Citizen Journalism/Attendee Projects
Are you working on a fantastic project in citizen media? Want to tell us all about it? There won't be enough time during the conference itself for us all to give mini-spiels on our work, but we'd still like to facilitate connections between folks who might want to work together, learn from each other, and more.
If you'd like to tell us something about your project, please feel free to add a few paragraphs and links here. If you'd like to create a separate wiki subpage, please name it Citizen Journalism/Attendee Projects/____ , where ____ is your name or the name of your project. This will help us keep track of our information within the larger world of the Wikimania wiki.
Just follow the examples of the entries from attendees below!
Enabling the Unheard Community Voices...to be Heard
We're quite new to this area of citizen journalism, but excited by its great potential for improving our communities. We wanted to share a community video blogging project that we recently started with United Way of Southeastern Michigan. They have recently identified early childhood development as a strategic area of need through a broad-based community survey. As they move forward to formulate programs to address the needs in this area, we proposed starting an on-going video blogging project that allowed the voices of those that the program is intended to help be heard so the programs could be developed in response to the reality on the streets of Detroit and the surrounding communities, moving those receieving the care from victims to partners in creating and inmplementing the solutions. We did our first video recording at some central parks in downtown Detroit the results were amazing. While we don't have the video up yet, you can read Annemarie Harris's blog comments(United Way - Early Childhood Development Director) in the UWSEM blog. We hope you can get a glimpse of the power of this movement. So at this unconference we come to share, but mostly to learn how to be as effective as we can with this citizen journalism project so the children of our community have a brighter future. Tom and Peggy Brennan
INSTEDD Connect
Proposal in progress: INSTEDD Connect is a distributed content network for Google Foundation, enabling a conversation on a global early-warning system to identify and prevent the spread of infectious diseases and other disasters.
Wired News: Brilliant's Wish: Disease Alerts
Lyceum - multi-user, multi-blog blogging services software
Hi, I'm John. I'm the architect of Lyceum, a multi-blog branch of the very popular single-blog system WordPress. Lyceum maintains compatibility with WordPress themes and plugins. Lyceum's development is funded by ibiblio. I am working with the following projects which use Lyceum to provide blogs for their users:
RootsPrimary Blogs - "a hub of early organizing and discussion for those of us who are crazy enough to be thinking about '08 [democratic] Presidential politics this early"
TeachFor.US - Blogs for Teach for America teachers.
East Somerville Community Mapping Project
Hello. I'm the Director of [Creative Narrations, http://www.creativenarrations.net.] We just launched this community map that was created by residents and organizers from the East Somerville Neighborhood Coalition, part of the Somerville Community Corporation. Check it out at http://www.somervillecdc.org/communitymap/
RealEstateBubbleMap.com
Featured recently as an example of "Real Estate 2.0.", Dan Gillmor and others have been saying good things about the Boston and national real estate bubble maps. Still we've had more disappointments than progress towards our dreams, so the opportunity to discuss implementation strategies and dream functionality is most welcome as a breakout session, a dinner this evening, or ongoing discussion online. See examples of homes selling for below assessed value in Cambridge, MA and "Tipping Policy" to get an idea of this map's potential as a decision-making tool and business model.