The Civic Crowdfunding project is an initiative to collect data and advance social research into the emerging field of civic crowdfunding, the use of online crowdfunding platforms to provide services to communities. The project aims to bring together folks from across disciplines and professions--from research and government to the tech sector and community organizations--to talk about civic crowdfunding and its benefits, challenges, and opportunities. It combines qualitative and quantitative research methods, from analysis of the theory and history of crowdfunding to fieldwork-based case studies and geographic analysis of the field.

Involving communities in the design process results in products that are more responsive to a community's needs, more suited to accessibility and usability concerns, and easier to adopt. Civic media tools, platforms, and research work best when practitioners involve target communities at all stages of the process: iterative ideation, prototyping, testing, and evaluation. In the codesign process, communities act as codesigners and participants, rather than mere consumers, end-users, test subjects, or objects of study. In the Codesign Studio, students practice these methods in a service learning project-based studio, focusing on collaborative design of civic media with local partners. The Toolkit will enable more designers and researchers to utilize the co-design process in their work by presenting current theory and practices in a comprehensive, accessible manner.

DataBasic is a suite of web-based tools that give people fun and relevant ways learn how to work with data. Existing tools focus on operating on data quickly to create some output, rather than focusing on helping learners understand how to work with data. This fails the huge population of data literacy learners, who are trying to build their capacity in various ways. Our tools focus on the user as learner. They provide introductory activities, connect to people with fun sample datasets, and connect to other tools and techniques for working with data. We strongly believe in building tools focused on learners, and are putting those ideas into practice on these tools and activities.

The Internet has disrupted the aid sector like so many other industries before it. In times of crisis, donors are increasingly connecting directly with affected populations to provide participatory aid. The Digital Humanitarian Marketplace aggregates these digital volunteering projects, organizing them by crisis and skills required to help coordinate this promising new space.

First Upload is a tool for verifying the authenticity of news imagery. It helps find the first upload of imagery, particularly videos. Finding the person who uploaded a video is a key to determining authenticity, because often it is necessary to contact that person directly. It is being developed with input from YouTube and Bloomberg. Currently we have a working prototype, built for the YouTube site.

This checklist is designed to help projects that include an element of data collection to develop appropriate consent policies and practices. The checklist can be especially useful for projects that use digital or mobile tools to collect, store, or publish data, yet understand the importance of seeking the informed consent of individuals involved (the data subjects). This checklist does not address the additional considerations necessary when obtaining the consent of groups or communities, nor how to approach consent in situations where there is no connection to the data subject. This checklist is intended for use by project coordinators, and can ground conversations with management and project staff in order to identify risks and mitigation strategies during project design or implementation. It should ideally be used with the input of data subjects.

How do people who lead communities on online platforms join together in mass collective action to influence platform operators? Going Dark analyzes a protest against the social news platform reddit by moderators of 2,278 communities in July of 2015. These moderators collectively disabled their communities, preventing millions of readers from accessing major parts of reddit and convincing the company to negotiate over their demands. This study reveals social factors--including the work of moderators, relations among moderators, relations with platform operators, factors within communities, and the isolation of a community--that can lead to participation in mass collective action against a platform.

Media Cloud is a platform for studying media ecosystems--the relationships between professional and citizen media, between online and offline sources. By tracking millions of stories published online or broadcast via television, the system allows researchers to track the spread of memes, media framings, and the tone of coverage of different stories. The platform is open source and open data, designed to be a substrate for a wide range of communications research efforts. Media Cloud is a collaboration between Civic Media and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

What have you seen in the news this week? And what did you miss? Are you getting the blend of local, international, political, and sports stories you desire? We're building a media-tracking platform to empower you, the individual, and news providers themselves, to see what you're getting and what you're missing in your daily consumption and production of media. The first round of modules developed for the platform allow you to compare the breakdown of news topics and byline by gender across multiple news sources.

Media Perspective brings a data visualization into 3D space. This data sculpture represents mainstream media coverage of Net Neutrality over 15 months, during the debate over the FCC's classification of broadband services. Each transparent pane shows a slice in time, allowing users to physically move and look through the timeline. The topics cutting through the panes show how attention shifted between aspects of the debate over time.

Pure networks and pure hierarchies both have distinct strengths and weaknesses. These become glaringly apparent during disaster response. By combining these modes, their strengths (predictability, accountability, appropriateness, adaptability) can be optimized, and their weaknesses (fragility, inadequate resources) can be compensated for. Bridging these two worlds is not merely a technical challenge, but also a social issue.

Recent years have witnessed a surge in online digital storytelling tools, enabling users to more easily create engaging multimedia narratives. Increasing Internet access and powerful in-browser functionality have laid the foundation for the proliferation of new online storytelling technologies, ranging from tools for creating interactive online videos to tools for data visualization. While these tools may contribute to diversification of online storytelling capacity, sifting through tools and understanding their respective limitations and affordances poses a challenge to storytellers. The NetStories research initiative explores emergent online storytelling tools and strategies through a combination of analyzing tools, facilitating story-hack days, and creating an online database of storytelling tools.

NGO2.0 is a project grown out of the work of MIT's New Media Action Lab. The goal of NGO2.0 is to strengthen the digital and social media literacy of Chinese grassroots NGOs. Since 2009, the project has established collaborative relationships with IT corporations, universities, and city-based software developers' communities to advocate the development of a new brand of public interest sector that utilizes new media and nonprofit technology to build a better society. NGO2.0 addresses three major need categories of grassroots NGOs: communication, resources, and technology. Within each category, NGO2.0 developed and implemented online and offline projects. These include: Web 2.0 training workshops, Web 2.0 toolbox, a crowdsourced philanthropy map, news stories and videos for NGOs, crowd funding project design, NGO-CSR Partnership Forum, database of Chinese NGOs, and online survey of Chinese NGOs' Internet usage.

The Open Water Project aims to develop and curate a set of low-cost, open source tools enabling communities everywhere to collect, interpret, and share their water quality data. Traditional water monitoring uses expensive, proprietary technology, severely limiting the scope and accessibility of water quality data. Homeowners interested in testing well water, watershed managers concerned about fish migration and health, and other groups could benefit from an open source, inexpensive, accessible approach to water quality monitoring. We're developing low-cost, open source hardware devices that will measure some of the most common water quality parameters, using designs that makes it possible for anyone to build, modify, and deploy water quality sensors in their own neighborhood.

Newspaper front pages are a key source of data about our media ecology. Newsrooms spend massive time and effort deciding what stories make it to the front page. PageOneX makes coding and visualizing newspaper front page content much easier, democratizing access to newspaper attention data. Communication researchers have analyzed newspaper front pages for decades, using slow, laborious methods. PageOneX simplifies, digitizes, and distributes the process across the net and makes it available for researchers, citizens, and activists.

After an election, how can citizens hold leaders accountable for promises made during the campaign season? Promise Tracker is a mobile phone-based data collection system that enables communities to collect information on issues they consider priorities and monitor the performance of their local governments. Through an easy-to-use web platform, citizens can visualize aggregated data and use it to advocate for change with local government, institutions, the press, and fellow community members. We are currently piloting the project in Brazil and the United States, and prototyping sensor integration to allow citizens to collect a range of environmental data.

Scanner Grabber is a digital police scanner that enables reporters to record, playback, and export audio, as well as archive public safety radio (scanner) conversations. Like a TiVo for scanners, it's an update on technology that has been stuck in the last century. It's a great tool for newsrooms. For instance, a problem for reporters is missing the beginning of an important police incident because they have stepped away from their desk at the wrong time. Scanner Grabber solves this because conversations can be played back. Also, snippets of exciting audio, for instance a police chase, can be exported and embedded online. Reporters can listen to files while writing stories, or listen to older conversations to get a more nuanced grasp of police practices or long-term trouble spots. Editors and reporters can use the tool for collaborating, or crowdsourcing/public collaboration.

Should students be prosecuted for innovative projects? In December 2014, four undergraduates associated with the Media Lab were subpoenaed by the New Jersey Attorney General after winning a programming competition with a bitcoin-related proof of concept. We worked with MIT administration and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to support the students and establish legal support for informal innovation. In September 2015, MIT announced the creation of a new clinic for business and cyberlaw.

The Babbling Brook is an unnamed neighborhood creek in Waltham, MA, that winds its way to the Charles River. With the help of networked sensors and real-time processing, the brook constantly tweets about the status of its water quality, including thoughts and bad jokes about its own environmental and ontological condition. Currently, the Babbling Brook senses temperature and depth and cross-references that information with real-time weather data to come up with extremely bad comedy. Thanks to Brian Mayton, the Responsive Environments group, and Tidmarsh Farms Living Observatory for their support.

Vojo.co is a hosted mobile blogging platform that makes it easy for people to share content to the web from mobile phones via voice calls, SMS, or MMS. Our goal is to make it easier for people in low-income communities to participate in the digital public sphere. You don't need a smart phone or an app to post blog entries or digital stories to Vojo; any phone will do. You don't even need Internet access: Vojo lets you create an account via SMS and start posting right away. Vojo is powered by the VozMob Drupal Distribution, a customized version of the popular free and open-source content management system that is being developed through an ongoing codesign process by day laborers, household workers, and a diverse team from the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA).