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.

This past week was a busy one! Ajoke and I reached out to a bunch of faculty members and staged a booki-like writing sprint (using google docs so it was only booki-like) monday night from 11 PM -1 AM. You can see the results of our labor here: HIA’s Proposal for MIT- Connecting Science & Opinion @MIT. Now we are solidifying plans for the Tech Infographic Workshop scheduled for this Friday 6-7 PM room TBD.

The videos that I have from Friday the 13th’s WakeUP event are now posted! I have to get the last few videos that are out there and then pursue loading these and pictures taken during the event onto the Student’s Occupy Boston site which I hope will continue to be the place where Occupy student groups are using to organize. I’ll be able to figure this out on Wednesday.

It’s a little late, but here’s a writeup of the notes on the consensus project workshop I ran with NASCO in Austin, TX.  Good times!

Upload was easy with a USB cable. But: the videos were all rotated 90 degrees, and I don’t know of an easy way to fix that!

Song Interview      ||    Adwoa Interview

My SD card reader gave me problems earlier this week because my Mac did not recognize it. Fortunately, I was finally able to transfer the video files and temporarily get my card reader to work with my Mac after I had a friend in SIPB find the reader via the terminal of the Dell Athena computer. Unfortunately, after unplugging and replugging the device into my Mac my computer has stopped recognizing it.

I played more with my phone’s Bluetooth too and was able to pair my phone and computer; however, the two computers that I tried reported that my data service must not allow the needed connection- hmmm.

In last Friday’s class we talked about Jenny’s plans for her work with IBA. This led to us all doing some quick phone reporting.

I had some problems loading video off of my phone. I tried loading using email which could not take such a large file, the microSD reader I own, and bluetooth. However, I was able to load the image that I took of Song.

TOPIC: Codesign || What is it and why are we learning about it?

Rogelio and I partnered to do an interview of codesign. Hope you enjoy.

The video I created a youtube, but for the pictures and audio I did something a little different. I utilized picasa to turn the audio and visuals into a mini video.

Unfortunately I am not able to add any of those media pieces here due to technical issues… So, I created a blogger account and was able to post them there.

Check out the entry:

http://codesignlearning.blogspot.com/2012/05/interview-thoughts-on-codesign.html 

On Monday, April 16th (Patriot’s Day) I have my 2nd committee meeting with Omar, Rafael, and Alex. Unfortunately Carmen was not able to attend, but I will be connecting with her before week’s end to give her a brief. Below is the agenda:

• Welcome. below are the two new additions to the team
  *Rafael moved to the area in 1981. He is an artist who had his first exhibit at Villa Victoria’s art gallery
  *Alex moved to the area in the late ’70s. He first got involved with IBA when he was 19 in the youth group. He is now about 38 and is still working with IBA.
• Review Mtg Min from the previous cmte mtg. you can find the link to the note by going to this link http://web.mit.edu/jennylb/Public/
• Update on the Fellowship application
  *I have submitted an application and I am waiting to see if I will have summer funding for the summer.
• Recap of workshop 1
  *We had about 12-15 participants
  *We were able to do mini interviews with various people and collect footage about people’s experience and memories of the time they moved to the Villa, how they got involved with IBA, how they understand the past of the community, and how they see the future of the neighborhood
  *It’s time to look at some of the footage and at a very rough level edit it a bit to show at the next workshop
• Documentary discussion (audience, purpose, impact)
  *We kicked off an important conversation about who our audience is for the documentary so that we can identify the story we want to tell. This will help guide the characters need to elevate and highlight the story.
  *We identified two: 1-the Youth to understand their identity as Latinos in the US and 2-the community leaders interested in mobilizing their communities.
  *We also agreed that once we have our audience it is important to have a purpose to produce an impact that will also serve as a call to action. Having these elements worked out will make the project that much stronger and tighter.
• MOU review
  *We reviewed the vozmob MOU and ID’ed componenets that will be useful for our MOU
• Next workshop
  *We agreed to schedule early May
• Next steps
  *We are having another cmte mtg in two weeks from Apr 16
  *Complete MOU
  *Prepare for Worshop 2