 We wanted to bring out a group of speakers and really talk about some of the more exciting and encouraging cases in the space. And one of the most exciting and encouraging cases in that space, it comes from Brazil, and we are very lucky to have Carolina Rossini coming to join us. She's a Brazilian lawyer who's worked on intellectual property, open knowledge, all sorts of internet and transformation issues over the last dozen years. I got to know her as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She's now the head of international work for public knowledge, which is an incredible advocacy group that has been working to look at reform of information loss around the world. And she's here with us today to talk about Marco Civil de Internet. Welcome. So, hi, everybody. Can you hear me? Yeah. So, it's incredibly stressful to be here right now because I don't know if you have noticed, Brazil is actually playing right now. So, well, I'm here at Internet 340 on Monday. It's a national holiday in Brazil. But anyway, so it's actually, they declare national holidays during the Brazil games. But to share with you a little bit the experience here on what we did in Marco Civil. To start with, Marco Civil, as you probably have heard, was considered a bill of rights for the internet or in Brazil, a constitution for the internet. But I'm going to arrive there soon. And what is achieved legislatively is that it sets a series of principles and groundbreaking rules for a civil framework for the internet. So, net neutrality is there, freedom of expression is there, privacy is there. I think it's one of the first legislations in the world to actually tackle human rights as the core framework for internet regulation. But it didn't arrive there simply or in one year or so. It actually took us more than five years to arrive here. It has not passed the mark of our copyright law, which is being reformed for more than eight years, but almost there with all the postponed votes. And it was due to a series of online and offline advocacy efforts. And a lot of people just think about those, right? So I'm gonna run through those, but I think my topic here is the focus I would like to discuss with you is another one. So of course, Marco Civil has gained Twitter many times. The hashtag, Marco Civil or Marco Civil now, Marco Civil Ja, was one of the main hashtags in Brazil in a number of occasions. We got extremely large international support from Mozilla, from Access, from the web we want, and from a variety of organizations like EFF. That was part of EFF at the time. And we were also able to put a series of videos to the FreeNet project, which is a Ford Foundation sponsor project, to explain to the common folks, to the non-lawyer folks, what is net neutrality? What is freedom of expression? Why does this matter in the day by day? So I really call you to check these videos, very, very interesting videos. And for the first time, I think online advocacy also got hand in hand with offline advocacy. And it was really amazing to see the policy, the police of officers looking up at the sign that was pasted in the clocks in the Paulista Avenue saying, what do we do with this, this civil disobedience, should I do that? And they actually were hold back from taking these things down. And this is another urban intervention that was developed projecting the principles of Marco Civil on the walls of buildings in downtown São Paulo. So it was a really strong effort on using new media and old media to really popularize the debate around Marco Civil, which I think is a little bit one of the debates we had when you bring the next number of folks from society to actually engage and call attention from the politicians, where you have that tipping point happen. But I think here, that's the story, that's the public story. That's the story that we can see in newspapers. But what interest for me has a advocacy person and has a person that's really focused on developing strategies for advocacy and what actually creates impact on advocacy change. I tried to understand and to engage. And I was part actually of the law school that came up with the Marco Civil idea was like, how do we organize and how do we train a new generation of advocates to really engage and to really build and develop a law. So that's my main concern here. And actually, that's what Ethan also asked me to focus on. And what are the lessons learned? So in the very early beginning, we got the support from a very high politician who was the head of our Ministry of Justice. And with his support, we joined efforts of this law school with the Ministry of Justice. And we did a first draft of the bill. So even the first draft of the bill had two phases. And it was done in a collaborative platform here. It is my presentation is already a slide share so you guys can have access to that. Actually, discussing what should be there? What are the civil rights that should be part of that law? And a second phase where actually normal folks could contribute writing for every paragraph of the bill. So that was a first step when the bill was actually not even a bill yet. It was just a draft. And since the beginning, we really wanted to hear the society has a whole what internet means for you. And technology really enabled that. In a second moment, when we actually had a draft, a consolidated draft that had support, we passed to a second phase where a politician, a house representative, adopted a law, has its outer and then a second politician more long, which is the one we hear more about, adopted the law, has its reporter. That was really important because those politicians we identify since the early beginning had a very strong technology portfolio in their political portfolio. And that proximity was really important to understand. So Brazil has a platform that actually got a lot of awards already. And its founder was actually at the Kennedy School for some time. They developed a democracy. And Marcos, if you was not the first experiment at the democracia, actually, we devised our current youth and kids law through this platform following the same model, from definitions to commentary, to public commentary, to webcasting. So there were a lot of public consultations in the law, all enabled through this platform, but also in person meetings all over Brazil. The idea here, the internet in Brazil recognizes diversity has one of its main principles. And to hold these meetings all over Brazil was core of that recognition for that path. One thing that the portal aims to is actually to have transparency on what was actually adopted by the reporter. And I think this is really important when we have this crowdsourced effort of drafting legislation is to say, is this, as we say in Brazil, bread and circles, or is this actually impacting or something? And the choice made by the policymakers here were actually to map in a series of reports and statistics what was actually incorporated in the bill that were coming from common citizens or law experts or tech community or even the companies that take hold of the business sector. And it's really interesting to see that they actually measured and put that very transparency which type of contribution was made. So this was just some examples of the contributions accepted. But then what happened, right? It was almost five years already and tons of postponed votes for Marcus Seville. Marcus Seville was not being approved. The biggest challenge there was the lobby by the business sector on the net neutrality issue. There was already a compromise with the content industry that still happened. Old politics still happened no matter the process you engage. But the transparency really allowed us to see what was happening and which were the interests of that. But with this no other revelations, as you see, Dilma actually, our president understood that even her personal emails were being surveilled. And we also passed through economical surveillance in the case of Petrobras and other major companies in Brazil. And she decided to negate a visit to the US and for the first time get engaged in the Marcus Seville negotiations. And I think that without this event, a lot of things would not have happened as fast. And not that one thing is a consequence of another, but it was a tipping point to generate our orders to the top politicians above the ministers that this was really important. And this was also a tipping point for the whole society also to get engaged. If you saw, we had a lot of protests in Brazil at the end of the beginning of this year. And a lot of folks engaged in those protests were folks engaged in the Marcus Seville advocacy at the grassroots level. So you see that same folks trying to create and generate awareness of the topic in those protests. So finally, in March 23, around 23, we got the Marcus Seville approved in the House of Representatives. I got super drunk that day. It was like, there is a picture in Twitter about that. I got super drunk and had to do it alone. My husband had put our essential sleep. So there I was drinking a whole bottle. But understanding how you see, for me, it was like finally, you know, and that the world leaves your back because it was such a curve and a long curve of learning for civil society and for experts that a lot of people called networked advocacy. And a lot of people called horizontal center cases on the grassroots and they call transnational horizontal advocacy and a lot of people call vertical advocacy when you have also lobbying involved. And all that happened in Brazil. All the concepts you can think of advocacy happen in the making of Marcus Seville. And it is amazing to understand how important, as we were discussing in the last panel, was to bring this new generation and understand which skills these people and their organization had to be inserted in one of this pyramid of tactics that actually brought about the Marcus Seville. A lot of the social media advocacy happened in this last six months or one year before the Marcus Seville was approved. Before that, we could say that we just had the vertical type of advocacy working on giving expertise and text to the bill. But without the grassroots horizontal advocacy, I think that would never achieve the moment of people going to the streets to have that approved. This other intervention here was during the Net Mundial Meeting, which was a stakeholder meeting in Brazil last April to discuss principles for the internet. Again, I think Marcus Seville really inspired the outcome document here because the outcome document is based on a human rights framework. It's a really interesting document to say that the public interest should be at the core of any internet regulations. And again, there was an information that on the Snowden moment and significance for all that. And here was Dilma signing the Marcus Seville on April 24th this year. And it was really interesting for me because I had the Cubans on one side. Actually, I was there, so I had the Cuban delegation on the one side, and then the South Korea delegation on the other side. And I was crying, and the guys were looking at me and it was a really interesting moment to see also everybody applauding, and the Russians and the Indians not applauding. But that's another story we can talk about. But anyway, so what moment we are here in Brazil, we are in the moment of rinse, letter, and repeat? Because now Dilma really assumed this possibility of social participation to develop law in Brazil. We actually just approved last week a law that enhanced ways for people to participate in decision-making, so it's a participative government we call. And she said that the Marcus Seville will also go through this process because now we have to regulate, right? The real fight now is the regulation here. And one of the bigger fights here is going to be on the net neutrality side and also on the privacy side, because we have a privacy data bill coming out of Brazil pretty soon. So I think these are some really good examples of identifying one case, all types of possible tactics, a forward focus you can have out there. And looking at it now, you see exactly the strategy that was behind all of that. And I really like this Beth Novak quote that I actually got from my Ether-Zukerman post saying that these models need to encourage participation, has a lifestyle, not just a periodic engagement. So I really hope we all think through this conference how we can always engage the next generation. Independently of the technology we're going to have and the breakthrough we're going to have, what is needed to always have those people on board to make that a lifestyle. And we are talking about people, not just technology here. So that's my message for now. Thank you. So Carol, the good news is that not only is it still zero-zero, but actually Brazil have all the shots on goals so far and Cameroon has picked up a foul. So just keeping an eye on it for you. Look, Marcos Saville is incredibly important. It's been one of the most hopeful moments for those of us who would like to see the internet really used as a platform for drafting legislation as a way of building movements. Not all of us are necessarily going to get involved with questions of how we draft legislation. The good news is that there's a lot of other issues that people can get involved with in ways in which the open internet is making this possible. And with that in mind, I'm really happy to bring to the stage an old friend of mine, Renata Avila, Guatemala and human rights lawyer, the head of Creative Commons, Guatemala, now the head of the Web We Want Project for the Web Foundation and really a remarkable individual who is leading a tremendously important project as we head towards the 25th anniversary of the Web. So please, Renata. Okay, I cannot start discussing the open web and all this conversation without mentioning Basel because my friend Basel Cartabil is what it represents the open web to me. And Basel is a loved friend of mine, a loved friend of many who is in a prison in Syria because he dared to create an open space to make the web happen in Damascus. So please, if you have a chance, please tweet something, say something and try to advocate and never forget him and Allah and so many activists who are in similar situation. But that said, and before starting my conversation about the web, I want to mention something because in the past, like two talks, the panel that we had here, we had this issue with the women issue. And I hate that it's a women issue, you know, that it's a separate topic. I hate how we are not aware, we are not embedding women as part of the conversation, how this gets, how it's still not there even in one of the most educated and aware spaces that I have participate into. And when Carolina was at stage explaining the unprecedented win that we had as global civil society with the approval of Marco Civil, it made me remember that it wasn't possible without the participation of lots of women because unlike the coders space, those lawyers slash advocates and lawyer slash academic slash activists are those who involve lots of women, are those who are fighting everywhere, everywhere to keep the internet open and free. So that said, I will explain my initiative. So basically, talking with 13 burners leave, we were discussing all the characteristics that make the internet open and free and accessible and so on. But we noted that there's a missing component, a component that is not there in the design of the internet and that is that the internet is a technical concept that was built without having human rights at its core. And now things like the Marco Civil are trying to, like now that the infrastructure is in place, we are trying to put that layer of human rights at the very heart of the internet and that's what the way we want is trying to do. So we launched the Web We Want Initiative last year at the UN Human Rights Day. And it was very interesting because you know, usually tech issues are discussing tech for us and the IGF and other conferences and technology conferences, but it never takes a central place at the core of the human rights debate. But on the 5th of December last year, we made it happen and we had the higher head of the UN, Ms. Navi Pillai, who is a human rights longtime human rights activist, saying, OK, it's time to move from the worldwide web to the worldwide human rights web. And it was the starting and we used, like it is true that the web is only 25 years, but we said, OK, we have this opportunity to celebrate the web, to create awareness and start the conversation about human rights and the web. And as a result of the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the web, we had this amazing outreach. But you know, it's just one day, it was just one celebration, more or less a week of celebrations. And that's not enough because, yes, people got the attention, many