At CityCircles, we've been fortunate to work with a local developer who is passionate about our project's goal of developing hyper-local communication tools for mass audiences. Our first implementation of that is a platform for light rail passengers in Phoenix, Arizona.

That said, one person can't carry the entire load, especially as the project inevitably evolves from its humble beginnings and wire frames.

One solution that's worth considering is sinking some funds into a test suite -- a closed environment where other developers who share a vision for the project can develop new features with the approval of the "master" developer. This is the approach we recently took with CityCircles.

Test Suite

In March, we contracted with a local development shop called Integrum Technologies to build a test suite. The project is connected to our code base and includes simulated tasks that other developers can build toward and "test." If these features pass muster in the test suite, then we can push those changes to our code base permanently. If they do not, then the developer can tweak them until they do without ruining the live site.

The test suite took almost three weeks to build and cost us roughly $9,500. (That may seem pricey to some, but good Ruby on Rails developers are not cheap. In our case, Integrum specializes in test suites.) However, for startups, this is a very helpful option for reaching goals of new features and functions on a budget. Open-source software developers that are looking for a "portfolio" piece and are attracted to the project's mission can participate at a fraction of the cost to the project. In return, they receive publicity and, in some cases, a promise of future paid work. The idea is that everyone wins.

Once your test suite is completed, start poking around your local area for developer meetups. Go online and subscribe to developer forums and Google groups. In our case, the project is built in Ruby on Rails. I have joined the Rails community's leading Google Group with the intent of marketing this test suite to developers.

I've also been invited to attend Integrum's weekly "hacknight" meetup in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb. Tomorrow night, I'll be there to spread the gospel of the project and hope that our handy test suite attracts the right crew.

Use these test suites to your advantage, as simulators like them can also help create an organic "buzz" around the project as well. Include the developers' names on the open-source software license, too. That will also help.

But be mindful of the pitfalls. Just as there are several developers that may want to participate, they may not have the chops to complete the work in a timely or accurate manner. It helps to have a strong master developer to sign off on their work.

What's the future of news? I'm tempted to say "not very much" since no one really knows too much about the future of news right now. You know this is true because senior news folk have given up on the doom and gloom stuff and are starting to talk about "the golden age of journalism" and how it's a "bright dawn" and that sort of thing. This would make sense if there had been any structural change in the economics of news, but there hasn't; so their optimism has the hollow twang of hope over reason.

Still, the optimists have got it half right. As Stewart Kirkpatrick, founder of the Caledonian Mercury, said at a #futureofnews conference a week or so back (I paraphrase): "This is a great time to do journalism. It's just not a great time to earn your living as a journalist."

What I Know

But, in these turbulent times, as I earnestly make my way from one news conference to another, a few things are starting to become clear. So this much I know:

• Even if pay walls provide a secure financial future for news organizations -- which right now seems unlikely -- they will reduce the pool of shared information, and cut those news organizations' content off from the openness, sharing and linking that characterizes the web. "You cannot control distribution or create scarcity," Alan Rusbridger said in his January Hugh Cudlipp lecture, "without becoming isolated from this new networked world."
• The pay wall is not the only way to sustain the digital newsroom. Advertising, though much maligned by many, could yet make online non-pay wall newspaper content viable within five years. Peter Kirwan did the math in Wired, calculating that if Guardian News Media manages a 20 percent annualized growth of digital revenues (it estimates growth will be 30 percent this year) it will be able to maintain a £100m digital newsroom seven days a week by 2015.
• There are other revenue models for online news -- ones that allow you to keep your news open, linked and shared, and make money. For example, there is what I call the "carrier pigeon model." In this model you let people share, link to, recommend, search, aggregate, and even re-use you content -- you just make sure it's properly marked up and credited so you can keep track of it and develop revenue models off the back of it. You do this with -- excuse the geek terminology -- "metadata." Embedded metadata has all sorts of potential benefits we're only just starting to take advantage of (hence why we've spent so much time on hNews and linked data). I call it the carrier pigeon model because the news doesn't just go out, it comes back.
• The cost base is still going to have to go down. The cost of producing news will necessarily have to be a lot lower than it has been historically. This doesn't have to mean cutting journalist's jobs or getting out of print. There are lots of ways to rethink costs in a digital world. One of the most inventive is Roman Gallo's Czech model. Gallo opened cafés in the centre of towns across the Czech Republic. He then put his news teams in the cafés. Not only does this mean they have very low office overhead (the café covers basic costs), but it means the journalists are working in amongst the local community and getting readers directly involved in production.
• There will need to be accessible, re-usable public data provided regularly and in a consistent format. Without this it will be much harder to keeps costs low because of the amount of time it takes to coax information out of public authorities and then analyze that data. This is why the launch of data.gov.uk was such an important development, and why we need to join Sir Tim Berners-Lee's quest for "raw data now" (as he shouts in his wonderfully quirky TED appearance).
• Whether or not pay walls work or online news makes money, there will be a public interest gap. Some newsgathering and reporting will almost certainly never again be commercially profitable in an open market. Online news is highly unlikely ever to pay for a journalist to sit in a local court for days on end, for example. This was one of the most important things to come out of Michael Schudson and Leonard Downie's report, "The Reconstruction of American Journalism." Schudson and Downie could not find a market solution to some of the news problems they were exploring, and so settled instead on a mixture of tax breaks, subsidies, foundation grants, and donations.
• We will rely, for aspects of watchdog journalism, on a combination of journalists, NGOs, and motivated members of the public. Note the use of the word "motivated." News organisations will need to find ways -- other than money -- to motivate and sustain people to help them scour data, dig through school and healthcare records, and alert them to corruption and injustice.
• As well as motivating people, news organizations will need to build the tools that help the non-professional journalists be watchdogs -- tools like whatdotheyknow.com, a site built by MySociety that makes it relatively easy for people to make freedom of information requests and share the results of those requests with a wider community. Or the way the Guardian got the public to search through the millions of MPs expenses claims.
• News organizations and journalists will need to form and re-form partnerships with other organizations, journalism co-operatives, NGOs and members of the public. We're seeing this start to happen with sites like the Bay Citizen in San Francisco (see a good post by Mallary Jean Tenore on Poynter) and OpenFile, the beta site just launched by MediaShift managing editor Craig Silverman et al in Canada.

Even taking all this into account there's a good chance that, without some tweaking of the market, a few tax breaks here, maybe a start-up fund there, there will be a lot of public interest news blackspots.

So there it is. Not so bleak, but not so rosy, either. And take it with a big pinch of salt since the only ones who seem to know about profitable business model for news just now are those running #futureofnews conferences.

I was honored to be invited by the EastWest Institute to attend in Dallas a Cyber Security Summit, which gathered a fascinating collection of tech elites including Michael Dell, Esther Dyson, Ross Perot Jr., and Randall L. Stephenson; current and retired military and intelligence like James L. Jones, Tom Ridge, and T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley; and financial titans like George Russell and Francis Finlay.

The mantra of the event was that cyber-security will be the new big obsession of our various security services for the next century -- an obsession on par with the human and material resources that went into the nuclear threat in the last century. The emergence of Information and Network Infrastructure Commands in military general staffs across NATO countries demonstrates that this is no rhetorical flourish.

Yet, we see very little public discussion of the threat, or the strategy or investments we are considering in response. Much of the presentations were cyber-security specialists explaining to financial elites that cyber-security is many things: Cyber-crime, cyber-espionage (military and economic), and cyber-warfare. The main challenge is that a country's assignment of responsibility for managing offensive and defensive capabilities depends on the source and intent of the attack. Yet, in cyber-attacks the source and intent is rarely apparent so roles are blurred often generating confusion and ad hoc-ery, or even paralysis. Scott Charney gave a very good lunch speech summing these points up.

