Using open source tools, the Data Anywhere project aims to solve these problems, one data set at a time.  The solution is to set up simple database, which will replicate itself, and simple scrapers on various virtual machines.  These are cheap (about $5+/mo on digitalocean), and many go unused/underutilized.

March Occupy Data Hackathon, James Gallery

The immediate goal is for the servers to aggregate any type of data, and make it accessible to the public. The longer term vision of this project will appeal to any data geek.  We’d like to use the data for examining unexpected relationships chronologically at first, but could be compared along any index.

Although just taking off, the Data Anywhere project has the potential to help many organizations. It integrates a persistent data model; if one machine is shut down, no permanent loss is incurred to the data set, since it replicated itself to several other machines. These servers can be used to aggregate any type of data, and make it accessible to the public at large, through a simple RESTful web interface.

We are actively looking for more individuals and community partners to grow the Data Anywhere community.  Our very first workshop was at the March Occupy Data hackathon.  We had two groups initiate projects, and we’re planning our next workshop for a summer Occupy Data hackathon.  At these events, participants are provided with simple instructions on how to set up and secure a server, and databases that maintain themselves, and replicate. Knowledge of Linux or Python is helpful but not necessary. Patience and a willingness to learn is MUCH more important.

More Info:  Our next workshop is being planned for this summer and is lead by an incredible software developer and Linux admin, teaching Linux basic system admin, MongoDB setup and usage, and flask web API. For Data Anywhere announcements subscribe to the Occupy Data discussion list, follow @occupydata on Twitter, or join us Meetup.com.

The post Data Anywhere: an Open Data Commons appeared first on JustPublics@365.

These are great triumphs and signal the beginning of a shift towards thinking about drug policy in a public health framework. So, does this mean that the war on drugs is over? Can we sit back and relax? Hardly.

On Friday, as a social media reporter on behalf of JustPublics@365, I went to a conference on drug policy in Buffalo, New York.  Knowing about the history of the Rockefeller Drug Laws and the racist underpinnings of New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy makes me somewhat “educated” about drug policy, but as a white female getting her Ph.D. at Yale University, I thought I had never been effected by the war on drugs.

It turns out I have, and so have you.

The ‘war on drugs’ is a war on people. It has targeted people of color – specifically young black and hispanic men – but it has a lasting effect on all of us regardless of age, sex, or race. It has created a culture of mass incarceration and elevated racial tensions in my communities. It has cost tax payers billions of dollars and allowed big businesses to profit from the mass incarceration of millions of Americans. It has created a system that every American should want to change or, at the very least, be aware of.

On the first day of the conference, which was hosted by the Drug Policy Alliance and the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, there was a screening of The House I Live In. This documentary film exposes the failures of the ‘war on drugs’ and has been getting a lot of buzz. A central argument in the movie is that drug laws were introduced to control ethnic minorities and a theme that is consistently repeated by the interviewees is that the ‘war on drugs’ has ravaged their lives and destroyed their communities.

I had seen the movie before but, unless your heart is made of stone, the stories make you want to do everything in your power to change drug policy in this country.

So, what could I do? My career choice had taken me in a different direction from public health and I was by no means a good community organizer. What action could I take?

I sat in on panel about harm reduction and drug policy the next day with the voices from The House I Live In still whirling around in my mind. Julie Netherland from Drug Policy Alliance opened up the discussion with a question: how can we push harm reduction beyond individual interventions. Since I had always equated “harm reduction” with “needle exchange” I perked up. What did she mean?

She meant that working on drug policy is, in and of itself, harm reduction and that by focusing on policy rather than individual behavior change we can accomplish a lot. Changing drug policy from a criminal justice model to a public health model is harm reduction because it minimizes the harm the ‘war on drugs’ does to communities. Changing policy changes the stigma that most drug users feel – that is harm reduction.

This panel made me realize that I could do my own form of harm reduction: I could write and I could vote.

At the last panel of the conference, gabriel sayegh from the Drug Policy Alliance encouraged people to work on a local level rather than a national level to move drug policy towards a public health model. Marsha Weissman, Executive Director of the Center for Community Alternatives, reminded the audience that, ”there are still people in New York State prisons doing life sentences on drug related crimes.” And, she declared, “our work is not done.”

On the flight back from Buffalo, I drafted Nydia Velázquez, my Congresswomen. It said:

“My name is Heidi Knoblauch and I am writing today because I believe the ‘war on drugs’ is doing more harm than good. I believe New York State should not use the criminal justice system to control drug use. I am in favor of policies that provide drug treatment rather than incarceration for drug users. I urge you to support legislation that takes a public health approach to drug policy.”

Sending this letter is a form of harm reduction and I encourage all of you to take this small step towards better drug policy in New York State. If you do not have time to write a letter, please use mine. You can find your representatives here.

The post appeared first on JustPublics@365.

The key takeaway is that sociology, as a discipline, must begin to reimagine scholarly communitcation for the public good in the digital era.

If public sociology can find a way to be digitally engaged and more fluent in the digital lexicon of the 21st century in which we find ourselves, then I believe there is hope for sociology to be a force for social good, and by that I mean, an engaged citzenry, and a more democratic and egalitarian society.

If, instead, sociology chooses to cling to a dying, legacy system of higher education, invested in status wars and internecine theoretical debates,
it will fade into irrelevancy.

The future of public sociology is up to all of us.

The post Public Sociology in the Digital Era appeared first on JustPublics@365.

Just yesterday, the Drug Policy Alliance and the New York Academy of Medicine released their Blueprint for a Public Health and Safety Approach to Drug Policy (pdf).  A multi-year effort, the Blueprint makes a strong case for what they call a “four pillar approach” to drug policy.  The pillars are:  prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and public safety.  The first three of these – prevention, treatment and harm reduction (such as syringe exchange) – are rooted in public health responses to drugs rather than the “lock them up and throw away the key” approach of the last 30 years.

On Monday, the day before the Blueprint release,  I took part in a round table conversation with a mixture of academics, activists, and journalists about these same issues. In a small group we tackled the following question: is public health resisting or expanding criminalization?

As each of us went around the table to introduce ourselves, I realized that there was a mixture of historians, lawyers, LGBTQ activists, public health professors, and journalists that made for an engaging, lively discussion.

The conversation opened with a declarative statement: the public health model is concerned with communities and populations, not individual behavior. “The criminal justice model is an individual behavior model,” said Ernie Drucker, author of Plague of Prisons, “and that’s why we should not use the criminal justice model to address issues of drug use and addiction.” Others agreed, but pointed out that public health has been a coercive tool and that it was important to be skeptical of behavior control methods being practiced under the guise of public health.

This part of the discussion produced more questions than answers. We wondered, how would public health drug policies be any different than criminal justice drug policies? What were the public health options for addressing drug use and addiction? Would public health officials be better suited for the problems of addiction than criminal justice officials?

(You can see more of the Twitter updates from this session here.)

Rebecca Tiger (@rtigernyc), author of Judging Addicts: Drug Courts and Coercion in the Justice System, was especially wary of turning the problem of drug use and addition over to public health without some critical examination of the history of public health practices.

(You can see more of the Twitter updates from this session here.)

Recognizing that public health has increasingly focused on individual behavior change, the group questioned when public health began to focus on behavior modification. I suggested that the visual anti-tuberculosis campaigns in early twentieth century, which aggressively targeted individuals with posters that told them to stop behaviors such as spitting and coughing, could have been the beginning of the use of mass media for individual behavior change.

Rebecca Tiger questioned how the media contributes to the public discourse about drugs in the United States. In response, Sandeep Junnarkar talked about how he encourages his students to move away from mass media and focus their own blogs or even radio blogs. Rebecca said she thought the mass media has been perpetuating the “criminalization conversation” and one of the biggest obstacle in switching the conversation towards decriminalization and public health. By encouraging his students to think more broadly about where they publish their work, Sandeep said he hopes there will be a new generation of journalists that can help sway the conversation.

(You can see more of the Twitter updates from this session here.)

The conversation cycled back to a discussion of the American public health framework when someone brought up the legacy of Progressive Era reform movements on present day public health. There were those who adamantly declared that public health was necessarily population and community based and those who were wary of public health practices. Clearly, we had not come to a consensus about the role of public health in decriminalization efforts.

The conversation, appropriately, raised more questions than it answered. Ernie Drucker said that part of the solution to the many questions and problems raised in the discussion was to have more cross boundary/cross disciplinary conversations like this one.

I completely agree.

You can see the archived livestream of our discussion here.  And, soon, we’ll have a more polished, edited video.

If you’re in the Buffalo, NY area and want to continue this conversation, you’ll want to attend this conference, May 2-3, at the Baldy Center for Law & Policy.  FREE and open to the public.

The post Round Table Public Health: Resisting or Expanding Criminalizaton? appeared first on JustPublics@365.

(Infographic from here.)

On Monday, I participated in a round table discussion among academics, activists and journalists as part of the JustPublics@365 Summit on “Resisting Criminalization.”  In one of three concurrent round table discussions, participants were invited to discuss ways to people in different arenas (academia, journalism, activism) might work together to “resist criminalization.”   All the invited round table sessions addressed three questions: 1) what’s the underlying problem? 2) how do we address it? and 3) what can we do when we leave here to create change?

What follows is a brief summary of the round table discussion on ending the school-to-prison pipeline.

What are the underlying problems causing the school-to-prison pipeline? The broad view of schools as a place where children are channeled into prison was further informed by the stories of social workers, activists, and directors of community-based organizations about what that reality looks like on the ground. On the one hand, students who are still in school don’t have adequate supports. They often need housing, job training, and caring, adult mentorship. On the other hand, the school-to-prison pipeline is the result of particular choices about how society responds to the behavior of young people. Youth need compassionate accountability processes when they mess up, rather than the full force of the correctional system. In addition to holding students accountable for their actions in compassionate ways, participants agreed that we need to hold accountable the multiple layers of systems that produce bad school experiences.

The school-to-prison pipeline also happens because we put police in schools. How do we come to see kids as criminal threats? Well, the police toolkit doesn’t come with very many different ways of viewing a problem. As Aaron Kupchik (University of Delaware) put it: when you put police in schools, more kids go to jail.

(See all the Twitter updates from this session here.)

Many others pointed out that policing (as in police in uniforms) and incarceration are only two of the most visible manifestations of zero-tolerance, criminal-justice-style disciplinary practices that have overtaken schools. Many American schools are put in the impossible position of trying to manage more kids with fewer and fewer resources all the time. This context contributes to an environment where any non-conforming behaviors (including gender presentation or questioning authority) become disciplinary problems.

How do we resist? In addition to the school-to-prison pipeline, many participants talked about the prison-to-school pipeline. We learned about a lot of work being done to help formerly incarcerated people attend University. The experiences of formerly incarcerated people in the room spoke strongly to the value of education as a way out of the criminalization cycle. More than a few participants talked about the need to love and care for young people who have been marginalized. Others agreed and asked what it meant to put love into action in our day to day reality – what does love look like in the context of school? In the context of a community organization? How do we build community power so that parents and students feel confident resisting criminalization at the school and neighborhood level? Can community organizing against these processes be achieved in community organizations as we know them today? Or is the funding model too restrictive?

What can we do? In the last part of the panel we discussed how we could best share the harsh realities of criminalization and all the work being done to resist it with the many “publics” whose minds we need to change in order to be able to mobilize on a larger scale. One activist told a story of distrust and trepidation toward the news media. A journalist who had spent four weeks with him and his organization as they did outreach work with a community of drug users ended up publishing a long news story that focused mainly on the sensational problem of drugs and addicts, rather than the effective work being done to respond to those problems. This raised questions of what community-based organizations can do to be in control of media representations of their work? Or, if that’s not possible, how can both activists and academics make our own media? One journalist spoke of the value of telling specific and detailed stories in order to garner public understanding about issues that can sometimes seem remote. Academics in the room asked activists what kind of information would be useful for their work. Still others insisted on the need to link personal stories to the systemic scale, insisting that both are vital to the process of criminalization. The need for team building and collaboration came up again and again as we listened and made connections between the many vantage points in the room.

You can watch the archived livestream of the session here.  Soon, we’ll have a more polished video that we’ll share.

The post Round Table Discussion on Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline appeared first on JustPublics@365.

Although the legal authority for street stops has existed since 1968 (based on the US Supreme Court decision on Terry v. Ohio) the kind of stop-and-frisk policing we see today really began in New York City in 2002 under the Guiliani administration. The number of stop-and-frisks continued to rise exponentially under Bloomberg’s administration. In 2011, some 685,000 people were stopped and frisked by NYPD, most were black and brown, and 90% were never charged with any crime.  Of the 10% who were charged, most were for small amounts of marijuana.

(Image from NYCLU)

On Monday, academics, activists and journalists met at the JustPublics@365 Summit on
“Resisting Criminalization.”  In one of three concurrent round table discussions, participants were invited to discuss ways to people in different arenas (academia, journalism, activism) might work together to “resist criminalization.”   All the invited round table sessions addressed three questions: 1) what’s the underlying problem? 2) how do we address it? and 3) what can we do when we leave here to create change?

What follows is a brief summary of the round table discussion on stop-and-frisk.

What is the underlying problem with Stop & Frisk? Many participants discussed the idea that over-policing of youth of color was based on essentialized ideas of black and brown youth as inherently criminal. Carla Barrett from CUNY John Jay drew disturbing parallels between the moral panic over ‘super-predator’ youth of 1980′s and today’s stop-and-frisk policies. Chino Harden of the Center for NuLeadership pointed out that this policing strategy does not result in fewer guns on the streets. The seizure rate of guns from these stop-and-frisk encounters is less than one percent by the police department’s own figures. The result, Hardin noted, was an increase in marijuana arrests. These charges act as a marker making future police interaction more perilous for our young people. She relayed a story that in her own police encounter, an unpaid criminal fine resulted in her arrest and incarceration. Annette Dickerson from the Center for Constitutional Rights emphasized that the problem of police mistreatment of minorities did not begin with stop-and-frisk and no court case (referring to Floyd, et al. v. City of New York, et al.) is going to end it. The struggle will be long.

How can we resist Stop & Frisk? Resisting Stop and Frisk comes in many forms. The facilitator of this session, Tara Conley (Media Make Change), is developing an easier to use version of the android app for uploading film of police encounters called TxtConnect. Steven Wasserman of Legal Aid said that he believes that the police view stop-and-frisk as a way to make ‘being on the corner’ uncomfortable for people of color. To which Annette Dickerson concurred, saying that ‘stop-and-frisk is part of somebody’s quality of lifestyle,’ connecting the politics of gentrification to over-policing. Other suggestions for resistance included sharing police encounter experiences over social media and print journalism. Chino Hardin also called for coming up with community-based solutions and not relying on police.  Another strategy she suggested was to build resistance via ‘a hood call’ where people hold police accountable by being visible presence when stops occur.

(See all the Twitter updates from this session here.)

What can we do when we leave here to end Stop & Frisk?  Everyone in the room wanted to not simply “resist,” they want to end it. Strategies for doing so included through alternate civilian patrols that would make minority neighborhoods safe for all (including LGBTQ members and elders). Great hope was placed in the change of mayoral administration as a means to affect change. As the participants agreed, “No one thought two years ago every mayoral candidate would have to have a position on Stop and Frisk. Now they do.” We just need to make sure a candidate whose position is to end it gets elected.

The archived livestreamed video of the event is here. To follow soon, we’ll post a more polished video recording of the panel discussion.

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Earlier today at the Graduate Center a panel of experts discussed a range of visualizations that may help in efforts to resist and transform criminalization.  The panel was moderated by Evan Misshula, Data Visualization Fellow with JustPublics@365.

In her presentation,“Data Visualizations in the Newsroom,” Amanda Hickman, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, shared some of the ways that she teaches aspiring journalists to dive into data.  Given that journalists are doing the hard work of translating academic jargon into plain English, Hickman also made a plea for the academics in the audience to avoid “academese.”  She closed by offering this list of resources, including a link to the course she teaches at the J-School:

• Amanda Hickman’s Course http://datadrivenjournalism.2013.journalism.cuny.edu/
• CUNY J-Camp http://cunyjcamp.com/ and JustPublics@365 MediaCamp (FREE) Workshops
• Hacks/Hackers http://meetupnyc.hackshackers.com/
• Investigative Reporters and Editors http://www.ire.org/
• NICAR-L http://www.ire.org/resource-center/listservs/subscribe-nicar-l/
• The Data Journalism Handbook http://datajournalismhandbook.org

Following next on the panel were María Elena Torre and Scott Lizama,“Visualizing Stop and Frisk Data” Morris Justice Project and the Public Science Project.  María and Scott presented work on their community-engaged project in the Morris Avenue section of the Bronx.  They have been meeting every Saturday for several years to collect, compile and visualize data with the Morris Justice Project, which is a collection of community members, academic researchers, and activists. Most of the data they are compiling has to do with the stop-and-frisk policing of the NYPD.  Working with members of the community, they have created a range of visualizations of this data from fairly high-tech mapping illustrations to what they described as “very low-tech, pen-and-paper illustrations.”

The final member of the panel was Sabrina Jones, a graphic artist, Brooklyn, NY who talked about her work illustrating “Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Re-Telling” based on Marc Mauer’s academic, no-picture text Race to Incarcerate.

Participants in the Summit’s Invited Round Tables earlier this morning were given complimentary copies of Jones’ book. Jones discussed her influences from art history, to classical Greek mythology, to contemporary artists.  When asked about how she imagined her work contributing to social change, she responded, “I’ve already seen it create change when people who’ve been incarcerated read it and realize, ‘it’s not me, I’m part of a larger system, and there’s a movement to resist.’ ”

All the panelists talked about the need to work collaboratively with others to create work that connects to broader audiences and transforms social inequality.  As María Elena Torre put it, “we’re able to work for change because we work in solidarity.  We come together with people who are good at what they do, like displaying things on the sides of buildings…” referring to The Illuminator who displayed some of their data on the side of a public housing project in the Bronx. Torre continued,”And, we work in solidarity with people in communities who are experts at the lived experience of what it means to be stopped-and-frisked thousands of times.”

The archived livestreamed video of the event is here.  To follow soon, we’ll post a more polished video recording of the panel discussion.

The post Visualizing Big Data, Resisting Criminalization appeared first on JustPublics@365.

Criminalization includes an ever-widening array of practices that reach far beyond the traditional criminal justice system. A growing number of academics, activists and journalists are critical of the expansion of criminalization for the inherently undemocratic tendencies in such practices.

Video Submissions: Conversations around criminalization often remains segregated between those who face it’s effects on the ground and those who study it. In an attempt to change this dynamic, we invite you to share your own stories with criminalization in video format.

Tell us: What does criminalization mean to you? How have you and/or your communities experienced it? What are the problems that you see happening on the ground, as citizens, as academics, as activists and/or as journalists? And, what can we do to change this system?

Some topics include, but are not limited to:

1. Stop and Frisk
2. School to Prison Pipeline
3. Public Health

Selected videos will be shared on our blog, and will be projected at the Resisting Criminalizaton Summit on April 22nd, 2013 at the CUNY, Graduate Center, in NYC.

All participants are encouraged to attend the summit, which is free and open to the public. For more details and to register, visit: http://justpublics365.commons.gc.cuny.edu/resisting-criminalization/

Rules and Regulations
1. Make a short video that in some way communicates the importance of resisting criminalization. Videos cannot be more than 1 minute and 30 seconds in length.
2. Upload video on Youtube using the tag “Resist13.” Instructions here.
3. Submit the link of the embedded video to justpublics365@gmail.com with the Subject Line, “Your name_#Resist13_Video Submission”
4. Videos can be filmed using a video camera, phone, computer, ipad – anything that records. They can also be live-action, animated, include photographs and slideshows. If you use outside content (content – including images, video, etc –  not created by you), it must be under a creative commons license and the work must be cited in the description.
5. Submissions are open to residents all over the world.

Deadline: All entries must be submitted no later than April 20th 2013, 5pm.

The post Resisting Criminalization: Youtube Video Campaign appeared first on JustPublics@365.

Unless you are blessed with better party invites than I, chances are you know just as little about what goes on in the minds of our toolmakers.  All of us, at some point or another, wish that we were BFFs with a coder so that we could finally build our brilliant self-destructing media app that would erase — with the swipe of the screen — all personal messages released into the eternal preserve of digital correspondence.  Oh yeah, or RateMyDate.

Kidding aside, regardless of whether digital tools trigger your personal faculties of enthusiasm or ennui, they powerfully shape the way scholars work and the way that work enters both the scholarly and public conversation.  And while I have preferred reading little poems composed when poetry was still meant to be sung, I too, have fallen charmed by the potential of tools to shape not just the way we communicate, but the way we think.

And so, in attempt to begin bridging the gap between tool makers and tool users, I begged the kind and illustrious programmer Andrew Badr to answer a few questions via email.  Thus far, Andrew has worked on an array of interesting projects, such as the art site Your World of Text which was misattributed to Miranda July and gushed about on Reddit.  Currently, he’s working on a start up project called Jotleaf — an interactive web canvas.  Though not built specifically with academics in mind, one never knows exactly what prototypes will become tomorrow’s fork and knife.  In his answers below, Andrew kindly spills the beans on what it’s like to turn an idea into tool.

1.  What is JotLeaf?
A Jotleaf page is an interactive canvas for the web. You can click anywhere on it to starting writing, add pictures, or embed videos or music players. You can style it in different ways, with custom colors and fonts, or invite people to collaborate on a page with you. It’s like a new creative medium. (See jotleaf.com and andrewbadr.com for other descriptions.)

Some ways people are using it:

To make art:

• http://www.jotleaf.com/JoeAranda/once-again-as-a-child/
• http://www.jotleaf.com/lanadandan

-To talk to their friends & fans:

• http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/jotleaf
• Inviting everyone to write on a birthday card for someone
• As a personal notepad for ideas

To some degree, we are trying to let the community guide our understanding of what this new medium is best suited for. But we also think things are possible that it isn’t being used for much yet, like creating more general-purpose websites, which guides some of the feature development.

The idea for it came out of a previous site I did, called Your World of Text. See http://yourworldoftext.com/home/ and the description on my homepage (under “Some Things I’ve Done”). Your World of Text is an art project, and I want to keep it that way. But for the past couple years, I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to turn the same kind of interactivity into a “startup”. Jotleaf is the answer to that question. And that’s just as much about my attitude towards the project, and how the site is presented and marketing, as it is about features.

I first saw Jotleaf in my mind some time in April of last year (2012). I started working on it part-time for a few months, then more seriously starting in September. In December, a friend from college joined the project, and we committed ourselves to it full-time. He lives in Italy, so in January I moved out here for three months to work more closely with him. We got some funding from friends and family — enough for a few months, to try to get the site to the next level and then raise a real round. In May, he’s moving to San Francisco for three months, and we’ll continue our work there.

2.  What does building such a tool entail?
A day’s work, at this point, is mostly writing code. Code to make the site do new things; make it look better; make it more reliable; and fix any problems that come up. There’s also marketing and customer support: Facebook and Twitter accounts, a monthly newsletter, and constantly talking to our users to see what they like and don’t like about the site.One challenge is that people can’t really tell you what they want. The best thing for your startup might be to radically change the product, but a user will never say that. Or say your site is slow — that will drive people away, but people don’t necessarily consciously realize that. So that’s where measurement and intuition come in.

3. How did you personally get involved in this line of work? Have you worked on any other similar projects?
I’ve been making websites since high school, and experimenting with the medium from the start. I didn’t know it was “what I wanted to do” until late in college though. The big appeal to me is how you can put something out there, and then the next day — you make the right thing  — the whole world could see it. You aren’t limited by who you know, or your credentials, or your hourly wage. It’s an exponential game.

4.  Tell us about what’s most exciting in digital innovation today! 
For the most exciting things today, Chris Dixon pretty much lists them out in this blog post.

But programming is always exciting, because it builds upon itself in a way that no other human endeavor has done. Something that took a year to program ten years ago is now a page of code that you could write in a day. And it’s been happening like that for decades, building layers of abstraction on top of each other, and it’s going to keep happening. The amount of leverage that one person has is amazing, and is going to keep getting more so.

5.  How might academics better collaborate with digital folk to improve upon or create new tools?
Re: academia, to be honest it’s hard to imagine new tools coming fromthat direction. The best people to create the tools are the people who use them. Academics should create tools insofar as they are practitioners. The most useful stuff I see out of academia is studies about user behavior.

6.  You’re in Turin right now.  Anything interesting to report about the international digital scene, or how exactly you started collaborating with an international partner?
I don’t know nothing about no international digital scene. I’m in Turin because my friend from college lives here. I don’t really hang out with anyone besides him, his wife, and their two year old daughter.

7. And perhaps not-relevant, but have to ask:   Are you socially-engaged with any academics in a way that influences the way you think about the potential of technology?
The only way I can think of that I’m socially involved with academics is that I follow @golan on Twitter and he posts interesting stuff sometimes.

8.  What inspires you?
What inspires me? Well, if you mean what’s my source of ideas, I’m just thinking about the web all the time. I have at least one idea. I’ve literally dreamt several website ideas. If you mean motivation… I want to push the web forward, and change people’s conception of what it could be, and create a space for new kinds of creativity and communication, and make something big.

9.  If time and money weren’t an issue, what would you build?
If money weren’t an issue, I’d hire my friend Brian. If time stopped, I’d first write a framework in which to write a framework in which to write my website. But basically I’m doing what I want to be doing right now.

Photo Credit: Joe Aranda, from JotLeaf.com.

The post Turning an idea into a tool appeared first on JustPublics@365.

This past weekend was the first time the conference has been held in New York City, at the CUNY Graduate Center near Herald Square.

Gatherings of this sort are typically insular, academic affairs, but organizers Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey, both sociology grad students at the University of Maryland-College Park, have attempted to broaden the tent to include bloggers, writers, and journalists of all stripes. “We wanted to create the sort of conference we would want to attend,” said Mr. Rey.

In the opening remarks on Saturday, Mr. Jurgenson elaborated, “We would go to theory conferences, and nobody wanted to talk about the Internet.” What ties the two worlds together, he added, is a concern with social justice—public intellectualism rather than institutional prestige.

Friday’s panel, “Free Speech For Whom?” was a good example of that hybrid approach.

Panelists included social media scholar Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research better known as @zephoria; Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen, an editor at The New Inquiry; and University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. CUNY Professor Jessie Daniels, author of Cyber Racism, moderated.

You can read more of Brendan O’Connor’s article in the NY Observer here.

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