Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech is a project led by Laurenellen McCann that deepens her work in needs-responsive, community-driven processes for creating technology with real people and real communities for public good.
This project falls under Smart Chicago’s work on the Knight Community Information Challenge grant awarded under their Engaged Communities strategy to the Chicago Community Trust “as it builds on its successful Smart Chicago Project, which is taking open government resources directly into neighborhoods through a variety of civic-minded apps”
Here’s how they describe the project on their grant page:
Building on previous Knight Foundation investments in the news and information ecosystem, via the Knight Community Information Challenge, the Chicago Community Trust will continue to design, build and demonstrate the power of digital tools to the community and empower residents to use news and information to improve their quality of life.
Here’s background on Knight’s current investments in four community foundations: Foundations take on projects to improve local news and information. A snip:
For 2014-15, the challenge is doubling down on projects by four community and place-based foundations with a successful track record in this area, helping them go further and then sharing the lessons with other community foundations and stakeholders in the local-news and -information space.
The project has three major components:
Scan of the field
Focusing on practice and the people most directly involved in the work, we will identify basic characteristics, best practices, and model examples of the community-driven tech landscape.
Convening of practitioners
We will gather a set of practitioners in a convening here at the Chicago Community Trust in early Spring 2015.
A book
Our research, documentation, and investigation of the community-driven space will culminate in a full report of the field that refocuses the narrative of “civic technology” and “civic innovation” on the populis praxis, not the pedagogy.
