Verde Smoke

As I sat in a meeting today at the Community Innovators Lab, where I volunteered to help with brainstorm low-cost ways to create interesting content for their Co-Lab Radio blog, I realized I’ve been a bad participatory media advocate.  Because I haven’t blogged myself forever.  I blame Twitter and Facebook, where I spew updates to a very select audience of friends who I assume want to hear 140 characters of what I’m thinking.

At the moment I am many things, but none of them is a full-time employee in my field.  Sometimes, I’m a well-trained temporary nanny for sick or childcare-challenged kids for the Parents in a Pinch agency.  I’m getting really good at reading A Snowy Day, making floor puzzles into teamwork exercises, making horror movies about attacking lemons, catching little one’s who fall over, and using non-verbal signals to know when someone needs the bathroom (a life skill I suspect to transferable to many situations, unfortunately).

Other times, I’m a consultant for my ol’ boss Thaddeus Miles and the Neighborhood Networks National Consortium.  I’ve managed to get my other ol’ pals at the Transmission Project involved in the design of a national program for local housing technology center support.  We’re visioning a strategy for an application to the mysterious second round of the NTIA/RUS federal broadband stimulus funding.  I’m getting to use my fancy planning school buzz words like “human infrastructure” and “community anchor institutions,” draw complicated network diagrams with little people icons, and use Twitter,  Google Alerts, and Delicous to predict how the first round awards will shake out.

A couple mornings a week, I’m a contributor to a new curriculum and outreach strategy for my ol’ organizing course friend Kyle Dietrich’s new non-profit, Peace in Focus.  In coffeeshops all over Boston and Cambridge (because they don’t have office space yet), I’m learning about peace-building techniques and offering my insight on how to use digital media tools like photography to encourage youth activism.  And using my brandy new graduation present, a digital SLR camera.  I’m getting good at purging my cynicism about Boston’s youth media programs, thinking about youth art as an ends and not just a means, and also how to drink decaf.

Finally, I’m ghosting around the MIT Media Lab again, at first just to hang out with my old Computer Clubhouse mentor, Leo Burd and reminisce about the days of Young Activist Network.  Fortunately, some very cool ideas are flowing, thanks to a new working group in the Center for Future Civic Media, around both tools and techniques for using mapping and mobile phones to engage youth more in reflection on and re-appropriation of urban spaces.  I’m getting good at learning about Jerusalem 2050 Media Barrios, plotting the creation of a City Department of Play, and eating free lunch on C4FCM.

Oh and somewhere in there I’m sending out resumes and woefully poking at anyone who’ll talk to me about possibilities for full-time employment. 

As the temperature drops enough to remind me I hate New England weather and the pounds of butter fill the fridge in anticipation of cookie baking, I continue to scheme with old friends on how to do some interesting media and community building work to fuel my escape from being a nanny with a masters degree from MIT.  I get to relax in Rhodey, eat my own turkey meat pie, then fly off to New Orleans to see how my new sister-in-law and brother celebrate a new year arriving. 

I hope you get whatever you wish from from Mr. Claus and we all get to feel a breath of fresh, economically stimulated new horizon next year.