We are pleased to announce that Upgrade! New York is now co-produced in collaboration with Brooklyn-based activist organization Not An Alternative, and will focus on topics related to open source activist and creative practices for the upcoming year.
This gathering took place at Not An Alternative’s storefront gallery space, The Change You Want To See, and featured a talk and video screening from the September 2007 Monk protests, known as the Saffron Revolution, in which mobile phones and the internet allowed protesters to coordinate and publicize the largest protests seen in a generation.
As an introduction to this season’s theme for Upgrade! New York, Clay Shirky discussed the concepts of forking and failure in the open source process, and its value to the context of activism and the creative process.
Kevin Connor & Matthew Skomarovsky from LittleSis.org (an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you) & David Nolen and myself of ShiftSpace have teamed up and together with Eyebeam have submitted an application for the Knight News Challenge. It is a cross between what LittleSis and ShiftSpace do best, applied to a rethinking of social media meets local journalism. We’re trying to get the best of both centralization (of collaboration and databases) and decentralization (of data sources, contribution and consumption) – combine what makes both the centralized Wikipedia and the distributed blogosphere. From the application:
As an introduction to our Upgrade New York year theme we are excited to announce this month’s speaker, Clay Shirky. Clay will discuss the concepts of fork and failure in the open source process and will open them to discussion in the context of activism and the creative process.
Freefarmfeed is an automatic twitter feed from weather stations at various sites around the world designed to provide instant local weather updates for urban farms and food gardens.
Julian Bleecker heads the Mobile and Pervasive Lab, a near-future think tank and research and development lab at the School of Cinema-TV and the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California. Bleecker is an expert technologist with over 20 years of hands-on experience. He is fluent in many modern programming languages and best-practices development approaches for distributed networked systems, desktops and mobile devices. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California in the School of Cinema-TV’s Interactive Media Division and is a researcher at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy.
Kevin Connor & Matthew Skomarovsky from 
