Category Cities

Entries 21 Total Description

Musings on urban and not-so-urban life.

Climate change and the currencies of movements

Nov 21, ’12 6:45 AM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

I spent a quaint Friday evening in New York in the company of DJ Spooky, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, and hundreds of other attendees of the Do The Math tour. Like an old fashioned tour (and I mean old fashioned—think traveling presidential campaigns of the 19th century), McKibben and friends were there to rouse the audience to their feet around the biggest threat facing us this century—today and in the next 50 years: climate change.

I’ve been mulling over a few of McKibben’s points, including what could be considered a movement’s currencies and actionable media literacy. These are explained in more depth at the end of the post, but before we get there, let’s set the scene:

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HurricaneHackers in Boston – Sandy hackathon projects, lessons learned

Nov 11, ’12 9:27 PM

This entry was written with Pablo Rey Mazón. It was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog and crossposted to PBS MediaShift’s IdeaLab.

A day before Hurricane Sandy touched down, netizens began to congregate via etherpads, Google Docs and IRC, assuming the name “HurricaneHackers.”

HurricaneHackers teamed up with Sandy CrisisCamps—a series of hackathons organized by CrisisCommons around the world—to host a hackathon at MIT Media Lab. About 30 participants worked together throughout the day to figure out how a remote set of volunteers could support Sandy relief with communication technologies.

Pablo and Denise were the main facilitators for the hackathon. With Pablo’s experience organizing OccupyData hackathons and Denise’s participation in hackathons, we knew that a common gathering place is powerful for imaginative and holistic thinking, and to matchmake that thinking with real world needs.

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HONK! Activist street bands, artists, educators talk inclusion

Oct 11, ’12 11:58 AM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

HONK! Fest is an annual gathering of activist street bands around the country. While the festival has satellites in Austin and Seattle, it got its start in Somerville, Mass. five years ago. Last weekend, some 30 bands descended on our northern neighbor, and a pedagogical symposium on Monday topped it off.

I attended the first part of the Monday symposium at Harvard’s Gutman Library (full notes here). Scholar and organizer Reebee Garofalo described the intention of the symposium as “expanding this conversation beyond music, beyond the area we know best.”

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Vojo at Park(ing) Day with Cambridge Community Television

Sep 24, ’12 8:04 AM

This entry was first published on MIT Center for Civic Media’s blog

On Friday morning, Becky, Rodrigo and I set out for Central Square, where we had a date with Cambridge Community Television for Parking Day. Parking Day is an international celebration, with do-ocrats, organizations and cities eager to reclaim parking spaces as public spaces. Your typical street-side spot becomes a mini-park, an outdoor lounge, an open-air library—I’ve seen them all. And on Friday, the lot in front of CCTV became a pop-up broadcast station. On one side was a television studio, and on the other, Vojo.

As we talked to Cantabrigians, we learned that a local co-op had moved to three spots within a one-block radius in its 40-year history. We met a citizen journalist who, through his work, discovered that while Boston and Somerville had a commitment to open data, Cambridge was still catching up.

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The view from Mt. Success

May 1, ’12 9:52 AM

I was soaking up sunlight at the Lincoln Center when, to my left, I heard, “Awwww yeah! Work it!” A young man was snapping photos with a DSLR bigger than his face. He suddenly straightened and walked away. To his right appeared a young woman in rolled up jeans and a loose t-shirt that hinted at her figure.

Nice, I thought. Young people can wear anything and look good. But those jeans would look just as nice if they were worn by a fuller woman, if those jeans hugged her curves. I paused: I’ve been both those women.

And that was the zip tie that brought everything together. At last it really sunk in that life is not a series of apexes of which we either fall short, try to maintain or failed to take the right exit. It was Mark Epstein who unravelled for me just how happiness is not the result of our most true and actualized self—indeed, we never are able to stay there—but a few of the stops, same as any other state of being.

As a society, we have saddled ourselves to certain ideals to indicate when we’ve reached the apex of success. None of us buy into the full array, but we’re haunted by some of these ideals regardless of how we feel about them. To name a few:

  • Beauty - youth, figure, style
  • Success - potential (youth), wealth, status, love + marriage + children, the feminist ideal
  • Privilege - white, [Ivy League] educated

A few scenarios:

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The purpose of this post is to make you jealous

Apr 13, ’12 3:30 AM

Can I tell you how lucky I am? I have such wonderful friends in Grand Rapids.

  • Heather Bryant, who checks in on me at least once every two weeks. She suggested the kale challenge as our friendship project.
  • Danny Lynn, who cops to missing my hugs despite being hug averse.
  • Katie Bauer, part one of a two-punch powerhouse penning the only lifestyle blog I subscribe to: colors, outfits, patterns, yes. Did I also mention regular music mixes?
  • George Wietor, who still includes me as he thinks through his design work and spruces up his Rapidian pieces. Or acquires another shiny tool for Issue Press operations.
  • And Mark Rumsey, who texts me out of the green to tell me he’s eating kale (and probably polishing some theoretical turd).

