Ending April with Showers in Chicago

I'm just recovering from April 2007, which will forever be known in my mind as "the month of excessive conferences." It started with WAM!, then NTEN in DC.

But then a couple weeks ago I stole Ben from Project HQ and we headed over to the newly renovated Yawkey Boys & Girls Club in Roxbury for the 7th annual Boys & Girls Club of Boston Cyber Summit. We did some digital storytelling and Google Mapping with 5 youth from Roxbury and Dorchester. The youth did great, taking lots of great photos outside the Club around Dudley but we struggled a bit with technical aspects of embedding videos in the new Google My Maps functionality.

You can check out the map but it keeps erasing the embed code so most of the videos won't play! We made DVDs and also put the videos on Blip.tv.

I also recruited former CTC VISTA Saul Baizman to do some web design, tag teaming with my pal Hope Roth who now works at Tufts University.

I enjoyed supporting my old co-workers and this great Club event. The projects the youth create in two short days (including one night of sleep-over that doesn't involve much sleep) always impresses me.

I had about 12 hours to do laundry, errand, and pack before I was flying off to Chicago, my first time in Chi-town. I jumped at a chance to attend at annual Intel Computer Clubhouse International Conference, to talk up CTC VISTA and help some Computer Clubhouses get VISTAs and present on using digital storytelling for community activism and outreach. After five years of running a Computer Clubhouse myself, I have a vested interest in how the Clubhouse theory is progressing and how these programs all over the world empower youth by giving them multimedia and independence skills.

This was my 7th Clubhouse conference, so I got to see many old skool folks like Mitch Resnik from the MIT Media Lab, Joyce & John from AZ, Gavin from Dublin, and my new friend Kane from New Zealand (who gave me kick-butt hat from his homeland and is still doing digital storytelling after I trained him last year at the conference).

I also got to see some VISTAs - my girl Shaneka from WYTEC presented and hosted with grace and I snuck Laura Mieczkowski in for free lunch so I could hear about her new outreach project with CTCNet Chicago. The crew of managers from the Boston Clubhouses were all still exhausted from Cyber Summit too, but it good to see all the old and new faces gathered to contemplate the next steps of the Clubhouse network.

Chicago was also an amazing trip because I got to chill with former CTC VISTA Nathan Biggs, who's now a fundraiser for The Association House and a damn fine tour guide.

I documented my tourist wanderings and impressions on Flickr. Overall, it was a good ending to an exhausting month of networking.

May looks lighter, both in work and weather, with facilitating just one adult digital storytelling train-the-trainer at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center and helping out with a series of Saturday trainings with youth at the South End Technology Center. Oh and working hard on user testing for the new online community site (StoriesForChange.net) I'm project managing for MassIMPACT for community digital storytellers (due to soft launch at the end of May). Oh and recruiting and matching up some new VISTAs for the June round and planning the next PSO, that's at the Grassroots Use of Technology Conference in Lowell, MA.

Wait...that's not adding up to "lighter"...is it?