I just published a short blog on Crowdfunding as Neighborhood Storytelling. The article is part of a “hotspot” series on civic crowdfunding, written by members of the Civic Paths research group at USC Annenberg.
Raising money is one objective for crowdfunding, but not the only one. Every crowdfunding attempt also performs a story. How does crowdfunding shift neighborhood stories of place?
Recap: in January I wrote a post on Inaugurations, Crowns and Badges for a special post-election series on revisiting the election in the Civic Paths group run by Henry Jenkins.
What symbols matter for an inauguration? There was no crown for Obama. But for mortals with a smartphone it was possible to get a badge, if you were one of the 20+ million users of FourSquare. To receive the badge for inauguration weekend, users had to “check in” with their smartphone at the National Mall on inauguration day, or at an official service event location around the country.
I recently organized a panel on Mapping as Strategy for Youth Engagement: Contributing Data to Real City Problems as Civic Learning, with Eric Gordon, Akili Lee, Elisabeth Soep and Nigel Jacob. The occasion was the Digital Media and Learning conference in Chicago on March 14-16, 2013.
Here is the panel description:
Mapping is one of several genres of data collection that can connect youth with physical space, neighborhood streets, and city planning. What structures of participation are emerging? Can we sustain participation beyond reporting a few potholes? Based on the leading examples today, do we need more leadership from city government to structure youth participation, or more commitment from grassroots organizations to generate useful data?
This panel considers several of the most prominent projects at the frontier of mapping and youth — including youth-made mobile apps (from Youth Radio), city planning (from Community PlanIt), and food access and map-based storytelling (from RideSouthLA). The respondent for the panel is a city official (Boston office of New Urban Mechanics). Each participant will justify their case study in terms of contributing to the public good — including working with open data, or advancing city planning, generating media coverage or building human capital.
Our format seeks to tackle hard issues, and avoid romanticizing the case studies. We do this by emphasizing “hard problems” facing the field, and only introducing the case studies in a problem-solving mode, highlighting where more work is needed. Each panelist will begin by proposing a “hard problem,” emphasizing barriers to combining learning with authentic civic contribution. After hearing the problem pitch, a case study will be brought forth in response, not to reveal a solution as much as to clarify what makes the problem hard, and where to begin. We expect to reveal 4-5 core problems, before opening the panel to audience discussion.
Some questions the panel will tackle include:- Integration of online with multiple offline institutions — how do we get organizations to follow up on their promises of collaboration?
- What is the flow between offline and online in terms of experience?
- Since paper remains the primary distribution vehicle for maps in many neighborhoods, how do we integrate digital data collection, and connect paper maps to social networks for distribution?
- Custom apps for mobile devices has incredible appeal for making maps interactive, and for ensuring data collection — but it also has huge costs… what can be done without investing in specialty tools?
- Games can structure participation, but also leave the system vulnerable to attempts to “game the system.” How can we ensure data quality, especially if youth are to substantively contribute to authentic civic needs?
- Do we need different metrics to demonstrate learning — such as “neighborhood belonging” or “collective self-efficacy”?
- Outcomes from the panel will include how city officials and other changemakers can best engage with nascent mobile designs, pitfalls to avoid, and an analysis of some of the platforms we think still need to be created.
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The video of our panel at the Philanthropic Leadership Forum in January is now live — see below. Moderated by Lucy Bernholz, with Allison Fine, Mayur Patel, and Constance Steinkuehler. The topic was an overview on some emerging trends for philanthropy around “Social Media and Games for Social Change.”
The Forum was hosted by the USC Center on Philanthropy and Public Policy on 25 January 2013.
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On February 20 I will be joining a public panel on the future of Los Angeles, for the launch of LA2050. This first public event will focus on “social connectedness” — which is one of eight dimensions of a new report to be released that same day.
