1) Class Description

General Description

Call for Action (CfA) is a 4 day intensive seminar on contemporary technologies and activism. How can mobile networked devices be used for social change, politics, and expression? Can Web2.0 techniques be used to help to organize people, gather information, and enable collective action to stop global warming? organize labor? end a war?

Each day we'll review existing tools for social change, cover techniques for mobile hacking, and piece together new experiments. International speakers ranging from Zimbabwean activists to telecommunication experts will discuss the problems with existing ICTs, and suggest parameters for new systems. We'll review protocols and packages like VOIP, SMS, and Asterisk to look at how they may be reused or reconfigured. And we'll do a variety of hacking and technical exercises that can demystify the field and act as springboards for future work.

Currently we have the following speakers confirmed:

• Katrin Verclas, organizer of MobileActive, the largest conference in the field
• Ethan Zuckerman, gadfly and cofounder of GlobalVoices, a news service that includes activist writers from around the world.
• David Reed, developer of the world's first electronic spreadsheet and co-inventor of the end-to-end argument, often called the fundamental architectural principle of the Internet.
• Sara Wylie, anthropologist of social movements, citizen and elite science, and environmentalism.

Class Scope

By the end of the class, we hope to collaboratively create new sociotechnical repertoires for social change and technical activism. In order to foster this creation, we aim to provide participants with overviews of the conceptual, technical, and historical space for mobile technologies in social change.

We will provide an overview of contemporary mobile and participatory technology and techniques, and cross-fertilize that with theory and best practices around social movements.

The goal of the class's technical component will be to expose participants to a variety of models for mobile and participatory systems. We will constrain the scope of our in-class demonstrations (for instance, using only the Python programming language) for the sake of continuity. Participants will not learn everything about programming X phone handset using Y operating system in Z language, but rather that these are the possible approaches, and this is what an X, Y, and Z looks like and how to approach finding out more.

Likewise, we will introduce some key concepts, scholars, and practitioners of social change, but will not aspire towards a comprehensive overview of their work or their fields.

2) Hackathon

From 1pm on Thursday, January 22 to 1pm on Friday, January 23 there will be a hackathon, "Call for Hacktion!". Call for Hacktion! will be open to the MIT community: teams will be asked to create quick sketches of sociotechnical technologies for a particular semi-fictional conflict. Teams will be able to choose which side of the conflict they will support, and set the parameters of their project and presentation. Some teams will probably choose to develop technical systems, others will create designs, still others might work on situationist interventions. In the two and a half days before the hackathon we will offer a strong enough foundation, through the social and technical examples in the class, for groups to create signficant projects.

The evening of Thursday we will also schedule a film festival, featuring three unusual films related to the class.

3) Provisional schedule

(Not necessarily in order, subject to change)

Friday, January 16

• Office hours, 4pm - 6pm

  • install vmware
  • get an introduction to Python

Tuesday, January 20

(We will pause for the swearing in Ceremony and Elizabeth Alexander's poetry reading. We will skip Dr. Rick Warren and the Navy Band Sea Chanters.)

• Introduction to the Course (course staff)

  • seminar overview
  • project heads-up

• Intro to field of technology and social change, with examples

  o dominant technologies (Korea)
  o resisting dominant technology
  o technologies of resistance

• Intro to social change, and breakouts

  o some theories of social change
  o general conversation about motivations, experiences, interests
  o break-out groups

• Intro to the development tools

• Practitioner Guest Talks

  o Katrin Verclas
  o David Reed
  o Skype: Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights

• History of contemporary communications

Wednesday, January 21

• General content (course staff)

• Handset review: Symbian, Android, iPhone

• Intro to Handsets: Nokia & Python

• Whtz n a nm? A anthropological evaluation of mobiles.

• Intro to Servers: APIs, Web Frameworks, Voip, SMS gateways

  o Ethan Zuckerman
  o Skype: Ricardo Dominguez

• Tutorial: Symbian Python in depth

• Tutorial: Microblogging, VOIP

Thursday, January 22

• Deeper Tech Talks
• Hackathon introduction
• Hackation discussion and brief breakouts

Call for Hacktion ---------------------------------> 24 hours

• Film Screenings, 5pm to 10pm

Friday, January 23

• Call for Hacktion project reviews
• Awards Ceremony
• Closing discussions
• Future work

4) To tech or not to tech

As described above, our goal is to expose a wide range of people to a range of contemporary technologies that might be useful for activism and social change. We will offer a blend of introductions, specific examples, and editorial opinions. In the tutorials we will aim to give demonstrations that everyone in the class can follow on their own laptops; the examples will be well commented, documented, and available for use during the hackathon. For the uninitiated: DON'T PANIC. This will be fun. You may never again need to do what you'll do in the class, but you'll probably never forget the experience. For the nerds: In order to minimize spurious transients, we will constrain the tutorials to one phone system (Symbian) and one language (Python). All demos will be available on a svn repo. Additionally, we will use VMWare Ubuntu 8.10 image with packages pre-installed.

Please free several gigabytes of disk space before coming to the class. If you are a member of the MIT community, we ask that you install VMWare Fusion before the class as well. Don't worry about making it work, just install the software available at:
https://nic-too.mit.edu/cgi-bin/vmware
You will need an MIT Certificate; if you don't have one, it's about time you got one at:
http://web.mit.edu/is/topics/certificates/

Participants who aren't part of the MIT community are encouraged to stop by the Friday, January 16 office hours to prepare their laptop.