Civic media as a tool for place-based community building & organizing The Future of News and Civic Media Conference Center For Future Civic Media MIT Media Lab June 18th, 2009 This session stems from a gathering of a few folks from the urban studies & planning arena at MIT (and branched out to other C4FCM folks) who are excited to share how we've been implementing digital storytelling/ interpretive history / participatory media for community building in various non-profit and university-community based initiatives.

1. Civic media
as a tool for place-based
community building & organizing
The Future of News and Civic Media Conference
Center For Future Civic Media
MIT Media Lab
June 18th, 2009

2. central questions
• how to collect individual stories in a larger narrative:
how to represent a diversity of voices with one piece
• how to "sell" old school community organizers/builders on using
new participatory tools
• advantages of power building by making media WITH people
instead of FOR people
• how to train youth and adults on the ground in communities to
make their own media as a tool for community development and
leadership building
• aligning existing network or community organizing techniques with
new media tools for sustained, genuine use by community
members
• using new media as tools for reflective practice and
institutional memory building

3. mit@lawrence
• action-oriented scholarship
through university-community
engagement for the purpose of
contributing to an equitable and
sustainable future in the City of
Lawrence
• a self-sustaining network for
reciprocal knowledge transfer and
innovation
• program areas:
– affordable housing
– community asset-building
– youth pathways to career and
education
– green building development and
job creation
http://mitatlawrence.net/matl-story-project/

4. lawrence: practicum 2009
• Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a community development corporation invigorated by 4 MIT
alumna
• Union Crossing (UC) project – an innovative mixed-use mill redevelopment project that aims to
be a completely "green" building, both in design, building and implementation as a community
involvement center
• historical "threads”:
– energy and technical innovation, most recently "green" public and private-sector initiatives
– organizing and mobilizing people for change, from the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912 to
LCW's nationally renowned "network organizing" model
• participatory action-research using ICT to develop specific strategies and prototypes to incorporate
participatory historical narratives and oral histories both physically and virtually into the new space
• interpretive history data gathering through youth-led
oral history interviews with factory employees, architects, real estate developers, and themselves!

5. lawrence: storymill
http://uclawrence.ning.com/

6. lawrence: yes we will
http://www.ywwlawrence.org/

7. nyc: the bmbc neighborhood media diary
http://thesoulofbrooklyn.wordpress.com/

8. watertown: h20town
http://h2otown.info/

9. framingham: snapshot photo hunt
http://framinghamgame.ning.com/

10. springfield practicum: public health

11. springfield: food vendor map

12. springfield: video story map