Our panel will be led by Torie Osborne, Deputy Mayor of Neighborhood and Community Services, with presentations by:
Join us on 2/20 at the West Hollywood Library from 4-6pm. RSVP to connect@LA2050.org. Here is the event flyer:
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LA Walking Tour + Party (December 8th). I’ll be leading a collective mapping activity as part of the tour, using everyday cellphones. From their website:
…an afternoon foodscape-mapping walk that will give us an inside look at downtown LA’s cold storage infrastructure, caffeine artisans, and future food market, followed by a happy hour food map presentation and party. The walking tour will take place from 1pm to 5pm on Saturday, December 8, and the party will follow on immediately afterward, from 5 to 7pm.
Culinary Cartography panel at LACMA (Sunday December 9th, 1:30pm). This is the 4th international conversation in a series called Foodprint. The LA version is at LACMA, where “panelists will explore the forces that have shaped the Angeleno foodscape and speculate on how to feed LA in the future.”
Culinary Cartography: What can we learn when we map Los Angeles using food as the metric?
Jonathan Gold (@thejgold) is a food critic who currently writes for the Los Angeles Times and used to write for LA Weekly and Gourmet. In 2007, he became the first food critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. He is also a regular contributor to KCRW’s Good Food radio program.
Mary Lee is Deputy Director of the Center for Health Equity and Place at PolicyLink, providing research, technical assistance and training to public and private agencies collaborating to build healthy communities. She is a practicing attorney with more than 25 years of experience in civil rights, land use, economic and neighborhood development strategies and civic democracy. Her areas of expertise include the impact of the built environment on health, health disparities in low-income communities, and food deserts.
Benjamin Stokes (@bgstokes) investigates real-world games and participatory mapping, most recently in South Los Angeles. Benjamin is a co-founder of Games for Change, the nonprofit movement to use games for social impact. Previously, he was a MacArthur Foundation program officer in the portfolio on Digital Media and Learning. Benjamin is currently completing his PhD at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism.
Teague Weybright is the current Board President of the Los Angeles Community Garden Council, which serves dozens of Community Gardens throughout Los Angeles County. His time is also spent at various school gardens, teaching urban agriculture to students, as well as developing urban farms with Farmworks LA.
Moderator: Nicola Twilley (@nicolatwilley), Edible Geography
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Video and slides (PDF) are now available of my talk at Georgia Tech on “ParTour: Mobile Storytelling and Bicycles in South L.A.” View below, or scroll down for a more complete description of the project:
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Yay! I’m pleased to have passed my qualifying exams (11/19/2012). Now I can start work on my dissertation proposal! Thanks to my committee members: Profs. Henry Jenkins, Sandra Ball-Rokeach, François Bar, Tracy Fullerton, and Bill Tierney.
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Next month I’m excited to be in Atlanta on November 14th to present at Georgia Tech’s Experimental Game Lab (6pm ET in the EGL/TSRB room 113a). A description of the talk is below.
ParTour: Mobile Storytelling and Bicycles in South L.A.
Can basic cell phones and bicycles help re-imagine the city? This talk analyzes a participatory mapping platform called ParTour. Over the past year, residents have used ParTour to transform their everyday phones into multimedia tools for neighborhood storytelling. Inspired by theories of real-world games, participants map and describe their pictures in real-time (using basic phones, not smartphones). Later, the pictures are used for city planning and turned into paper maps for advocacy. Unlike many mobile projects, the goal is not to generate data, or points-on-a-map. Instead, ParTour seeks to structure civic participation, and invigorate the neighborhood imagination — a kind of urban acupuncture. Mobile media introduces new possibilities to situate storytelling in physical spaces, with implications for place-making and civic engagement.
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I am thrilled that our report (http://CivicTripod.com) is now available as an interactive website from MIT Press as part of the International Journal of Learning and Media (see official stub). Our official title is Mobile and Locative Games in the “Civic Tripod:” Activism, Art and Learning. This report seeks to help frame the field in the mobile space, co-authored with Jeff Watson and Susana Ruiz. We emphasize looking across examples rather than single case studies. Additionally, we think the voice of game designers is distinctive — and different from the technical expertise of programmers — so we directly include a number of interviews with leading designers. This report is published by MIT Press/IJLM, and was initially funded by Intel.
