what's up? i'm coming from ATL, from an organization called the Southeast Community Research Center. we're a social change organization that provides technical assistance and CBPR training to community-based organizations in the South, mostly those working in Environmental Justice. my background is in public health, and i kind of got thrown into the tech world at this organization because it was needed. i was interested in it too. so, i've been learning recently about all the new tools and strategies for using the web for social change. my experience is in popular education, public health, and community-based participatory research. i train capoeira too! i'm definitely interested in learning about how to use new tools, seeing what has worked for others and challenging ourselves to continually question the issues surrounding access. if we do not incorporate everyone, then we are just fooling ourselves, exchanging one form of oppression for another. 

This is the same issue that organizers and participatory change agents have been attempting to address for years. The simple answer is that the tools alone are insufficient. Access alone is insufficient. As a tangent, the question of access needs to be addressed. There are still hoards of people, especially here in the South that have niether connection to the web nor computers. 

A popular education approach has been shown to be the most effective. Paulo Freire is the most often cited Pop Ed author. His approach is about engaging in a dialogue to essentially understand the culture of the community and their motivations. Using those cultural relics and motivations, one can then introduce new material (i.e., a new tool) with which they can express their knowledge. Successful implementations of this approach result in phenomenol achievements of empowerment, gained shared knowledge by all participants (community and outsider), and genuine steps towards social change.

I'm definitely interested in learning more about the ability of mashups to forward the social change agenda. Our organization provides technical assistance to social change community-based organizations, especially those working in environmental justice. There is a ton of data available, for example through Scorecard.org, the EPA, and the Right-to-know network. It would be interesting to see the different ways to reconfigure this data. Scorecard.org does this already in one way, but mashups, i think, could offer another way to go about doing it.