Program in Media Arts and Sciences MIT

This thesis, written for the Program of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab, focuses on the design of technological initiatives for social empowerment, with special focus on youth participation and local civic engagement. The work, as stated by its author, Leo Burd, "critiques telecenters and other traditional approaches to technology-supported social development and proposes a framework for the design and analysis of initiatives that are more inclusive and democratic." As an output of the thesis research, Burd attempted to implement an open-source, neighbourhood news system that combines the power of the telephone and the web to help young people become more actively engaged with their local communities.

To foster a more democratic and participatory youth project than the telecentre-style information and communication technology (ICT) project, Burd proposes a framework for the design and analysis of technological initiatives for social empowerment and applies the framework in the implementation of two initiatives that focus primarily on youth participation and local civic engagement. To further this aim, Burd worked with the Young Activists Network (YAN) initiative youth technology centres, organising young people to become agents of change in the places where they live. He encountered a labour intensive structure that was a drawback to sustainability and to bringing the project to scale. Based on the lessons learned, he started the "What's Up” Lawrence project, an initiative that aimed at building a self-reinforcing, city-wide network to help young people organise and create a calendar of personally meaningful community events." For supporting this network, he built "What's Up", a neighbourhood news system that combines the power of the telephone and of the web to make it easier for young people to share information, promote community events, and find out what is happening in their region.

Burd's thesis provides a detailed, experiential description of the process that led to "What's Up". It also highlights the main technical, educational, and organisational elements to be considered in the implementation of technological initiatives for social empowerment. A web-accessible slide presentation gives a review of the project with a visual introduction to the "What's Up" news system.

The goals of the research include answering:

• What are the main attributes of learning initiatives that foster youth participation and local civic engagement?
• How can digital technologies support the implementation of those learning initiatives in youth technology centres?
• What attributes should digital technologies have in order to become more suitable for that task?
• What other factors have to be in place, besides the technology, for those initiatives to succeed?

Burd chose to work in young people’s neighbourhoods, in “youth technology centers,” meaning the community centres, libraries, telecentres, school labs, and other spaces in which young people can use computers for open-ended and personally relevant activities. Using a “design research” approach to set up various iterations of the YAN and then the "What's Up Lawrence" initiative, he used the goal of empowerment shown through youth participation in civic engagement to establish his assessment criteria. Among a number of criteria, the research looks at the project accessibility, organisation, sustainability, and scalability; whether the initiative fosters new community initiatives, whether organisations involved have increased capacity to reach youth, and whether more young people are participating in youth projects and community events and in decision making about them.


YAN, a volunteer-based initiative, partnered with youth technology centres from different parts of the world and helped them organise local youth to become agents of change in the places where they lived. Projects involved using technology for interviewing residents, visiting local organisations, taking pictures, building representations, and then choosing a personally relevant neighbourhood challenge to tackle and document as a reflective story-telling process. Early strategy changes implemented in the YAN programme included increasing youth participation in leadership and planning to attract and maintain interest, structuring to allow youth to be engaged in activity (little "down" or reflection time), increased staffing - including opportunities to unite with other organisations, and implementing simplified software for easier youth access without intensive adult instruction. As a strategy in its third iteration the YAN project accumulated and trained a volunteer group and set up an electronically accessible calendar and information page for sharing materials, as well as an email contact system. This support system aided in youth engagement and project expansion. Also, the project focused on the 10 - 12 year old pre-adolescent group, found to be more willing to collaborate with adults than counterparts of 13 - 15 years old. Projects included a children's rights poster based on United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF 1990) written in a simplified language that youth could understand - and incorporated into video skits written and presented by youth; a trash Olympics to clean the streets; community mapping, including audio recording; and a teen pregnancy project.


In implementing the "What's Up" project, Burd began with a youth activity survey to assess youth attitudes towards their city and its services. He took lessons learned from YAN and from a summer project, Building Blocks, in which mobile telephones played a critical role in keeping youth in contact, and for bringing photographic and recorded information back to the group. He increased contact with families of youth and increased adult project support by partnering with the youth initiative Movement City. Supporting local civic engagement was the focus of what was attempted as an inclusive, youth-led, "organic", "viral", safe, adaptable, and easy-to-maintain network of youth communication. The system, a phone component and a web component, were designed with open-source software. The phone system offers a calendar of community events, announcements, and audioblog entries, "What's Up" system information, a personalised area, and a directory with event extensions. Callers may add new entries, such as calendar events, which are also added to the website. Callers may organise groups who can receive the announcements, such as sports teams, family, and friendship groups. The website includes announcements and a calendar. Eventually, the strategy of linking to social network personal pages like MySpace increased youth interest.


In organising the "What's Up" project, Burd found that the telephony concept of self-organisation was too abstract for the youth involved, and the associated web page gave them a more concrete sense of its utility and allowed their involvement in the design. He found that the mobile telephony operational system needed to be very simple, with simple menu options to attract user interest. He concluded that the system was effective among Movement City users who had his technical support, but it would require organisational support to scale up to attain city-wide usage.