This mission certainly introduced me to a lot of people and organizations I had previously known little about!
I really wanted to shadow Verne Harris of the
Nelson Mandela Foundation, who has written eloquently on the
effects of apartheid on social memory. Unfortunately he doesn't appear to have a social media presence.
Rand Jimerson? Nope, despite the
reading group moderated by Archives 2.0 legend
Kate Theimer, I could find neither micro- nor macro- blog.
So I decided to go broader (archives being a fairly narrow field).. Who espouses similar values and has a larger audience?
Noam Chomksy! ...but again, no active social media presence. This is getting tricky.
My next step was to poke around Google Scholar with combinations of words like memory, power, justice, society, and heritage, with an eye towards results with high citation counts.
This was far more difficult than I imagined.
Finding organizations on Twitter?
No problem at
all. But the individuals who started them? Not so much -- especially not if you're looking for an account that appears personal, rather than one that just
shares links.
Eventually, NPR
came to my rescue with a story on
SeeClickFix.
In their own words, SeeClickFix "encourages residents to become citizens by participating in taking care of and improving their neighborhoods." This encouragement comes in the form of a mobile app and wb interface for reporting non-emergency issues when they are spotted. If the city in question has a paid account with SCF, users can upload photos with GPS coordinates; otherwise a plain-text email is sent. The issues are reported on the website, and although they are often fixed by public services, it's also not unusual for someone in the community to take it upon themselves to pick up trash or remove graffiti. I'm a big fan of both citizen action and crowdsourcing, and SCF uses both effectively.
And the founders are all on Twitter. :) I've added both
Ben Berkowitz (who was interviewed on All Things Considered) and
Miles Lasater (who tweets about social entrepreneurship more broadly) to a
list I've started for tweeps found through Evoke missions.
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