Civic Hacking & MediaAnika Gupta @DigitalAnikaMay 7, 2016 Graduate Student, MIT

What does it mean for civic hacking to go right?

Problem: Under-representation in Media

Solutions: Exposure,Collaboration

Not one of these projects still exists

TwitterBot Digital Audiobook Crowd-Sourced Safety Map

We Did: Unlock languageIntroduce mediamakers to new formatsCreate initial prototypes

We Didn’t: Publish or develop the prototypesSolve the problem of underrepresentationBring in all the stakeholders

Could We Have Made it Worse?

We Did: Anonymize dataGet permission to use audio filesTranslate (?!)

It Was: The right format for asking difficult media questions

It Wasn’t: The right format for Solving* the problem

*Partly due to our choices, and partly because these problems are hard to Solve, and assuming we can SOLVE them in a weekend might be a mistake