Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Location: N/A

Website: hurricanearchive.org

Launched in 2005, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media and the University of New Orleans, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institutions National Museum of American History and other partners, organized this project.

Generously funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2005-2008), the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank contributes to the ongoing effort by historians and archivists to preserve the record of these storms by collecting first-hand accounts, on-scene images, blog postings, and podcasts. We hope to foster some positive legacies by allowing the people affected by these storms to tell their stories in their own words, which as part of the historical record will remain accessible to a wide audience for generations to come.

This project builds on prior work by George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and other partners such as the Library of Congress and the Red Cross, to collect and preserve history online, especially through the ECHO project and the September 11 Digital Archive. It is part of a growing practice of using the Internet to preserve the past through “digital memory banks.”

For those interested in reading more about designing this project, or those considering launching a digital collecting projects, see: "Why Collecting History Online in Web 1.5, by Sheila Brennan and T. Mills Kelly.

Urban Prototyping

Location: San Francisco, CA

Website: www.urbanprototyping.org

UP: San Francisco is a festival centered around Placemaking Through Prototyping: How Citizen Experiments Reimagine the Public Realm. The festival fosters a wide array of new creative projects which blend the digital and physical to explore new possibilities in public space. Every project produced is open source, publicly documented, and replicable in any city in the world.

The project teams behind these works represent exciting new collaborations between the creative technology, participatory art, and urban design communities. The UP Festival 2012 series of events – centered around an open call for proposals, a weekend makeathon, and a public street exposition– brought together thousands of participants and attendees, building a community around civic engagement through creative work.

The UP exposition in October 2012 served as a high-visibility public venue for showcasing San Francisco’s leadership in the fields of technology, design, civic participation, and maker culture.

UP ia a global movement exploring how participatory design, art, and technology can improve cities. Each UP Festival uses its own strategy to uniquely address that city’s specific circumstances – soliciting, testing, and deploying digital and physical projects with high potential for impact.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), the San Francisco nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture, in partnership with Rebar, IDEO, and strong local partners in cities around the globe.

UP: San Francisco is produced in partnership with Intersection for the Arts and the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation, with many other organizations contributing to the effort. For more information, see our Partners page.

San Francisco is the second city to host an UP Festival, with Singapore hosting the inaugural festival in conjunction with the World Cities Summit in June-July 2012. Produced in partnership with Newton Circus and Re:Imagine Group,

UP Singapore focused on how public and private data could be leveraged to build new web and mobile applications promoting health and sustainability.