it's, let people start up things. Some of them will survive. It's called Subjected Mapping. Mapping of course is a huge aspect of websites right now, thanks to Subject guys like Google Maps but for everything that mapping, as we know it's on the web reveals, it seems to secure other issues of locality. Those maps all look the same no matter where you're going. And so these are approaches of highlighting the local in an interesting way. We start with this. I think, okay. Is this one weird? It's not too much for you guys. It's not yet. I don't know of it. Hi, there's no mapping actually in this but it is about sort of local geography people's thoughts about local geography. So I want to talk about BostonBoston.org. That's not very extreme view. It's right behind you. Oh it is? It was right behind me. Let's try it again. That's good. Oh, watch back. Okay, thank you. So check this time. Okay. This is online.free, those of you who know Boston, this is online you didn't have if you're sort of oriented towards facing downtown right next to MassArt. And you can see it's a sign that sort of calls out the key arts institutions in Boston, right? It's got the mentioned MassArt. It says Isabelle Stewart Gardner. She's just going to walk over here and then four blocks from there is the Museum of Fine Arts and then another four blocks of Symphony Hall. She kind of lays it out. You might think that hey, after five terms of there you finally got the idea that the single biggest problem in Boston is that people can't find their way around it. That's not true. You didn't get that idea. In fact, the city has nothing to do with this sign. In fact, if you look, it's not even on, it's auto-advancing. It's not even on city proper. This is sort of, it's basically colorized to show you that the red there is the city part of the sidewalk. But the green is the MassArt part of the sidewalk. This is actually cited on MassArt. It's cited on private land in a very public place. And not only is it on sort of private land but it was really sort of private design that went into doing this. It wasn't some big signage bureau that decided, hey, what are the important things to call out here? It was a local community. Here's Bridget, student of MassArt who actually came up with the winning design for this sign from a small competition in a class. And her class decided what are actually the key places to be calling out around MassArt. So this idea that sort of Chris alluded to earlier of local community, local neighborhood, using local assets and local know-how to solve a problem is what Lassen-Bossen is all about. There's a website that blends all those things together to bring some sort of more global visibility and maybe some more global sponsorship. But at the end of the day, it's all about local communities that decide what goes there and where these things go. We got the first sign up just a week ago and we are sort of rolling this out. The most interesting thing to me about this is the way that, you know, is sort of the model. In fact, that seems to be working pretty well. Just getting one sign done has got lots of people to talk to us who basically tell the same story so far and the people I've heard from is like, wow, we've got this massive signage problem in our part of town and I've pretty much killed myself trying to get sort of public money to fix it. And so the a-ha insight, hey, guess what? Maybe you don't need to approach it that way. You could approach it in a much more local, in a much more local community, bottom-up driven approach. Thanks to Ray Platt who did the design, the work on the site and then MassArt and Urban Arts Institute are collaborating on the project. And if you have a site or if you want to sponsor a sign-up or you want to design a sign or you can go check out the website at Lassen-Bossen.org or email me at info at Lassen-Bossen.org. Thank you. I'll go to the next one. Okay, this one, please. As this... Jay Silver. Jay Silver. Jay Silver! So this project that our group did is like a lot of the projects in the subjective mapping category, asks what's a map? Guys, what's a map? You know, what, really? And who makes them? Is a building a road a map? What's a map? And I was inspired kind of by these diner maps, like this is a map, right? But it's not a map of roads and it's not a map of buildings only. It's kind of a, it has a caricature to it, kind of a caricature map. And I was inspired by that so I made a map of my childhood. And so, you know, I grew up a vegetarian that's tofu up on the left. I was birthed at home and across the street. You know, it's not very literal, right? But it's a map of my childhood. And here's a map of a workshop I ran once. So I kind of have been thinking about what is a map and how do you make them? What spaces do they exist in? Only geographical or are they in my mind and in my emotion space? And so that's why we are working on this project called Awareness Mapping. So what does it mean to map for the purpose of awareness? So we went over to India and we worked with some kids in a really cool school, not school, kind of a strange school. And we said, okay, let's make a map of your community. So let's first focus on nature. Here, take pictures of nature. Here's some cell phones. And some of the pictures we got seems like nature. Okay, yeah, I see what you're doing. Here, they're taking a picture of a satellite dish or something with a scarecrow on it. Here, it's like a mosquito dish but also like a sewage drainage ditch but also kind of a bathroom as I learned later as I was digging in the dirt, they told me. And this is like a well where they pump the water. And so all this is nature and then we said, okay, we'll sketch those, let's take our favorite parts of nature and focus on them. And now we're gonna start paper crafting our buildings. So first, we'll start with the school and let's get our bodies involved and measure the building with our hands and take string to the top of the building, see how tall it is by dropping the string down and we started to build paper crafts and those fans you see there on the lid, those fans are on the ceiling and it's kind of like a realistic-ish model and they're really good with paper and so we did 3D pop-up stuff and we related this a little bit to Google SketchUp but then there's this question of how do all these things interrelate? So we've got this nature and that nature and humans as part of nature and man-made things as part of nature and so we acted that out to try to get a feel for how all these things relate to each other and you can see there's complex interrelationships. This is the well and someone pumping it. We really got viscerally involved with how are things in motion when things are moving in a map? How do you represent them and they drew diagrams? Oh well the cow goes to market but then we have to take the product back home and how is it all interrelated and we thought maybe we can have a moving map. So we made this map by cutting holes in paper and mixing computers right in and I'm gonna see if this video plays and if not I have it on a thumb drive so I'm gonna try to play it off the thumb drive. Okay I don't have any sound but that's all right. So here you see a breakout of the map and here you see the entire map put together with computers woven into the paper. There's a bare Nokia N810 and a second you'll see actual like a classmate woven in behind the paper kind of crafted in. Here's a story about for example like the story of the chicken and where it goes and how it interrelates with the other parts of the map and what we did actually after this is we broke all these pieces out of the map so we didn't just leave them in the classroom. We said let's break these mobile installations and take them out into the community and run around and show them in your houses and install them on your walls. You know there was a tsunami while we were there so we're like oh well let's cover tsunami stuff. What happened with you in the tsunami? Oh well my house got broken down. Okay well let's install this as an interactive panel woven into your bricks and let's kind of like cut right into the dirt and install this kind of thing about that one picture that that guy took earlier of the mosquito ditch which was also a sewer which was also all of these things. Actually here they're installing that exact piece so there's kind of the ditch and then they're like kind of in this next scene they're literally crafting the computer into the dirt. You see the edges of the paper are kind of meant to look like the trash itself. So I guess a question that I bring to you is what is a map and with the 30 seconds that I seem to have left I will show you one thing that may or may not be a map and I'll let you decide this is footage taken in Bangalore. So just a video but maybe it's a map, I don't know. And last of all we have Jeff Warren with Cartogen. So I think I have too many slides so I'll just do them really quickly and then we'll just have to keep up. Sorry, I have too many slides. But I'm trying to make a lot of, oh I'm sorry, I'm Jeff Warren from the Media Lab. I'm in a group called Design Ecology and I work on mapping tools and thank you. I try to make maps of things that say, for example Google cannot or will not make and really trying to think about mapping from the other side about the people who are in the map and how they participate in the map. So I like to go to places in Google Maps where they have kind of a representational problem like here they're not really sure where they were since Sahara as a country so they just put a dotted line and that's because Google's not really trying to take a political stance on that but I think I try to frame how I approach mapping with these five issues and try to answer some of these questions. But let's see. So the core of my work is this project called Cartogen and what it is, it's a set of tools for mapping but at the heart of it it's a renderer. What that means is it takes discrete mapping information like coordinates, polygons, things like that and it renders them in front of you at about 15 frames per second. So you can view a map just like in Google Maps but you can make these really dramatically different maps. The project's open source, it's cardigan.org and there's API and documentation online and some videos. But this is a good example. I made a map of the entire world that looks like the classic computer game Warcraft 2 and you can see London here and there's the parliament and the treasury but this is kind of a fanciful example but with this I was able to take a map which is kind of dry and purely geographic and make it extremely relevant to viewers on, say, Boing Boing who really liked playing Warcraft or did back when that was all the rage. So it was a way to create a lens for the entire world to make information more relevant. In this case, just in a kind of frivolous way but I think there's a lot of potential to look at mapping as a filter or a lens. And I also think there's a lot of potential to do things that are very interactive. This is a map using open stream map data that actually is showing the road conditions, pavement conditions in Cambridge and it's collaboratively contributed but this is a map you imagine you could have open at the MBTA or whoever fixes potholes. And these maps are HTML5 with JavaScript. These are available on an iPhone or an Android phone and they're not as fast as I'd like but we're getting there. So I'm gonna show one project I did to demonstrate what you can do with Cardigan which is this really scriptable dynamic mapping framework that's called Newsflow. And what Newsflow does is it looks at where articles occur, the places that are in news articles but also where they were written or more accurately where the headquarters of the news organization is. And this is like a lot of different articles over a few days but if you go to the site you'll see in real time like these are articles that occurred in the last few minutes. So this one, I just did this video before coming here so this should be only a few hours old and you can kind of wander around, interact with it. You can click on Reuters for example to see all articles recently by Reuters and to see kind of what is their global reach. Is Reuters, did they have a particular interest in area of the world? Are they ignoring certain areas? And by contrast, could you look at, say, Chinua I think is an interesting case and I think in the video I do that in just a second but I'm trying to contrast different news sources. It's only English-language news now just because I suddenly had to write a thesis proposal and couldn't add the other languages but they're almost there. And so yeah, this is Chinua here. I like this one. And you can also click on Places and see the actual articles. There is an interface for looking at all the news sources that cover a single location rather than all the places that a single news source covers, so the inverse of that. And trying to think about kind of an immersive way to look at news. So I think that, I'm totally out of time here. I'm just gonna rush through here. I want to make tools for people who don't have the money to buy a GPS but still want maps. I think places like this, which I'm hoping to visit in January, this is on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, they have a need to express their geographies, their informal geographies. They're not legalized, they don't have deeds to the land but we can use very inexpensive techniques. I'm looking at how people used to use sextants and can you automate a sextant reading using a cell phone? Could you scan in maps that people draw and rectify them, stretch them to make things fit? This is a map I did with a friend of mine, Santiago Alfaro, tried to stretch it so that it actually was geographically accurate by correlating corners to the edge of a GPS. You may have heard at MIT here some students recently launched a balloon to 90,000 feet for $150. So tomorrow, I just actually, before coming here ordered some helium. And tomorrow at noon in front of the media lab we're gonna try to launch a balloon but on a tether and just use it to take pictures from above. So I think that's it. That was within a millisecond of when you hit me. It's on time. Several of these projects deal with mapping. And I wonder if each of you would talk a little bit more about the larger implications of why it's important for the capacity to map and to map things that haven't been mapped before. Why is that an important power to make available to people? What's sort of the large picture here about why these projects are potentially transformative or deeply helpful? Well, I think I guess I would imagine traditionally a lot of people interact with maps by going to the gas station, buying a roadmap or something like that. And today we do the same but with Google. The experience hasn't changed I think in the underlying principles. The media has changed a bit. But I'd like it if people were more able to produce maps and communicate via maps and if it were more of a medium of dispute or a conversation or, you know. So that's my interest I think. Oh well, in an age of overflow of information map is like a snapshot of a space. And it shows a lot of different things. It shows how to use a space but it also shows why is a space beautiful. But what's hidden is who made the map and really what is it bringing to the forefront. And what's important. And maps are so powerful in that but the authors, I've never seen a map with an author in my textbook when I was a kid. Maps have authors and perspectives are so important. So maps, short snapshots, how to use a space and why they're beautiful. I'll go a different way with that. I guess I feel about maps the way I feel about journalism that it's not important unto itself it's important in terms of what it can do and what it can do is just make you feel located and make you feel connected, grounded, part of an area. And so if you saw what I did there, there were no maps. We talked about putting a map on the sign and I don't know my experience of maps on signs is that obviously they're aspiring to make you feel grounded but they don't. They're often barriers to feeling like you know what's going on. So we started with more sort of more of an oral culture of directions like straight, four blocks. And that just seemed to work better for those types of problems but the goal is the same to make it feel like when you're here you have a sense of where you are and what's around and you feel connected. I'll ask the same question that I asked earlier but I have to put it in context. I'm a mapaholic. I love maps. I have a huge collection of them. I'm also part of a group from Pepperdine from Los Angeles. So I ask the questions that I ask are how do we use them or know about them in Los Angeles? How do we spread them? I think all three of you or what you're doing actually in the journalists too are doing really interesting and important stuff, technical term. How do we take that and then spread it out in Los Angeles and then kind of send it out as they said earlier with the photographs and being able to spread it out to other people because it is so important? Well, this won't completely answer your question but just to take the viewpoint that I think needs to be championed more often is maybe these things can be rolled out virally more easily than stamped out industrially. So maybe if you love it, absorb it and retransmit it, obviously, but just to point out that, you know, rolling these things out and spreading these things can be like oral tradition absorbed and retransmitted but that's just a small part of your question. Yeah, actually I completely agree with that. I mean, you know, I'm sort of old style about that. I think that interesting ideas can spread themselves. You know, just based on our approach to sort of getting something in the ground, we're seeing that other people are seeing it and it's growing. You can ask me again in two months whether it's completely stopped dead. But I think, you know, the emphasis that we have at the center on making something and getting it out there and as Chris said, doing it in the context of a community so that you validate your assumptions as you go, hopefully positions what you've made to be, you know, to organically grow without the need for a billion dollar marketing campaign or a massive amount of, hey, you know, go do this. We're starting with small, you know, we're starting with short resources here. So those kinds of things are more naturally replicable than, oh, hey, we got, you know, $100 million to do this. Why don't you go get $100 million and go do it? Thanks, it's a good question. We all sort of have map grammar that we've grown up with about what maps are and what they're good for and when you don't go to a map. Have you had any experience from your users? Are they okay with what you're doing? Are they confused? Are they there with it? Is it a stretch for people to think that way about maps? I mean, the people I worked with didn't have a problem working with maps that way, but, you know, we kind of were giving and taking all the time. We didn't go in there knowing what kind of map we were gonna make ahead of time. And I think if we called it something other than a map, they would have agreed that it was something other than a map, so we framed it as one. It's good, I have to think about that, so. I think people are pretty comfortable drawing places, and especially if they're not worried about whether it's the correct latitude or longitude, but just saying, this is my home, this is my yard, this is my dog or whatever, and I think when a group of people get together and they draw together on a map, or it's kind of like they're sharing a little bit of brain space, that this representation of this place that they share is being agreed upon, they can all look at it, and it's not like they can, not that people are always doing this, but it's not like you can twist people's words around, you have to kind of agree by putting things on there, and you can scribble something out and move it, but I think about a lot of neighborhoods that map themselves or something, or like a community that can't decide whether, like two neighbors who are arguing about a tree, something like that, is it a my land or your land, and whether mapping can resolve even small disputes like that, is that a good sign? Can we build on that and scale that up in some way? If I'm allowed to reflect and give another answer. I recently heard from a friend that he read in a book that the only voice you really have is when you're writing for your own self as your audience, you can only write for yourself, it's one perspective, and sometimes when I'm doing this awareness mapping stuff, I feel like it's asking someone, oh, so tell me about yourself, but really, really, just tell me about yourself. Yes, there's a sort of trend on the internet to go from text to visual to more kinesthetic sorts of applications, which maps to PSJA's ways of knowing. I'm curious whether or not you've looked into more kinesthetic ideas. What got me thinking about it was the video that you showed, I had to think about that, and it's kind of like, that's very kinesthetic, and you know, bees communicate location and direction by actually doing a little dance. Any thoughts, it's a little wild of a thought, but... Could you just say what you're talking about with the kinesthetics? Like, I mean, in the video you said. Well, in the video, there's a sense of moving, right? And you're actually moving through the space, which is a kind of a kinesthetic. The bee thing I'm talking about is they communicate where the pollen is, apparently, according to this National Geographic, by pointing in a direction and flying. Please do it. Ha ha ha ha. Is that on the video? And the other bees then know how far to go, and in what direction, and for how long. It's an interesting idea. I don't have anything to show, but I was in a workshop in Taiwan last winter when the group I was working in, we tried to make ribbons that you could, attach like a beanbag to, and then look across this Taiwanese alley to some neighbor and throw the beanbag up. And the beanbag had this symbol for good luck on the front of it. So you might see it flying in direction, but it's not threatening, hopefully. And it would get kind of entangled in the banister, and then it had messages in a little pocket. And so you could open the pouch and read about it, and then the idea was you would weave it through your banister and then throw it to your next neighbor. But they all went back to the park, and in the park there was this big spool. And you could attach things to the ribbon as it went out. And it also, as it went, it rang a little bell that went like ding dong, ding dong. And I mean, basically like we were playing on or something that nobody, none of the neighbors knew each other, and that this would be a way to connect people, even though they don't have a shared doorway or whatever this is, and to make kind of a very slow physical network to connect the whole neighborhood. It was like not very instant messaging, and it's only one to. And then everyone we thought could also pull on the ribbon. And if they all went at the same time, perhaps, you could feel each other pulling on the ribbon even if you can't see each other. So, I don't know, I mean, there's kind of aesthetics on that, and I thought it was pretty nice, even though the ribbon got really pretty tangled pretty fast, so maybe it didn't work that well. Okay, thanks guys so much. We should move on with that. Next we have Josh Levinger, who's gonna be showing virtual Gaza. Is Josh in the, oh, there he is. He's been a snake, it would have bit me. It's called Crossing Borders, but it's actually also about mapping, so you're not out of the woods yet. Where did the, yeah, so my name's Josh Levinger. I'm a student in the Computing Culture Group and a fellow in the Center for Future Civic Media, and my project is called Virtual Gaza. And I started in January last year, right as the war broke out. We got it online just as the ceasefire occurred, so we just missed the deadline, unfortunately. But it was a project to aggregate stories from civilians who were present really as the bombs were falling in January 2009. It also uses a sort of cartographic interface, but it has a little twist that shows you more of people's individual stories as they experienced it. So each of the dots, normally Google Maps gives you all these pins on the map in their places you wanna go. These were houses that were destroyed. So the impetus for the project was the Israeli media blockade. There were only six international journalists in Gaza at the time of the war. No more were allowed in once the bombs started falling. And there was the sense of even-handed coverage by the American press. I didn't see these two pictures exactly next to each other, but I think it's an interesting juxtaposition of a woman in Starot, which is in Israel, sort of cowering with her children, and then many people who were killed in Gaza. I think this was from Gaza City. So the media sort of presented both sides as if they were equal actors when there was really disproportionate destruction on one side. And there was the sense in Israeli and American public opinion that if the IDF had to do this destruction, they must have been justified, which we'll see if you agree or not. So the goal of the project was to allow civilians to share their own experiences and tell their stories and really put a human face on the reconstruction as it progressed, which has been quite slow, but we grouped the checks by region, giving a sense of sort of what each neighborhood was like. And the tagline of the project was to break the information blockade. So the implementation was a collaboration with the Harvard Alliance for Justice in the Middle East. It grew through a literal social network and Chris introduced me to someone at Harvard and she knew someone in Gaza and they knew 10 people and they knew 100. So it grew, we collected 77 testimonies from 29 authors mapping 32 neighborhoods in five cities. That grew with the help of a Europe who is from Gaza and he's an MIT freshman and I was a sophomore, but he wasn't allowed to go home. So over the summer, he worked with me and his name's Obaidah Abu-Hut Hashem. His help was invaluable because I can't read Arabic at all. So we allowed people to upload their own stories and videos. These are some of the contributors and this is a short video sort of walkthrough. So as you zoom in, you see the different stories from the areas, the different pictures. So you sort of move down the strip. It's a remarkably small area. I'll zoom into one particular testimony that I found particularly compelling by a mother, her name's Meda Alsaka and it's about sort of how she was gonna explain to her son who was about five, what was going on. In response to the question that keeps getting asked every time, how do you gain an audience for this? The answer is, I don't know. We do these things, this share, stumble upon. I still get a small amount of traffic but it never really got picked up by mainstream media sources. So we have a bunch of photo galleries that were submitted by individuals. So they're really quite personal. So the top level is a family that whose chicken coupes were destroyed. This is the second level is the UN headquarters. You'd think that they wouldn't bomb the UN headquarters but they did anyway. And then the American International School which was really the main school in Gaza City that was not controlled by Hamas. This also had an open source component. You can overlay open stream map data. And one of the reasons why open stream map is so powerful is particularly in conflict areas it's much better data. So on the left is Microsoft virtual earth and on the right is what open stream map was able to put together pretty quickly. So over the summer I tried to go to Gaza to improve the projects but I wasn't able to go. I went to the West Bank instead meeting with activists and I'm trying to develop new modes of geographic activism. So I stayed in Ramallah and went to Jerusalem pretty frequently and to do that you have to go through this checkpoint. And I worked on a project called Voices Beyond Walls which is remarkably similar to what Jay was doing although it's in a different area. So I assisted with a spatial mapping exercise and it looked pretty similar. We asked kids to take us around the neighborhood show us things that they, how they constructed the neighborhood. This is in the old city of Jerusalem and the Shufat refugee camp that's right next door. And we had them draw out, take pictures and then draw out their neighborhood and contrast it with what I was able to create with the GPS unit. And I think theirs looks better honestly. I lost GPS signal and some of the, I guess I'm done, but. Signal lost. Yeah. Anyway, thanks a lot. Introduce again Rick Borovoy with a project called Micro Tourism. Did you get the timing out of there? We're gonna see. I guess we could all watch this and see if it advances on its own. Looks okay so far. So this is a fantastic Brazilian restaurant in Framingham. It's in an old H.H. Richardson building. It's actually the old train station in Framingham. Many of you probably know H.H. Richardson, fantastic New England architect. Really great restaurant. Really good food, beautiful setting. It's about $10 for all you can eat. Should be very popular in the recession, right? And in fact, I don't know, it's still a lot of advancing. In fact, it is very popular with Brazilians. But not so much with non-Brazilians. Brazilians came to, Brazilians, there's a really large immigrant community in Framingham. And in fact, they kind of rescued downtown. They, after the Nidic Mall moved in and downtown Framingham became kind of blighted, the Brazilians moved in and built a lot of stores there and really brought the whole place back to life. But the interesting thing is that non-Brazilians don't really go there. And if you ask them why that is, they'll say a lot of different things. They'll say, well, the traffic's really bad. They'll say, well, it's not really safe, which is not really true anymore. They'll say, basically, they'll have a lot of different codes for sort of, well, it's just other. It's really not on their mental map. Back to the mental mapping sort of exercise. The interesting thing is that there are a lot of non-Brazilians who go to the library. There's a picture of them right there, which is sort of downtown, on the outskirts of downtown, but they don't really go any further. And so we've been thinking a lot about how you get people to cross these sort of cultural divides. We were thinking, you know, which is if only there were some metaphor that took that idea of sort of exploring the other and turned that into a positive thing. And of course, there is such a metaphor. It's tourism, right? My one little PowerPoint animation there. Tourism is all about exploring the other and the joy of discovery. And it's a $500 billion a year business. It's the world's largest industry, bigger than technology, bigger than healthcare, probably bigger than those combined. And here we have this opportunity for tourism that's right in the neighborhood. And so that's what we set out to do is how can we create this concept of micro-tourism that's gonna move these people from the library to the restaurant and through downtown. And on Saturday, a few days from today, what is it, Thursday today, day after tomorrow, we're gonna try the world's first micro-tour. The restaurant and a bunch of business owners in downtown are put together sort of a Brazilian cultural festival that starts at the library and then a whole set of Brazilian guides are gonna move people from the library through town to the restaurant. And in fact, it kind of grew out of what someone said to us which is that you're not gonna get these people here unless you leave them by the hand. And that's what we're gonna try. And what you're looking at here is the passport that people are gonna be given at the library. And this is all pretty low-tech except for the fact that there's a stamp in the lower right corner that's a code. And we're gonna scan people's passports as they move from spot to spot. And by doing that, they're gonna get an incentive in the mail to come back to downtown on their own. So we're hopefully gonna create a kind of trajectory of guided tour goes to self-discovery, goes to more people just coming downtown and sort of rediscovering the area. And then hopefully replicating that to other tours in some ways a similar model to the Lost in Boston, which we're trying to create an example for this, figure out if it's compelling. If it is, put the basic pieces in place to help other people replicate it other places. Can't point you to a website on this but get in touch with me at boravoyatmedia.mit.edu if you wanna hear more and if you really wanna come check it out, we're gonna be downtown at the Framingham Library starting at two o'clock on Saturday. And last we have Charles Dottar between the bars. Seems to not be great. All right, so I'm Charles Dottar. Hi, it's great to be here. Between the bars is a blogging platform that's for about 1% of Americans, prisoners that makes it easy to do blogging on paper using the standard US postal mail. So prison populations are rising. We've all heard about this stuff in the news but that's only half the story. The other half the story is that as prison populations rise, the population of ex-prisoners rises even faster. And ex-prisoners face a lot of discrimination when they come out from employers. This graph on the right here is asking questions of employers whether they would be interested in hiring prisoners or not, a lot of them are not. People face voting discrimination, they're unable to vote, reduced abilities to participate civically. And faced with all these, this sort of forms of cultural exclusion, it's little wonder that recidivism rates are so high. Studies do show that prisoners who have a stronger connection with the outside world and who maintain an identity as citizens instead of as just miscreants, are much less likely to commit more crimes. So conditions in prison are pretty terrible. Sean Atwood, the author of John's Jail Journal which is a blog that he started in prison, wrote the following. Says the dirty potato peelings are back as the main course among the diarrhea inducing expired eatables. Bone dry citrus fruits are the new additions to breakfast. The stench of filth and sweat pervades the air. The bed sore on my left buttock is blistered and bleeding. My mouth and tongue are ulcerated. This joyless maltreatment is clearly designed to chafe one's happy-go-lucky disposition. The lure of being consigned to the grave can become an unremitting thought as evidenced by the periodic suicides. So Sean Atwood's father describes the effect that running a blog and keeping a blog well he was in prison had on Sean. He says, it's his lifeline really. He gets printouts back. The other inmates get copies as well and they're quite pleased. It's a link not just for him to the outside world but for his inmate friends as well, a lifeline to the outside world. Ethan Zuckerman, I hope I don't misquote you too badly. From the Berkman Center for Internet and Society has been working on a project called Global Voices which is blogging for people in the third world and other places that don't have a lot of access to broadcast media. He said about these blogging communities, I think it really has to do with being listened to. These people are saying, please don't presume to speak for me. We have a fascinating back door open with blogs. It really is diverse and complicated. And so anybody can write a letter from prison but it's only those people like Sean Atwood who have a connection to people who are tech savvy have friends and families who are able to do blogging that are able to blog and have access to that sort of broadcast media. And so what between the bars does is it makes this whole process easier. The initial implementation is a standard blogging platform that supports scanning letters directly to the web. All the usual blogging features such as commenting, tagging, RSS feeds and notifications for friends and family when new posts arrive. In addition, the software supports a crowdsourced transcription service which both increases the visibility of these letters to search engines and also gives people an opportunity to directly participate in individuals' process of getting their stories out. So our next steps with this project involve interviews and conversations with all the stakeholders in the prison system. Initially not including prisoners actually due to some limitations from the committee on the use of humans of experimental subjects but we're going to get to that eventually. It's just a longer review process. And then after that we're gonna begin opening the site to the first prison letters and then hopefully within the next six months or so ramp it up to full scale. Thanks. Thank you. So for the hour, feel free to go if you have to go where it's at seven. But hopefully you didn't skip around for a few extra minutes. Question? Do you have this? You said it's a great question. Yes, I have a curiosity question about the strategy of future media, civic media. It's a very impressive array of micro-civic action projects. And I'm just wondering, and those projects empower local communities. I'm just wondering whether you'll be focusing on 20 sustainable by sustainability, I mean scaling up the potential of a project to scale up. Whether you would focus on, I mean this is a question really for your entire team, whether you will focus on picking 20 potentially sustainable civic action tools. Or whether you will proliferate the number of the micro-civic action tools under each cluster, you have four. Whether you would, so the question is sustainability but in a different context, scaling up. And that has to do with the mandate of your operation. Clarify that just a little bit. Are you asking whether the idea is to sort of Keep more projects you presented today will be potentially sustainable? By that I meant scaling up or scaling across? I'll take a whack at that. Not speaking officially, that's a great question. I mean from my perspective, I got my PhD at the Media Lab and I see that there's really a strong sort of Media Lab inflection in the way that the center is approaching some of these social issues. And the Media Lab perspective is definitely both to those. That there's an emphasis on both, trying new things constantly. It's a laboratory approach and the idea of starting small because you don't know what's gonna work rather than sort of prematurely focusing on scale which I think is kind of a mistake that a lot of people make. They get worried about, oh well this isn't gonna scale up and they don't focus on the fact that no one wants to, three people don't wanna do it so don't worry about a million. So I think there's a lot of emphasis on doing new things. But then I think there's also the opportunity for things that are successful to get traction. One of the great things about working in a university environment is students, graduate students, people leave the university and go off and pursue projects that they've started. I started a company based on my PhD research here. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for work to grow past here as well. And I think the interest is really in both of those happening. And there's also, you can start something here that you don't have to go follow but it can be a replicable model and I think we're seeing some examples of that. So also a lot of what we've done is built an ecosystem of small apps but they all use the same or very similar underlying technologies. I mean, most of these are either Django or Drupal. There's some that are our PHP that Matt wrote by hand. But so what, instead of building one sort of mega system that maybe it will or maybe it won't catch on, we've built a lot of, we've thrown a lot of things at the wall and tried to see what sticks. Oh, and everything is open sourced. I guess, let me ask one, obviously this is a strong main question. For Josh and Charles, it seems like you guys are intentionally choosing very difficult places to work. Is that so that you can have an excuse if you don't come up with results or why are you approaching that? Yeah, it's true. It's a difficult place to work in prison. It's difficult for the guards working in prison too. I mean, they're given a social mandate that's almost impossible to fulfill. But basically my perspective on the problem is I see what is a very dire and an important social problem. I see a situation where people are, people are in a situation where they can't make things better for themselves and we're preventing people from making things better for themselves and making things worse for ourselves at the same time by doing that. So it seems like it's a very important area to intervene. And it's something that seems like it can be intervened with using the tools that we have available to us. So even though it is a difficult area, it's not insurmountable and the reason it's difficult is the reason why we need to do it. I think it's important to work in places with high need because anybody here can build a Facebook page or join any one of a number of social networks but in places where people are imprisoned either on a small scale or a large scale or don't have access to the large social media that has been built in this country. I think it's important to build actually small scale targeted tools that are maybe more likely to be picked up and to answer a particular