people, especially after the Snowden revelations, were quite aware of the need of something else more than just code and free regulation for the companies. And so even if we got all this attention, we are still struggling on how to build a movement out of it. So we started the dialogue, but how can we make something as the last four decades, the environmentalist movement has done to create citizen awareness on why it is necessary to engage and take some degree of responsibility on keeping the web open and free. So we are a group of organizations with long history in these issues, struggling with design problems. And basically it's how to overcome the gender barrier, for example, how do we include 50-50% in the conversations? How do we create some consensus among very different societies and very different cultural approaches to the web? And how to avoid the app trap? Because while Marco Sefil was a wonderful process and very interesting one, it only involved something like, you know, less than 1% of the population in Brazil. So less than 1.001% of the population in Brazil who are like millions, 100 millions, over 100 millions. So how do we open a process that is meaningful enough for all the people in a country and around the globe? So we are building and it is, it is, it's very challenging and I am skeptical myself on how we will do it and if we will achieve something. But I hope that we can. So we are building this powerful alliance among very strong actors of civil society who are doing what they do best. The association of progressive communications who will celebrate the 25th anniversary next year is designing a strategy to not to replicate but try to nurture similar processes as the Marco Sefil process in strategic countries. So we are talking about helping Tunisia, Nigeria, Philippines and other key countries where there's something already happening to promote good practices on the web. Mozilla is providing not only the tools but also bringing the geeks with the open net fellows program to the game. Article 19 and global partners are bringing the expertise so because many, many things and it's a problem that Brazil is facing now, for example, in the global south even if you have the willingness to implement a right privacy policy or a great net neutrality law, you don't have the expertise there. You don't have the people who will know the best way to implement it because it's very technical issues and our congresspeople, I mean, and even the advisors, is simply not there the capacity. So it's an ecosystem of solidarity and each institution doing what each institution and each constituency do best to have a virtuous circle where everyone helps everyone. And we have a large advisory committee. This is the advisory committee which is guiding the initiative and saying, no, stop, that's another good idea or what about following this or that approach to make it happen. The initiative that we want was reformulation and a response of the constant fire station approach that we have to internet issues because if you look 10 years back, it has been like reaction, reaction, reaction. Oh, there's a bad law here. Let's protest against the law and let's bury the law. There's a bad measure here and censorship. OK, let's do online protest so they unblock the site. But we have neglected the proposal. We have neglected the proactive approach that we have to distinguish. So we are trying also to engage different sectors than the usual ones because this is a very lonely space. And if you think even here, but if you go even more south, if I think of my country, Guatemala, for example, every time that we are discussing net neutrality is a table with 10 people involved because the cultural and arts space, the human rights and business space, the entrepreneurs that like even the government, they do not understand the implications of having the grown legislation in here. So this is a long term proposal. This is not just a year of celebrations. The year of celebrations is the excuse to get the attention of the people and to frame positively what the web has achieved and what the web has meant to many. But it is just the beginning of something that we hope that it will be bigger. And we have three pillars that we are working with. Legal and policy measures that's where the national Marco civilians will take place. The user choice and trying to build an effective movement and how we are designing it. And that's a point that I want to refer that sometimes in these conversations, including the Marco civil conversations, they're very urban, very middle class, very city conversations. So for the design of the national dialogues and any activity of the web we want, by design is 50% of women included and it's 50% of rural population involved. That's expensive, yes, but that's a priority for us. We cannot have a meaningful dialogue and a meaningful space if we don't implement by design measures to include people because that's the web I want. And this is right now what we are doing in general, an overview of what we are doing and moving from opposition to proposition and trying to suggest good and healthy policies for governments and for different spaces to start. But now at the web we want initiative we have another problem. And this is because Tim Berners-Lee said this and then, sorry, this guy said this. So this crazy idea that many, many, many very visible people is mentioned in everywhere of a global internet Magna Carta. So this is placing us at the web we want in a very complicated position because we were advocating for changing the local to impact the global. But it turns out that many people is asking also for a global tool, a crowdsourced where everyone is saying what is the web they want and which are the principles will govern the internet. And to be honest, for the internet Magna Carta, I need your help because I do not have any clue on how this will take place without being exclusive, being a tool of exclusion or being a tool that's captured by specific interests. So if you have ideas, please come to me and let's discuss and help me, please. Yeah, we are building a movement. So I hope that you join us. Thank you so much, Renata. I just want to emphasize that. I know that Renata is here in no small part because she really is interested in this question of what looks like a Magna Carta for the internet and how is this a document that ends up being incredibly inclusive, reaching out to all sorts of different populations. I was thinking about how radical that idea of 50% rural inclusion ends up being when we think about how getting involved people in internet dialogues from rural areas in the developing world has been. It's an incredible bar to set for herself and for a project and I really hope that people will reach out to her and look for ways to go forward. We have two short talks at this point, both coming from students of mine talking about some of the work that we're doing at Center for Civic Media around this idea of how might civics change if we took seriously this notion that we had a free and open internet. And so the first team we have coming up is the Promise Tracker team. We have Chelsea Barrabas. We have Heather Craig. We have Alexis Hope making her second appearance on the stage today. Looking forward to hearing from all of them. Welcome up, guys. Hi, I'm Chelsea. I'm Heather. I'm Alexis. So as Eva mentioned, we're going to share with you a little bit about our experiences working on the Promise Tracker project, which really focuses on building tools and processes that are geared towards enabling citizens to collect data and monitor in an ongoing basis the progress that their elected officials are making on the promises that they've actually committed to doing while in office. OK, it's the green button, right? OK, so the concept for Promise Tracker was kind of born out of a provocation that I think Ethan kind of posed to us about kind of the state of elections that we see today and many of the democracies around the world, which was that we have free, open, and bad elections. And in order to kind of understand what we mean by that, we need to think about what actually role, like what role elections play in the democracies that we have today. Elections are really one of the primary mechanisms that we have for enabling citizens to hold accountable the elected officials that they put into office. So if our mayor commits to improving the streets in our neighborhood and then completely neglects that, we as citizens are able to then oust him in favor of somebody that we think is actually going to carry through on what they say they're going to do. So when we think about kind of the biggest threats to actually elections serving this purpose and democracy, we often tend to think about election fraud. So politicians or political parties that actually try to rig elections so that they undermine kind of the will of the people during these elections. In recent years, we've seen actually some really great progress being done with citizen groups actually starting to self organize and monitor the elections in their countries and really starting to improve the transparency of elections all around the world. But at the same time, we're also seeing that elections still don't seem to be very connected to politicians' performances in office. So we began to ask ourselves, how could we actually start to extend some of the positive benefits we've seen of citizen monitoring actually beyond the election process to the in-between spaces when politicians are actually supposed to be doing what they said they were going to do. As we started to think about this, we started to look towards some of the other more inspiring projects that are going out there for citizen data collections, particularly within the environmental space where organizations are designing cheap and really accessible tools for enabling citizens to really engage with their environment and measure sound pollution, the quality of the water, things like this. So we started to think about how could we use one of how could we build off of one of the more accessible technologies that's kind of on the rise around the world today, which is mobile phones. We, over the last six months or so, have been designing a mobile app that we piloted for the first time in Brazil in January. We chose Brazil because it was a really great opportunity for us to test this mobile application in two really different contexts. So one of the places was in Sao Paulo where we were working with one of the biggest grassroots civic organizations in the country. And actually in the months just leading up to us going there, NOSA Sao Paulo had actually mobilized 10,000 citizens within the city to identify a set of goals that the mayor had committed to implementing during his time at his office. So we had a great environment with a clear set of goals that we could actually test. And these goals ranged from health care related things to parks and the arts. Very, very diverse. The other partners we had was actually not a citizen group. It was the government, the state government, of Minas Gerai. They were really interested in seeing the potential of using this from the government side and actually being able to engage their citizens within around