the reality tunnel

Community organizers in the northeast of Chicago are partnering with school communities to make sure that their neighborhoods are accurately counted in the 2010 census.

I was recently asked to advise on the 2009 Allied Media Conference’s How-To Track (you can check the 2008 track out here) and I’m trying to think how to approach it.  Watching teachers recently and thinking about the community organizing that’s happening here in Bloomington, a lot of the skills I want to know how-to [...]

Linuxfest 2008 web page. In the first talk the presenter said that he felt the greatest contribution of Linux was that it was the great equalizer and that it was responsible for the generation of skilled IT workers in India, China, and other parts of the world that are emerging as producing a lot of [...]

CI Researching with Communities: Grounded perspectives on engaging communities in research Edited by Andy Williamson and Ruth DeSouza Networked neighbourhoods : the connected community in context / Patrick Purcell (ed.). Community informatics : shaping computer-mediated social relations / edited by Leigh Keeble and Brian D. Loader. Social and community informatics : humans on the Net [...]

Some folks have started organizing to plan resistance to plans to organize against a proposed “justice campus” in Bloomington that would include a new, larger jail (as the jail is notoriously overcrowded and there is a federal lawsuit about conditions in the jail), a juvenile “treatment” facility (as youth from Monroe County who are sentenced [...]

Update: Apparently Houston is going for it, planning on deploying 10 wifi ‘bubbles’ in low-income areas.  Link to Houston Chronicle article about the plan. From the NYTimes (via the Community Informatics Researchers mailing list): PHILADELPHIA — It was hailed as Internet for the masses when Philadelphia officials announced plans in 2005 to erect the largest [...]

I think that California always has had this iconic quality of Americanness, capturing the most extreme visions of both this country’s aspirations and its challenging realities. This weekend, Greg rented a documentary called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea about the Salton Sea, an area in California that, in the previous century, due to [...]

On behalf of Nu Alpha Alpha Chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., I would like to invite you to participate in our “Men Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence.”  This program will be held at the Monroe County Public Library’s Auditorium on Thursday November 15, 2007 from 7pm-9pm. The program will be divided into [...]

I decided to go to the IU library to check out the book The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town? (ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-678-4) and found a wealth of other interesting books in the HN80.N5 section on the 7th floor. I also checked out There Goes The Neighborhood (ISBN-10: 0-394-57936-4), [...]

In a way, the question of how you deal with the scumfucks who probably have been breaking into buildings around the fest is the same question as what you do with the wealthy college kids who live in the fancy apartments, is the same question as the ones asked by “The Hardest Question Ever”. How [...]