The Merrimack Valley Hub: Community Connections Section

LTC

Lowell, United States of America

Felicia Sullivan
community@ltc.org
Daniell Krawczyk
cpc@ltc.org
Robert Haigh
exec@ltc.org

 

Description

The Merrimack Valley Hub (http://www.mvhub.com) is an online community resource and information portal. Through the efforts of local Community Software Lab (http://csl.ltc.org) and a strong set of community-based partnerships, this portal has two main anchor features (a community services directory and a community events calendar). These have been developed completely using open source under the GPL.

As one of the lead agencies, LTC (http://www.ltc.org), is interested in building locally controlled and sustainable information systems dedicated to serving the residents of our region. We are also dedicated to advancing the tools available to other communities in service of online communications.

The next phase of the MVHub.com project is to build out a community connection section that would allow our residents to interate with one another. File sharing (specifically locally created photos, music and video), participatory publishing (via blogs) and dynamic community debate (via discussion forums) are the tools we would like to incorporate into the overall project. We have begun work in this area (see http://cityvoices.ltc.org- community blog- http://10speed.ltc.org - bittorrent project, and http://www.flickr.com/groups/48600081582@N01/ - photo pool). We have local talent and personnel who are familiar enough to describe / design specs. We would be happy do develop one or all of these tools. We specifically want independence from commercial providers and the ability to revist and revamp as future needs determine.

We would be very interested in working with your group on these projects.

Expectations

LTC is dedicated to expanding the concept of community media and technology into one of community communication. We combine traditional PEG cable access with community technology and community info systems. We want to promote local use of a range of tools in assisting communities to communicate and build strong local infrastructure, skills and content. We want to use these tools to build a stronger community for all who reside here and hope that the lessons we learned can be effectively used by others engaged in similar work. We believe we have been successful thus far in accomplishing this work.

Realistically, we hope to add new tools to our community web portal that will allow others to become engaged in our work.

What proposer can provide for Evergreen

Existing project that can be scaled out. Staff who are knowledgeable and excited about developments of technology for community benefit. Connections to other community media and technology centers and a willingness to share our project and progress with others. We love to collaborate and would work very hard to provide exposure to Evergreen student's work.

Reasons to collaborate

We would like to share the practical work we have already done in this area, gain additional expertise for our own community, build useful tools for other communities engaged in similar work.