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In 2003, I drafted a brief piece on community technology and its relationship to public discourse. This piece can be found at: Community Technology and Public Discourse.

I have just reread this work. It is interesting to see where my thinking on this has progressed. In the last year, infrastructure development at LTC has progressed dramatically. The Community Software Lab continues to expand its tools and activiites and with the recent re-launch of the MVHub plans are in place for a community web portal. The tools are there, the challenge now is to harness them for further community development. [Dan MacNeil, David Seigal, and Eric Milosevic] should be appauled for their work in pushing these activities forward.

Also during the last year, LTC has launched the Digital Bicycle as a means explore methods for sharing and distributing media content via the Internet. Initiated by Daniell Krawczyk, this work was prompted by the need to more efficiently share youth media generated at the various Youth Channel members (the Youth Channel is a group of communtiy media centers working to create a youth media culture within these centers). One of the first concrete projects prompted by the Digital Bicycle is a BitTorrent project initiated in collaboration with the Commonwealth Broadband Collabortive.

To date the CBC has used Internet distribution to share three of its “First Tuesday” programs. In addition to BitTorrent, FTP access has also been used. At the CBC, Nettrice Gaskins, Saul Baizman, and James Fishwick have been critically engaged. Ginny Berkowitz and Jim Youll at Cambridge Community Television have also actively worked to think through these mechanisms.

I hope to use this space to continue exploring (and sharing) my thoughts on new opportunities for what I am currently calling Community Communications.

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