Citywide information-sharing

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 kids in Somerville. A great listserv is typically in English.

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 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 the district was furthest along as a possible "hub" for community calendaring (she also had the District using 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. With the editor, Nina xx, we brainstormed out how to mix pictures in with translation to bring the information alive. The video was excellent, but a bit expensive. The idea: to put the video in public places -- hit up against the idea that there aren't many public screens. Would a bulletin board in public places, like in front of Market Basket, be just as good?

We still believe greatly that innovations on 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 learning more about related projects underway at the Center for Civic Media at MIT xxxxx]. We're going to partner with CCM on finishing our hotline; similar software was used in What's Up Lawrence.

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 capacity got sucked up into our other Working Groups. We just ran out of time!

We'd love 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.