Week 6: Final Project

ABOUT

You can view my final project at: https://lydiajessup.github.io/nycb-radio/

Try stations:

• Brooklyn 1

• Bronx 11

• Manhattan 9

• Manhattan 12

• Queens 6

• Queens 9

• Staten Island 3

Technical

I built this with p5js and basic html and css. You can view the code here: https://github.com/lydiajessup/nycb-radio

Ackowledgements

A HUGE thank you to the following people who read community board meeting notes:

Aaron Moreno

Adi Dahiya

Cara Neel

Hannah Tardie

Jonathan Koch

Megan Tracy

Kaelyn Cincotta

And a final thank you to Dana Elkis for visual language consultation!

Week 5: Final Project Draft

This week I worked on building the website to host the community board meeting notes.

I started by making a basic site and based the scroll bar feature off of one of Allison Parrish’s examples in p5.js. I started by adding structure for the labels.

Then I added text and the numbers for tuning. At first I had whole numbers, but then I decided to replace the numbers with dots for every five so that there was more space.

Finally color (I am still playing around with this)!

Finally, I added some example sounds to test out how the scroll feature would work. So far, the Brooklyn #1 and Bronx #1 stations work. Right now you can view the website on github pages: https://lydiajessup.github.io/nycb-radio/

The full code is on github here.

Next I need to:

• replace the black box with a razzle dazzle pattern

• upload real meeting notes

Week 4: Problem Area/Final Project Proposal

This problem space - civic engagement - is very complex and the smaller problem space I’m trying to tackle - community board meetings in New York - is still very complex. The challenge I’m trying to tackle on this project is specifically access to community board information, which will hopefully translate into first, awareness about community boards and community issues and second, eventually greater attendance.

It’s impossible I think to pinpoint a root cause, but I think that contributing factors to poor access to this information include 1) lack of money/public resources devoted to digital communications 2) an old system that hasn’t been updated for the 21st century 3) lack of awareness around importance of this information and 4) people with power in this system not wanting others to access it. I hope that my project can begin address at least a few of these.

This week I started to formalize my plans for my website radio. I started by making a mood board:

Then I sketched out some layout options, thinking about website clicking and dragging functionality:

I like the retro look and the contrast with modern web page design, but I also want to make it colorful and fun since most people consider this a boring topic. My friend Dana introduced me to razzle dazzle warship paint (more formally called dazzle camouflage) from WWI and since then it’s been popping up everywhere for me, perhaps because I have been thinking a lot about surveillance this semester. I originally thought that all of the dazzle was black and white, but recently realized this is because the photos are in black and white and the ships were actually brilliant colors! I love thinking about bright ships going around the ocean.

As I’ve been thinking about surveillance, I’ve been thinking in particular about the aesthetics of obfuscation efforts (in order to avoid surveillance). I like the idea of this being a radio for and by citizens and putting the dazzle on the website to “obscure” it from entities (the dazzle paint wasn’t actually meant to conceal ships, but to make estimating their speed, trajectory, etc difficult) trying to overly surveil activities. Of course this wouldn’t actually work and community boards are part of a larger entity that normally does a lot of surveilling, but that’s the way it connected in my mind. I think this may have also come from thinking of something to replace the speaker on the old radio layout. So here is my dazzle mood board:

This helped me make a more detailed layout and make a few palette options for my website:

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

I also looked into the history of Citizen Band Radio, but ran out of time to dig into this. I’d like to ground this in the history of radio or at least think about how to be in conversation with these previous technologies and efforts.

Week 3: Ecosystem Mapping

This week our assignment was to pick an issue/topic area for our final project and create an ecosystem map. Our final assignment is to “Create a product prototype or installation that either A) provides more efficient government services or advances human rights or B) that addresses or comments on the growing various threats that technology poses civil society.”

I have chosen A, to create a prototype that provides more efficient government services. In particular, I am focusing on civic engagement through community boards in New York City.

Below is a spreadsheet I made with my ecosystem map following the guide above (click to enlarge). I plan to continue to revise this as I learn more about this topic (you’ll see some spots are blank). You can also view the google sheet version here. I relied heavily on the NYC Community Board about page to make this.

View fullsize

Taking this into consideration, below are some responses to the final questions in the ecosystem mapping process:

What does the space need? One clear need is greater diversity and attendance at community board meetings. The flip side of this need is better methods to engage and communicate with residents. For residents, a need is easier access to information and transparency in the governance system.

What are the structural gaps? The model of showing up in person in order to access information and share your opinion is designed for a small town before the internet, not a busy metropolitan and modern city. Right now the notes from community board meetings are online, but the interface is cumbersome and difficult to navigate. I also wonder if there is an internal issue management system for boards to keep track of and elevate issues.

What are the biggest opportunities to create value? Either as a way to add value to someone else’s endeavor or as a standalone project? I would like to focus on access to information from community board meetings for residents. I think that increasing access could also help increase engagement and interest in community boards and local issues.

How can you help them? How can they help you? I believe I can contribute my coding and design skills to create a New York Community Board (NYCB) Radio website. To start, community board notes in a text file format instead of pdf would be a huge help! Or audio recordings!

Week 0: Statement of Purpose

In college I studied International Relations and after I graduated I moved to Peru where I worked for an NGO with a community health worker program. I was set on a career in diplomacy and had even already passed the Foreign Service Officer Test. I then moved to Lima to work for Innovations for Poverty Action, a development policy research group. During my time there I assisted with the evaluation of a text messaging platform to build trust and mitigate conflicts between community members and mining companies. This was the first time I saw firsthand how technology can be used as a social justice tool.

I found this work interesting and rewarding, but moved by the Black Lives Matter movement, I felt called to work on social issues in my own country. This led me to the UChicago Crime Lab where I worked as a Research Manager for three years on evaluations of youth violence prevention programs. I loved this work, especially collaborating with city agencies to make progress on the city’s most pressing challenges. But I also I saw how far behind the public sector is in terms of technology, which motivated me to teach myself coding and audit classes at UChicago and is what ultimately led me to ITP.

I believe that the next technological revolution needs to be in governance. Most questions people ask about technology are about how we can be more efficient, have access to more information, or get to places faster, but these are tools, not ends in themselves. Instead, I think we need to ask: how do we design systems that enable our best humanity? Technology is not capable of building just and equitable social systems on its own. That ability and responsibility is ours.