I am happy that I got the chance to grapple with creating Civic Media in a studio setting. Being exposed to how civic design is tackled from an academic and codesign standpoint opened me to some new considerations:

1. Creative projects can have structure.
2. There is a good deal of usefulness to legal agreements. They protect the interests and define the goals of creative projects. MOU’s are definitely things that I will look more into in the future.
3. Everyone comes in with biases. By having structured conversations- running workshops, creating timelines, using sticky notes you can reveal some biases and problems that you may have missed.

By reading papers such as the Bespoke Project, journalism as a catalyst for change, and  seeing how other people in the class designed and worked to expose their own biases when it came to their projects I was motivated to make my project better and smarter- learning from those around me.

My final presentation, a Prezi can be seen here.

The Tech Article, The Art of Advocacy at MIT, was Published this past Tuesday!  I was able to use it to introduce myself to Jonte, the new UA President when I dropped by the UA offices yesterday afternoon.

The Next Steps are putting the work that was done this semester to good use and planning for next term. I am set to meet with Kate at the end of this week and have offered HIA’s findings and documentation as something the UA can use as they move to implement online resources for Undergrads to Use to stay updated on institute events (Tech Article advice #1: Make interactions more transparent by developing online platforms that are relevant, easy, and efficient. )

On the last day of the Civic Media Co-Design Studio course, all of the different teams and projects had the opportunity to present their work. In our case, we presented on the overall co-design process working with Press Pass TV on the Respect in Reporting Campaign. The presentation was comprised of many different sections and provided an overview of the project for newcomers. We modeled our presentation after the Co-design Manual, which is one of the outcomes of our course, and the major sections included: Project overview, The Process of Co-design, Securing a Community Partner, Doing Design Work Together, Testing Ideas Together, Passing the Torch, Fail Hard Redux, and Growth, Learning, and Success .  The full presentation can be seen here.

Today I met the newest addition to the Villa Victoria Documentary committee member. She works in the VV Center for the Arts and has film-making experience. It is exciting to bring her on to the project.

Below is the general agenda of the meeting:

• I gave our newest member a brief overview of the genesis of the project, myself, and current status of the project.
• We reviewed the edited MOU
• We discussed the total cameras that IBA has in its possession that we can use for the project
• We discussed what to do with the taped recordings of all channel 6 footage (the station that IBA used to run for the community)
• I informed them of the tapes I collected from the Colab interviews conducted in 2006, but now I have to find a video player to see them.
• We discussed the fellowship I have to fund the project this summer with the end goal of the trailer
• We identified where I can work in the office during the summer months
• We set the next few meeting dates and the expected goals for the next meeting (e.g. watch a couple of sample documentaries, finish the MOU, and confirm the date of the next workshop)

Obviously this project will continue and so will my blog postings. However I have created a blog specifically for the project. If you are interested in this project and would like to stay connected please refer to this site: Villa Victoria- Documentary Project

I can’t wait for the summer. It will be a great time to get to know the people and community even more, while getting some good work done on the project. Wish us luck! 🙂 

So this is my 3rd attempt to imbed the image of the multimedia. Below is blogger post where I was able to imbed the interviews and video. This is the link to the blog: http://codesignlearning.blogspot.com/2012/05/interview-thoughts-on-codesign.html

I was able to take the video from my phone and email it to myself. From there I uploaded it to Youtube so I could imbed it in the blog.

The voice and photos, I wanted to merge into one medium. As a result, I uploaded the photos to Picasa. Picasa has a function where you can create a video of photos and text slides with audio. Since I had more audio than photos I simply set the photos on repeat until the audio interview was completed. Please click on the link above to open a new tab to see and hear the interviews.

enjoy!

Final class deliverables:

• Villa Victoria Wikipedia Entry, below is an image of the entry I am working on with the community.

• Digitized Timeline

• Final Presentation

• Project Reflection
  I am continually engaged and energized by the project and the people I meet at Villa Victoria. Although, I wish we were farther along with the workshops, I am excited about this summer because I think we will be able to accomplish a lot. I have a fellowship to continue the work and hope to have the trailer done by the end of this summer. There is a lot of great archived footage, but I also plan to engage the community to produce new material that they can contribute to the project and perhaps feel an even stronger sense of ownership.
  I am constantly learning about codesign and what that means in the context of a documentary. I think this pattern will continue throughout the process.
  When we went through the fail hard process there are still a few issues that I think about. For example, what is the impact, who is the audience, and will anyone care. As I work with the committee to answer these questions I think we get closer and closer to a core audience for which we can create a targeted message that is also a call to action for greater involvement in grassroots movements for community members who are seeking an identity within the American culture that marry’s the past (heritage from the place of origin) with the present (US assimilation). This is not an easy task and often there is the feeling of betrayal that we may have to contend with.
  All in all I have enjoyed the project so far. So long as it stays a collaboration with clear and understandable expectations it will be a fruitful partnership. I look forward to what we accomplish in the coming months and years.
• Next Steps
• Committee Mtgs
• MOU
• Review archived material
• Complete workshops
• Edit trailer
• Community screening and support
• Continue to the next round of funding
• Feature length
• Distribution

This week I have done some thinking about whether my work has been an exercise in codesign or not. That results of my thoughts can be found in the course booki.

