Center for Civic Media


The MIT Center for Civic Media is a research and practical center that develops and implements tools that support political action and "the information needs of communities". Its mission reads in part:

History

The Center for Civic Media was founded in 2007 as a joint effort of the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Comparative Media Studies program. Its initial funding, a four-year grant from the Knight Foundation, was won in a contest "to foster blogs and other digital efforts that seek to bring together residents of a city or town in ways that local newspapers historically have done." The founders planned to "develop new technologies and practices to help newspapers attract readers as a greater number of Americans use the Internet as their primary news source." It expanded in 2011.
Staffed by academic, technical, and professional staff, the Center was originally led by Christopher Csikszentmihályi, along with the Media Lab's Mitchel Resnick and Comparative Media Studies' Henry Jenkins. Ethan Zuckerman was announced as the Center's new director in June 2011. Others affiliated with the center include Sasha Costanza-Chock, Benjamin Mako Hill, William Uricchio, Jing Wang, Joy Buolamwini, and Jeffrey Warren.

Research and development

The Center creates tools for deployment and testing in geographic communities. Like the Media Lab, the work is iterative, experimental, and draws in large part on the work of current graduate students. But unlike much other work at the Media Lab, Center tools are expected to have immediate applications, even if narrowly focused on a specific community's need.
With varying levels of adoption, deployed civic media tools and communities have included: