mtl3p

local information ecosystems. i think I’m actually going to use the acronym lies. People will laugh at it, but it’s memorable.

Participatory Urbanism:
empowering citizens to collectively author, share, and remix
measurments from their environment from Eric Paulos on the Intel Urban Atmospheres list.

I’m trying to put together a panel on this for the upcoming community wireless summit in Maryland. I’m one of the co-organizers. The panel would be about LIE’s and the local information infrastructure that supports and influences them. Because I find that CWN geeks forget that the goal is to have a better community. They remember when you remind them, but they only see the (wireless) pipes. I look at people like Patrick(for supporting yulblog) and Patricia Bergeron (ONF’s Citoyen Parole project) and admire them for their tremendous positive influences on my community’s IE. They are making positive interventions in the same way that CWN’s are.

Right now, two of the groups having the best impact on our community’s IE is Koumbit and Miriam. Both of them are setting up local organizations, provincial political parties and local projects with Drupal sites left, right and center. Very recent examples: Mir transfered University of the Streets from a static site to a Drupal install. And Koumbit hooked up the Montreal Volunteer Bureau with a drupal site (to be launched this spring). Those organizations are both precious sources of information in Montreal. And now the information that they hold is becoming more dynamic, more accessible, more fluid, thanks to those two. This means that ISF is closer to being able to do stuff like show users the volunteer possibilities in their neighborhoods. Which would be lovely. and which would make our IE better. Which has effects like making us more informed and more cognizant of our communities.

Also an example of a having an effect on LIEs is the Terminus1525 project that I started. The goal behind it was to use small amounts of money to encourage cash-starved CWN’s to incorporate diffusing art as part of their mandate.
Both WT and now ZAP quebec are now showing art on their portal pages.

wireless toronto portal page
zapquebec portal page

I don’t claim to have “tricked” the groups into doing this work- both of them were already interested in this goal (Gabe was before I ever heard about locative art). But the project really worked in using small amounts of cash to make sure that something easy was done and once it was done, it becomes a (stronger) part of that groups identity and mission. Hopefully it had an effect on the norms or protocols of that infrastructure.

and btw I’m switching the name of my org from civic sense. it is too close to civic access and it doesn’t make any sense to use both of them. So I’m moving to oppidan.org

Oppidan means “relating to the inhabitants of a town”. And the focus is going to be specifically on helping communities improve their own LIE’s. with the involvement of their local technical communities.

okay, maybe I do need a better acronym than LIEs if I ever want to get a contract.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 7:37 pm and is filed under IleSansFil, information ecologies, ubicomp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.