Dissatisfaction with existing governments, a broad shift to "post-representative democracy" and the rise of participatory media are leading toward the visibility of different forms of civic participation. "Participatory civics" uses tools of participatory media and relies on theories of change beyond influencing representative governments to seek change. This article offers a framework to describe participatory civics in terms of theories of change used and demands places on the participant, and examines some of the implications of the rise of participatory civics, including the challenges of deliberation in a diverse and competitive digital public sphere.

Breastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems-and relationship-based approaches to problem solving. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we restructured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems.

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One of the biggest news stories of 2012, the killing of Trayvon Martin, nearly disappeared from public view, initially receiving only cursory local news coverage. But the story gained attention and controversy over Martin's death dominated headlines, airwaves, and Twitter for months, thanks to a savvy publicist working on behalf of the victim's parents and a series of campaigns off-line and online. Using the theories of networked gatekeeping and networked framing, we map out the vast media ecosystem using quantitative data about the content generated around the Trayvon Martin story in both off-line and online media, as well as measures of engagement with the story, to trace the interrelations among mainstream media, nonprofessional and social media, and their audiences. We consider the attention and link economies among the collected media sources in order to understand who was influential when, finding that broadcast media is still important as an amplifier and gatekeeper, but that it is susceptible to media activists working through participatory or nonprofessional media to co-create the news and influence the framing of major controversies. Our findings have implications for social change organizations that seek to harness advocacy campaigns to news stories, and for scholars studying media ecology and the networked public sphere. Contents Background Context for the study Methods and data Chronological analysis Statistical comparison of media attention measures Bitly data and the role of race-specific media Conclusions Future work Background On 19 February 2012, 17-year-old black male Trayvon Martin and his father traveled to Sanford, Florida to visit his father's fiancée in the Retreat at Twin Lakes housing development. The gated community had recently experienced a string of burglaries. During the halftime of the NBA All-Star Game on 26 February, Martin walked to a nearby convenience store to get an iced tea and a bag of Skittles for himself and his stepbrother-to-be. It rained that evening, and Martin wore a hooded sweatshirt. Martin caught the eye of Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic man, as he drove his car on an errand. Zimmerman had previously reported suspicious individuals to the Sanford Police Department on five occasions, including an incident on 2 February 2012, when he reported two young black men, who went on to burglarize a house four days later. Zimmerman called the Sanford Police Department to report Martin. As Zimmerman called the police, Martin was on the phone with his girlfriend, and told her that someone was following him. While Zimmerman spoke to the police dispatcher, Martin fled, and the dispatcher asked him not to pursue him. Zimmerman pursued Martin anyway. An altercation occurred between the two, which Zimmerman has claimed was initiated by Martin. Zimmerman sustained injuries to his nose and the back of his head. A witness called 911; cries for help and a gunshot can be heard on the call audio. Sanford Police officers arrived, followed by Sanford ...

Users interact with online news in many ways, one of them being sharing content through online social networking sites such as Twitter. There is a small but important group of users that devote a substantial amount of effort and care to this activity. These users monitor a large variety of sources on a topic or around a story, carefully select interesting material on this topic, and disseminate it to an interested audience ranging from thousands to millions. These users are news curators, and are the main subject of study of this paper. We adopt the perspective of a journalist or news editor who wants to discover news curators among the audience engaged with a news site.We look at the users who shared a news story on Twitter and attempt to identify news curators who may provide more information related to that story. In this paper we describe how to find this specific class of curators, which we refer to as news story curators. Hence, we proceed to compute a set of features for each user, and demonstrate that they can be used to automatically find relevant curators among the audience of two large news organizations.