Tuesday, March 1st : The Tactical Design class will be held at sprout, with Jeffrey Warren presenting on his work with DIY aerial photography, and Alec and Shaunalynn presenting about Sprout. 7-10pm. www.thesprouts.org

This Saturday, March 5th,  will be FarmHack at the Microsoft NERD Center. The idea is to get local farmers together with engineers and designers to create tools that will be useful for the farmers.

More info : http://mitpsc.mit.edu/globalchallenge/?p=676

Tuesday, March 8th will be the second Dorkbot Meetup of the year.  It will be held at www.thesprouts.org.

Alex Pentland will be speaking at the New England Complex Systems Institute seminar series on Friday, March 4th, at 12:30pm, in building E51-376, on the topic “How Social Networks Shape Human Behavior”.  He will talk about measuring the dynamics of social networks using distributed sensor platforms (including mobile devices) and making predictions on human decision making.  His group won the DARPA baloon challenge, and he will describe the winning strategy.

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There will be a lunch conversation on Monday, February 28th at noon, on the topic of community participation and involvement in urban planning at MIT building 7-431.

Join us for a conversation on how we can help support community participation and involvement, encourage the development of environmentally-friendly communities, create an equitable access to community commons, and much more. What are the mechanisms whereby new policy initiatives can mitigate barriers to well-being — and in the gap between policy implementations, what are the other mechanisms and tools we can create to foster healthy communities?

This is definitely an important topic, and of considerable attention recently.  A few weeks ago Ethan Zuckerman spoke on communities and urban planning, and one of the topics brought up in the Q and A was how the design process for cities misses out on considering values of the individuals of the targeted communities.  The communities will live with the design choices, whether or not good decisions were made, without having a say in the process.

More info : http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/events/view/143

There is a new 1 year Masters program at Royal Holloway, University of London, in Practicing Sustainable Development with a specialism in Information and Communication Technologies for Development.

It is designed for IT-experts, designers, students, professionals and development practitioners who want to develop their skills specifically in the area of ICT4D. The degree prepares you for work in the public, private or NGO-sector locally or internationally, or can be a stepping-stone towards a PhD.

The program is critical of the ethics and imposition in design for development, encouraging participatory and culturally, socially, environmentally aware and gender sensitive approaches, i.e. ensuring that the design process includes those who one is designing for, and takes into account their values.

More information : www.gg.rhul.ac.uk/psd/ict4d

Code for America is here in Boston until the end of the month, and they are looking for collaborators to continue projects.  Their kickoff event was last night, and basically they are thinking of ways to reframe government- to think of it as a platform.

What I admire most is their approach.  Before anything is rolled out, they go out and talk to various departments, groups, schools, to get an idea of what would be most useful.  And any software developed here in Boston is going to be shared with other cities, likewise other cities will share their developments here.  And the Code for America fellows facilitate that cross-pollination.

Some of the fellows will be at the health 2.0 code-a-thon, and the Bocoup meetup next week.  Bocoup is an awesome co working space I just learned of- they work on open source web projects, including processing.js, and popcorn (which allows you to edit movies in the browser!).  I’m looking forward to checking out that space.

And now, for the events.

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Ethan Zuckerman spoke recently at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, titling the talk ‘Technology and Serendipity: Stumbling in the City’.  Below I’ll write out some of the notes from attending.

A little background on Zuckerman – in the 90′s he was one of the co-founders of tripod, later created Global Voices, and he is currently a fellow at the Berkman Center.

Cities are Serendipity Enginges

The urbanization rate is increasing in cities. By 2008, over half of the world’s population was living in cities. Take a step in the past, back to London when it was one of the world’s densest cities.  Its hard to imagine why people would move into that city given the possibility of tragedies. Fires spread quickly, burning through the city. The population suffered cholera outbreaks.  It wasn’t a very pleasant place.  But people still went to the city.  People wanted the possibilities and the opportunities a city could provide.

Cities provide the infrastructure for chance encounters, and among so many possible interactions there is opportunity. Cities are serendipity engines.

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Quite a few exciting events around town exploring ideas in Design for Empowerment: Extended. A talk focused on understanding DDoS attacks, especially relevant in light of the recent attacks on major websites, a couple book talks- one on distributed political power through technology, the second on our physical interpersonal interactions affected by our internet social lives- and a great introductory event for a local radical education group.

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Ben and I have been meeting on Sundays to informally work our way through the projects in Tom Igoe’s Making Things Talk, taking twists and turns as they may come up.  Most of all its great to wire something together, or debug together- its also a more hands on approach to some of the concepts we’re learning in DFEX. If you’re interested in meeting up with us feel free to join.  Send over a message to to confirm we’ll be there (just in case).  Right now we’re in chapter 2 working through Monski pong.

As people come back from holidays, DFEX is starting up again.  We’ll meet up next week and discuss ideas for the upcoming months.  I met up with Ben last week and other makers around town, brainstorming ideas for the future of the course.  Also- some events for the upcoming week or so.

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Went to a fantastic talk by Nathan Eagle yesterday.

Here is an older version of the talk, still pretty similar http://senseable.mit.edu/engagingdata/presentations/ED_SIII_Eagle.pdf

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