So as part of this MMP has developed a series of 4 community portals focused on themes around Philadelphia from labor, to education and housing. Each of these themes has it's own portal and community editorial team, which is responsible for getting an increasing number of folks engaged. Each of the specific community portals also RSS feeds into the a central community portal seen above.

Currently we are training folks in how to use these sites and in the future we expect the sites to become a dynamic thriving space for community voices to be heard across the city. We fully recognize that while the development of the site took time and energy the real energy comes in the next phase of getting communities engaged and identifying with the site.

The expectation here is push against or build upon the citizen/public journalism movement creating space to create a "community journalism movement." The difference here is that while public journalism focuses on folks that already have Web access and other forms of cultural and social capital, this project focuses on individuals and communities that do not have access and otherwise have few venues to have their voices heard in the public sphere. Below is a picture of the Our City Our Voices web portal.

Hey folks,
I wanted to tell you all about a study I am wrapping up with Peter Funke, Dan Berger and a few other folks in Philadelphia. We received a grant from the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) "Necessary Knowledge for Public Sphere" initiative to study the Media Mobilizing Project(MMP) and their use of new media and digital inclusion to promote civic engagement in disenfranchised communities across Philadelphia

To offer some background, MMP was launched in 2005 as a strategic initiative to partner with local organizations, facilitating grassroots media production to advance socio-economic justice through the (self) empowerment of disenfranchised communities. MMP has four goals:

• Build community media infrastructure that results in concrete gains for groups.
• Innovate and implement new tactics for use of media in organizing campaigns.
• Assist organizations to build capacity, providing documentation and dissemination of audio/visual materials highlighting their issues.
• Develop leadership in new constituencies who are strengthening and expanding the focus of the media reform movement

The basis for MMP's work is a belief that we have entered a new era of participatory communications, where people are increasingly called into the media production process through the ascendance of a range of technologies from blogs and podcasts to video cameras and cell phones. Paradoxically, while people have increased access to media making, we live in an increasingly undemocratic society plagued by structural inequities. This is illustrated by a media sector, which is rapidly consolidating, resulting in fewer communities having access. The root is not embodied in the media system alone, but rather in a highly stratified economic order.

Building on this vision in three years MMP has become a thriving network of 10 organizations across the region from students groups and immigrant rights organizations to taxi driver and hotel worker unions. Together this network of groups, aims to use new media to break our isolation, creating new networks to tell and share stories and build the power necessary to create a more just Philadelphia. One of the projects of the MMP network is Our City Our Voices: Immigrant Newscasts in the Digital Age, which is a 21st Century News Challenge Project. Through this project we have trained over 100 immigrants and low-wage workers in basic video and Web production while finding innovative avenues for getting people Internet access. The aim has been to offer the skills, access, and platforms for new communities to share stories in order to organize and make both personal and collective change.

Building on Our City Our Voices and other projects, the basis of the SSRC study is to analyze the linkages between issues of new media and civic engagement in impoverished communities. Through this study we are beginning to show new ways that new media and social justice can be twinned with organizing to overcome the digital divide and defy the economic obstacles underlying it.

One of the goals of the study is to produce a toolkit. This will be a 100-page book, which both analyzes the problems and possibilities of the information age, while offering practical lessons on how MMP has used new media as a tool for social change. We are now beginning to write this toolkit and we are thinking of organizing the toolkit in three sections: Part I would look at the history, strategy and present make-up of MMP; Part II would be stories from the field from folks in the network that have used new media in innovative ways and Part III will be a glossary of key terms.

Scholars of contemporary poverty tell us that the central aspect of impoverished communities is their political and civic demobilization. This study is an examination of how new technologies and the possibility of community media can offer new venues for those same communities to speak, engage in the democratic process and create the vision for a city which speaks to their concerns.

The participants of Media Mobilizing Project and Juntos's Immigrant and Low-Wage worker video project have finished their first batch of videos. The videos tell a wide array of stories focusing on health in the community, discrimination against immigrants, the role of unions in protecting immigrant workers and community outreach.

As a reminder, the project is threefold. Through Our City Our Voices we: 1) offer video and web workshops to immigrants, 2) we teamed with the city of Philadelphia to get participants both computers as well as Internet access and 3) we are in the process of creating an online portal (drupal based) which is a home setting for these learners to post their videos but also to discuss their life experiences.

Please check out the first video Does Discrimination Exist Against Immigrant Workers. To see the rest of the videos go to our provisional website.
We are having a screening of the first 6 videos this weekend and our excited as we begin to see this process unfold.

While we have completed two series of workshops thus far, this summer we have two workshops planned, one for Spanish speaking youth and another for English speaking youth and two more courses planned for the fall.

The graduation will take place at Songhai City Cultural Center at 3117 Master Street in Philadelphia at 3pm. Like their counterparts from the previous Spanish speaking workshop, members of this class learned web skills, video-making skills and media literacy. In the course of the 8-week workshop these students actually completed three five-minute pieces, which will be screened at Sunday's graduation.

The second round of classes was made up of a mixture of immigrants and low-wage workers across the city--from Togo and India to Morocco and Philadelphia--and the class included taxi drivers, nurses, teachers and security guards. Students in the class will also be receiving free wireless Internet for the year as well as computers and the skills necessary to utilize the web through MMP's digital inclusion project and Wireless Philadelphia. The aim here is to offer the workshop participants, both the skills as well as the tools necessary to be cultural producers in the digital age.

Finally, we will be launching an innovative website in May which will be a vital compliment to the classes. The website, will be a mixture of a blog and social networking site, utilizing the Drupal content management platform. The site will be focused on the videos and stories members of this class create and will be a place for them to claim ownership on the web.

We finished the first round of video production training! On Monday December 3rd, 20 Spanish-speaking immigrants received diplomas for successfully completing the first in a series of workshops in which they were trained in video production and basic web skills. This project, developed by the Media Mobilizing Project with Mexican immigrant community based organization JUNTOS is called, Our City, Our Voices: Immigrant Newscasts in the Digital Age. To remind people, the goal of the project is to give Philadelphia's newest inhabitants the capacity to tell their own stories and document their struggles through short digital videos. At the forefront of the growing wave of community journalism projects, Our City Our Voices is innovative in its goal of creating a community driven journalism project, which connects those most silenced, to new video technologies and Philadelphia's wireless network.

To those ends, while we are training folks in basic web skills, video production and basic computer use, we are also a Wireless Internet Provider (WIP) with Philadelphia's municipal wireless system. Through this partnership we are offering individuals wireless Internet for a year along with a basic computer, a router and technical support at little cost, to make sure they have the tools to get online. We believe this pushes the boundaries and ways that "citizen" or public journalism is conceived, as it works with those with the fewest opportunities to speak, but also aims to actually get those people the tools to be a vocal part of the digital age.

Now that the first round of participants have finished the training aspect of the project they will take scripts developed during the workshops and turn them into videos on themes ranging from worker's rights and life in South Philadelphia to lack of access to higher education. Through this project, people from Mexico to Chile, working as carpenters, cooks, laborers and nannies, and ranging in age from 16-60 will begin the process of creating mini-documentaries. The common denominator amongst these new media makers is to illustrate the challenges and hopes of leaving your home and living in a place that does not know your history.

Ultimately, the project aims to promote respect and create a shared understanding of the stories and struggles of Philadelphia's diverse communities. In this first stage, participants were Latino immigrants and the workshops were given in Spanish by Gabriel Berrios, co-developer of the project and specialist in audiovisual production. During the second phase of the project the training is being offered in English to other groups of immigrants as well as workers, students and other folks that are rarely offered the opportunity to speak.

Through "Our City Our Voices" we aim to create community driven journalism, so that the various groups in Philadelphia working for social change can promote and spread consciousness about their struggle and eventually develop better living conditions here in the city and beyond.

Here is an image of the posters and flyers we have put out across Philadelphia as we prepare for the beginning of our video and basic web trainings on November 11th. The Media Mobilizing Project is planning to start with two classes of approximately 8-10 people which will take place from November into early December. In these classes people will learn how to use a video camera, write a script, edit and many other skills. Thus far we have been getting the project off the ground while holding a series of forums/conversations within the Mexican immigrant community to find out what people want and what we can achieve through this project. At the same time now we are beginning to have conversations in other immigrant communities as we plan for our second series of trainings with other immigrant communities at the end of January.

Of course much of the excitement of this project hinges on the municipal wireless network that is being built out across the city of Philadelphia. Earthlink (the provider) and Wireless Philadelphia (the non profit set-up by the city to manage the network) say that the wireless signal currently reaches about half of the city, and they are on track to have the wireless network blanketing 135 square miles of Philadelphia by the end of the year. Currently we are working on the details of a partnership with Wireless Philadelphia to get participants in this project free computers, tech support and free wireless for the year. This we feel is vital as giving people the skills to use the internet and become producers is so much more powerful when linked to a second step of getting the the tools to actually be online.

We will be back with more soon.