Finally got around to posting my final paper for the Social Facts Class. The title of the paper is:

Creating Connections for Disaster Relief in New Orleans
Looking at Social Software and Community Groups

The paper came out of observing community groups working within the city of New Orleans, research that I have done through the class on the ways that groups maintain effectiveness and translate their activities to online environments and thoughts I have had about facilitating social action through social networking.

Here is the PDF.

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Today, Angela and I presented Under the Level to the Urban Computing class.

You can find the pdf of our presentation here.

Overall, it went very well and people seemed very receptive to the project. Although we have had one mass sticker post and have the asterisk side of the project running well, Angela and I still have a lot to do with the website. One of our biggest challenges is figuring out what specifically we want to encourage those who participate in the project to do and how to get involved. This has been such a challenge because of the complexity of the problem in New Orleans and the lack of any national organization collecting relief funds. Kevin Slavin asked me tonight after class what the one thing I would like to change in New Orleans is, beyond simply creating awareness of the problem. I think my heart mostly lies with helping the Lower 9th Ward, not simply because they are suffering the most, but because what they are facing is completely unfair and criminal. Ultimately, I would like to prevent developers from buying up people's land there, which is what is currently occurring. Imagine how horrible it must be to lose your home to the storm and then lose your land because you can not afford to pay your property tax! Short of finding a way to achieve that, I think a secondary goal could be collecting funds to assist the Lower 9th Ward Homeowner's Association in their plan to construct temporary housing for former residents so they can at least return to their neighborhood.

Another large sticker post will be occurring next weekend after thesis week and before the show. Under the Level will be featured in the ITP Spring Show occurring on Tuesday, May 9th from 5-9pm and Wednesday, May 10th from 5-9pm. Hopefully the show will provide us with an additional venue to promote the project.

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Tonight, Angela Pablo and I will be leading a group through the East Village/Lower East Side and Williamsburg, Brooklyn posting stickers for our project Under the Level. I just got word from Angela that the stickers are in and that they look great. Hopefully we will get them all up tonight with a little help!

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Tomorrow, or rather today in a few hours, freeFormed.net will be out in full force supporting the Sea of People protest rally. Come join us! Take pictures and video with your mobile phone and upload them to freeformed.net's new Sea of People circle by sending them via MMS to mobile@freeformed.net with the word 'sea' (no quotes) in the body of your message.

For more information visit the Sea of People website.

Posted by Cat at 04:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Angela Pablo and I are moving forward with the aforementioned project for our Urban Computing Final. And we have a name (thanks to Kate Bauer), Under The Level. For us it signifies multiple meanings, under the water level, under the consciousness level.....etc.

We have decided to focus our attention on the areas of Manhattan east of 1st avenue between Houston and 14th street and Williamsburg Brooklyn (both of which would be significantly affected by a raise in sea-level followed by a flood). We have a preliminary design for the sticker. It will be slightly different, probably identifying the neighborhood in New Orleans where that area of New York would be comparable to in terms of destruction.

We will be setting up an asterisk number for people to call in to with an extension that will correspond to a message that lists the conditions at that location (i.e. 10 feet under water for three days, buildings destroyed, 10 animals found dead, four people)

The URL will be an interface comparing the specific neighborhoods directly....with pictures of the location in New York side by side with the location it corresponds to in New Orleans. I am currently developing the interface for the site now.

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I have been thinking a lot since I got back from New Orleans. Being there was amazing, but I came back very disheartened by what I experience, disheartened and angry. Angry at the devastation I witnessed and the lack of an appropriate governmental response, angry that so many people have been displaced and are unable to return because their homes have been seized, angry that the media has disappeared and the national awareness of what has happened and what continues to happen is virtually non-existent.

I have been thinking a lot about what I can do to have an effect on this situation, short of volunteering, which I plan to return to New Orleans to do once ITP is over. Ideally, I would like to do something that encourages people to donate money, but I have yet to figure out an adequate plan for how to do that. Do people really give money online? Would they donate to this cause if presented adequate and correct information from reliable sources? I don't know.....

So, for the time being I have been contemplating simply how to create an awareness. I was shocked when I arrived in the city, and I think other people would be too because they simply don't know what it looks like there now. I also feel that what has happened there directly relates to issues surrounding global warming and climate change. Much of the information I have found online suggests that the idea of building a city that is below sea level was asking for a disaster of this nature to happen. But what happens if sea level rises, what happens when other coastal cities, like New York, become at risk. It is hard to get people to care about something that doesn't affect them. Perhaps it would affect them if it was directly relate to where they live...

New York if sea level rises 14m

Somehow I am going to try to re-appropriate this image:

More about this to come.

Posted by Cat at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

freeFormed.org has submitted freeFormed.net for consideration for the NetSquared Conference 2007. The basis of the conference is to connect socially relevant new web technologies with funding sources to support their goals. In addition to attending the conference, freeFormed could also receive up to $100,000 in funding, which we would utilize to support and improve the freeformed.net site.

Netquared’s mission statement:

“Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.There’s a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as “Web 2.0″; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.”

The voting process will begin today and extend through April 14th. To vote, you must register for the netsquared site. You can go and view voting information here. Once you register for the site, you can find freeformed by searching by project name or from this url.

You can find out more about the conference here.

So, if you support freeformed’s goals, go vote! There are a lot of other amazing projects to look at as well. So please, support social activism on the web!!!

Posted by Cat at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jadie and I (and the whole freeformed crew) got a huge scare today when our site went down last night at 1:45 am. Dreamhost's support team did not contact us back for over twelve hours and we were stuck with very strange internal server errors after making no changes on the site. Finally we were contacted and told that it was runaway processes from a wordpress plugin that were causing the problem. Since we are not using wordpress on the freeformed.net site, we were both angry and mystified as to what to do next. I had a hunch it was a database server error. So jadie and I backed up all of our code and then deleted the entire freeformed site. We initially put up an html script, which was perfectly fine. But the minute we tried a php script with a sql statement, the site hung again and we got the same errors. We contacted dreamhost, telling them we had deleted all of our processes and their was no way it was anything but a database error (which is what I had originally suggested in my first email to them). We were very nervous, as it seemed that the database had some how gotten corrupted. It wasn't reachable from anywhere, not even php myadmin. Thanks to a conscientious dreamhost employee who restarted the database server the site is back up. And so far we haven't noticed any corruption.

Jadie and i were ready to fly to dreamhost headquarters. It is incredibly frustrating to not have control over your server. Especially when receiving support responses that make no sense. So what did we learn....back up your database, take a deep breath, don't panic immediately and figure out the problem yourself (as much as you can) so that your hosting company can't write it off.

It sure was a stressful day.

Posted by Cat at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

freeFormed has submitted a paper for inclusion in I-Media 2007, which will be held in Austria in September of this year. From the Rhizome.org Call for Papers:

I-MEDIA will bring together
traditional media companies, new media start-ups and academics to shape
the future of media technology, and to make the most of distributed text,
audio and video resources.

Beginning in 2007, I-MEDIA will complement I-KNOW (www.i-know.at), the
largest conference on knowledge management of its kind in Europe. This
extension reflects the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge
management and new media technologies. This lets participants of both
conferences benefit from the synergies of both events, in particular from
the presence of different yet related expertise at the same place and
time.

Our paper is called New Architectures for Social Networking: Bridging the Gap with freeFormed.net. Read the PDF here

Posted by Cat at 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)