Project Goals and Background:

The Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) proposes extended development of mediamobilizing.org, an online multi-media news platform for reporting, analysis, and original first person story telling that unites issues of poverty, human rights, and social movement organizing. Development will primarily result in new, improved Drupal CMS modules for open use that will increase the effectiveness of this online space for offline organizing efforts. 

MMP is both a community-based media and communications infrastructure and a network of organizations across the Philadelphia region that aim to “build a movement to end poverty.” Through the powerful combination of communications and organizing, we clarify the issues at stake and inspire and unite those who have a vested interest in change. By sharing our stories, we end the isolation of our communities and the sense that our struggles are separate from each other. 

This project builds on five years of work building an extensive network of video and radio producers and community journalists who are also leaders of poor people's organizations working on issues of labor, housing and education. The redesign of mediamobilizing.org would continue to strengthen the online identity of this work, engage a broader community in dialogue and movement work to address poverty, and shift the power of new communications technologies and the web into the hands of poor and working people.

For the past two years Media Mobilizing Project has developed and operated mediamobilizing.org. This website has served as an online space for Philadelphia based news and analysis across several social issues. It provides a necessary alternative in the city's media ecosystem, providing a space for members of poor and working people's organizations, trained media makers, and community journalists to collaborate and share information. Mediamobilizing.org has often provided the only coverage of specific social issues in the region, such as neighborhood struggles against gentrification. The website also offers unheard viewpoints on high-profile issues, including the recent month long strike by nurses at Temple University Hospital. As such, mediamobilizing.org is an increasingly important media outlet for the region. 

We are proposing a three phased development of this site in order to

1) training poor and working people as editors and contributors of their own online news and blog space to facilitate communication in organizing to end poverty,

2) develop new Drupal CMS modules to improve multi-media and social media integration with Drupal for mediamobilizing.org and the Drupal community generally and,

3) create an online collaboration and learning space for poor and working people to develop leadership and education skills for organizing.

By doing so we will increase the accessibility of social media and multi-media tools for first time Internet users, allowing them to better leverage these tools as media production and organizing.

Mediamobilizing.org has innovated by fostering strong ties between grassroots participation and online coverage and reporting. The site's content is produced by those at the front lines of social struggles who use their media to facilitate organizing and newly emerging citizen/community journalist. The work of Philadelphia taxi drivers is a prime example. Members of the Unified Taxi Worker's Alliance collaborated with MMP to produce a short documentary highlighting their dangerous working conditions, lack of healthcare and low wages as part of their campaign to secure worker's compensation for all taxi drivers. Drivers have used the website to distribute the documentary and promote their campaign, reaching state representatives, the public and other drivers. One major goal for further developing mediamobilizing.org is to build on and broaden the success of this journalism and organizing model.

Mediamobilizing.org is built using the Drupal CMS. Drupal is entering its 7th version and has been home to a vibrant community of open source programmers, providing a powerful platform for website creation and management. MMP has been able to take advantage of some of the best innovations of this open source web platform while building out custom modules to fit our needs. One of our goals in the development of this project is to contribute to the Drupal development community, creating and enhancing modules for publishing multimedia content, integrating databases and social networking tools, and cross platform uses including mobile technologies and SMS/MMS messaging. The development of the mediamobilizing.org will leverage and integrate existing technologies, and offer its innovations openly to the broader ICT and non-profit community.

MMP has experience managing collaboratively developed technology projects, such as our recent and ongoing work on SwitchBoard, a text message/SMS based communications platform for organizers and groups to enhance discussion, coordination, and announcements.  Our work on SwitchBoard was funded by the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation, allowing us to bring on two programmers and a designer to work closely with a group of users made up of community organizers who set the development priorities and features of the application. Nearing completion, with an expected release this fall, Switchboard will offer an affordable and easy way for organizations to take advantage of text messaging in their work. These outcomes were only possible through a close attention to community needs throughout the development process. 