This is a huge problem. After hundreds of years of struggle to assert civilian control of the security services -- which was in large part achieved by dividing the roles of the military, police, and intelligence functions -- we find ourselves in a context where the institutional pressure to retain those divisions might quickly fade. Elements of the overreach by the Bush administration intelligence services monitoring domestic communications are just a small taste of where this can go.

A Need to Engage the Public

It is a challenge crying for an informed engaged public discourse, for the sake of our democratic principles, and to defend our brave security services against those who would abuse them for petty political ends.

One reason given for the lack of public dialogue about cyber-security is that a cyber-war doesn't draw blood, which makes it a challenge to visualize the importance of the threat to the general public. But, running with the analogy here a bit, we did not -- and still do not -- have a very public discourse on the nuclear threat either.

Traditional media did cover the Dallas event, but new media has a special responsibility to dig deeper, ask security elites the tough questions, demand answers, and break through this myth of the bloodless cyber-security threat. There is a need to tell the compelling stories, to inform, and elicit visceral passionate reactions, to devote space and energy to engaging coverage of these questions.

"Hacks and Hackers," our young organization focused on bringing journalism and technology closer together, seems to have struck a chord.

Over the weekend of May 21-23, 80 journalists and technologists in San Francisco participated in the group's first "Hacks/Hackers Unite" gathering, where they developed 12 iPad applications. Meanwhile, our "question-and-answer" site, Help.Hackshackers.com, launched less than two months ago, is becoming a thriving online community for people interested in computer programming for journalism and media applications.

Here's the latest sign that Hacks and Hackers is meeting a need: the RSVP list for our first New York City event tomorrow night (June 2). There are now more than 160 people who've confirmed they plan to attend.

"I'm thrilled with the way this group seems to have hit on something right at the right time," said Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times, co-organizer of the meetup and one of three founders of Hacks and Hackers. (The other two are me and Burt Herman, a San Francisco-based technology entrepreneur and former Associated Press bureau chief and foreign correspondent.)

Burt did an amazing job leading the organization of the Hacks/Hackers Unite event in San Francisco focusing on iPad applications. The event was sponsored by KQED, National Public Radio, the Knight Digital Media Center, Demotix, Speck Products and Exygy.

At the end of two days of coding, judges picked two projects as the best applications:

• Citizen Kid News: an iPad app that provides a visually dynamic and accessible framework for kids to safely explore and interact with the news. Top kid-appealing news content is curated on a daily basis, in 5 categories: Animals, World, Science, Sports and Entertainment. A photographic touch interface provides a window into each story, and kids can select stories for further exploration that includes additional text, photos, video and audio. The app incorporates game mechanics to encourage participation: kids earn points for commenting on articles, viewing videos about the reporter's process, and eventually contributing their own articles. Kids earn badges along the way, starting with "Cub Reporter" and culminating with "Editor". Screenshots of the application can be found here and here and here.
• Who's Reppin' Me, a Web-based app that feeds users news stories about their political representatives based on location. Users can then send Tweets to lawmakers to express their approval or disapproval of their actions. The app is online at http://whosreppin.me/

A list of all the projects completed during the weekend is at: http://unite.hackshackers.com/2010/05/order-of-presentations/.
Video from the event can be found at http://www.youtube.com/user/hackshackers. Matt Baume, on Poynter.org, did a nice writeup on lessons learned from Hacks/Hackers Unite.

The New York event tomorrow isn't going to try to tackle any technology problems - but it will be a great chance for hacks and hackers to get to know one another and talk about future collaborations. Burt, Aron and I will be there to talk about Hacks and Hackers. Jennifer 8. Lee, who has played a key role in organizing the event, will discuss her work with the Knight Foundation to support journalism innovation. Josh Cohen, senior business product manager at Google News, will also make some remarks. And folks from Patch, an event sponsor and AOL's hyperlocal startup, will be discussing their approach to news and technology, as well as the skills and experience they are looking for on their product and technology teams.

The event also gives me, Burt and Aron an excuse to get together in one place for the first time. We'll be talking about next steps for Hacks and Hackers. Feel free to post ideas and suggestions in the comments below.

I recently spoke with a friend of mine here in Sochi, Russia. She is a specialist in modernizing the technological infrastructure of sanatoriums, which were the places where lucky Soviet working class heroes would be sent to rest and relax. (Think of them as health spas.)

It's a challenge to transform the Soviet-era sanatoriums. For example, her job entails computerizing the files and data and modernizing the registration of new clients. But she said it's exciting work. For her, the most enjoyable part of the job is organizing courses for the staff (doctors, waiters, janitors) who at first seem dazed and confused by the changes and new technology. Gradually, their puzzlement gives way to excitement. "How come we were doing this job manually for so many years?" they eventually ask.

Those many people, who are trying to modernize different aspects of Sochi culture and society for the upcoming 2014 Winter Games, can definitely relate to her experience. It's not just about the modernization of the sanatoriums; it's about every aspect of the locals' lifestyle and the character of the infrastructure. Of course, this is what makes this process of transformation so exciting.

Our project, SochiReporter, a hyper-local citizen news website, is working to create an archive of these changes -- an archive that is built by and for locals. And, as the website is reflecting change and transformation in the city, it changes itself.

Over the last several weeks we have been working at mastering our own technology. We added new features to the site, expanded the social networking component, added links to SochiReporter groups on other social networks (twitter, vimeo, flickr, livejournal, vkontakte.ru, ya.ru), and will add more changes over the next two weeks. Also of note is that the website is loading much faster, partly because of some back-end work, and partly because the new 4G WiMax Internet service called Yota was launched in Sochi at the end of March.

Becoming a Journalist-Entrepreneur

I have become part of the new breed of journalists-turned-entrepreneurs, and I'm finding a certain amount of pleasure in this lifestyle, crazy though it is.

First of all, I am living between two cities: Sochi and Moscow. Being in Sochi means working with contributors and the people who actually submit content to the website, and promoting the project at the local level. Moscow is a bigger source of financing, a business hub where I can meet with advertisers who might be interested in supporting SochiReporter.

Our team has recently been working on developing a sustainable business model, as the Knight Foundation grant money that enabled us to launch the project and start the experiment will soon run out.

Being an entrepreneur means being simultaneously responsive to two mobile phones, an iPad, a laptop and even a fax machine. It also means being very open to new collaborations and projects. You need to be open to taking risks, and adept at using the knowledge you acquired in traditional media reporting and applying it to new media.

Giving Newspapers a Chance

We recently decided to start giving the local Sochi papers, which don't have an online presence, an opportunity to place their content on our site. This section is called News and it's where we mostly have content from RSS feeds. It's separate from the Reports section, which is filled with reports from citizens and includes original content.

The editor of the first Sochi paper to go on our site is extremely happy about the arrangement. He had been seeking a presence on the web. For our part, we'll see how things go and will probably partner with additional local media. However, our main goal is to provide our content to local media. We hope to expand those possibilities by enabling people to submit reports and photos via mobile phone. Right now, people aren't able to upload content using their phone, though they can read the site and add comments to the articles.

Marketing

Just a final word about marketing, as it is now one of our primary goals. With the site now built and working, we are focused on telling people about it and getting them to use it. One way of doing that is by being part of big events in the area. We were recently chosen as a media sponsor for one of the biggest annual movie festivals in Russia, Kinotavr. It will take place in Sochi from June 6 to 13.

We are the only Sochi-based media outlet to be among the sponsors. The rest are Moscow-based media outlets. We will receive some very cool promotion during the event and the SochiReporter logo will be present in the Kinotavr daily newsletter, its brochures and on its website.

There are no magic wands in the digital transition. Everything has to be built slowly and surely, as with legacy media. And failure is as likely, maybe even more likely, than in the analog world. But you have to keep trying because cell phones, the first true mass digital channel in Africa, are getting faster and smarter; if you don't exploit the power of the new channel, you're toast because others will and are.

Grocott's Mail has been serving the small community of Grahamstown, South Africa with local news and information for a long time (140 years precisely on May 11). Grocott's Online -- which got going properly a year ago -- caters to those who prefer pixels to paper, but until now, locals with mobile phones haven't had a comprehensive way of being informed about what's on the go in Grahamstown.

Launch of Grahamstown NOW

Enter Grahamstown NOW, the first concerted attempt by Grocott's Mail to provide news and real-time information to Grahamstonians on a mobile platform. It's part of the Knight-funded Iindaba Ziyafika project and is led by Michael Salzwedel, New Media Editor at Grocott's Mail. Here's what Michael emailed me when I asked for some info about the technical side of the project:

It's not fancy or shiny - on the surface it appears to be just another mobisite. But there's a lot of depth below that surface. What it lacks in glitz and glam, it makes up for in its ability to serve up a snapshot at any given point in time of what's just happened, currently happening, or about to happen in Grahamstown.

Grahamstown NOW focuses on providing practical, immediately usable information directly related to the living out of the daily lives of people in Grahamstown. The idea is that Grahamstown NOW should become the central aggregator of as much as possible of Grahamstown's news and informational content, ultimately enabling citizens to make more considered decisions.

The launch version of Grahamstown NOW provides the following content:

• Event listings: These are pulled in from the Grocott's online events calendar. Users can submit their own events directly from their phones.
• Business specials: What's currently on special (at registered businesses) at any given time in Grahamstown, and how much longer those specials are on for (or time until they start).
• News items: The latest and most popular stories from Grocott's Online.
• Webcam snapshots: Users can see current views from a number of webcams across Grahamstown. This will include "stream cam" that captures the queues at the local source of fresh spring water. With Grahamstown experiencing both drought and water quality problems, rich and poor are queuing for hours to supplement their municipal supply at the spring. It would great to be able to check on your phone for a real-time lull in the queue!
• Movie screenings: What's coming up next at the local cinema.
• Radio shows: What's on now and coming up next on local radio stations.
• Weather conditions: Should you grab a jacket or an umbrella? Check on Grahamstown NOW.
• Tweets: Latest tweets from @grocotts, and the latest tweets mentioning Grahamstown.
• SMSes: Latest SMSes received by Grocott's Online (MMS support coming soon).
• Ride offers/requests: A simple matching service.

The emphasis is on time and timing of events and specials and happenings around town. There is also an emphasis on freshness and "nowness." So while many sites allow you to see what's on in the next few days or weeks, or tomorrow's weather, Grahamstown NOW focuses only on today's happenings, weather, shows and commercial specials. If you want to know what's on tomorrow, check in with us again closer to that time.

All About Now

This approach might not work for congenitally forward-planning people, but it is, in testing at least, proving to be a great way to cut through the clutter of most sites, and curate information and news through the singular lens of currentness. Grahamstown NOW only gives you the very latest news story or two, not all of them. If you want to know what's coming up next on the local radio station, we'll tell you -- but not about the show after that.

Instead of comprehensiveness, Grahamstown NOW is much more like Twitter or a Facebook wall. It's about the latest, most current information. If you snooze, you lose that part of the stream.

Michael and his team are enthusiastic about how useful this could be.

"Most of the above can be displayed according to time (countdown until something begins or ends), so the home page and section pages are dynamic and never look the same," he said. "Users might see that a jazz concert is starting in an hour and 30 minutes, or that a 2-for-1 pizza special at a local restaurant started two hours ago, or that the next showing of a certain movie begins in 20 minutes, or that a public council meeting is scheduled for two days' time."

Grahamstown NOW is primarily meant to be accessed with a mobile phone, but there's also a desktop version. For now, that's simply the mobile version contained within a mobile phone graphic, with additional Javascript and AJAX functionality to enhance the user experience by allowing easier inputs and no page reloads. We are debating 'converging' our Grahamstown NOW website and the Grocott's Online Website.

Users can also interact with the site by leaving "chirps" (comments), submitting their own events and ride offers, and easily sharing content with friends via email or WAP pushes.

Integration With Nika

I asked Michael to outline why Grahamstown NOW will work in our small town, and how it fits in with what we're trying to do with the Nika system we developed. He replied:

The average Grahamstownian is not rich, does not have an expensive phone, and is very conscious of how much they're spending on data. Thus, the first version of Grahamstown NOW has been designed to be accessed on even the simplest of Internet-enabled phones, and the HTML has been 'minified' to reduce bandwidth consumption.

Later in the year, Grahamstown NOW will be integrated with Nika. The aim is for Nika to become the central CMS for all Grocott's Mail's offerings: The print edition, Grocott's Mail Online, Grahamstown NOW, our SMS headline service and our upcoming instant messaging offerings (which will include selected Grahamstown NOW content).

Nika 2.0, which is now available as a free download, is evolving into a more comprehensive and mobile-orientated CMS. At its heart Nika is an editing workflow suite and digital content manager; but Nika also has additional functionality for community newspapers in that it can take SMS and instant messages directly into editing streams, and send SMS and IMs back to cell phones. Overall, Nika is great for generating user generated content and for easily getting headlines (and soon whole stories) back out to users' cell phones.

Future versions of Grahamstown NOW will have more differentiation between what is served up to PCs and to mobile phones, will include geo-location functionality so users can see business or event locations on a map or tag their social networking interactions or content submissions with their location, and will have tighter integration with Facebook.

For now, we think Grahamstown NOW offers immediate benefits for citizens -- with a particular emphasis on "immediate." Grahamstown NOW will launch officially in mid June 2010.

I had the pleasure of attending the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Santiago, Chile earlier this month. The summit brought together bloggers, activists, and thinkers working to advance citizen media all around the world. While the discussions that took place were informative, most presentations and panels fell short in recognizing the role mobile phones have played and exploring the potential mobile phones can play in citizen media. I'd like to highlight some of the potential for mobiles in citizen media that were not adequately discussed.

The Potential of Mobiles in Citizen Media

Mobile phones have already played a significant role in advancing citizen media around the world. They were instrumental in helping capture photos and videos on the streets of Tehran during 2009 protests that followed the elections there. A video captured during that time even won a prestigious journalism award. Mobile phone technology has been used in Namibia to enable more people from around the country to express their views in one of the country's largest newspapers.

In the U.S., day laborers have been using MMS messages to blog about their daily lives. In South Africa, citizen journalists use SMS, MMS, and other phone-based technologies to submit content and commentary to a local newspaper. In India, mobiles are being used to enable both reporting and news dissemination in local languages. Many more examples exist.

These examples only scratch the surface of what is possible with mobile phones in independent and citizen media. The first panel at the summit, for example, featured online participation efforts around Chile. The government there is working to bring taxes and procurement data online. This was also a project that enabled citizen journalism in 12 local newspapers, as well extensive social media usage by Chileans. Non-profit organizations are also actively participating and responding to online conversations.

The projects were impressive, but panel and audience members rightly raised the issue of a "digital divide" in Chile. There were only 32 internet users per 100 Chileans in 2008. However, there were 88 mobile subscriptions per 100 Chileans in the same year.  It was noted in the panel that access isn't the only barrier to participation. But missing was the discussion of opportunities to use a widely-used technology that could increase participation.

