For this week's class session, we'll briefly look at three more civic application case studies.

  • Advocacy campaigns. Student Lev Rickards will talk about his summer internship with Civic Actions .
  • Local information collections and geographic information systemsPlease check out Healthy City LA
Posted October 13th, 2006 by Lev Rickards


Cost Structures:

as email gets easiest, it becomes least effective way to influence someone.

Coordination+Provision Problems

http://www.pledgebank.com/Electric
http://fundable.org/

Neighborhood Informatics:

ThinkNOLA.org
Neighborhood Knowledge LA
ineighbors.org
daviswiki.org

txt-ing:

Sara's experience in Benin: new candidate entered presidential election late in the game. People started txting to get friends to register to vote, then organized buses with music and eye-catching behavior to get people to vote.

Posted October 11th, 2006 by Anne


At my last job at the Kettering Foundation, Unchat gave a presentation. This was several years ago, and I'm not sure about the status of this software. Regardless, I thought I would post a link to it as it is related to our Friday discussion on Civic Applications. I found a few organizations using it including MIT. Ben Barber and Beth Noveck were the brains behind this project.

Unchat hopes to provide a chat software program that encourages deliberation. From their web site: "Put to use in civic and political debates, learning and educational development, community building and non-profit communications, corporate meetings and knowledge management, our software will enhance discussion, nurture deliberation and facilitate the arbitration of differences and the quest for common ground."


In the first two sessions we looked at access to computing and networks.

In the next two sessions we looked at information systems support for organizations that act in the public interest.

Now we turn our attention to information systems that directly serve the public interest. They may be independently operated or operated by an organization with a broader public interest mission.

These civic applications can serve functions such as: