Acting Locally: Civic Media and the Information Needs of Communities

The MIT Center for Future Civic Media is a multidisciplinary research group that develops sociotechnical systems to strengthen geographic communities. Working in urban and rural communities, from the US to Peru, our civic projects focus on a community's ownership of its own information and the ability to turn that information into constructive social change. This lecture will give an overview of recent activity at the Center, and cover lessons learned in the process of fieldwork and deployment.

Chris Csikszentmihalyi directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, dedicated to developing technologies that strengthen communities. He also founded and directs the Media Lab's Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, politics, and the arts for 16 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations on five continents and one subcontinent.