A very interesting project, Biblio Redes, provides a blogging platform for local communities in Chile around a community's local library. The presenter for this project highlighted the difficulties of working with older participants who may have an oral rather than written tradition. Projects based on voice-based technologies present interesting potential to address this population, as has already been done elsewhere (see, for example, this project with indigenous tribes in India).

At the Summit, there were also many conversations about fostering online participation in other languages. Voice-based technologies on the mobile phone may play a role in helping there as well, especially with languages with weak association to written representation, or languages with tricky character sets. Mobile voice-based technologies also provide opportunities for information services and participation for non-literate audiences.

Bloggers and reporters also need to think more about using their mobile phones. In conversations I had with bloggers, I realized that most don't see their mobile phones as potentially helpful devices in normal reporting work. One blogger who had used his mobile phone to stream live video and take pictures of protests was the exception rather than the rule.

Our discussions managed to identify at least three distinctive advantages mobile phones have over traditional multimedia capturing devices:

1. They are always in our pockets and therefore always accessible.
   
2. When there is a data connection, they allow instant uploading and live coverage.
   
3. Because they are light and seem more innocuous than large cameras and microphones in situations like protests, they allow reporters to capture multimedia in more situations.
   

So, Now What?

There were three unconference-style sessions at the summit, and each session had at least some discussion on the use of mobile phones in citizen media. In most of these conversations, I was glad to realize that the mobile phone's potential for use in citizen media was in the back of many minds. Given the potential, however, I kept wishing that this role was front and center.

As a way to push these ideas further, I pose the following questions:

• How can you use mobile phones more in your daily reporting work? How can it let you become more creative, spontaneous, immediate in how you cover events and news?
  
• Can we turn increased access that mobile phones provide into increased participation? What is required beyond access to facilitate participation using mobile phones? Can we include ways to participate via SMS or voice in every new participatory project that we envision?
• Can we use voice-based technologies to interact better with communities that have richer oral than written traditions? Can we enable more participation in native languages by using voice-based technologies?

Add a comment if you have ideas, or of you are exploring some of these ideas in your work. If you would like to find out about the tools that you will need to do this work, find case studies of other organizations doing similar work, or a myriad of other resources having to do with mobile phones, check out the MobileActive.org mDirectory.

If you want to read about case studies, tools, and resources specifically to do with media production and dissemination, have a look at this page. 

This post was cross-posted on MobileActive.org.

In a recent Idea Lab post from the Center for Future Civic Media, Jeff Warren wrote about using inexpensive balloons and cheap cameras to make pseudo-satellite imagery of a given area. He had been using it to help people in poor areas establish title to their land (Google Maps satellites don't map poor areas as fast as these areas actually grow).

But then the Gulf oil spill happened...

Phone calls and emails started coming in from suddenly out-of-work fishermen who were frustrated with British Petroleum, and also flummoxed by the lack of imagery explaining how and where the oil slick was spreading. Warren has since made multiple trips to the Gulf Coast, primarily to the Chandeleur Islands, where these same fishermen are taking him out to map the disaster. The resulting images, after being rectified and stitched together, are humbling. You can also read his recent Idea Lab account of his work there.

The Value of Cheap Mapping

You might ask, "What's the point of 'cheap' mapping?" Warren's work is proving to be invaluable for three reasons besides cost:

1. It's responsive. You don't have to schedule a satellite flyover; you can just do it, multiple times if needed.
2. It's open source, if you want it to be. You don't need a vendor's permission to use the images as you wish.
3. It's high-res. And there's the key in a fast-changing situation like the one in the Gulf: you can overlay a high-resolution balloon-mapping image on a low-res Google Map and know exactly how dramatically the situation is changing...

Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones. What other applications of balloon mapping can you imagine? Share your thoughts in the comments.

