News

From "Inventing the Future", Boston Phoenix:

In 2006, Alyssa Wright, then a Media Lab student studying mapping, tackled a similar goal: she created a walking memorial in Boston to commemorate civilian deaths in Iraq. Shocked at the "astronomical" discrepancy between the actual civilian death count (she estimates it was up to 250,000) and what Americans thought the death count was (around 9000, she says), Wright wanted to make an impact. So she hit the streets with an exploding backpack.

"We really don't have a sense of what it's like in someone else's shoes, but technology can bridge that gap," says Wright, who tracked media-reported deaths in Baghdad and overlaid them onto a map of Boston. When she wandered into an area of the city that corresponded with a Baghdad death, her backpack exploded with white confetti, each piece inscribed with the name of someone who'd died.

These days, Wright is channeling her tech-meets-art-meets-protest angle into Hero Reports, a Manhattan-based Web operation that tracks courageous moments among everyday people by collecting e-mails, phone calls, and letters, and then mapping positive news. It's a direct counterbalance to New York City's "See Something, Say Something" campaign, which encourages people to look at each other with suspicion.

Hero Reports is not just a Web site. The project, which she began at the Media Lab's Center for Future Civic Media, also uses an open-source mapping platform, which allows for greater customization. Most of all, it shows how technology can change social engagement and political decisions. Which is exactly what Wright wants.

Dear friends,

We're preparing for the second annual Knight News Challenge Conference in June. But it was already a busy end of the semester...

Video is now available for the three C4FCM lecture series events we held in April, from a discussion of multimedia for documenting human rights abuses to a great talk about the future structure and funding models of investigative journalism.

• Video: C4FCM Lecture Series: Sam Gregory of Witness
• Video: C4FCM Lecture Series: The Future of Investigative Journalism, with Rich Tofel of ProPublica
• Video: C4FCM Lecture Series: The Future of Profitable International News, with Philip Balboni

Be sure to keep in touch with us at civic.mit.edu as we get closer to the June conference. Because it's limited to invitees from MIT and Knight community, we'll be sure to post as much as we can online for everyone to view.

Ellen Hume, research director of the Center for Future Civic Media, discussed public media at prospect.org with Jessica Clark of American University, Kinsey Wilson of NPR, Rey Ramsey of One Economy, and Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation:

The Center for Future Civic Media is delighted to announce that we have four "Knight News Challenge Fellows" participating in our research. The four are:

• Dharmishta Rood, a graduate student at Harvard's Education School and creator of a student journalism project at UCLA;
• Lisa Williams, creator of Placeblogger and H2otown.org;
• Ethan Zuckerman, co-creator of Global Voices and a researcher at Harvard's Berkman Center;
• and Aaditeshwar Seth, who will join us later in the spring and is working in India to connect rural community radio stations to the Internet using new software and computer-based FM transmitters.

Our Fellows, among other things, will participate in our Wednesday afternoon research meetings and help mentor graduate students with related research interests.

From a November 2008 Soap Box Series at the MIT Museum, featuring the Center's Ellen Hume:

Drill, baby, drill may be what’s on the minds of gas companies, but if you’re a landowner of a potential gas site, you probably have a lot of questions.

New software helps locals deal with natural gas companies

David Chandler, MIT News Office
December 2, 2008
Original article: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/mobilizecms-1202.html

Don't want Big Oil knocking on your door for drilling rights? Not fond of natural gas and toxic chemical leaks in your community? Who can blame you?

Ellen Hume, Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Nadav Aharony, and Henry Jenkins will each host courses during this winter's Independent Activities Period, a time between fall and spring semesters that anyone at MIT can enroll in, or even teach, a class.

Henry Jenkins, co-Director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program and one of the founding Principal Investigators of the Center for Future Civic Media, will join the University of Southern California as a Provost Professor this fall.