CMS.360 | Fall 2012 | Undergraduate

Introduction to Civic Media

Classroom Notes

These notes cover an outline of class activities, and descriptions of hands-on workshops. For each session, there are one or more facilitators who will lead the discussion, and one or more scribes, who will take notes and live blog the session. To learn about live blogging, check out “How To Liveblog Events With a Team” by Matt Stempeck.

Each session should:

  • Motivate students with an intriguing question or problem.
  • Build a framework (write this down beforehand).
  • Limit the number of points (3 or 4 major ideas).
  • Move between levels of abstraction (simple/complex, abstract/concrete, familiar/unfamiliar).

Session 1: Introduction

Course overview, expectations, introductions and interests, shared course tools: course blog, etherpad, twitter.

Session 2: The ‘Crisis in Journalism’ and Digital Inequalities

There’s a lot of talk about the crisis in journalism. We’ll begin by grounding our understanding of the ‘crisis in journalism’ in data about the state of the news industry.

Session 3: Dialogic Approaches: From the Public Sphere to Networked Counter Publics

The public sphere is the dominant framework for thinking about the relationship between information and civic engagement.

Session 4: Contentious Approaches: Power and Conflict, From Hegemony to Media Justice + Project Proposal Workshop

Although it is the most visible in contemporary US debates about the future of media, Public Sphere theory is not the only framework for analysis.

Session 5: Critical Political Economic Approaches: Is it the system, or is it propaganda? Yes.

The critical political economy of communication is an influential framework for understanding the relationship between the economics of the cultural industries, policymaking in the arena of information and communications technology and cultural production, and the reproduction of power inequalities.

Session 6: Free Cultural Labor

What is free labor?

Session 7: Civic Maps

As GIS and map literacies become more widespread, maps are increasingly important tools across all spheres of civic life.

Session 8: Platforms and Affordances: From Pamphleteers to Peer to Peer

If we only focus on digital media and new platforms, we lose the ability to critically examine continuity and change within and between media and communication technologies as tools for civic engagement and social change.

Session 9: Net Culture, Civic Remix, and Kony2012

This session, we’ll look at civic action taken by netizens and how this relates to movements and campaigns off the net.

Session 10: From the Barricades to the New Normal, or, from Indy media to the Age of Citizen Journalism

The birth of Indymedia in 1999 was a watershed moment for the intersection of radical media making, free software, the global justice movement, and the World Wide Web as a viable space for large scale participatory news production and distribution.

Session 11: Freedom of Information: from the Pentagon Papers to Wikileaks and Beyond

Guests: Emi MacLean.

Session 12: Mobile Civic Media

Mobile phones: everyone knows that we will soon be born with nanobot mobile phone implants coursing through our bloodstream. What will this mean for civic media?

Session 13: Civil Disobedience and Hacktivism, from the Black Bloc to DDOS and Beyond

This session is all about: disobedience, black bloc tactics, civil disobedience, hacktivism, and digital direct action.

Session 14: Video Activism, Free Software, and Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region

Andrew Lowenthal from Engagemedia.org, the Plumi project, and video4change will be visiting us for a guest presentation and conversation.

Session 15: Final Project IGNITE Talks

During the last class meeting, each student (or project team) will formally present their final project as an IGNITE talk (5 minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, automatically advanced. Final projects are due. No late projects will be accepted. For more information about final projects, see the Assignments page.

Introduction

This session we’ll go over the course logistics, and then discuss what we mean by the term ‘civic media.’ We’ll also use the 10 points tool to come up with our own shared definition.

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From the Barricades to the New Normal, or, from Indymedia to the Age of Citizen Journalism

Everyone from web startups to legacy media firms began to move to establish models to appropriate and monetize user generated content. These texts critically examine the birth, rise, and spread, and mainstreaming of open publishing news models.

In class:

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Freedom of Information: from the Pentagon Papers to Wikileaks and Beyond

In class:

  • Draft your own FOIA request. (1 hour)
  • Review draft requests. (10 min)
  • From this review, and from the earlier discussion, what would be considerations in drafting of a request, and thinking through the process? [10 min]
  • Discuss with a partner what kind of information you want that the government (state or federal) might have. (15 min)
  • Draft a very brief. (5 min)
    • What categories of information would be of interest?
    • How does (or might) the government keep the information?
    • Do you actually want the information? Do you expect to be provided the information? (In some cases, for instance, you may not expect to get the information but you may want to prove a point or advance an issue by making the request, and, for instance, doing advocacy around the request, or around the denial of access to information.)
    • Draft a FOI request based on the type of information you would like to get [10 min]. (There are few rules regarding format for information requests from most government entities. They can be more simple or complex depending on the kinds of information you are seeking—but simplicity is better; really difficult requests can, in some cases, be turned down). [10 min]
    • Share a copy of the request. If you want to submit online with Muckrock or FOIA Online. If you want to mail these, print it out now and we’ll put these in the mail tomorrow.
    • What information do you want to keep track of regarding these requests?
    • Are you comfortable sharing any results publicly?
    • Are you willing to follow up on the request? Did you draft a request that requires (or suggests) substantial follow-up?
    • Share with the class how far you got - and any lessons learned. [10 min]

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Video Activism, Free Software, and Human Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region.

