Last Friday, Rogelio and I asked Cara if we could meet her for lunch as we had a gift we wanted to give her on behalf of the team.  We decided to go to the farmer’s market, which is now running in Copley Square on Fridays.  It was nice just to stroll around together and we could talk about whatever was on our mind.  What we realized is that we have a really good trusting relationship with Cara and we assume that some of that natural trust was built out of the collaborative processes which were used throughout the semester. Furthermore, even though there was some element of closure in this meeting, we realized that Cara sees us as integral to the campaign after she asked if we could represent the campaign at an upcoming event with an organization that might help support the campaign by increasing its visibility.

Unfortunately, Rogelio and I were not available for that meeting but may help her with similar activities in the near future.

Below is a picture of the farmer’s market in Copley Square.

Today, we had a great workshop/meeting to review potential online widgets to help facilitate the goals of the RIP campaign. Those widgets included online tools that allow for campaign donations, event facilitation or tools such as Tumblr that are more to get individuals to come to the RIP – site. This workshop was a follow through from Sumona’s meeting last week with Cara in which they brainstormed popular widgets (Gigya, Tumblr, Meetup, etc.,) used in other social outreach campaigns, such as Colorlines. The widgets we went over today included:
1. Mobile Access for WordPress – Song made a PowerPoint (WordPressTools) reviewing how it works and the different features available when WordPress is accessed via mobile. In particular, he showed how donations could be accessed through some of these features – one of these fundraising tools is more text based and the other more visual (an hour glass type depiction). Cara said currently PressPassTV has been using ‘Network for Good’ but that this may be a more flexible tool if not for RIP for other campaigns conducted by PPTV.
2. Tumblr – per our discussion and brainstorm activity we felt that this online tool would be useful particularly to pull in the youth (adolescent) population – an online claw if you will to pull users of different sites back to the RIP-site. (Tumblr insta-1). The issue of humor also came up and how Tumblr is often used as a tool of humor. (Ryan Gosling – Hey Girl pictures, Arrested Development characters depicted with quotes from Mitt Romney, etc.,). In light of that discussion, we briefly discussed how humor could be used in the RIP campaign. Ultimately, while Cara did not see Tumblr as a central tool for RIP, she saw it as another avenue for getting people’s interest sparked in the campaign.
3. Meetup – Could be a useful way to set up meetings for the immediate campaign but also a good way to spread the tools of the campaign to other communities but in a way that aggregates the use of those tools under a central event-organizing tool. A potential negative of the tool is that as it is open source. Anyone could organize a meeting under the RIP or PPTV banner but not truly represent the views and actions of the organization or the campaign. If Cara does decide to use it for the campaign, we suggested she include a disclaimer, letting others know that PPTV is not liable for misreporting under its name or activities that do not align with the organization. Meetup
4. Multilingual Plug-ins: This was a quick discussion but Rogelio mentioned to Cara that there were multi-lingual plug-ins available for the website, and he also offered to translate anything into Spanish if Cara so desired.

Last Friday, March 23rd, the MIT members of the co-design team were able to meet with Cara and her intern in Harvard Square to review both our workplan and the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). Rogelio went through the major headings of the workplan, explaining the rationale to Cara for each one. She really appreciated the comprehensiveness of the workplan. The MOU we presented was fine and Cara signed on and each member from the MIT side signed on. The next important thing that we really need to get hammered out is how we will conduct the workshops, who will be present, what the content will be and when they will occur. We hope to have the next workshop this Saturday. It is still unclear whether the youth will be involved, but we are brainstorming a number of potential alternative forms of communication through which the Press Pass co-design team can communicate with youth and adult community members. Some of the proposed strategies for getting the youth involved is to use Internet relay chat (IRC), live streaming, conference calling and/or pirate pad.

Yesterday we had a highly productive meeting with Rogelio, Song, Sumona and Sujata attending.  During this time, we fleshed out the work plan, which we will share with Cara this Friday, March 23^rd.

In our meeting, we discussed topics such as the different branches of the Respect in Reporting Campaign; these ‘branches’ are dubbed Areas in the work plan.  Under each of these areas are ‘to-do’s to address a particular area.

In addition, the work plan includes

• Detailed definitions of how tasks are defined
• The collaborators on the workplan
• Types of meetings we will have and who will be involved
• Logistics of project documentation
• Information about Website Design/Online Tools and Widgets/Social Media Strategies
• Basic information for Outreach to

1. Community
2. Media
3. Collaborators

At the meeting we also had some generative dialogue on what might be various purposes for the different workshops and also techniques and strategies that we have individually learned about for facilitating storytelling among people in a community.  One of those ideas came from Chris Johnson’s Question Bridge Project and the storybooths used in the non-profit organization, StoryCorps.  We will also bring up these ideas with Cara when we see her.

What we have found in the last weeks is that as difficult as it is to get a group of us together, given all of our hectic schedules, when we get to really sit down together and collaborate, we not only get a lot done but we get to experience a creative synergy with the different thoughts and ideas which each of us bring to the table.

Because our workplan is so extensive, we have decided to not include it here.  However, anyone who has the time to look at it for critique and/or would like to peruse it for his or her own use, please let us know and we will be happy to share it with you.

Cheers.

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.html

As of the writing of this post, there are five of us from the class working together with PressPassTV: Song, Dan, Rogelio, Sumona and Sujata.  Unfortunately Dan could not join us for the first meeting (as we had scheduling difficulties – sorry Dan!), but the rest of us met.  Sasha suggested that at this meeting, we:

• Schedule a regular meeting time
• Figure out skills & roles of each teammate
• Create a project proposal, together w/Press Pass, so that everyone’s expectations are clear
• Coordinate w/Cara at Press Pass re: dates for one or more workshops before the end of the semester that include some of the high school students they work with

We worked on the second bullet point.  For the remaining three bullets, we need to make sure that all of the members of the team have been able to collaborate respectively on details of the project proposal and mutually convenient dates for meetings and workshops.

To create, what we dubbed our ‘collective resume’, we each went around and listed things we each felt we may be able to bring to the project proposal: knowledge, skills and competencies garnered from educational, professional and volunteer experiences.  When we meet with both Cara and Dan and figure out the details of the project proposal, this collective resume could be a good way to start figuring out where each of us may play a useful role for PressPassTV’s needs and our own interests and passions.   If anyone in the class is interested in seeing the minutes for our meeting, they follow.

Cheers. 😉

_____________

Co-Design PPTV Meeting 1: “Creating a Collective Resume”

Skills & Competencies

Sujata:

• Communications and interviews with diverse groups (e.g., Have done many focus groups with individuals with HIV and AIDS
• Taking content and making it amenable to different audiences.
• Comfortable with ethnography.
• Comfortable with writing: blogs, prose, etc.

Sumona:

• Video
• Graphic design
• theater based workshops
• Weird public art stuff

Song:

• Speak fluent Mandarin
• Technical skills in video and media production, video-filming and editing
• Working on an IT training program
• Worked with a youth retreat program – so got experience working with children (teenagers) and they had their own media production program and it was also a leadership development program
• Statistics

Rogelio:

• Come from a background of community organizing which entails: general forms of community outreach, media creation, video audio, poster-flyer production, video and audio software for editing, programming experience (Python, Java, HTML), ethnographic work, participant observation/interviews, literature review
• Speak fluent Spanish – good at transcription

What needs to get done (Proposed ROLES):

• Photographs/video: Song
• Blogging: weekly status blog: Rogelio/Sujata
• Coding: Dan.
• Graphic Design: Sumona
• Coordinator: Rogelio in charge of Google Groups, Meetings, Emails.
• Booki Group: Rogelio and Sujata.
• Notes: All of us – depending upon that particular instance where note-taking needs to take place

Goals:

• Create document that sets parameters for written documentation.
• Sumona: document for post-observation feedback.
• Project Proposal: Respect in Reporting.  Create new google.
• Create Booki group Google document with project breakdown.
• Setting up meeting with Sujata.
• Follow-up with Cara.
• Invite Cara to Google Groups.

Proposal:

This still needs to be developed, as we are yet to meet with both Cara and Dan as a whole group.  However, the following are ideas floating around in our collective ether:

• NewsJack
• Drop the ‘I-Word Campaign’
• Summary of Rogelio and Cara Meeting:  Met with Cara: 1 page overview/proposal is in the works.  We are working towards developing a work-plan and setting up regular meetings.  We will be working with the undergraduate interns directly, and on occasion with the youth members.  What is needed from MIT: collaborate with the interns and youth to design the Respect in Reporting Campaign. There will be many dimensions: tool development not the only component.  With our group: organize documenting process of the process.  Develop a system for keeping track of the project with the e-book/published work in mind.  Build: video of minority media representation.

I wanted to provide a synopsis of my meeting with Cara from PressPassTV.  Yesterday, I traveled down to Copley Square to find the humble but active office of PressPassTV tucked within a 3rd story landing.  Cara’s partner in crime, Joanna, was there as well as another woman.

Cara kindly treated me to a Boloco mini-burrito, while we talked about a variety of topics.  At the forefront was what Cara called the two important social justice issues for which people are blamed: poverty and weight.   She said a big problem is how at the national level we frame issues of nutrition and health and socioeconomic disparities to children in a way that fails to get at the root causes of the problem.  It seemed the general theme was that in trying to apply palliative remedies, eliminating snack machines, getting kids to lose weight and exercise more still did not teach kids what types of behavior would make them more less healthy.  I thought this was interesting because culture plays such a role in the consumption of food as well.  Anyway, this was not the gist of what Cara necessarily would like me to work on for my co-design project but it was an interesting conversation that spun into the I-Word campaign, which she is currently putting together.

PressPassTV’s proposed campaign is modeled after the Drop The I-Word campaign (http://colorlines.com/droptheiword/) started by the Applied Research Center (ARC).  (The ARC is an organization which advocate on a number of racial justice issues and also publishes a magazine called, Colorlines; in this magazine, one can find news and different perspectives on racial justice issues.  ) At the ARC site is even a toolkit for those who want to start their own campaign.

Cara asked if I could work with her initially on planning a rollout schedule for the campaign helping with outreach to get early adapters to their campaign.  Such individuals and entities could be partners and community allies of PressPassTV, community and organizational people who have made the pledge, grassroots organizations, community members, media outlets, individual journalists and academics and academic institutions.

At the current time, I do not have one community-based organization to which I am wed.  However, upon watching the video about Food Justice being promulgated at Press Pass TV through the creation of community gardens, I became interested in their mission: http://presspasstv.dreamhosters.com/2011/10/27/grow-or-die/.  I particularly had interest in this organization, because I have worked with adolescents for over a decade, and I want to support any cause which helps them cultivate their voice in a productive way.  Furthermore, I think that the way PressPass TV is working, the demonstration of such voice could also allow adolescents to help create better dialogue with adults by communicating their needs and desires in way such that it will help them better engage with youth.