People’s Software Company

Chris Csikszentmihályi

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams

I was away from TechStars last week — I went home to Boston to visit my kids. One of the things I did while I was in Boston was to attend a gathering put together by the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. [There's Chris Csikszentmihályi, one of the three founders of the Center.] Going to the Media Lab is a little like walking into Wired Magazine, without the bad typography.

Ellen Hume and her gang put the meeting together. In the past few years I’ve attended a lot of conferences — if Powerpoint were a radiation source, my badge would be black by now. Most of them either bore me or drive me crazy. It’s really hard to give a good conference, and I have to say: this was a really great conference.

My favorite part was seeing the amazing variety and technical chops and wit of the projects being done by the graduate students whose research is being funded by the Center for Civic Media (which in turn got $5M from the Knight News Challenge). I really loved Leo Burd’s project What’s Up, Lawrence?. Lawrence is a city in Massachusetts which is plagued by poverty and crime, and what Leo did was to give people a call in number, and each new user would get a voice mail box and could network that with other users. It’s great because you can get the end result of community news, poetry, people singing — all without requiring Internet access, because you can just call an 800 number and hear the latest. It’s also a very innovative combination of Drupal’s Organic Groups, podcasting, and mobile device access. The extras he wrote, he told me, never got packaged up and released to the Drupal community as a module, but I hope that they do someday. Maybe someone can offer to do the packaging up and a little maintenance for him, because it would be a wonderful contribution.

I also enjoyed talking to Geeta Dayal, who’s writing a book about Brian Eno (!!) and Colleen Kaman, who is working on a project called Do It Ourselves Radio.

There were a few other Knight News Challenge winners who were new to me — like Brein McNamara, who is doing “signcasting” — videos in which he signs the news in American Sign Language. Some weren’t new but I was thrilled that they were one of the News Challenge winners and that now they had the cash and backing — because now I’d be able to use their stuff. Dan Pacheco’s Printcasting means I’ll be able to take my local site’s RSS feeds and flow them into a print layout resulting in a PDF I can send to a local printer, and boom, I’m a media mogul! Can’t wait. And Margaret Rosas is going to make radio station websites suck less. Good, because I love radio. And David Cohn got some cash, and really, it almost doesn’t matter for what because it will be great.