In class:

  • Video selection from engage, hands-on short video w/mobile phones, subtitles.

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The ‘Crisis in Journalism’ and Digital Inequalities

There’s also a lot of talk about participatory media as a panacea for the supposed crisis. We’ll ground that conversation in terms of what we know about digital inequalities.

  • In-class logistics: Confirm blog accounts, scribe plan, roles: sessionly discussion facilitators, etc. (20 min)
  • Discussion of posts (25 min)
  • Crisis in Journalism (40 min)
  • 10 min break
  • 40 min: Digital inequality
  • 45 min: small group exercise: build a theoretical model of digital inclusion. Report back.

Note re blog posts: your blog post can be a comment, or a standalone post. Be sure to select the category ‘Intro to Civic Media’ when you create posts!

Note re: facilitation, scribing/blog teams: don’t forget to sign up for a facilitation/scribe/blog team for a session that interests you! Do this by selecting the session’s title in the Google doc and adding your name in a comment.

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Dialogic Approaches: From The Public Sphere To Networked Counter Publics

Yet the concept is often tossed about without reference to the series of deep critiques of its basic assumptions, developed by scholars, intellectuals, and activists during the 1990s, around inclusion, counter publics, cultural styles, the role of emotions, and more. This session we’ll examine these concepts and complications, and explore what they mean for civic media.

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Contentious Approaches: Power and Conflict, From Hegemony to Media Justice + Project Proposal Workshop

This session covers theoretical approaches that center power and conflict, ideology, hegemony, and resistance.

In class:

  • Check-ins (10 min)
  • Hegemony, Ideology, Resistance readings (40 min)
  • Media Justice readings (30 min)
  • 10 min break
  • Project Proposal Workshop (90 min)

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Critical Political Economic Approaches: Is It The System, Or Is It Propaganda? Yes.

At the same time, attention to the representational distortion produced by the economic logic of the cultural industries also needs to be balanced by an understanding of the realities of concrete propaganda campaigns by state, corporate, and other nonstate actors.

In class:

  • Check-ins, final project discussion (30 min)
  • discuss readings (50 min)
  • 10 min break
  • “Theory of Change” in class project (45 min)
    • create a theory of change
    • share back with everyone
    • choose a model and apply to your class project

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Free Cultural Labor

In class:

  • discuss blog posts (20 min)
  • readings (45 min)
  • 5 min break
  • Good Copy, Bad Copy (60 min)
  • The Free Culture Game by Molleindustria (20 min)
  • Hands-on Exercise: Attempt to create a model that would allow you to calculate the value of your social media labor. Drop in some best estimates and come up w/rough max-min. (30 min)

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Civic Maps

There are multiple and overlapping histories of communities using maps for civic action, from participatory GIS to environmental justice, from indigenous land claims to crisis mapping. Currently, there is an explosion of new civic mapping tools and practices. For example, Open Street Maps allows large numbers of people to participate in improving an open map base; Grassroots Mapping provides tools for community-created aerial imagery layers; Ushahidi’s hosted Crowdmap service allows quick and easy creation of incident report maps; etc.

Visiting facilitators:

Jo Guldi : A historian of modern British history and the commons and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and teller of true stories about why things are the way they are (history).

Catherine D’Ignazio : A current student with the Center for Civic Media, director of the Institute for Infinitely Small Things and the Experimental Geography Cluster at RISD and proponent of experimental mapping as civic action.

Arlene Ducao : A current student at and creative computerist at the MIT Media Lab and coresident of Boston and Brooklyn where she is working on, among other things, OpenIR, making geo-located infrared data available for civic purposes.

Pablo Rey : Visiting researcher with the Center for Civic Media and creator of civic mapping platforms Meipi and Basurama.

Jeff Warren : Researcher with Grassroots Mapping, enablers of balloon and kite mapping.

In class:

  • Blog post chat. (10 min)

  • Students will talk about an ICCM experience, the Civic Maps Toolkit project and how we are defining civic maps.

  • Jo will share a brief history of mapping and why we need a class of maps called “civic” maps. Jo will talk about who owns maps and why aren’t they inherently useful for civic purposes and about civic mapping from a time before the internet. (30 min)

  • Then we’ll hear from some civic mapping practitioners about forms of civic mapping that they are currently working on. We’ll ask probing questions about how these are and are not participatory and connected to action.