Additionally, we will bring this web platform to thousands of Philadelphians who will take part in our upcoming city-wide digital inclusion efforts. Currently the City of Philadelphia, the Free Library, the Departments of Parks and Recreations, and several local community organizations, including Media Mobilizing Project, are embarking on an $18 million project to bridge the digital divide. Through recently awarded Federal Stimulus funds part of the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program Grants, this coalition will enhance or create 77 computer labs across Philadelphia, and extend broadband awareness, adoption and training programs to over 15,000 low-income residents in the city. MMP will facilitate a number of sites based in already existing community centers, building on their strengths and activities. Across these centers we will coordinate news and information gathering, collaborative media production, and help establish community newsrooms in low-income neighborhoods throughout the city. It is our intention to further develop mediamobilizing.org to engage those who will come online for the first time as a part of this initiative. This project will help ensure that these new internet users from low-income communities have access to journalism and media production tools in order to tell their own stories and engage as media makers and not solely as passive consumers of content.

ICT Development Process and Phases:

The development of mediamobilizing.org will focus on community and grassroots engagement, training of poor and working people in media skills, and collaborative programming and design of the site that contributes to the open source community.

Phase One (1-2 months): The first phase of the project is the training of poor and working people as editors of mediamobilizing.org. MMP has trained hundreds of people in media production, media literacy, and community journalism. This project will inaugurate an eight person team of trainees that will form an editorial committee for mediamobilizing.org. As an editorial committee they will coordinate with others in content production, lead the technical development and implementation of the site redesign, and continue to produce content themselves. This experience will later allow them to take the role of trainers, working with others who graduate through MMP's media production trainings to become editors of mediamobilizing.org. Harnessing on the ground organizing, which creates clarity in mission, fosters collaboration and dialogue, this team will help leverage online 'reach' to increase real world impact. They will also guide development of the second and third phases of the project.

Phase Two (2-6 months): The second phase of the project will attempt to tackle some of the leading issues of current day Information and Communications Technologies while redesigning mediamobilizing.org to create a central web space for social movement work in the region. Usability, dis-integration of technologies, and scalability have presented themselves as issues for small groups and non-profit organizations in using social media and other ICT. Even in its 7th version, Drupal has issues that would be helped by improvements in these areas. Small issues like the lack of consistency across interfaces present huge obstacles because they leave users with a high learning curve for using social media tools. Within Drupal, improvements to the translation interface would allow greater ease in creating multi-lingual accessible sites. 

The second phase of the project will therefore focus on increasing the access to new media tools by redesigning mediamobilizing.org with a high level of integration with cutting edge communications technologies. For example we look to bring together Drupal with blip.tv for web-based video distribution. We also will work to integrate Drupal with SalesForce, to ensure the facilitation of effective constituent relationship management in the online space. This phase of development looks to improve access to social media and multi-media technologies by making these tools more useable across Drupal without a high level of technical knowledge. Development will focus on integrating multi-media and social media tools like blip.tv and SalesForce and other tools like Facebook and Youtube more closely with Drupal. Along with this we will also focus on making content creation more accessible through improving areas like embedding video and audio in web posts, rich-text formatting, and user interface enhancements to improve ease of use for first time web users. In our work training people to use the internet and become content producers we have experienced the steep learning curve of content management systems as a barrier for users. We think improvements in these areas will be beneficial to others making use of content management systems for organizing. The redesign of mediamobilizing.org and the production of these points of integration and user interface enhancement will be carried out collaboratively with organizing communities that use them, ensuring the technology development is responsive to real world needs. It will also improve and produce Drupal modules, open and publicly available for others to implement the same integrations, with thorough documentation on how to do so.

Third Phase (Following FACTS Project): Along with these first two phases, we see a third phase that furthers this project as a part of city-wide digital inclusion efforts. This phase would extend development to facilitate online collaboration and learning, directly assisting broadband adoption programs and public computer centers by developing a learning management system closely integrated with mediamobilizing.org. It represents a culminating step for this project, using mediamobilizing.org to share learning tools on social media, and media production. The system would be available at Public Computer Centers and over the public Internet, to create continually evolving learning environments that can effectively engage thousands in digital and media literacy, skills training and social movement organizing. We are seeking the support of the FACT Social Justice Challenge for the first and second phases of this project. 

The Mission of The Media Mobilizing Project

The Media Mobilizing Project (MMP) exists to build a community media infrastructure for the growing movement to end poverty. Through the powerful combination of communications and organizing, we clarify the issues at stake and inspire and unite those who have a vested interest in change. By sharing our stories, we end the isolation of our communities and the sense that our struggles are separate from each other. Together, we develop the leaders and the networks we need to address the root causes of the problems we face. Media and communications act as the central nervous system of this movement -- a broad-based social movement to end poverty, led by poor and working people united across color lines.

