Citywide information-sharing

Communication We Hoped to Improve

Somerville is full of people who forward emails of local resources to each other, but there's no one "hub" you go to to find out what's going on for young people in Somerville. The most popular listserv's material is typically exclusively shared in English.

How can people better circulate information and opportunities so that everything available for young people, is known? We wanted to know.

Our Work and Ahas

In July 2010, we had a meeting of "mediamakers" from Somerville and brainstormed some citywide issues of communicating opportunities and information related to young people. General anonymized notes can be found here.

PHOTOS HERE. CURRENTLY ON A ONEVILLE FACEBOOK PAGE

After this brainstorm, group energy was for a community calendaring project of some kind, for event-sharing. So, from there, we attempted to assist community calendaring by supporting the district's communications director to develop the district's calendaring further, since the district was furthest along as a possible "hub" for community calendaring of child- and youth-related activities (she also had the District using Twitter actively!). In the end, she spiffed up her the district's calendar on her own.

To try a new way of circulating public information, we then supported a multilingual video made by Consuelo Perez at Somerville Community Access Television, sharing out services for young children available at several community organizations. Bilingual staff at the organizations recorded their information in both languages. The editor, Nina xx, experimented with ways to mix pictures with translation to bring the information alive. A next idea: to run the video in public places -- hit up against the idea that there weren't many public screens. Would a paper bulletin board in public places, like in front of Market Basket supermarket, be just as good?

With five other working groups going, we ran out of capacity and time to further pursue this aspect of "communication infrastructure" work in 2009-11, but we still believe firmly that innovative citywide info-sharing on opportunities related to youth and families is crucial important for young people in the city. Everywhere we go we hear about youth and families simply being unaware of what's available (even for free) for supporting young people; we're learning more about related civic media projects underway at the Center for Civic Media at MIT xxxxx]. (They've been trying to make electronic signs outside of businesses, sharing bus information!) We're going to partner with CCM on finishing our hotline.

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 our first "citywide info sharing" meeting, our time and capacity got tapped into our other Working Groups.

Questions to Ask Yourself if You’re Tackling Similar Things Where You Live

To ask in any community:

In this community, do most people know about resources, opportunities, and services available for youth and families?

If not, what channels would help them get this information?

See also the toolkit created by the Knight Foundation, which is further along on this, and the Catraca Libre effort and other efforts at the Center for Civic Media.