tasneem raja | print and multimedia journalist

This summer I’m working as a fellow at UC Berkeley for News 21, a project that’s funded by the Carnegie and Knight Foundations to create neat-o digital journalism.

Five j-schools across the country are involved, and my school’s topic is cities. The assignment: tell a story about cities that uses new technology, engages actual city dwellers, and looks wicked awesome.

My team’s project is called Intersections. The two-minute elevator pitch:

Intersections is a clickable panorama of two very different intersections in Oakland, one “rich” and the other “poor,” that examines how history, politics, money, education, etc. collide at these spaces and define how they look.

The full proposal is below, and I’m calling on you, my very smart, click-happy, 2.0 readership, to evaluate. If we could pull this off, would you dig this site?

****************

What is Intersections?

We’re going to take a panoramic look at two street intersections in Oakland and examine the “big ideas” that shape life there.

At a busy street corner, people are heading in a million different directions. They’re going to work, to school, to get a bite to eat, to cash a check. Some people walk along these streets maybe once a month. Other people call them home. We want to get a sense of who uses this space and how they use it.

We want to zoom in really close, to the cracks in the sidewalk, and investigate how city services, crime, foot traffic, and history have shaped that space. And we want to zoom out really far, and look at waves of immigration in and out of this space. Those are just two examples. Other “big ideas” we’re interested in are education, business, food, and access to credit.

We’re looking at two intersections for this project, in two very different neighborhoods: Temescal and West Oakland. We’re doing this to make a point. We want to show how these intersections are shaped and defined by abundances and absences of the “big ideas” we’re interested in.

And we want to go beyond the idea that Temescal is defined by abundance, and West Oakland is defined by absence. We’re still sketchy on this point, since we have a ton of reporting to do, but we suspect that our final project will show that the flow of life at these two intersections is highly nuanced, paradoxical, and ever changing.

What does Intersections look like?

You can start envisioning Intersections by clicking around on this panoramic Google map:
View Larger Map

Like Google Street View, our final product will be a panoramic, stitched-together, 360-degree view of an intersection. But what’s cool about Intersections is that certain elements, like that blue Prius in the middle of the street, will be clickable. So that it’s obvious that the Prius is clickable, we’ll make it bright, or put a glow around it.

When you click the Prius, the rest of the screen goes black, and audio or video starts playing. An audio piece about how longtime residents of the intersection feel about the increased traffic that’s coming with gentrification, for example. In the black space around the Prius, we’ll put up text and graphics about traffic in and out of the intersection.

Another element might be two strangers entering the West Oakland BART station at the same time. One could be an Ethiopian immigrant, the other a black business owner. When you click on them, the rest of the screen goes black, and a video starts playing. In the video, these two men discuss the demographics of the neighborhood, and talk about how different groups get along. When the video stops, text and graphics appear on the screen that give more information about the history and effects of demographics at this intersection.

Our two intersections will have their own, separate “sites” that link to each other. An intro to the project will tie together what we’ve learned about both spaces–how they overlap, where they differ, etc. But beyond that, we’ll let the user draw their own conclusions.

What about community input and mobile technology?

As soon as we choose our two intersections, we’ll plaster them with flyers asking people a very simple question: “Why are you here?” and ask them to text us their answer. The flyer will include information about the project, and explain that we’re interested in how people use the intersection and what they do here. We’ll also get some wacky, existential responses, and we think that’s awesome.

We’re also going to explain the texting project to business owners at the intersection, and ask them to get involved by telling their customers about it, and hosting one of our flyers in their shop.

We’ll collect the responses and incorporate them into our project. How? We don’t know yet. It depends on what we get, how much we get, and how often. Ideally, we’ll be flooded with responses all day every day, and we can keep the texting project live after Intersections goes up on the web. But if we only get a dozen or so responses, we’ll just make a smaller, static box for them.

Can you pull this off, tech-wise? What do you need?

We need:

1. A least one really stellar photographer

2. Some way to “stitch” our photos together, seamlessly, into a panorama

3. The Flash skills to create our clickable elements and display the accompanying text/graphics

4. A text message “inbox”

What about reporting? Do you have enough people and time?

Basically, we’re offering an overview about each neighborhood’s history, education, traffic, etc., and entering each of these “big ideas” through the smaller story of a person/place/thing at the intersection.

There will be 8-10 clickable elements in each intersection’s panorama. With five people taking on 2-3 elements/”big ideas” each, this is doable.

How will you pick your two intersections?

In Temescal, we’re already set on 51st and Telegraph, because it has a great mix of elements that represent big ideas. For West Oakland, we’re going to talk to people like Grabs, friends of ours who know the neighborhood, and drive around scouting for a location.

Have you thought about setting up a drop-in audio recording booth at your intersections? How about mobilizing teenagers with cell phones to canvass the intersection with survey questions? Wouldn’t it be awesome if [insert awesome idea here]?

It would be totally awesome! That’s one of the cool things about News 21: it’s an incubator of amazing, useful ideas about technology and storytelling. We want to include all of the new ideas that folks will inevitably come up with for Intersections. And we want people to look at Intersections, get inspired, and create their own version.

To help them, we’ll create a “Wouldn’t It Be Awesome If?” page that acts as a collection box for ideas that we love, but can’t execute due to time/resources/absence of time travel.

How sweet would it be if someone liked Intersections, checked out our WIBAI? page, and set up that drop-in recording studio in their own neighborhood? We’ll also include links to free applications like Vuvox, Gigapan, etc. to help people get started.