Our History: MLK's Poor People's Campaign and the call for an Independent Media

MMP grows out of two separate but convergent histories of organizing around issues of poverty, human rights and communications rights. The first stretches back to Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign forty years ago, but has its most direct resonance in decades of organizing in Philadelphia and around the country to build a social movement to end poverty led by the poor. Two lessons emerged from this experience:

1. A communications rights framework is invaluable in building leadership and cohering an otherwise fragmented movement.

2. The future of movements for social and economic justice are dependent on the development of a community-based media production and distribution infrastructure.

The second history grows out of the Indymedia movement, where MMP structurally took shape as part of the Philadelphia Independent Media Center (Philly IMC) in 2005. Philly IMC is one node in a network of local autonomous media centers, known as the Indymedia network that has emerged globally since 1999. Today's global Indymedia network includes self-published news in at least thirty languages and over 200 local autonomous media centers on six continents around the world. Indymedia pioneered the use of technology to create open-publishing platforms that demystified the media making process, making community news production more accessible. The critical lesson of Indymedia is:

1. New communications technologies offer vital platforms for disenfranchised communities to speak.

Our Media Programs:

Through this framework MMP has created a series of media production programs, trainings, and communications platforms to organize poor and working people in the Philadelphia region and serve as a model for movement building beyond our region. 

MMPTV - Broadcast on Philadelphia's public access station, Philly Community Access Media, MMPTV presents a newsmagazine of struggles for healthcare, housing, and dignified work from the perspective and produced by those most affected.

Labor Justice Radio - Labor Justice radio is a monthly radio program that advocates justice for all working people. This program addresses issues that affect Philly's union members, working families and their communities. The show is produced collaboratively by members of Unified Taxi Workers Alliance of Pennsylvania, SEIU 32BJ, Philadelphia Joint Board/Workers United, and Media Mobilizing Project. Labor Justice Radio airs on West Philadelphia's community radio station, WPEB 88.1FM.

Radio Unidad - Radio Unidad is a monthly radio program broadcast on West Philadelphia's WPEB 88.1FM for the spanish speaking communities of West Philadelphia and beyond. Radio Unidad presents the shared struggles of immigrants and citizens through promoting unity across color lines and language, exposing the interconnectedness of often divided communities.

SwitchBoard - Switchboard is a text message/SMS based communications platform for organizers and groups to enhance discussion, coordination, and announcements. Scaling across the web and mobile phones SwitchBoard was developed through close collaboration with organizers to create a responsive, affordable, and easy to use open source platform for quick and scalable communication. 

Community Journalism and Digital Inclusion Initiative - Harnessing technology for progressive social change, this initiative is situated at the intersection of the crisis in journalism, growing rates of urban poverty, and the intractable problem of the digital divide. Through this program MMP trains members of Philadelphia’s impoverished communities in journalism, audio /video production and computer and Web literacy. Students will also receive the basic tools of the information age (Flip Video Cameras) in an effort to bridge the digital divide. 

Public Computer Centers - Over the next two years MMP is playing a key leadership role in the creation and improvement of 77 Public Computer Centers throughout Philadelphia. Funded through the federal Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program created in the national stimulus bill, MMP will extend all its programming across a number of these labs and ensure the accountability in the implementation of this Philadelphia-wide program collaborating with the City and non-profit Partners.

Mediamobilizing.org - Founded as a network of community blog pages, mediamobilizing.org is an online space to bring together the on the ground organizing, stories, news and, analysis of struggles across sectors of social movement organizing. Through this project we look to improve mediamobilizing.org to act as a nexus for the varied activities of our media production programs, trainings, and communications, while creating a model that leverages new communications technologies for ending the digital divide and organizing poor and working people.

Project Details

Project url: 

http://www.mediamobilizing.org

Project image: 

Project video: 

Project RSS: 

http://mediamobilizing.org/feed

Supporting organization: 

Media Mobilizing Project

Project Social Media Links: 

Media Mobilizing on Facebook

Media Mobilizing on Twitter

MMPTV Channel on Vimeo

Media Mobilizing on Youtube

Location