During the last four years, ITSRG has sponsored the BITS Program, an after school and summer intensive program aimed at increasing information technology skills among students enrolled in local public high schools. The program has involved over 400 high school students and reached out to their families across North Philadelphia to raise community technology skills and improve preparedness of students to pursue their educational aims. We focus particularly on broadening participation among underrepresented youth in science, technology, engineering and math - so called STEM fields of study.

Today, Barack Obama’s campaign held a rally at Progress Plaza, located in North Philadelphia - next door to ITSRG’s location on Temple University’s Main Campus. Our recent opening of the ITSRG Workroom, a community-university computer technology learning space located in University Services Building at the corner of Broad and Oxford Streets, is the culmination of our long effort to situate our community outreach and collaborative programs in a dedicated lab on Temple University’s campus. We have aimed to create a spot where students from the surrounding neighborhoods can join with Temple students and faculty in the exploration of the local community, gain an appreciation of the geographer’s eye for learning about people and places, and build information technology and geographic analysis skills through hands on learning activities that are fun to engage.

Our students have been studying Progress Plaza throughout these past four years. They have examined it in the context of the Charles Blockson-inspired program to demarkate sites of importance in the African American experience throughout Philadelphia. They have examined it in terms of its role in supporting community health because of the dental and chiropractic community services that are located at the shopping center. They have considered the magnitude of the loss of the neighborhood’s only supermarket ten years ago and its long term impacts on community nutritional needs and food security concerns. They have anticipated, along with the whole ITSRG staff, the promise of the return of a new grocery store. They have examined the use of Progress Plaza’s ramps to provide accessibility for wheelchair users to the shops and services and thus fostered an understanding of how built environments can shape social inclusion in the local economy. They have tested the availability of wireless Internet services through Philadelphia’s free wi-fi available through Wireless Philadelphia at Progess Plaza, concluding that the wall along Broad Street is not a bad spot from which to use an Ipod Touch!

As ITSRG begins recruitment for BITS 2008, we observe the dramatic changes that are occuring at this historic hub of local economic development in North Philadelphia. Who could have imagined when we began teaching students from the community how to take digital photos, create blogs, make maps using web applications, and use collaborative technologies to share their work with each other that this spot would be a backdrop in a presidential election of unprecidented historic proportions four years later? The event may be momentary, but the symbolism at this historic site founded by Leon Sullivan forty years ago will resonate in this community’s memories for years to come. Maybe that is why people stood in a half-mile long line beginning at 6:00 am this morning to catch a glimpse and be a part of the moment.

Michele Masucci, Director - ITSRG
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.