Megan Garber of the Nieman Journalism Lab posted a writeup on our recent Knight News Challenge grant along with some thoughts on civic technologies:

During a year that found many of the winning KNC projects focused on data management, The Public Lab’s toolkit is something of an outlier. And that’s part of the point. “Knight is very interested in digital issues,” Warren notes; “but one thing that I think interested them about our project is that a lot of it is not digital — or not online, per se. The main activity we’re advocating is going to beaches and flying balloons.”

Which is not to say that the project is tech-phobic or even entirely analog. The Public Lab’s members certainly use digital tools (witness The Public Laboratory Archive, which hosts all of the data they’ve collected so far); and as part of C4 and MIT’s Media Lab, they share workspace with, you know, robots. It’s just that technology, Warren notes, is ancillary. “I think we’re actually pretty sophisticated on the tech side,” he says, “but we’re not subservient to it.”

That makes sense: A civic media toolkit, if its previous incarnations are any measure, isn’t just about information-gathering; it’s also about empowering community members to learn about, and document, their immediate environments, ecological or otherwise. While digital tools have their place in that process, it’s the analog items — kites and their counterparts — that, on the ground (and in the air), can actually be most helpful in solving particular problems. They also tend to be cheaper and more easily accessible in rural areas where they might be most useful. Part of the thinking the Public Lab members will do as they develop their civic media toolkit on a broader plane will involve informed judgments when it comes to technology itself: what’s truly useful, and what’s extraneous. With each new idea and application for the toolkit, “the challenge to us is to question whether it’s a good idea at all,” Warren notes.

Read the full post here: http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/07/the-macgyver-method-with-news-challenge-funding-the-public-lab-is-building-up-its-civic-media-toolkit/