Citywide information-sharing

Please use this to organize your documentation:

Contents [hide]

   * 1 Summary
   * 2 Communication we set forth to improve
   * 3 Process
         o 3.1 Basic History
         o 3.2 Communication ahas, implementation ahas, and turning points!
   * 4 Findings/Endpoints
         o 4.1 Concrete communication improvements
         o 4.2 Main communication realizations and implementation realizations
         o 4.3 Technological how-tos
         o 4.4 Things we’d expand/do differently

In July 2010, we had a meeting of "mediamakers" from Somerville and brainstormed some citywide problems of communication. After a group brainstorm, energy was for a community calendaring project of some kind, for event-sharing.

From there, we attempted to assist community calendaring by supporting the district's communications director, since they were furthest along as a possible "hub" for community calendaring (they also use Twitter actively!). In the end, she spiffed up her the district's calendar on her own!

We supported a multilingual video made by Consuelo Perez at Somerville Community Access Television, on services for young children available at several community organizations.

We still feel that some sort of curated calendaring project or other form of citywide info-sharing on opportunities related to youth and families would be much more exciting and, we think, important for young people in the city. We're exploring this for a Phase 2, with the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. We might also support an Open Cities initiative in Somerville, where young bloggers participate in circulating events.

So, we now know a lot of people in the community who are interested in pieces of citywide info-sharing. We just haven't engaged them in a robust project to date because in the months since this meeting, our capacity got sucked up into our 5 other Working Groups. So, it's a great time to come back to that "layer" of our work in Somerville, esp. because our PI will also be exploring that layer (citywide info sharing) in San Diego.

We also believe that tools/strategies for citywide info-sharing can be utilized for schoolwide info-sharing as well, and so we're interested in exploring those two "layers" simultaneously in Phase 2 (while continuing our work on info-sharing around individual youth).