The central premise of the Participatory Chinatown project is the staging of what we call “augmented deliberation.”  We introduce augmented deliberation as a possible design solution that addresses uniquely difficult contexts where deliberation is complicated by one or many external factors, including language barriers, power differentials, visualization and challenges with communicating professional […]

Categories: boston · hub2 · civic_engagement · net-locality · cities

We’ve made some good progress on the Participatory Chinatown (PC) project.   Building off of the first iteration of Hub2, PC will continue with the focus on creating platforms for “augmented deliberation,” but it will do so by more thoroughly exploring the power of role play in people’s ability to understand urban issues.  In the past […]

Categories: boston · games · hub2 · civic_engagement · net-locality · mediated urbanism · cities

While new mobile technologies are often characterized as distractions from the world around us - just consider the outcry over train operators texting while driving - they are, in fact, technologies of attention.  They get us to pay attention to them.  Actually, that’s not true.  We don’t pay attention to our devices, we pay attention […]

Categories: placeofmedia · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities · geography

This should be an interesting discussion about out-of-the-ordinary applications of virtual world technologies.  I will have the opportunity to speak about Hub2 along with John Lester from Linden Lab and Drew Harry from MIT’s Media Lab.  It’s happening May 1 from 6-7:30 at the MIT Museum.

Categories: placeofmedia · boston · hub2 · net-locality · mediated urbanism

My article on Network Locality has finally appeared in the journal First Monday.   Hey, and it’s free and online.  Go figure.  Academic papers that people can actually read.

Categories: placeofmedia · net-locality · Community_Informatics · cities

The goal of Hub2 is to introduce a deliberative process into community meetings that currently does not exist. Who do this by integrating Second Life into the existing community process. We believe that the affordances of the tool and the specifics of the practice we built around it, we are adding the following:

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Categories: placeofmedia · boston · citygovernment · SecondLife · hub2 · gene_koo · civic_engagement · net-locality · mixed_reality · mediated urbanism · cities

It has been some time since I posted to my blog. This is primarily because I found myself quite busy working on my new book, whose title has changed to “Location Matters,” with some snappy subtitle to bring it all home. What follows is a section from chapter two that describes the concept […]

Categories: placeofmedia · citygovernment · civic_engagement · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities

I just got back from the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, CA this morning. As someone who attends mostly academic conferences, it was both refreshing and disturbing to spend two days with this group. Refreshing because the group was composed mostly of developers, interested in figuring out how to transform the emerging […]

Categories: placeofmedia · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities · web 2.0 · geography

Over the last few days, I’ve refined my thoughts on the concept of network locality. Up until this time, I’ve been thinking about how geographical space functions within the connectivity enabled by digital networks. But as I pursued this idea, I began to realize that starting from geography was not the most productive […]

Categories: placeofmedia · net-locality · mediated urbanism · mobility · place · geography

I’ve had this question running through my head for some time now: what’s the connection between mobile computing (i.e. cell phones, PDAs, GPS, etc.) and local computing (neighborhood networking, digital civic forums, etc.)? On first blush, these are entirely separate phenomena. But, the more I consider it, the more I see them as […]

Categories: placeofmedia · citygovernment · city · net-locality · Community_Informatics · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities · place