CivicActions

We're proud to announce civic.mit.edu, the primary web presence for the Center for Future Civic Media, based out of MIT's Media Lab and the Comparative Media Studies program.

As you might expect from their name, the Center for Future Civic Media has plenty in common with CivicActions, from promotion of technologies that empower, to their commitment to open source. This is especially clear when they define civic media:

We use the term civic media, rather than citizen journalism: civic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting. MIT students are experimenting with a variety of new civic media techniques, from technologies for protests and civil disobedience to phone-texting systems that allow instant, sophisticated votes on everyday activities. The Center amplifies the development of these technologies for community empowerment, while also serving to generate curricula and open-source frameworks for civic action.

The site highlights dozens of innovative civic media projects and tools, developed both within the Center as well as by organizations in the center's network (including, for example, The Hub, a video-sharing website developed for Witness by CivicActions in 2007). If you work on a project or tool that you think belongs on their list, you can submit it to the center for publishing on the site. There is also a discussion forum and blog for furthering dialogue about emerging civic media issues.

Some details about the site:

• largely out-of-the-box drupal 5, using Panels2, feedapi (for pulling in C4FCM team members' blogs), various workflow modules, simplenews, content_taxonomy, and tagadelic for the nice tag clouds
• the design by Corey Macpherson Nash was masterfully turned into a zen-based drupal theme by Sam Lerner