Occupy Research: Methods and Tools for a Decentralized Future

Occupy Research is a highly participatory band of researchers active in the Occupy Wall Street movement, with working groups popping up across the country. Committed to using open methods, they outline different areas of interest in a wiki and share ideas, tools, and information about the movement.

Sasha Costanza-Chock, one of the initial visionaries of the project, has a strong interest in media use at social movements. Currently Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT and a Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, he answers some questions about technologies and the decentralization of information.

Technologists in the Occupy camps set up the basic infrastructure for communication with electrical generators, wireless internet, and media teams. The old-school chat client IRC makes an appearance for realtime conversations between camps. They use existing corporate media sites like Twitter and Tumblr to broadcast information about the movement, and as a result, most reporting is about what happened on social media sites during protests. "The process or methods should reflect the vision of the movement," says Costanza-Chock...