Violence In Boston’s work revolves around educating the surrounding community and in order to do so, they use their social media platforms heavily; specifically, they use Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. As a team, we each take one day of the week and have divided the weekends throughout the semester in an effort to break the work up evenly. Each day, we receive notifications from four Twitter pages: @BEMSincidents, @LiveBoston617, @universalhub, and @stacos. The respective accounts notify their followers, who majority live in the greater Boston area, about incidents of violence (gunshots and stabbings, for example) and we use this information to educate VIB’s followers. In our posts, in order to respect the privacy of the potential victim, we never include names or concrete addresses. Instead, our posts include the time, area of the city, type of violence that occurred, the street(s) names, and #ViolenceInBoston.

Additionally, we recently made the decision to color code each post which, after more incidents occur, will illustrate specific patterns in terms of areas that are home to higher rates of violence. For example, in less than a week, there were two incidents of gun violence in Roxbury (which is now represented by the purple color) and visually, it is now obvious that more counts of violence take place in certain areas. Having the opportunity to work with VIB, specifically through their social media, has given our group an insight to the extreme amounts of violence that take place in and around the greater city of Boston and the importance in using specific resources (in our case, technology) to educate those around you.