Radical Reference conducted two workshops and tabled at this year's Grassroots Media Conference. We've been participating in the conference for five years (or so) and a partnering organization for the last two. It's one of my favorite conferences, with lots of sessions I want to attend, even though I don't really consider myself a media maker in the same way that most of the attendees do. I make zines and blog and all that, but it's not with a journalistic intent.
I facilitated a session, along with Jess Ross, on getting alternative materials into libraries: Radical Reference Unpanel: Alternative Materials in Libraries. We developed this skillshare in response to feedback from previous conferences and questions we've received, but unfortunately the workshop wasn't well attended. I suspect the unpanel model might have been a contributing factor, which is my fault. I think folks want to be given the magic key to getting libraries to shelve their small press or self-published books and videos, and sadly, there isn't one. A highlight of the session for me was Amanda Vender sharing her experience trying to get the three public library systems to distribute IndyKids, a "free newspaper and teaching tool that aims to inform children on current news and world events from a progressive perspective and to inspire a passion for social justice and learning" that is "geared toward kids in grades 4 to 8 and high school English Language Learners." They were most successful at NYPL, partially because they threw ALA's Library Bill of Rights at them, and also maybe just a little threatened them with bad publicity.
I attended Taking Back Wall Street: DIY corporate research for activists and media makers, which was led by Aliqae Geraci (Queens PL) and Karen Okamoto (John Jay, CUNY). Aliqae, who is working on a labor studies degree was a super pro at researching corporations, and Karen added some legal know how and showed us the lovely Who Profits site that tracks corporations involved with the Palestinian occupation. The main lesson of the session for me is that public companies basically have to include risk factors and executive compensation in their quarterly and annual filings, and in their proxy statements, which are all available via the SEC. During the Q&A they also talked about some NYC specific links for researching real estate and other info.
Our table was next to Prometheus Radio's, where they were teaching passersby to solder sound boards. (I think that's what they were soldering, anyway.) I thought it was awesome that they were demystifying hardware like that. I had no idea that normal people could do that sort of thing.
Comments
Alycia (not verified)
Thu, 06/04/2009 - 7:40pm
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So bummed to have missed the
So bummed to have missed the GMC this year! Thanks for writing!
Totally unrelatedly: how are you getting blog posts with photos on drupal? What type of content are your posts? Matt's been telling me this sort of thing is hard to do, so I'm hoping you know of a feature he is unaware of!
jenna
Thu, 06/04/2009 - 9:04pm
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I've gone a few different
I've gone a few different ways with posting photos to blog posts, but what I've found to be the most effective is linking to images that are already online. If the picture isn't already posted somewhere, and for whatever reason I don't want to put it on Flickr, I ftp it to my site and then link to it that way. I think the directory is files/name.format (e.g. farfel.png). I use QuickTags, so I don't have to know the html to reference an image. Every so often I forget to change the input format to full html, and I wonder why the hell my image isn't appearing. I had some weirdness with the image content type, so I stopped using it. There's some convoluted method I've used on Rad Ref, but it's convoluted.