Think New Orleans Project
From New Orleans Wiki
This is a place where I can write about Think New Orleans, as a project, and not be so self conscious. Now I need to write two pages about Think New Orleans. Joy!
Contents |
[edit] Mission
Think New Orleans is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to explore and implement Internet based strategies for inclusive and widespread civic engagement. At Think New Orleans we develop solutions to increase the productivity of neighborhood and civic organizations, with the belief that civic productivity is driven by knowledge, participation and consensus.
[edit] Core Values
- We value open data.
- We value the real world social skills of New Orleanians.
- We value civility in dialog.
- We value concise, productive, goal-oriented communication.
[edit] Goals
- Providing citizens with the skills to share information in such a way as to produce knowledge and consensus.
- Providing citizens with the skills to express their ideas to each other and people in power.
- Buttressing existing social networks by sharing and archiving information.
- Promoting the value of brave, forthright dialog and sincere questioning.
[edit] How We Got Here
- Recognizing that New Orleanians are overwhelmed with disjointed communications from many different sources in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
- Recognizing that New Orleanians prefer to meet face to face and are not primary publishers on the Internet, especially the World Wide Web.
- Recognizing that New Orleanians are hungry for opportunities to participate in substantive civic dialog.
[edit] Participatory Media
Think New Orleans applies the tenets of participatory media to civic engagement. We promote the use of the Internet as a collaborative environment where citizens publsh vital information, share insights that create knowledge, strengthen social ties within and between neighborhoods, and deliberate on issues in order to build consensus.
Think New Orleans focuses on the human element of pariciptory media, working to bring together people across New Orleans' social-economic and geographic bondaries. Through the Internet, we help people find common interests and a alliances, and through workshops and other face-to-face meetings we help citizens address their concerns through civic action.
Thus, it is important to note that Think New Orleans uses the Internet itself as a means to the end goal of civic engagment.
[edit] Projects
Already, Think New Orleans has responded to the needs of New Orleans citizens in the aftermath of Katrina. We have envisioned and implemented a number of projects that have had very tangible results. These successes include:
- Developed a web publishing platform for neighborhood groups and nonprofit organizations by integrating a proven web publishing platform with extensions specific to the mission of civic engagement.
- Established two dozen neighborhood and nonprofit web sites and taught their authors to actively publish on the web.
- Created a volunteer maintained web site, the New Orleans Wiki, with over 200 articles about New Orleans, including neighborhood histories, school openings, and nonprofit organizations.
- Co-produced the Rising Tide Conference, a gathering of New Orleans participatory media mavens.
- Provided platforms for collaborative authoring and organization of the Mid-City Recovery Plan, Neighborhood Planning Network ByLaws, and The Rising Tide Conference.
- Created a volunteer maintained listing of local of local web resources using the New Orleans Wiki.
- Created a volunteer maintained listing of school openings on the New Orleans Wiki.
- Provided the Neighborhood's Planning Network with solutions for web publishing and document sharing, developed and executed an IT training program for their staff, and developed and hosted email outreach program.
- Engaged in civic research, producing research papers on the Unified New Orleans Planning Process and the New Orleans Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan.
- Created a social network diagram for the City of New Orleans, to analyze the organizational and individual relationships involved in city's recovery process.
- Recorded French Quarter Town Hall and the Lower 9th Home Owner's meetings on site, produced audio recordings of the meetings, and hosted them online through Think New Orleans.
- Recorded Audio Town Hall interviews, recorded converence calls between neighborhood organizations and neighborhood planning firms, and hosted the recordings at Think New Orleans.
also, you could add "collaborative" to "transparent and inclusive" under "civic information systems" on the first page and stress that you are working with all these other groups to build their capacity and fufill your mission at once
[edit] Biographies
[edit] Alan Gutierrez
Alan Gutierrez is a computer programmer working professionally with Internet technologies since 1996. He has developed software for research firms and with corporate IT departments. He pioneered the voter information web sites for Publius.org in 1998. He most has most recently co-authored the EAC guidelines for voter information web sites.
[edit] Sarah Elise Lewis
Sarah Elise Lewis is Operations Director of Think New Orleans, where she coordinates the New Orleans Social Network Map project. She is a PhD candidate and Urban Studies instructor at the University of New Orleans. Her research addresses heritage as a resource and source of conflict in disaster recovery.
[edit] Karen Gadbois
Karen Gadbois is The Outreach Coordinator for Think New Orleans. Before moving to New Orleans in 2003, she helped to create the "Retablo Project " working with indigenous women in rural Mexico to create embroidered narratives, as well as working in the Mexican Penal System with Artist/prisioners.
[edit] The Older One
In the wake of the Katrina disaister, several factors have emerged that push the boundaries of our current understanding of citizenship, community and democracy.
[edit] Questions About Democracy Crisis
Among the questions that immediately emerged:
- What constitutes the new fabric of New Orleans?
- How did technology, designed originally by the military to operate in a distributed de-centralized fashion in the event of catastrophe perform?
- What happen to the layers of social networking we've layered on the internet since it's inception?
- How did the efforts to reconnect citizens of New Orleans use the internet? How did those efforts connect with people on the other side of the digital divide?
- Are there lasting implications for the digital divide?
- Where is New Orleans today - In New Orleans proper? In the hearts of it's evacuees? In chatrooms and blogs? On FEMA resident databases?
- What happens next?
[edit] Questions About Internet Democracy in Recovery
As time passed, a second set of more intricate questions about democracy emerged:
- When should an election be held after a catastrophic situation?
- How can a candidate campaign to a population scattered across the country?
- Who controls the new addresses of the evacuees?
- How long can a "citizen" be away from their home town before they cannot reasonably be expected to know enough to complete the bottom of the ballot?
Because Publius stated mission is to explore the impact of the Internet on democracy and develop web-based tools to enhance the exchange of ideas and information, this new frontier of online community and democracy is a critical nexus of future research.
Publius has recognized evolving efforts on the ground in New Orleans to reconstruct and inform community as vital to the furure of Publius' mission. To that end, Publius, has partenered with Alan Gutierrez, a recognized leader in New Orleans online community to established a pilot a program called Think New Orleans, to be headed by Alan and based in New Orleans. Many of the questions listed above do not have answers, but some of them do, and many more will. The Goal of the Think New Orleans project for Publius is be in a position to answer the questions above while actually implementing solutions that can help on the ground.
This hybrid approach allows accademic research to be done as a byproduct of on-the-ground activity to assist New Orleans.
Publius is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996
Think New Orleans is a project to develop information systems and training for use in civic organization in the City of New Orleans.
[edit] Civic Information Systems
At the heart of the Think New Orleans Project is the design and implementation of Civic Information Systems.
Civic information systems are networked computer applications that share information within individual civic organizations, publish information for citizens, and coordinate the activities of civic organizations.
An example of a civic information are community newsletters distrubted via web, email and syndication. Other examples include collaborating writing software, distribution
- Transparent
- Civic information systems aim to make both information and decision making transparent, because they present information in a public forum and preserve a historic record of the information and how it has changed.
- Inclusive
- Civic information systems aim to include wide a range of citizens in the decision making process by making systems that are simple to use, low in cost to operate, by extending the reach of the information through traditional broadcast media, telephony and print.
[edit] Education
Civic information systems are ineffective if they are unable to collect information.
