It's been an interesting week so far, and it's only Tuesday! Yesterday, I met with organizers of the Rez the Vote, a grass-roots campaign in Second Life intended to get Americans registered to vote in real life. Tomorrow, I'm spending the day at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media, where the people responsible or some of the best ideas in communications technology over the last quarter-century have gathered to consider new tools for promoting citizen engagement.

The Center for Future Civic Media is a collaborative effort of MIT's Media Lab and its Comparative Media Studies program, funded by a $5 million grant from the Knight News Challenge. The Center uses the term "Civic Media" instead of "citizen journalism, because:

"[C]ivic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting. MIT students have experimented with a variety of new civic media techniques, from technologies for protests and civil disobedience to phone-texting systems that allow instant, sophisticated votes on everyday activities. The Center will amplify the development of these technologies for community empowerment, while also serving to generate curricula and open-source frameworks for civic action.

"Transforming civic knowledge into civic action is an essential part of democracy. As with investigative journalism, the most delicate and important information can often focus on leaders and institutions that abuse the trust of the communities they serve. By helping to provide people with the necessary skills to process, evaluate, and act upon the knowledge in circulation, civic media ensures the diversity of inputs and mutual respect necessary for democratic deliberation. Some of what emerges here looks like traditional journalism, while some moves in radical new directions."

The group's blog considers lots of examples of civic media, from a group that uses mobile technology to share ideas for social change, to the travails of the WikiNews project. Their consideration of existing efforts and brainstorming has led them to offer a tentative set of criteria for "civic" technology:

"New technologies deployed within a community should be inexpensive, scalable, and easily accessible on the part of the end user. A technology should not require the implementation of an extensive infrastructure, and should aim to make use of existing technologies with which members of most communities are already familiar. Some students are in favor of internal networking technologies that defy the logic of centralization and are not reliant on external networks or communications infrastructure. In addition, a technology should be adaptable so that different communities can tailor it to their specific needs. As a bonus, the technology should help to bridge the digital divide and should be suitable for use by those who are semi-literate or illiterate."

One of the prime movers behind the new center is Mitch Resnick, a former journalist-turned computer scientist whose innovations include the invention of Scratch a kid-friendly program for creating animations and videogames, along with an accompanying social network.

Two of my TCNJ colleagues and I are visiting in part to share our own work in journalism education, multi-threaded storytelling and other related projects. I look forward to reporting more about the goings-on at the Center after tomorrow's meetings. Ciao!