ITSRG is sponsoring a Tweetup for Earth Day, April 22, 2009 called #GreenPhilly! The Center for the Humanities at Temple - CHAT - is cosponsoring the event.

Follow the event on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/itsrg.

The #greenphilly Tweetup Schedule is here.

Here is a list of social media projects showcasing environmental issues for Philadelphia and beyond that will be featured participants sharing content through Twitter for the 24 hour event:

The Green Life Philadelphia Project

http://greenyourlifephilly.blogspot.com/
http://livingecofriendlylifestyle.blogspot.com/
http://livingtheecolife.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/livingtheecolif
http://twitter.com/greenlifephilly
http://greenlifephilly.weebly.com/
http://twitter.com/newxrose
http://twitter.com/kcov

The delAware Project

http://twitter.com/delaware
http://www.pollutionpolitics.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/greengertrude
http://delawareriver.blogspot.com/
http://delawareriverchemistry.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/4_eveRgreen

The Ecovillage Evolution Project

http://twitter.com/ecovillages
http://ecovillageevolution.blogspot.com/
http://ecovillagepotential.blogspot.com/
http://www.ecovillagenergy.blogspot.com/
http://ecovillagevolution.tumblr.com/

The E-Wasted Project

http://twitter.com/ewasted
http://connecting-the-electronic-dots.blogspot.com/
EwasteSuzie25
http://kamara2000.blogspot.com

The Sustainable Housing Techniques Project

Sustainable Housing Techniques
http://twitter.com/SustainableHous
http://sustainablehousingprojects.blogspot.com/
http://picasaweb.google.com/brown.kris10/SeniorSeminarPhotoGallery#slideshow
http://repurposinglife.blogspot.com/
Capzles Site

The Philly Green Vision Project

http://www.phillygreenness.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/greenphilly
http://artofgreen-jsims.blogspot.com/
http://howgreenisphilly.blogspot.com
http://agreenvision.wordpress.com

ITSRG is sponsoring an Earth Day Tweetup on Wednesday, April 22, 2009. The aim of the event is to raise awareness about environmental issues, actions and research related to Philadelphia, PA. 

The event is being organized with Temple University researchers, students enrolled in Environmental Studies Senior Seminar course who have developed social media projects this semester, with Philadelphia area environmental researchers, advocates, and citizens and with animal activists on Twitter. 

The event will begin at 12 am on Aprill 22 and continue for 24 hours. Prime Tweetup hours are from 8 pm- Midnight on the evening of April 22. We will post a schedule of activities that will comprise the Tweetup on this blog, along with a list of environmental social media projects developed at Temple University.

There are two Twtvites available to mark your interest: 

http://twtvite.com/4aznab

http://twtvite.com/teyj3j

You can follow and engage the discussion by using #greenphilly #earthtweet #templeu in your twitter messages. Follow us here:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=greenphilly

Stay posted to our blog for more information in the coming days.

Michele Masucci
Director, ITSRG
Temple University

The post above, tweeted around 7 pm last night, set off a tweetstorm of LOLs, sarcastic advice, witty patois, and outright disbelief both inside the venue for the McCain dinner to honor Obama on the eve of the inauguration and outside across the twitter network of @ev. Some of @ev's twitter followers joined the fun within seconds:

"don't you just love it that politicians are so "with it" : - ) "

 "Very jealous of @gmc @konatbone @ev and @sacca right now... "
   
"LOL! tell him you have a great mid range system! "

"Tweeter is a much better name. Of course Stat.us was even better."

"You should've asked if he was excited about being Secretary of the Anterior in response."

@ev responded by tweeting: "Travis (@konatbone) is signing up Senator Wicker to Twitter via sms: @magnolia09," followed by a question about which senators are on Twitter. The responses came quickly: Clinton, Biden, Dodd, Franken, OBAMA and  countless links to congressional twitterer aggregators. With so many thousands of emails sorting the silos of political and technology knowledge bases, a few folks might have missed a really cool pic of @zappos in a tux, also attending the dinner.

It seems likely that Obama will keep his Blackberry, and for good reason. With CEOs of major technology companies all in a room electronically high-fiving their tweeps - while simultaneously mobilizing a just-in-time research force consisting of tech savvy and interested followers around the world - the movement of information through social networks has never been speedier and more able to transform the dynamics of a given space at a given time. 

Twitter followers of dinner participants were put in the place, albeit through the eyes of tech movers and shakers. Yet older established politicos and tech elite alike were exposed for the breathtaking quality of the information silos that shape their decision making worlds. The dinner space was subtly altered by the tweet heard round the tech-crunched world, even if only adding a bit of snarky levity to the milieu.  Yet through the digital footprint of the event, we gain yet another reminder of the profound ways in which social media are reshaping the creation of knowledge far beyond the boundaries of that room.

Michele Masucci
Director, ITSRG
Temple University

Click here to view all photos
in slideshow by Chris Serik.

I have to admit, I was rather skeptical of the entire Park(ing) Day concept in the days leading up to the event.  I seemed like just another exercise in green futility: good intentions wrapped in the idealism of collegiate exuberance, distributed to like-minded individuals with extra care not to ruffle any feathers along the way.  Our banishment from the greater Philadelphia Park(ing) Day participants, due to our late arrival and associated liability concerns, did not help matters any.  It is always comforting to be a fool in the company of fools, rather than a lonely fool mimicking the activities of a bunch of fools across town who didn't have room on their release forms for our foolishness.   

