I just got back from Boston, there for MIT's first annual Conference on the Future of Civic Media. It was a fruitful conference, but an even more fruitful trip. I spent my first night in Worcester, visiting our friends at the Participatory Culture Foundation. We've been talking about partnering with them for over a year now, but the recent Knight News Challenge will help make that possible, and among many things, we discussed the possibility of using Miro as the tool for sharing broadcast-quality content across Public Access stations, a question the PEG community has struggled with since the early Digital Bicycle days.
The PCulture office was nothing like the Deproduction Office. In this old-school house across from a huge park.
In the park was a beautiful memorial to the Vietnam veterans from Massachusetts. The Stone pillars you see have inscribed in them letters home from the service-men... last letters to mothers and girlfriends and fathers and siblings that definitely brought a tear to my eye.
The PCulture guys were great hosts, and on Wednesday we headed into Boston, where I spent part of the day visiting with friends at Cambridge Community Television, one of the most respected and successful Public Access TV stations in the Country. I was excited to see their website now on Drupal, and Sean proudly demonstrated some of their new geo-tagging features using the Gmap Module, among other things. I hope to work with them more in the future, as they were one of the first stations we visited when designing Denver Open Media. I met their E.D. Susan Fleischmann at the first Beyond Broadcast Conference, and have been admiring their work ever since. Speaking of which, the 3rd Beyond Broadcast conference is happening this week in DC, hosted by Pat Aufdeheide and the Center for Social Media, whom I know will put on a great event.
I was lucky to hook up with Daniell Krawczyk and Jason Crow (who is now at Berkman), two young, talented, and committed friends of PEG whom I've known since Deproduction joined the fray in 2005. We had some great conversations about PEG and the new generation of individuals committed to helping PEG transform with society in a way that continues to serve the public good and avoids becoming irrelevant in a changing world. I'm often surprised at how people don't seem to leave this line of work once they start, and I have a feeling that these two, along with the others I caught up with on my visit, including Nicholas Reville, Holmes Wilson, and Ben Sheldon will remain fixtures in the evolving PEG picture for the rest of our lives.
The conference was very engaging and impressive. MIT is such a unique environment to be in. Besides being exposed more deeply to my fellow Knight News Challenge winners, we all got to see the great work being done at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. Read Ethan Zuckerman's Blog on the conference... he's always dependable. Some of my favorites were:
- The Civic Defense
project from Chris Csikszentmihályi and Sara Wylie, focusing on technological tools that can aid in the organizing of traditional ranching communities in Colorado as they struggle with Oil & Gas exploration, a topic that is near and dear to my heart. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to their impressive project, but here's a trailer to a video I hope to revive with their insight and energy.
- Selectricity: a wonderful tool designed to facilitate smarter and easier voting, which as many of us know, is key to the work being done here at DOM and across the internet, as we try to enable the people to better organize, categorize, rate, rank, and find the content they want in this wonderfully-endless abyss that is being generated by our growing user-generated culture.
After the conference ended, I hooked up with old-friend Ben Sheldon and together we took a trip to visit the new Boston Neighborhood Network facility, which was the nicest Public Access facility I had seen and definitely one of the top 10 in the country. They have an incredible new building, full of great equipment and a large staff. I hope they have some money left for Drupal development and bandwidth! I demonstrated our Drupal tools and discussed the possible time, staff, and cost savings that the tools could represent for them, and I am confident we'll be able to work with them in the coming years.
