Journalism

MIT Center for Future Civic Media Site Relaunches

Congratulations to the MIT Center for Future Civic Media team, a 2007 Knight News Challenge winner (remember, only two days left to apply for this year’s contest), on their relaunched Web site.

From the site’s about page:

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

Sorted by topic in the site’s left sidebar, the featured tools from the Center include:

extrACT, an action map of Colorado that “may amplify the effectiveness with which landowners and industry workers can collectively influence gas development policies through negotiation, regulation, legislation, or litigation.”

Comm.unity, “a new platform implementing a wireless, device-to-device information system that bypasses the need for centralized servers, coordination, or administration.”

Selectricity, “Web-based voting machinery for the masses takes some of the best and most exciting election technology developed for government elections and deploys it in service of everything else. A tool for communities to make better decisions in better ways.”

You can also find blog entries and watch the 2007 video or podcast of speakers Chris Csikszentmih’lyi, Henry Jenkins, Beth Noveck, and Ethan Zuckerman on how to define civic media; the Center describes their efforts as “developing the emerging ‘Fifth Estate’ of participatory news, media, and civic change.”

Thoughts on the new Drupal site? Use the Center’s contact page or the comments below.

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