Excerpt from our project overview:
The “big picture” for mobile and locative games has been hard to see, and hard to articulate. One cause is that the examples are rarely woven together across disciplines. Second, theory has too often been absent or heavy-handed. Something in-between is needed. This is especially true for more deeply social designs, which are too often reduced to case studies especially in fields like education, the arts, and civic innovation. We argue that this fragmentation of isolated examples is undermining our ability to think big, design holistically, and evaluate broadly.
For this report, we ambitiously seek to curate a set of conceptually important mobile projects, and to connect them with a light weave of theory from three distinct traditions of practice. Specifically, this report outlines the emerging field of mobile and pervasive games along the dimensions of (1) civic learning, (2) performance/art, and (3) social change. Focusing on real projects from the field, we aim to reveal key opportunities and constraints on the mobile frontier for civic games.
We argue that this three-legged “tripod” is increasingly necessary to articulate how mobile game projects are succeeding (and failing). In the past, designs have been analyzed separately by the siloed domains of art, learning, and social action. Each silo remains a useful lens, but combining the lenses is increasingly necessary for mobile media.
Mobile media is different because it ties into the physical space of our neighborhoods, with longstanding relationships and neighborhood dramas. On the streets in front of our homes, most of us already know if there are potholes, and whether socio-economic segregation is getting worse or better. But we may need the vision of art to imagine alternate futures. Art on our streets resists abstraction, and raises immediate questions of civics, prompting us to ask, “what can we do about this?” And taking action points back to learning, since the neighborhood solution is so often to empower ourselves, which necessitates learning who we are, determining what assets and power we have, and learning the skills of collective action to push for change.
Clearly the tripod legs are not just connected — they overlap. In fact, we argue that games are pushing for further blur between art, activism and learning. Games are a form of media that do less to structure facts, and more to structure and shape the player’s experience and identity. Learning is inherent in games, since their engagement depends on providing challenges that are just barely possible. (To use the language of Vygotsky, we might say that games are only fun when they scaffold the experience to keep the player within their zone of proximal development.) When games are tied to physical space, their action ties to learning about our own neighborhoods — how to move through them, and to change them. The art of such games is often the physical world itself, with better sounds and graphics than any screen! And the digital side of games draws in the civic, if only because it is so easy to link to more information on how to take action, or how to learn more. In other words, the experiential nature of games pulls mobile experiences on civics into being a mix of art and learning.
Pragmatism was partly behind our initial selection of these particular three legs of the civic tripod: as authors, we alternately identify as (a) artists, (b) activists, and (c) learners. Each of the tripod legs also points to an applied field that is a hotbed for games. Entire conferences are exploring learning games (see, for example, GLS), activism games (see Games for Change), and artistry (see IndieCade). Finally, each leg has a kind of distinct and powerful notion of audience: activism targets citizens, art targets the public, and learning targets students and lifelong learners.
Impact assessment also benefits from the notion of a civic tripod. Art has different ways of measuring impact from civic participation, which is different from learning. Yet as games blur the tripod, the full impact of a game may be best understood by drawing together the legs in a more ecological view. In particular, the question of whether a game is “engaging” is answerable separately by each leg of the trip — since engagement is essential for learning, necessary for civic engagement, and a central question for art venues like theaters, galleries and museums worldwide. (Here we draw on the emerging analysis of situated engagement from Stokes and Bar, 2012.)
Like any curatorial project, we are not comprehensive and must exclude some fantastic projects. Yet the field also needs some basic lists of leading games, curated with some theoretical grounding. All the games selected we see as emerging at the intersection of civic learning, performance/art and social change.
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