Open Technology Institute Supports Community Technology at the 2015 AMC

Washington, DC - New America’s Open Technology Institute is excited to support the Community Technology Network Gathering at the 2015 Allied Media Conference in Detroit, Michigan. The gathering will convene practitioners and enthusiasts of community-centered technology in all of its forms to explore how such technology can be used to address needs and move communities towards a more just and creative world.

The gathering will be a day-long agenda consisting of group discussion and problem solving with the purpose of building stronger relationships, discovering new approaches to the problems facing the participant’s communities, and growing a shared sense of priorities and values between the participants. It begins with the personal experiences and histories of the participants and how each came to working with technology in a community frame, moves through generating big questions that address the problems communities face, and finally focuses on groups of participants working together to answer the questions posed.

The concept for the Community Technology Network Gathering formed out of many years of hands-on, participatory, community-centric technology work at the Allied Media Conference. There has been a Media Lab as part of the AMC, since the conference first moved to Detroit in 2007. The Media Lab has been a place of hands-on experimentation and demystification around technology and how it intersects with media and organizing. In later iterations of the conference, this evolved into and intersected with the How-to Track, the Webmaking track, the Do-it-yourself Technology track, the DiscoTech (Discovering Technology) practice space, and other elements of the conference.

This year the hope is to bring together people who design, build, and facilitate community technology projects - and strengthen the connections between everyone represented. With more work and support, it may expand into a larger support network for everyone working on technology to help communities grow, self-govern, and self-determine.

The gathering is jointly coordinated by Andy Gunn from Open Technology Institute; Diana Nucera from Detroit Community Technology Project; Jack Aponte from Palante Technology Cooperative; and Janel Yamashiro from Co.Open.

The shared practices developed at the network gathering will be available on OTI’s community technology platform at http://communitytechnology.github.io/. More information about the Community Technology Network Gathering is available at https://amccommtech.wordpress.com/.