local question. I thought of this question in the context of Between the Bars but I guess it really applies to everyone's. How do you decide the technology that you're going to bring to bear on the situation? I guess that's the end of the question. Yeah, so it was in the context of Between the Bars the technology for getting messages out from prison was made obvious by the current policies of a lot of prisons where people generally don't have access to computers, certainly don't have access to cell phones at least not legally. And basically it's just phone calls or letter writing. Letter writing is much easier to do from a blogging sort of perspective. We could do something with phone calls but that's also a little bit harder. So in some ways the choice was made for us if we were going to provide a broadcast media letters or the most obvious and simple way to do it. I have a, I'm sorry, continue, sorry. I was gonna say that I think in some of these types of projects there's a lot more sort of negotiating around the technology and the sort of the access of technology than there are in more maybe traditional MIT technology driven projects. I mean I think we've all probably had to make funny trade-offs where we thought we were gonna use technology X and we wound up using technology Y because that's what people had access to. And I think that's part of what's good about this type of work is that there's room to do that whereas if you're kind of taking a technology focus then switching technologies to accommodate the users isn't kind of how you're thinking about it. My question is connected to the comment you've just made and it's sort of a broad question that afflicts anyone who works with new technologies. But I'm wondering how many of you folks or other folks who have participated in today's forum have thought about this, what seems to me a sort of major difficulty, maybe one that will increase as time goes on, which is what I'll call the instability of platforms. The fact that platforms disappear almost more quickly than they can be even begun to be exploited or discovered. And it seems to me that in working in this kind of civic media environment where you're really trying to create applications and projects that will empower disenfranchised folks or folks who don't have access to the technologies that people at universities do, how do you think about the problem that you might be designing a project and by the time the project is finished and it's sort of been tweaked so that it's a workable, usable project, the platform you're working on has now been rendered obsolete. How do you deal with that issue and how serious do you think that question is? Yeah, so that is a serious thought. All web technologies that I'm aware of, all major web companies, all web 2.0 things, all that sort of stuff are in a constant state of revision. There isn't anything that somebody writes and just leaves there and it's done and then it works and then they leave. So a project like Between the Bars or Virtual Gaza included, it's gonna be something that requires constant maintenance and constant tweaking to keep up with the latest changes as the platforms evolve. The software in all these cases is open source so that opens up the possibility that other people can be working on the platform as well. If an idea ends up taking off and it ends up being a really good idea, other people are gonna clone it and copy it and make also rands that do the same thing. So in some sense, it's important to just get the idea out there, get a working version, maintain it for long enough that it becomes part of the cultural vernacular. But at the same time, it is something that does require continuous maintenance and continuous work. The same thing applies with any sort of documentation or information that's describing how to do something. Same thing applies with a lot of different things. I mean, it requires continuous work and continuous maintenance. It's not just gonna make itself. An unrelated question having to do with Between the Bars project specifically. Although I can see how this might also be an issue in many kinds of empowerment, bottom-up kinds of projects. That is, have you built in mechanisms of surveillance and control? I mean, what if someone sends a letter that it's not just an expression of a particular prisoner's anxiety and resentment, but it's really a sort of screed against all of the other inmates in the prison and a call to Jihad against the prison population. How do you deal with the danger that freedom is often dangerous? Sure, and that's a problem that every site that accepts user content faces. The initial solution that we're working on with Between the Bars is just to have a mechanism that allows users to flag content as offensive. And once they do that and a moderator agrees, then that content is only viewable if you log in and set a bit that says I wanna see the offensive content too. So we don't wanna do censoring. We don't wanna be controlling the content that people display, but we do also want to keep it so that it's PG-13 on the front page. I faced this problem too with virtual Gaza. I got a submission that was, there were all supposed to be first-hand accounts and one that was a second-hand account that didn't have a ring of truth to it. It was sort of, it was too much to have been true. And maybe it was, and maybe it wasn't, I wasn't there. But the response that I did is I took it off the site and all of the content has been looked at by a human who at the moment is me. So that clearly doesn't scale. But one of the problems with really divisive issues is if you let users moderate or do dig style, thumbs up, thumbs down, I don't think you're gonna separate the signal from the noise. So speaking of censorship, I'm afraid I have to close this event, but thank you so much for coming. 15 projects in two hours. I can't believe we were within five minutes or so. We're gonna be, thank you to the speakers all the time. Thank you.