  • Catherine talks about critical mapping. (25 min)

  • Arlene talks about OpenIR and how it’s being used. (20 min)

  • 5 min break.

  • Pablo talks about Meipi and Basurama. (15 min)

  • Jeff talks about Grassroots mapping. (30 min)

  • Hands on: Local Ground. (15 min) 

     

Resources

  • (Choose by theme) - choose a category you are interested in, get the contact info of the other students in the category; write up 5 resources that you find, keep in touch with each other about which resources you are writing about so that you don’t duplicate. Storymaps may also be interesting. 

    Take some time to brainstorm kinds of resources (when writing up, use tagging/writing instructions~)!. 

    • Walking Papers is a tool to submit hand-drawn contributions to http://www.openstreetmap.org/ with corrections for new streets and street formations and details about the ways that buildings are occupied—public, private, residential, businesses. You can print out a map with a QR code, annotate by hand and send to Walking Papers who contribute it to OpenStreetMaps. The goal of Open Street Maps is to geospatial data in an open way to update and correct for the geospatial data sets available commercially that may be incorrect, out of date, misrepresentative.
    • Local Ground is a similar tool, but for creating your own maps rather than contributing to another mapping project. You can see examples of use on their website.
    • We’ll break into small groups, print out maps either of our home areas or work areas (what do people prefer?) and in groups, choose things to map that are important to you—what are the routes you most commonly move along, what kinds of paths would you like; where do you hang out, why; where do you find groceries, other staples?; what would you add to your immediate surroundings if you could? Work together to share ideas about what you would like to share about this area and what you would like to change. After a bit, we’ll try to take a picture of these and scan them into the platform to share them with each other.

Case Study

(5–10 min) Choosing Assignments

Assignment: Write 1 case study for the Civic Maps toolkit or 5 resource entries. We’ll select these in class from a list. Case studies are due as drafts in session 8 and final drafts in Session 9. Resources are due in session 8.

Please use these templates to organize your case studies and resource write ups:

Case study template: http://bit.ly/civicmapscasestudytemplate

Resource template: http://bit.ly/civicmapsresourcetemplate2012

Couple up for grabs:

  • Japan Digital Archive - Crisis Mapping Case study
  • Safecast - Safecast is a global sensor network for collecting and sharing radiation measurements to empower people with data about their environments.
  • Nijel.org: Water.org, Water.org, a nonprofit organization that strives for the day when everyone in the world can take a safe drink of water, works to provide access to clean water and sanitation to hundreds of communities in Africa, South Asia and Central America. NiJeL developed the WaterPortal, an internal, custom-built content management system, and the WaterCredit.org Map Explorer on top of a robust database that now houses all of Water.org’s programming data.
  • My Dot Tour - Boston youth media education and empowerment - contact, Kate Balug, Rahul Bhargava, Leo Burd
  • Villa Victoria - Grassroots planning and development in South Boston, contact, Jenny Larios Berlin

From our list or if you know of others and are excited about them as Civic maps.

  • toolkits and how-tos
  • mapping platforms - online/web-based
  • open source tools
  • data
  • mapping projects
  • NOTE: resources for students: our brainstorm, articles, look for other aggregations of resources, etc.

Hands-on workshop: 
[#hurricanehacking!]

In groups of 2–3, create an annotated critique of Kony2012 (using critical commons, Zeega, popcorn js, macro generators, or any tool of your choice. And/or: newsjack.in.)

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Platforms and Affordances: From Pamphleteers to Peer to Peer

This session’s readings place emphasis on debates around the relationship of ‘old’ media technologies to social change - when they were new.

In class:

  • Discuss readings (45 min)
  • 5 min break
  • Individual sessions with instructor about final projects, and Mapping with Walking Papers (70 min)
  • Work on final projects, sessions with instructor (1 hour)

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Net Culture, Civic Remix, and Kony2012.

How are netizens shaping messages and using digital tools to disseminate and grow campaigns and movements? How do fans apply their values to real world campaigns? How did netizens take action on the net around SOPA/PIPA? What is Kony 2012, how is it related to offline organizing and larger debates about messaging? How does internet “success” relate to real world goals?

Visitor: Scot Osterweil, Games for Change

In class:

  • Scot Osterweil talks (45 min)
  • 5 min break
  • Konypalooza.(60 min)
  • NewsJacking and #hurricanehacking (1 hour 1 min)
    • Hands-on workshop: [#hurricanehacking!]
    • In groups of 2–3, create an annotated critique of Kony2012 (using critical commons, Zeega, popcorn js, macro generators, or any tool of your choice. And/or: newsjack.in.)

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