These are just a few of the folks whom I love. I’m three months out of GR now, but I still feel connected in the most important ways.

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Effort or thought: What makes art profound?

Mar 26, ’12 1:33 AM

Every ArtPrize, the walking population of Grand Rapids, Mich. metastasizes to urban proportions. For a few weeks, downtown GR is a mine field of makeshift galleries as artists compete for the popular vote that determines who will receive a cash prize.

Without fail, it sparks controversy among the GR artistic community about who benefits, the type of art ArtPrize attracts, how proud citizens want their city perceived and more. And at least one of my friends made it a deadline to move out of Grand Rapids before the third year of ArtPrize kicked off.

A close-up of "Cavalry" by Chris LaPorte, a vintage photo reproduced and enlarged as a drawing by way of pen scratches // Photo by Cliff Muller

Mark Rumsey was the first to give it a name via The Rapidian; one theme and common discussion point in GR is the West Michigan Aesthetic.

The correlation of how long it is perceived that an art object took to make is directly proportional to its value on the WMA scale. We understand time and we value time. When something looks like it took days or weeks or months to make, then we assign it value according to the labor invested.

This suspicion speaks to winners of the last two ArtPrize: Chris LaPorte’s “Cavalry” (get a sense of scale in Brian Kelly’s video) and, more embarrassingly, Mia Tavonatti’s “Crucifixion.” These works took diligence, effort and meticulous detail. But what thought did they actually provoke? What question did they pose? In other words, what are the responsibilities that come with art as an applied label?

Mia Tavonatti's "Crucifixion" is an assemblage of thousands of pieces of cut glass // Photo by David Guthrie

The most recent RadioLab short pushes this even further. It explores the beliefs of Alan Turing (father of artificial intelligence) that humans are machines, and machines are human if they claim and exhibit sentience.

At 20:16 -

James Gleick: “I think we’re just machines. I think we’re just made of matter… but for me, that doesn’t make me feel that we’re any less special. What a wonderful thing that a collection of matter created by a process of evolution that lasted billions of years, how wonderful that this process and that these little collections of matter are able to produce Cezanne’s water colors and Bach’s preludes. I can live with that.”
Robert Krulwich: “If I built you a computer that could create equally beautiful watercolors and equally beautiful musical compositions, would you feel happier or diminished?”
JG: “I think in a way, you’re asking, if you see how the trick is done, does it then vanish? Does it just become a trick, the trick being a great painting or a great piece of music? I feel the art I love is always art that I don’t fully understand. There’s some mystery there always. I don’t quite fathom it. So if the computer is churning out a bunch of notes and you know exactly what the rules are that the computer is following and there’s no mystery, how can that possibly be a great piece of music? And the answer is… we don’t know how the machine is gonna do it, and when the machine produces music that is as lovely as the music you and I love, I believe it will still be unfathomable.”

In a world where machines can be programmed to create works of art at the skill level of master artists, how does that change the conversation as we evaluate the merits of art?

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If you could meet anyone…

Mar 22, ’12 3:13 PM

A year ago, I began a blog entry that faded into the annals of unpublished entries. At the time, I was the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, and a young woman asked to interview me.

I’ll not spoil it here except to say it has come full circle! On March 8, Hacks/Hackers and CUNY J-School hosted a talk by Jonathan Harris!

Ignore the top right portion, where I steamed about $11 for a cookie + smoothie + espresso. Oh, NYC.

APRIL 2011 - On a cold day, I biked up to Grandville Avenue Arts and Humanities for a site visit with the Press Club, our bureau partner focused on youth reporting. A set of magnet letters were arranged on the filing cabinet, scribbles on the white board spelled out what the kids talk about nowadays:  ”Chocolate Martinez” and “Peanut Colada” (I thought hard about that last one). Four cubs made it to class, and a shy young lady asked to interview me.

A few routine questions – Tyesha and I are both twins, we both like purple – and then: If you could meet anyone in the world, who would it be?

Justin Bieber? she asked. Lady Gaga? I timed out. I may have said “Vladmir Nabokov” half-heartedly.

If I were Tyesha’s age, I would have answered Amelia Earhart. After watching a scene in Madeline where our heroine loop-de-loops around Paris (about 7:25), I was determined to become a pilot, and Amelia was the real thing. But what would I say to her? Hey how was it under those murky depths when we were all looking for you?

So I switched the setting: Who would I want to grab a beer with?

Maybe Jonathan Harris, whom I admire for his experimentation with aesthetics and interactive data to push people to engage with the world. How’s a kid going to understand that one, I thought. But who says it has to be a real person? Sherlock Holmes? I had a literary crush on him all through high school but ended our relationship when it became clear he could not give up the coke. Perhaps T-Rex (or Ryan North dressed as T-Rex)! I am irrationally into Dinosaur Comics, and his quips are so adorable. Imagine the antics!

Alas, a month later, I still haven’t settled on any one being.

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Women In Technology: Community and virtuous cycles

Feb 21, ’12 11:45 PM

Can I share something with you that really lit up my day today? It made me so happy that I want to tell the world!

On February 28, Grand Rapids will host its first women-led hackathon.

See, nearly a year ago, I initiated a monthly social called Women In Tech for women working in high-level technology environments. This is commonplace in many cities, but Grand Rapids was not home to such support. In fact, for all the distance that GR has come and continues to go, it is still a place where women technologists are assailed with assumptions. Show up to a tech meetup, and people ask you if you’re there with your husband. Instead of talking Rails, you get questions about gardening. Volunteer at a code sprint, and someone may ask if you’re there to help with the food. These are all stories that women have shared.

I left GR a month ago yesterday, and one of the women sent me a link to the WIT Hackathon, generously prefacing, “Your hard work… here is your return, friend!”

This is what I love most (and the type of work I love most): Regardless of who catalyzed it, the point at which others feel such a sense of ownership and make it their own. And because they have made it their own, it grows in a virtuous cycle of sharing.

♥♥♥

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Takeaways from Xconomy

Feb 3, ’12 7:55 PM

On Monday, we attended Xconomy’s forum, “New York’s Venture Emergence.” Each session was a coupling of entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists. We heard from Bit.ly, Gilt Groupe, Second Market and many more. Among the highlights that I think are fascinating from a journalism perspective:

  1. I believe it was Todd Dagres (founder and general partner of Spark Capital) who said he would not want to invest in content as a VC. It felt like he was representing a general perspective when he said that he would not want to be working in the news content and print industries, most of all literary publishing. What he is interested in is *investing in platforms and networks*. If I may interpret this and share as well, many journalists in the room were a little taken back by this, to summarily dismiss content as an unworthy investment. I think, though, that platform doesn’t exclude content. It just means content has to be embedded in the platform, like a rider is attached to a bill. VCs could be interested in platforms because platforms are what are scalable and adaptable, but as content is specific to particular communities and geographies is not that adaptable beyond curation. Think of SacPress (grew their tech services as they grew the news side), Chattarati (has been building a CMS, design services), Texas Tribune (CMS).
  2. Alexis Maybank, founder and chief marketing officer of Gilt Groupe, said that she emphasized as she was hiring (to get investors interested, they bluffed that they would get a $6 million return on investment in their first year, but if I understood correctly, they actually brought in $38 million) that a sign of success is scaling. As the group becomes more successful, the scope that their staffers were assigned will diminish as they hire more people to take those responsibilities on. However, while your original role as director of accounting/sales/HR/customer relations/merchandise, etc. may diminish, you may be responsible for a greater number of people.
  3. The CEO of bit.ly (who was not the founder or from within the bit.ly team!) as well as the VC for Gilt Groupe both emphasized that a huge appeal in taking on or investing in companies is company culture. Bit.ly‘s Peter Stern said “culture building takes time, modifying culture takes longer.” Nick Beim, the VC for Gilt Groupe, said that the dynamic of the Gilt team was what sealed the deal for him, and Alexis actually said that when they hired, they weren’t looking for the best and brightest in their field but creating the best dynamic.
    All of this reminded me of two things: The Dream Team and Megan Garber’s piece on collective intelligence.Not a basketball fan myself, I’ve only heard that while the Dream Team was a collection of MVPs assembled for the Olympics, they didn’t play well because they were all so used to being set up to shine. Megan’s piece also touches on this; collective intelligence is not enabled by bringing the brightest but by puzzling together personalities. Rich Levandov, another VC, also touched on this, referring to it as a model of “finders (fundraisers, partner brokering, etc.), minders (managers) and grinders (engineers, scientists, journalists, etc.)”
  4. A few tips from the various VCs and entrepreneurs:
  • Ask what your product is and then ask what enables it to exist in the service.
  • Play the “could you-would you” game. Could you use….? Would you pay for it? How much would you pay for it? Corral a number of your customers and play that game. This is good for figuring out the relevance of the business and how far it can go.
  • The founder of Simulmedia said do not hire a C– (CEO, COO, CTO, etc.) till they will actually be useful. When you add that insulation, you can no longer “feel the road.” (Dave Morgan)
  • Every part of your entrepreneurial structure will break. The key is not to ensure that they won’t break but get good at predicting when they will so you can plan ahead. (Alexis Maybank)
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