The Civic Beat Sandbox is an open collaboration platform that will be used to archive and curate internet memes emerging around critical social and political issues. By building a public repository of images, videos, and other media, we hope to capture the fleeting, online sentiment around global breaking news events before they are lost in the tide of social media.
As a result, we hope that the Sandbox will allow journalists, social change advocates, and concerned citizens to contribute to and help shape the global news conversation while building a rich compendium of creative media strategies for social movements. With active research, curation and community management, our platform will:
- Encourage global communities to submit and collect memes as they appear on social media. We will build tools that allow global communities to share impactful social change memes and capture the relevant (and ephemeral) cultural and political contexts, to encourage cross-group learning and dialogue.
- Curate memes from these community submissions by grouping and contextualizing them. Memes will be grouped according to news event and social issue. Our editors will work with our contributor community to tell the story behind the meme, and our platform will employ basic social media metrics to support the curatorial work.
What People Are Saying
“Digital activists listen up! Are you looking for inspiration or ideas for your next catchy online campaign? Look no further than The Civic Beat Sandbox, a curated collection of the best social change memes from around the web. From racism to human rights to climate change, the Sandbox hopes to highlight a range of campaigns and subjects by engaging directly with activists and sharing their work with a larger audience. They also aim to use the site to collect best practices and effective new strategies for digital campaigning. We are excited to see this project blossom and reach new generations and communities of potential activists and organizers.”
– Sarah Kerr, WITNESS
Contact
We are currently seeking engineering support and funding for the Sandbox while we pursue early iterations. Interested in getting involved? Please get in touch with our co-founders!
Jason Li – jason@thecivicbeat.com
An Xiao Mina – an@thecivicbeat.com
The Civic Beat is a collective of researchers, writers and artists exploring the intersection of creativity, geopolitics and the internet. We support each other in our goals to engage the public through writing, talks, workshops and exhibitions.
We have led workshops and exhibitions in spaces such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Mozilla Festival Open Artist Studio (curated by the V&A Museum and Tate Modern), the Asian Art Museum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the ACLU and RightsCon, and we've been producing what Net Monitor called "the cutest map of the internet" – a world map of animal memes in collaboration with over a dozen internet culture researchers.
