Boston Area Social Network

 
A project of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, UMass-Boston, and Massachusetts Campus Compact, funded by the Corporation for National and Community Service through Learn & Serve America

 
Imagine harnessing the energies of up to a quarter of a million undergraduates in a single metropolitan area. Working with other citizens, they give time and energy, discuss and deliberate, learn from one another and exchange ideas, recruit peers to join them, and collect, analyze, and present information about the community’s issues and assets. In all this work, they cross lines of race, culture, and social class. These barriers have been further diminished by these students’ use of Web 2.0 technologies.

Our team has developed a powerful social software platform. This software is based on Community Knowledgebase, an application that was created for newspapers, local governments, and other clients to map and analyze their communities’ civil society. Users enter information about issues, problems, and local organizations; the software generates analytical diagrams and maps that help them in planning. By December 2008, we will have begun integrating YouthMap with popular social networking tools such as Facebook and MySpace. This platform will be available for community collaboration among college students (and others) in the Boston area.

Students are already performing hands-on service and activism projects through their various institutions. Some through classes and others though student groups. Non-college-students (of any age) will also be welcome to participate.

Our social network platform will help participants throughout the Boston metropolitan area to further existing service projects by:

 

a)      discussing common issues and concerns that arise in their various projects;

b)      coordinating their work in order to enhance their impact on community problems;

c)      recruiting additional partners, including fellow students who will join service-learning for the first time thanks to this recruitment, or who will shift from episodic and superficial volunteering efforts to serious engagement with issues;

d)      collectively conducting research to reveal the network of civic actors in the metro area and how these organizations and individuals work on various issues. This cumulative “map” of the community's civil society will be published on the web as a resource for anyone who is planning service work. The software will make building this map relatively easy. It will add a research/analysis dimension to many of the students’ projects, thereby making the “service” into service-learning. It will help students to draw on expertise in planning their service activities.

 

This platform will be based on four layers of social networking:

1) The personal network layer will provide a set of application program interfaces (APIs) to available social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Students and other participants will use the APIs to link to their own existing social networking pages, thus creating decentralized opportunities for networking, discussion, and collaboration. Additionally, we will draw students across all the major social networking services and messaging environments such as Yahoo Messenger, MSN Live Messenger, and AOL Instant Messenger. In this way students  can connect with our collaboration site potentially bringing their network of friends with them. This strategy leverages the power of existing social network platforms to pull students into this highly productive network.

2) The community network layer draws from Community Knowledgebase, a powerful tool for community network-visualization and collaboration, developed for governments, local journalism, and non-profits. When students encounter people, organizations, and ideas in their service and activism work, they can enter information about each of these these key players and how they relate. The information that they contribute builds a growing network map of the whole Boston community that any user can search, edit, and see what individuals work on particular issues, how issues and organizations are connected in the real community, and where there are gaps (such as clusters of organizations that do not seem to connect to each other). In addition to the network information that students may contribute by clicking a link and filling out a form, the software will also pull information from public databases such as the archives of the Boston Globe to help populate the map. Students can then consult the map to guide local service work and activism.

3) The collaboration layer will allow students to engage in a wide-variety of collaborative projects, some internal to the campus, some cross-campus, and others between campus and community networks. In this way we will push students outward, to build broader campus and community networks. The tools will be used to build and extend networks, track documents and shared work products, provide easy to use web-building platforms, and to track network building progress in a visual way. So students will build their networks out and see progress extend across the entire campus and community.

4) The competition layer will draw from multi-player games that use teamwork and points to encourage continuing play and further build networks. Students may form teams and compete for recognition for recruiting new participants, collecting information about the community, and taking other specific actions that advance this overall project. Students and teams will be able to qualify as experts on particular issues or neighborhoods. Thus the gaming layer will drive the collaboration layer.