Between the Bars is a blogging platform for one out of every 142 Americans—prisoners—that makes it easy to blog using standard postal mail. It consists of software tools to make it easy to upload PDF scans of letters, crowd-sourced transcriptions of the scanned images. Between the Bars includes the usual full-featured blogging tools including comments, tagging, RSS feeds, and notifications for friends and family when new posts are available.

Involving communities in the design process results in products 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.

The Department of Play (DoP) is a working group of researchers, students, and community practitioners who share a common passion: designing appropriate technology and methods to empower youth and their communities. In particular, the Department of Play initiative aims to develop an easy-to-use, open-source digital toolkit to foster youth participation, social inclusion and local civic engagement. Among other things, we are implementing a multi-channel neighborhood communication system that combines email, SMS and regular touchtone phones to help young people organize and promote block parties, games, performances and other events in the places where they live.

Have you ever been forwarded an email that you just can’t believe? Our inboxes are rife with misinformation. The truth is out there, just not when we actually need it. LazyTruth is a Gmail gadget that surfaces verified truths when you receive common myths. It all happens right in your inbox, without requiring you to search anywhere. The result is that it becomes much more convenient for citizens to combat misinformation, rather than acquiesce to its volume. Whether it’s political rumors, gift card scams, or phishing attempts, fact is now as convenient as fiction.

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 gender across multiple news sources.

NGO2.0 is a project grown out of the work of MIT’s New Media Action Lab. The project recognizes that digital media and Web 2.0 are vital to grassroots NGOs in China. NGOs in China operate under enormous constraints because of their semi-legal status. Grassroots NGOs cannot compete with governmental affiliated NGOs for the attention of mainstream media, which leads to difficulties in acquiring resources and raising awareness of the cause they are promoting. The NGO2.0 Project serves grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China, training them to enhance their digital and social media literacy through Web 2.0 workshops. The project also rolls out a crowd map to enable the NGO sector and the Corporate Social Responsibility sector to find out what each sector has accomplished in producing social good.

The U.S. banking crisis and economic downturn has led to many people to seek assistance from social service agencies who'd not previously sought assistance. Same Boat lets people who've discovered helpful social services to share their discoveries with others who are in the same boat. Using the technologies in our What's Up toolkit, Same Boat is currently in the process of co-development in Wisconsin Falls, Wisconsin in partnership with the Community Foundation of South Wood County, Wisconsin.

VoIP Drupal is an innovative framework that brings the power of voice and Internet-telephony to Drupal sites. It can be used to build hybrid applications that combine regular touchtone phones, web, SMS, Twitter, IM and other communication tools in a variety of ways, facilitating community outreach and providing an online presence to those who are illiterate or do not have regular access to computers. VoIP Drupal will change the way you interact with Drupal, your phone and the web.

The VozMob Drupal Distribution is Drupal customized as a mobile blogging platform. VozMob has been designed to make it easy to post content to the web from mobile phones via voice calls, SMS, or MMS. You don't need a smart phone or an app to post blog entries - any phone will do. VozMob allows civic journalists in low-income communities to participate in the digital public sphere. Features include groups, tags, geocoding and maps, MMS filters, and new user registration via SMS. Site editors can send multimedia content out to registered users' mobile phones. VozMob Drupal Distribution is developed through an ongoing codesign process by day laborers, household workers, and students from the Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA.org). The project received early support from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, Macarthur/HASTAC, Nokia, and others.