kind of the progress they were making while in office. So we conducted two initial design workshops with our local partners in Brazil, one in Minas Gerai and one in Sao Paulo. And each of these workshops followed the same basic three-part structure. So first we started by identifying priorities to monitor. And then we collected data on Android mobile phones. And lastly, crafted data presentations tailored to specific audiences. So day one of the workshop was basically about identifying community priorities and participants in the workshop selected government goals to monitor. And in Sao Paulo, we had this fairly unique situation that Chelsea just touched upon briefly where we had a set of over 100 government goals that the city of Sao Paulo committed to carrying out. And so on the first evening of that workshop, participants went through these goals and chose the ones that they were most interested in monitoring. In Minas Gerai, we had a different scenario. So we had participants' brainstorm issues and infrastructure that they were interested in monitoring and they thought could be improved in their community. And then we filtered these to the most relevant seven or eight that could be monitored in the next couple days of the workshop. So after identifying priorities, our team collectively created custom data collection forms for Android phones using a platform called Open Data Kit. And we loaded these forms onto the mobile phones and on the next day of the workshop, participants went into their communities and gathered data on the issues that identified on day one. After collecting data, everyone brought back the phones and we uploaded the content and printed out not all but some of the content, so photos and maps. And then in groups, participants in the workshop created data presentations and presented their findings back to the group. And the data presentations, this idea drives from the work of Rahul Bargav, who you heard from this morning with his data therapy work. So we learned a lot from these workshops, which has taken back with us and is informing the direction of our project since. So the first big thing we learned, as Heather mentioned, on the first day, we sat down with a group of folks and talked about what the needs and priorities of the group were. And we found that while people cared about monitoring very concrete quantifiable things like instances of trash not being collected, they also cared a great deal about very complex thorny problems, things like the quality of education and government housing approach, appropriation, things that take a little bit of creativity to figure out how to measure. And so we found that people were really interested in documenting the stories of their neighbors, so not just quantifiable things, specific data points. They wanted collection forms that offered more than just geo-location and take a photo and answer a question. They really wanted to interview their neighbors and surface those stories. So as we move forward, we're thinking about how to integrate those stories into the presentation layer of Promise Tracker. The second thing we learned is that there's no one-size-fits-all data collection form. So we're, as you can see, like there's lots of people who want to monitor education, but when you talk to them, there's very different ideas of what specific data should be collected. So that's informing what we're building over the summer, which is a web tool that lets citizens easily build these data collection forms based on their own interests and they can share them with a community that they want to collect data with and then they can use that information in whatever way that they choose. So we're really interested in scaffolding process with this tool and not just offering another tool to build a data collection form. So we're thinking about things like how do you help people decide what data to collect? How do you help them decide who they want on their team collecting data? And then how do you help them decide what they want to use that data for? Because if you don't have a reason to use it, there's really no reason to collect it. So here you can see the citizen is invited to choose an issue to monitor and then here they're asked to define their campaign goals. This is an area where scaffolding is really important. So we're trying to think of good ways to help people define what their campaign goals are because it's very tricky. Then they can add different elements to the forms like GPS and photo, video clip and drag them around, change it and preview the form on an Android phone simulator before they share it widely with anyone so they can make sure it's really what they want to collect. And then lastly, they can sync that data with our site to see some very simple visualizations like this map, for instance, but also export the data to other sites that offer data visualization tools because we don't want to reinvent the wheel and we want to make sure that we're making good use of all the other data visualization projects there are there. So thank you so much. If you're interested in talking more about this, come find us at one of the breaks. And also Ricardo Katowaki from the Minas Gerais State government is here today. So if you see him, say hello. Without him, the workshops would not have been possible. So thank you. Please don't let the professionalism and polish of these remarkable young women fool you into thinking that this is anything other than the beginnings of a huge ambitious project that we are still figuring out. So one of the reasons we're sharing it is we really do want to have conversations with people about where we're going with this. We are looking for something as ambitious as a framework for communities everywhere to find ways to monitor powerful institutions. We do understand just how giant and how scary a project that is. On the other hand, the more we've dug into it, the more we realize how much there really is a need for it. And I've just learned a ton on this project and particularly from the three students we have on stage here. So thank you so much. And now, closing out this session, we have another terrific student from Center for Civic Media who's been working on a master's thesis. And I'm not even going to tell you what it's about because Earhart is going to tell you all about Action Path. Take it away. Hi, I'm Earhart from the Center for Civic Media. For the past few months, I've been developing a prototype Android app and also a theoretical argument for location-based civic engagement and what I'm calling Civic Reflection. The app is called Action Path and I'll start by telling you a little bit how it works. So imagine you work at MIT and you walk over to Kendall Square to catch the 85 bus home to Somerville. As you approach the bus stop, you actually step into a geofence, a kind of GPS hotspot and this allows Action Path to send you a push notification on your phone, alerting you to an opportunity for civic engagement specific to that location. As a busy adult, you may not find the time to attend a town hall meeting or a design charrette, but you still have time to think about and respond to an issue while you wait for the bus. Perhaps you had heard about MIT Corporation's proposal to create an East Campus gateway by the tea head house right there in the photo or possibly you didn't. Either way, you might have an interest in how that's going to happen since you walk through that corridor every day and while it's fine to see the architectural mock-ups on a printed poster or on a website, ideally you would consider those options right in the space where they are meant to go and that's what Action Path is meant to do. So Action Path survey shows you these two options. One for a renovated MIT press building next to a new transparent tea head house and another for a new much narrower building that would go where the press building currently exists. You could look from your phone back up to the street while you're staying there waiting for the bus back again thinking about kind of, you know, what are some of the aesthetic concerns you might have, maybe looking up for additional information as to what's going on with this conversation currently and you can make a choice and have your vote submitted. At this point, Action Path automatically subscribes you to updates to that issue so that you can follow what happens next and maybe re-engage with it at a later stage. It becomes part of a portfolio of issues that you have learned about, reflected and taken action on. And this question about the MIT East Campus Gateway was just one of five actions that I created for a half dozen media labbers who volunteered to test an early Action Path prototype last week. I interviewed each of them after they'd used the app overnight taking their commute home and back, looking for design feedback but also probing for how using the app made them think and feel. Several testers noted how the app inspired their curiosity about what issues affected the places they lived, worked and commuted. They were disappointed, actually, when there weren't actions tied to certain locations and institutions which they cared deeply about. They wanted a way to participate and be involved in issues surrounding those things they cared about. They were also eager to explore their cities more widely and collect all the actions, almost like playing a game. Several of the testers felt that they gained a heightened state of mindfulness as they walked around their city as well as a sense of agency in their responses. Asked about the option to follow at the end of each survey, one tester said, it felt like not only did my voice matter but I could continue on the issue if I was interested. I thought that was the simplest, easy way to get involved in the community. It wasn't a high commitment level. It was just whether or not I wanted to follow an issue. So, needless to say, I was encouraged by the positive reception by the early testers. They got the idea right away. One tester told me, unprompted, that the onus is always on you to go to a meeting. It's great to get beyond that. Now, there's a lot of bugs still to work out, many of which were pointed out by my testers, of course, but the core idea seems to resonate with everyone I talk to. And it's not just on the side of the potential active citizens that it resonates, but among the cities and the organizations that might devise and sponsor the questions fed into Action Path. I've been having a string of meetings with multiple Boston area municipalities who are interested in running prototype deployments this fall of Action Path, working on real issues affecting their cities, real planning concerns, and connected to problems that they keep telling me about. These problems of reaching out to young and new citizens, getting quality feedback outside of town meetings, and to get enough responses on all of their protocols for surveys and interviews in order to help inform decision-making. So at the beginning of these conversations I have with these potential partners, I always argue my vision and I get a little theoretical. So I'm gonna get a little theoretical with you. The key part of my argument is inspired by a conversation Ethan and I have been having over the past year about what makes for effective citizenship. That is the ability to affect change using whatever tools and theories of change might work in order to have that change happen. We've been reading Michael Shudson and a few related scholars and looking at how their ideas for new models of citizenship might be adapted for technology-enabled efficacy. This led Ethan to Shudson's Monitorial Citizen concept. This concept motivates the Promise Tracker tool which you just heard about. It also powers action, action path, particularly when you view Monitorial Citizenship as the descendant of Jane Jacobs classic idea of eyes on the street. Now Jacobs, the urban theorist and sociologist used this as a method for learning about what urban planning works and doesn't. But it was more than that to her. It was the practice of neighbors looking out for one another, building a sense of collective trust and through that knowing what was going on. Matching this activity with mobile computing gives us the recipe for what some have called surveillance, grassroots power through crowdsourcing, one of these open web ideas. There is missing piece here though for me and it's the reflection in and on practice or what I'm calling civic reflection when done in the midst of this kind of civic work. I argue that this is necessary for effective citizenship or else you are just an extension of a data collection tool. For me, this boils down to a social and technical design problem for the work that I'm trying to achieve with action path. We need to investigate the design principles that make civic technologies good for effective citizenship. Fortunately, I'm not the only person working on this problem. I can build off others in this space and build off them in kind of critiquing your friendly competition way. I critique these different projects because I love them. So you look at folks like Mind Mixer and Co-Orbanize which are great virtual town hall services. Unfortunately for me, they represent these non-mobile sites that you have to go back to. You have to remember to go back to. Sometimes there's a reminder email sent but it's not connected to your daily life in a regular way. There's the 311 apps like C-Click Fix and Citizens Connect, these kind of report of pothole services. They certainly utilize the affordances of smartphones for monitorial citizenship. However, the definition of citizenship embodied by their designs really emphasize citizen as data collector rather than something that challenges you to be more deeply engaged. Part of that urban intelligence industrial complex that Susan was talking about earlier. That said, Street Cred, a companion platform for Citizens Connect developed over at Emerson College here in Boston, adds a layer of team collaboration and competition to make the experience more exploratory and playful. Which is what I think is the only missing element right now in text is in, which is a fantastic platform doing a very similar form of collaborative and crowdsourced decision making via SMS. Now this is all to say that there is good work in this space but that there is still more to do. There's still more to think about and there's more to do with regard to applying these kind of more thoughtful approaches to design that embody these theories of change, not just around issues that you wanna change but about citizenship itself. And so while we're talking about cases here on this panel, I also wanna kind of put forward a research agenda that I'm hoping to follow over the next few years. So how well can a solution like Action Path actually scale? Is there a possibility that with some combination of civic technologies we can solve the problems of adoption rates and persistently small ends that come out of technologies dedicated to civic engagement? Whereby knowledge or can technologies like Action Path in and of themselves represent ladders of engagement? Whereby knowledge and a sense of agency move citizens towards so-called thicker forms of participation? To me these questions suggest a research agenda of two parallel components which I hope to pursue over the next few years starting with Action Path and ideally in partnership with the community in this room that cares deeply about civic technology. First I think we need to continue to develop prototypes and field test them like I'm planning to do this fall with Action Path in the cities that I'm working in. Some of these will be production quality like Emerson's tools. Others will remain proofs of concept both of which we should use to convince major platforms like Facebook, Foursquare and Quora that there is value in pushing out those designs to their users. I believe a core role we researchers and technologists should play in translating the open web to offline participation is by working to make all apps more civic rather than just making more civic apps. Simultaneously we need to redesign civics education or more accurately open up civic learning to incorporate the practical and sometimes playful meaning means by which young and old can push for change. Models of effective citizenship like monitorial citizenship rely on experience and reflection like we were hearing about what Mikva Challenge is doing in Chicago in the previous panel. It comes down to knowing how to learn more about issues affecting your world and how to find small ways to contribute toward bettering that world one action at a time. In the end, that's what Action Path for me is all about. So please wish me luck on my pilot deployments. I'll wish luck on everybody else's. And I really would love your help in these efforts in this research agenda. Thank you.