SCI and our civic networking technologies are featured in the March 3, 2008 edition of Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology. Here's an excerpt:

Whereas municipal websites typically list government-sponsored activities and information such as trash pickup schedules, those developed by SCI include both municipal information and events by private organizations and residents.

For example, SCI's MyDorchester.org connects social service agencies with residents they're trying to reach. And its Woburn website offered such information as a summer concert series and a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day event at a local church.

Click here to read the full article. Or, visit our News page for a local archive.

SCI Dorchester Site Director Marisa Luse forwards a fascinating study on college students' use of Facebook. Written by three scholars at Michigan State University, the study surveyed about 280 MSU undergraduates and concludes that Facebook is used primarily for maintaining connections made offline--"maintaining social capital." They also conclude that Facebook is better suited for building "bridging" social capital over "bonding" social capital.  read more »

On Friday, January 25th, SCI convened a group of leaders from the business, nonprofit, and educational sectors for a discussion of how we are using web technologies to increase civic engagement. This event was graciously hosted by the Museum of Science, and was in part a follow-up to our January 11th Brainstorming Session.
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SCI held a brainstorming session Friday, January 11th, generously hosted by the Museum of Science. Attendees included all of SCI's Outreach and Technology AmeriCorps members; SCI staff; SCI Board Member Jamie Hollis; and independent technology consultant Benton Ho.  read more »

Last Thursday around noon, when every person with a car in the state of Massachusetts decided to take to the road at exactly the same time, I had my own solution to the traffic problem: I simply got out of my car, put it in my pocket, jumped up into the air and flew home. (Sure, I could have just teleported home with a snap of my fingers, but I thought I could use the exercise.)

Then I logged off Second Life, put my computer away and sat in real traffic for 4 hours, while trying to get from Beacon Hill to Porter Square.  read more »

The following story caught my attention in this morning's Globe (actually syndicated from the NY Times). Apparently some social scientists are taking advantage of Facebook's vast database of personal information to conduct research on human behavior. Interestingly, according to the article, users are not being asked whether they would like to participate in the research. Here's an excerpt:

Each day, about 1,700 juniors at an East Coast college log on to Facebook.com to accumulate "friends," compare movie preferences, share videos, and exchange cybercocktails and kisses. Unwittingly, these students have become the subjects of academic research.

To study how personal tastes, habits, and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits, and values), a team of researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, is monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name for privacy reasons.

"One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste," said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. "Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?"  read more »

Speakers from the Social Capital, Diverse Neighborhoods & Networks track. From left to right: Joseph Porcelli, Executive Director, Neighbors for Neighbors; David Crowley, SCI President; Jeff Stone, Director, City-Wide Dialogues on Boston's Ethnic & Racial Diversity; Bishop Walter J. Weekes, Christ Tabernacle Apostolic Church; Sayra Pinto, Executive Director, Twin Cities Latino Coalition.

If judged by turnout, then Friday's Civic Engagement Summit in Worcester was a terrific success. Organizers' expectations were exceeded as nearly 700 people convened upon the DCU Center to participate in five tracks, including a track on Social Capital, Diverse Neighborhoods & Networks facilitated by SCI President David Crowley.

SCI was involved in the planning process for the Summit from the beginning, and we were delighted to see it come to fruition. In addition to helping plan the event, we also have set up a follow-up tool at MassCivicAction.org. The site, the address of which was widely distributed at Friday's gathering, is also open to anyone in MA who wants to contribute to the continuing conversation about civic engagement in our state. MassCivicAction.org includes a database of civic engagement projects, blogs from the 5 summit tracks, and, very soon, complete session notes and pictures.

Click here to visit MassCivicAction.org!

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Alberto Ibargüen, President of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has a commentary in the October 10 issue of the Philanthropy News Digest. Speaking to the necessity of information to democratic engagement, Ibargüen reveals part of the rationale behind the Knight Foundation News Challenge: helping local (or "physical") communities cope with the emergence of "cyber" communities as a place to connect and share information.

Cyber communities continue to form every day. They don't need our help. But physical communities, the places where we live and work, do need our help. The news and information we most care about is not fiction or entertainment or even opinion. We care about news in the public interest, the news the citizens need to run their democracies and their lives. And our democracies are organized by geography.

Much has been made about how cyberspace creatively destroys physical space, about how the Web gives people with common interests all over the world a way to work and play together. I agree that tech-savvy teenagers — all of us, really — have a greater capacity these days to appreciate that what happens in a far-off part of the world can affect our lives here. And that's good. But I also think we know less about what's happening locally.  read more »