Infographic Workshop & Tech Article

Next Tuesday the Tech Article that I have been working on for HIA will go out. I received comments on the first draft from the Campus Life Editor Saturday and talked with the graphics department about the graphic I am planning- inspired by the drawing created during the Infographic Workshop held last Friday!! (pictured below)

The Discussion, Politics & Advocacy @MIT Workshop (Infographic Workshop), had a low turnout but I received a lot of bounce back –

Contacted by member of MIT’s Jewish Community Concerned that I forgot to include them along with some of the religious groups I invited to the Workshop.

Asked for an update on the findings of the workshop from MIT’s Lutheran Episcopal Ministry who I have connections with through HIA/The Technology and Culture Forum (T&C), and Director Mytty.

I was able to learn and connect with one of the exec members of Active Minds, a student mental health advocacy group just launched a post-it note campaign in the infinite this week- another example of how students are reached on campus| fun – entertaining – installations.

What I learned

It was interesting to learn about how Active Minds like Relay for Life, another successful and integrated student group is part of a nationwide organization. Most of the advocacy groups that I have run into are:

1. Off the grid: started by passionate students/friends or with the support of outsiders- nationwide organizations or churches

2. Administrative: related to the institute’s administrative offices, DSL| Division of Student Life, DUE| Department of Undergraduate Education, SAO| Student Activities Office

I had planned the workshop for the group of 6 that had RSVP’d from MITOccupy, The Forum, Active Minds, and the Black Students Union:

Instead I used Charlie’s dotstorm to take some notes and had more of a conversation learning about how Active Minds has sustained itself and how the exec member pictured his student group’s connection to the Administration and  to the student body that they hope to serve.

Key takeaways from the Workshop discussion:

MIT students can be qualified as skeptics. Unless questions are asked in the right way [forum/location] they will not be answered with the  clarity and freedom of expression that is needed to generate understanding. A number of realizations, covered in the Tech article, discuss how this quality can be leveraged.

Board Activity Outcome: MIT is structured like a bubble and the administration is on the outside. The less obvious statement is that inside the bubble there are divisions that are rarely crossed and it is the result of efficiency.

Villa Victoria Timeline

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Last week, I had the opportunity to present our work on consensus codesign to sponsors as part of the MIT Media Lab’s semi-annual member meeting.  As part of the presentation, I collected some of the background research into groups and meeting process in this presentation.

Two of the important organizing principles that I’ve found the most useful to talk about are both taken from McGrath’s 1984 book “Groups: Interaction and Performance” — meeting structure, and task types.

Meeting structure

Here is McGrath’s model of the structure of a meeting, attempting to map out the major contributors and influences to a meeting process (these graphics are my own adaptations and simplifications of McGrath’s):

Influences of a meeting: Individuals, group structures, tasks, and technologies.

The model identifies 4 major components that contribute to the function of a meeting:

• Individual considerations: What are the skills, dispositions, interests, and agendas, and communication styles that individual participants have?
• Group structure: is it a rigid hierarchy, or an explicit non-hierarchy? Is there a facilitator? Are there expected patterns of behavior or rituals that the group brings? These all contribute to the group structure.
• Task/situation: What is the group trying to accomplish? More on this below.
• Physical setting / technology: Are you on a street corner, or in a board room? Do you have computers, whiteboards, smart phones, projectors, post-it notes, or any other meeting aids?

I find this model useful mostly in thinking about just how limited a purely technological solution or meeting aid will be.  All of the other considerations need to be taken into account — it may be necessary for the group to engage in more nuanced trainings to inform their meeting process or group structure in order to make effective use of any particular technology.  This is where games like Moon Talk or Flame War come in.

Task types

This is a complicated, but surprisingly insightful model of the different sort of tasks a group might engage in:

This model posits four main quadrants of different types of tasks a group might engage in:

1. Generative tasks: brainstorming, coming up with new ideas.  The point is to generate and expand a set of possibilities.
2. Choosing tasks: deciding, selecting, figuring.  The point is to contract the set of possibilities and choose something.
3. Negotiating tasks: the difference between this and choosing is that negotiating tasks involve power dynamics or personal conflict.  It’s not just a matter of selecting the “correct” answer; it’s about building trust and understanding, and potentially making concessions.
4. Execute: getting things done — building things, organizing things, documenting things.  This could involve stuffing envelopes, writing code, or doing tasks in a project.

In addition to the four main quadrants, there are the two additional axes: on the vertical, the range between cooperative and conflict oriented tasks; and on the horizontal, the range between conceptual and behavioral tasks.

• Generative tasks are inherently cooperative; negotiating tasks are inherently conflict oriented; choosing or executing can be a mix of the two.
• Choosing tasks are inherently conceptual; executing tasks are inherently behavioral; negotiating or generating can be a mix of the two.

These divisions and quadrants, I find, are super useful in trying to figure out what sort of affordances a tool might need if it’s going to support a process of a particular type.

The takeaway

I find these models to be incredibly useful in building understanding of just what’s going on with a meeting process, and also laying out the field of possible places in which to build either process-based or technology-based interventions.  Like any model, these aren’t definitive declarations of how the world works, and they’re wrong a lot of the time.  But they’re useful ways to decompose and think about a complex issue, and to come up with new ideas.

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.