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.

As part of our larger effort to build out a suite of tools for community organizers, we are helping to build their capacity to do their own creative data visualization and presentation. New computer-based tools are lowering the barriers of entry for making engaging and creative presentations of data. Rather than encouraging partnerships with epidemiologists, statisticians, or programmers, we see an opportunity to build capacity within small community organizations by using these new tools. This work involves workshops, webinars, and writing about how to pick more creative ways to present their data stories.

Erase the Border is a web campaign and voice petition platform. It tells the story of the Tohono O'odham people whose community has been divided along 75 miles of the US-Mexico border by a fence. The border fence divides the community, prevents tribe members from receiving critical health services and subjects O'odham to racism and discrimination. This platform is a pilot that we are using to research the potential of voice and media petitions for civic discourse.

We want to help people in nations where electric power is scarce sell power to their neighbors. We’re designing a piece of prototype hardware that plugs into a diesel generator or other power source, distributes the power to multiple outlets, monitors how much power is used, and uses mobile payments to charge the customer for the power consumed.

Books are challenged and banned in public schools and libraries across the country. But which books, where, by whom, and for what reasons? The Mapping Banned Books project is a partnership between the Center for Civic Media, the American Library Association, and the National Coalition Against Censorship to a) visualize existing data on book challenges, b) detect what the existing data doesn't capture, and c) devise new methods to surface suppressed speech.

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.

New Day New Standard is an interactive hotline that informs nannies, housekeepers, eldercare-givers, and their employers about the landmark Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights, passed in New York State in November 2010. Operating in English and Spanish, it's a hybrid application that combines regular touchtone phones and Internet-based telephony within an open source framework. The Center for Civic Media and REV- (http://www.rev-it.org) are currently developing Call to Action, a generalized version of the platform and associated GUI to allow other groups to create interactive hotlines for a wide range of use cases. NDNS was presented to the White House's Open Government Initative.

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.

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.

The Toy Interface Construction Kit Learning Environment (T.I.C.K.L.E.) is a universal construction kit for the rest of us. It doesn't require 3D printers or CAD skills. Instead, it's a DIY social process for creating construction interoperability.

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.