We are just two weeks out from the install date of Virtual Street Corners and our publicity campaign is gaining momentum. The project will connect two neighborhoods in Boston via live video connection in public places. We've been picked up a lot on the blogosphere, on CBC radio in Canada, and The Atlantic magazine came out today with a feature that put Virtual Street Corners on the front page of its website.

Within hours I had an email from Israel offering me money and assistance to set up the same project between Tel Aviv and the West Bank. That was interesting because I started with that concept years ago, and also because I had an offer to pull in a live feed from Gaza. So we are currently exploring the possibility of bringing in live feeds from international sources for a couple days during the course of our installation. On the one hand it could garner a lot of interest, but on the other hand it could be a distraction from the focus on local interaction/relationships in the Boston area.

By bringing the conflict in the Middle East into our project, I worry that we could exacerbate the existing tensions between Dudley and Coolidge, the two neighborhoods we're focused on connecting. There is a possibility things could get ugly, since people feel such passion about the issue. Yet the concept of using this technology to address social division and to allow people to represent themselves and be in direct communication is very much what Virtual Street Corners is about. It is interesting how such a hyper-local focused project is resonating nationally and internationally.

Advertising

Who am I to you?
Where do you get your news?
Everyone has an opinion.

Those are some of the taglines on the ads that I recently dropped off at the printer. We were donated space on city buses to advertise Virtual Street Corners, and they specifically gave us space on Route 66 because it connects the two neighborhoods where we will be putting our installation. If you are out and about in Boston hopefully you'll see a few of these roll by:

Meet the Journalists

Citizen journalists are a backbone of the news-sharing aspect of our installation, and despite it being a short term and underpaid gig we have managed to get an array of qualified folks with strong roots in the neighborhoods.

Our journalists in Roxbury are lifelong residents. Yawu Miller is a freelance journalist and photographer. He is a former managing editor of the Bay State Banner, a weekly newspaper serving Boston's African American community. Miller was born in Boston and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1990.

Jamarhl Crawford has worked in all kinds of media, including print and radio as well as being a poet and performer. He has lectured at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, Northeastern, Boston University, and Boston College; he's been on BBC and NPR and performed with Public Enemy, Dead Prez, Amiri Baraka, Gil-Scot Heron, Run-DMC and many others. Stand on a corner with Crawford in Dudley and you will quickly be introduced to six or seven people.

Our Brookline reporters include Emily Corwin who works at the Public Radio Exchange, hosts and produces "The Neighborhood" on WMBR in Cambridge and does freelance radio production in the Boston area. Her stories have aired on public radio stations across the country.

Also working in Brookline is Joanna Marinova, co-director of Press Pass TV, a non-profit organization that engages youth in advocacy journalism to tell the stories of those communities that work for change. And Sue Katz is an author, journalist, teacher and blogger who has lived on three continents and been widely published in each.

Something that will be both challenging and very interesting is seeing how the reporters negotiate this new media form. Some are planning to bring people directly to the portals, in order to interview them; others will upload video and photographs they have recorded; and others plan to recount stories and make commentary. Of course, each will be interacting with a live crowd on the other end. Hopefully they will be able to adapt in exciting ways.

The other element we have thrown in to help activate participation is to organize discussions between people in the two neighborhoods. Some examples: A city councillor from Roxbury will meet with their counterpart in Brookline; musicians will play together via video; Peace in Focus, a group that uses cameras and photography to teach peace to teens, will be taking photos and interviewing people from each location, and along the bus route that connects the neighborhoods. They will then show the photos and talk about their experience.

In addition, students from the local public high schools will compare their experiences and discuss education. The Imam from a mosque near Dudley Square will discuss religion and religious freedom with a Rabbi in Brookline. We have identified many more issues, and have many people in Roxbury eager to engage in the conversation, but we have less connections in Brookline and are still trying to find participants on that end.

Lastly, we are preparing to launch our website, which will have reports from our journalists, video clips of interesting conversations that have occurred, and ongoing commentary and discussions about the topics we are addressing.