In addition to these conceptual concerns, I was having trouble arranging a picture in my head of how these pieces were going to fit together into a cohesive unit that was both pleasing to the eye and compelling enough for people to take time out of their day to participate meaningfully.  On the day of the event, however, the many pieces of Park(ing) Day seemed to fall into place with little effort, like a jigsaw puzzle dumped onto the asphalt in perfect order.  The portions of the exhibit constructed by my classmates were light years beyond my expectations in terms of quality and relevance; and the park took on a deeper and more palatable shade of green thanks to the help of a local gardening center that loaned a majority of the plants within the exhibit.

These developments produced a profound change of heart and as the day wore on I found myself taking some pride in our efforts and engaging passersby with that sentiment worn conspicuously on my sleeve.  But the event did not reveal its full promise until late in the afternoon, when my wife and son arrived.

The local news cameraman in attendance was filming my son, Henry, tottering through our little park when I had an epiphany of sorts.  As I knelt down to steady my 10-month old, the blur of the passing traffic and din of their engines gave the impression that our little park was under siege.  My son, oblivious to all but the leaves and flowers at the tips of his tiny fingers, suddenly became a symbol of Innocence in a Paradise Lost.  It was almost as if he was seeking refuge from the storm of human progress swirling around him in our modest little oasis.

Not being particularly full of religion, I had always wondered what kind of wisdom I could pass down to my son, what kind of sage-like advice I could possibly muster while maintaining a straight face.  And here it was.   Respect for the natural world and its integral place within the human experience is a value of the highest order, one well worth passing on to the next generation.  The fact that people all over the country were simultaneously erecting protest parks in parking spaces was a clear symptom of the deep imbalance that human activities had imposed on the planet and its evolutionarily honed systems.

As I plucked my son up from the walkway, I made a solemn oath to teach him a better way.  To show him that progress is not always defined by economic growth or dollars and cents.  To teach him that the current paradigm of human progress will eventually crash headlong into the very real limits of a finite Earth, flipping civilization on its head and giving the impression that we had been descending all along.  To instill in him that every patch of green was worth saving from the lacquer of concrete and steel dripping across the earthly realm in complex gobs of greed, subsistence, and foolishness.

So what began as an exercise in futility approached with a cynically raised eyebrow, ended as an occasion for high-minded rhetoric and solemn oaths to future generations.  What a difference a Park(ing) Day makes.   

December 16, 2008
Lance Duroni
Temple University

ITSRG partnered with students enrolled in Environmental Policy Issues, a course offered by the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University, to mount a Park(ing) Day space on North Broad Street last Friday. The students in the course planned and executed the event. ITSRG has supported the project dissemination through maintaining a live blog of the event on our Twitter feed last Friday and continuing to integrate feedback into the project blog found at: http://plantyourpark.tumblr.com.

Park(ing) Day is a once yearly event that has a simple premise: organize people to plant a one-day-only park in a metered parking space, preferably in a visible and high traffic locale. The aim of the event is to raise awareness about the implications of our automobile driven lifestyles and the quality of urban spaces. The day has expanded to become an international event from its grassroots start in San Francisco in 2005.

Our investigation of web activities related to Park(ing) Day reveals that very few universities explicitly engaged the event. We are aware of the University of Kentucky's GreenKY event because they followed ours via our Twitter feed and blog. We have also found information about the event organized by architecture students at the University of Southern California through their blog post. Students are clearly deeply connected with spaces that were created all over the country, however we found it interesting that little attention to their involvement per se is rising to the awareness of academic departments and researchers. We would love to catalog other events that students created in connection with their academic courses of study and student organizations, so please email us with your links.

We suggest that there are at three themes that provoke interest in Park(ing) Day and other web-disseminated environmental campaigns like it for the academic and organizing information technology, education and geographic communities.

First, Park(ing) Day illustrates the power of viral campaigning that characterizes web 2.0 dissemination approaches.  Nearly 70 cities participated, with multiple parks created throughout via the assistance of what is now the National Park(ing) Day organization. This illustrates the rapid increase in attention to the event that has been generated within the blogosphere. Interestingly, our local official organizers encouraged us to implement our site as a "guerilla" park because we only recently connected with them when classes started in September. Given that just three years ago, the entire event was uncoordinated by local and national organizers, we found their suggestion to work outside of the organizer and city-defined parameters quite intriguiging.

Second, Park(ing) Day represents the state of the blogosphere in terms of the connections between different social media to promote the event and call attention to parks created. Flickr photos are fed to national and local organizer websites, and individual parks garner attention from both mainstream and independent news media.

Third, the geographic implications of the event are also noteworthy. Because flickr photos can not only be geotagged but also geo-rssed (is that really a word now?), one can discover parks that were created well after the event occured and in concert with other photographs about unique locations situated nearby.

Finally, one gains an appreciation of the degree to which organizing is being reshaped by the blogosphere and interconnected web 2.0 technologies. Our stats related to this event include not only the thousands who drove by our highly trafficed locale, the hundreds who walked by, and the dozens who spent real time in the park throughout the day - but also our Twitterers followers, the news reporters who appeared because they followed our Tweets, their audiences, our student participants and their social networks, and our broader BITS and ITSRG program participants and their social networks who track us on our blogs regularly. We suggest that the magnitude of our individual event, along with the National phenomenon, illustrates that web 2.0 and interactive mapping tools exponentially increase the numbers of people and range of their interests exposed to these activities, while simultaneously illustrating vastly different levels of engagement in the ideas and substance of the event.

Michele Masucci
Caroline Guigar
Temple University

Jonathan Otto, Cartographic Intern at ITSRG created the map below of Green Spaces in Philadelphia along with Philly Park(ing) Day 2008 sites, shown in red. Our site was chosen because of the relative lack of parks and open spaces off campus in North Philadelphia.