"e-topia/Designing Cambridge: 21st-Century Communications for Our Community," a two-day conference featuring lectures and panel discussions with technology innovators, MIT faculty and community activists, will be held at MIT this Friday and Saturday, Nov. 21-22.
"Designing Cambridge" was organized by the MIT Communications Forum. It is free and open to the public.
William J. Mitchell, head of the program in media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, will open the conference. Mitchell is the author of "e-topia: Urban Life, Jim-- But Not As We Know It" and "Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City," both from MIT Press.
Mitchell will be joined on the opening panel by two experts in public policy and advocacy: Josh Barrett of Suffolk University's Beacon Hill Institute for Public Policy, and James N. Horwood of Spiegel & McDiarmid, a Washington, D.C., law firm that represents public sector and consumer-owned entities. That session will take place in Bartos Theater in the Media Lab from 4 to 6 p.m.
There will be two "Designing Cambridge" sessions on Saturday, both in Room 6-120.
The first panel--"How Can Information Technologies Be Used in Cambridge?"--begins at 10 a.m. Speakers are Keith Hampton, assistant professor in urban studies and planning at MIT; Ceasar McDowell, director of MIT's Center for Reflective Community Practice; Mitchel Resnick, associate professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, and Richard O'Bryant of Northeastern University.
"How Well Does Media Serve Cambridge Citizens?" begins at 11:15 a.m. Michele Babineau, a reporter for the Cambridge Chronicle, and Susan Fleischmann of Cambridge Community Television will speak.
