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

BITS student Ken Sprull designed the logo above in the summer of 2007 as part of his experience to engage in actions to improve local environmental quality in North Philadelphia.  He, along with other students in his group, strongly articulated the viewpoint that North Philadelphia environmental concerns are deeply connected to social ones. Their perspective was that those include the need to foster racial harmony and reduce violence in their daily lives. His logo and the group's sponsorship of community-building  events to raise local environmental awareness captured this sentiment.

With this, and many other similar exchanges in our experiences implementing the BITS Program during the past four years in mind, we followed with great interest the events of the presidential election campaign throughout last year. Our staff, the students and  families with whom we work, and Temple students have found the campaign season and Obama's story of community organizer to President-elect to be fascinating as well as inspirational. Our attention has been on the use of information technologies by the candidates, the shocking media attention paid to one of our own staff who was at the center of a national debate on journalistic ethics in a web 2.0 era, and Obama's visit to historic Progress Plaza in October, a site that students in the BITS Program have been depicting as part of our community geographic information systems (GIS) initiative during the past four years.

The logistical juggernaut of the upcoming historic Presidential Inauguration has been the topic of lively conversation during the past few weeks at ITSRG. We spent considerable time debating whether or not to attend, and if so how. We ultimately decided to follow events from the ITSRG Workroom, the spot that has been our vantage point throughout the past year.

We are pleased to share the news that the Office of the Provost of Temple University recently announced that classes in session on the first day of the semester - Inauguration Day - Tuesday,  January 20th may be canceled at the discretion of the instructor from 10:10 am through 1:00 pm so that students and faculty can watch the Inauguration Ceremony. Events will be shown on large screen TVs at five locations across campus:

Howard Gittis Student Center, Room 200, Main Campus
Mitten Hall, Great Court, Main Campus
Bright Hall Lounge, Ambler
Learning Center Auditorium, Ambler
Student Faculty Center, Health Science Campus

ITSRG will share perspectives throughout the day via our blogs and Twitter feed, including those of BITS students with whom we have worked over the years.

Michele Masucci, Director
ITSRG

In his Stuff White People Like blog, humorist and cultural critic (to use both terms rather loosely) Christian Lander sarcastically sings the praises of 'raising awareness.’ Tongue held firmly in cheek, Lander defines ‘awareness’ as ‘the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it.’

Now, awareness isn’t all bad; in fact, it really is an important thing, an essential component to any kind of major movement for change. Lander’s point, and my own, is that awareness in isolation is pretty useless. A nice gesture, sure, but so was that 'Mission Accomplished’ banner we had flying over in the Persian Gulf a few years ago—and we all know how well that worked out.

National PARK(ing) Day, as it currently exists, is all about raising awareness. It’s a powerful communication tool, taking advantage of the high visibility of its PARKs to help engender a re-imagination of the urban landscape. And to that extent, it’s fantastic. The way a message is communicated is often as valuable as the message itself (as any post-Inconvenient Truth convert to climate change activism will no doubt confirm for you), and a PARK is a pretty memorable medium.

The problem, however, is that communication—even especially effective communication—can only get you so far. The message matters, obviously, but so do the various uses to which that message is put.

Ostensibly, PARK(ing) Day is supposed to be about making our cities greener, and thereby more livable. For a number of the participants in Philadelphia’s PARK(ing) Day, however, making our cities greener means making them more money. Of approximately 35 “official” participants in PARK(ing) Philly, more than fifteen were architecture, landscape architecture, design or engineering firms for whom “the greening of Philadelphia” also means the greening of their wallets. While it’s not my place to say whether the various national and international firms that participated in Philadelphia’s PARK(ing) Day truly did so altruistically, it’s also impossible to deny that for such firms, a purely monetary interest in greener cities most definitely does exist.

Whether or not much of Philadelphia’s “official” PARK(ing) Day event (organized, it must be noted, by the American Institute of Architects) violated the philosophical spirit of PARK(ing) Day, numerous aesthetic violations most definitely did occur, as “official” participants dispensed with possibly the most poetic aspect of a real PARK(ing) Day celebration—the meter itself.

Talking the Parking Authority into extending the two-hour time limit on a space is one thing; talking the Parking Authority into actually bagging off the meters is entirely another. As if the corporatization of Philadelphia’s PARK(ing) Day hadn’t done enough to kill off the anarchic spirit of the initial event, the AIA and PPA felt it was necessary to deliver this coup de grace. Working within the law to perform an act the legal establishment might not necessarily love (but can’t legally do anything about) is different from asking the same legal establishment to allow you, just this once, to “break” the law—with official sanction. It’s like shoplifting something you’ve already paid for: for all intents and purpose, an empty gesture.

Later in his entry on ‘awareness,’ Lander makes another interesting point: ‘Raising awareness is also awesome because once you raise awareness to an acceptable, arbitrary level, you can just back off and say, “Bam! did my part. Now it’s your turn. Fix it.”’ The humor in Lander’s statement, unfortunately, stems from its truth. For many of its participants, PARK(ing) Day 2008 is likely to be an isolated event; awareness raised, they can now go back to living their lives, and perhaps expecting a little more business to trickle in as a result of their “involvment.”

For the Temple students involved in this event, however, September 19th was just the beginning of a process about more than just “awareness.” It’s about investment, it’s about involvement, it’s about imagining our future.

And we’re not poised to make a cent out of the whole thing.

Peter A. Chomko
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.

ITSRG, Temple University's Information Technology and Society Research Group, is initiating ITSpace, a blog related to the societal dimensions of information and communication technologies. ITSpace is particularly interested in posts that examine the intersection of geography, information and communications technologies, health, education and the environment. Original Post Date: 03/24/3008

Michele Masucci
Temple University