By Judith Hawkins, on October 4th, 2013 
This post is part of a series of report-back posts from the 15th annual Allied Media Conference held in Detroit in June. Besides being a regular contributor to Grassroots DC, Judith Hawkins is a Client and Community Organizer at Bread for the City. The following article is also posted on their BFC’s blog.
This year, 6 Bread for the City clients and 2 staff members went to the Allied Media Conference (AMC). As I blogged about before we went, my first time at the AMC changed my life. This is the response that many first time participants give when asked how they feel about the AMC. Participants attended sessions on media making, networking, and urban farming and many more. View a complete listing of the 2013 sessions here.
So what’s so life changing about the AMC?
The energy charged atmosphere is like being hit by lightning. People are excited about learning, exchanging information and sharing their experiences. I found it quite refreshing to witness different generations, races, genders, and people whose “issues” may be different working together to solve problems, not just talking about the history of the problems and how we got here.
“The AMC is stimulating and informative,” according to Dusti Ridge, CAB Member.
I attended a session on cross-issue organizing, which explored strategies for organizers who are working on different issues or campaigns to identify the intersections or similarities and to use those similarities as a bridge to bring people together and work collaboratively. The discussion was led by a panel of people from several groups: The Teachers Action Group (TAG), the Youth Art and Self-Empowerment Project, the One-Love Movement, Decarcerate PA, Fierce New York, and the Alliance for Educational Justice. We talked about identifying the gaps in service and activism and making combined efforts to fill them.
The conference sessions use a popular education style. Attendees are encouraged to participate, and there are plenty opportunities for hands-on learning. For example, at the Discotech (Discovering Technology) Lab, young people explained the basics of electronics by showing participants to use electrodes to make jewelry.
A recurring theme at the AMC this year was learning how to support each other in helping others.
Joni Podschun, our Advocacy and Community Engagement Manager at Bread for the City, really enjoyed The Biology of Burnout session and would love to see some of the strategies she learned applied at BFC. Stay tuned for a blog post on that session!
By Ben King, on September 3rd, 2013 
This post is part of a series of report-back posts from the 15th annual Allied Media Conference held in Detroit in June.
The title of this post is borrowed from a session at this year’s Allied Media Conference. The workshop was timely when it was conducted on June 21 because Google had just been implicated in the NSA’s spying scandal, known as the PRISM Program. Apparently, Google could not live up to its mandate, “Don’t be evil.” Also taking place that weekend in Detroit was a commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech.” (MLK gave a version of that speech in Detroit in the summer of 1963 before bringing it to DC for the March on Washington in August.) One wonders what Dr. King would have said about our information freedom fighters today, like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.
So what is the cloud and why should we care?
According to the workshop presenters, the “cloud” simply means your software or data living on another machine. A great example of a cloud service is Gmail. Google keeps your emails on its own machines. That means you can access these files from any computer. Additionally, Gmail is convenient because it gives you a web-based interface (software) that allows you to view, sort, or search your emails.
For activists in the information age, trusting Google to keep our information 100% secure is delusional at best. The company is ultimately accountable to its shareholders and its advertisers, and it does not have the best interests of people (i.e. human beings) in mind. There are already a few alternatives to the services you get through Google (see below), although they might not be as convenient at the moment. However, if we want to envision a future where people are free from information tyrrany, we have to imagine a future where we don’t keep everything on Google Drive or the iCloud. We have to start coming up with our own, more complex networks that will strengthen our internet backbone as a whole, rather than forcing a centralized system.
Freedom in the 21st century means freedom of information. For our information to be free, it must be decentralized, copied, and reproduced from a variety of locations, available for a variety of uses, at a variety of times. Small cloud networks can start with wireless mesh networking. Communities could build their own servers, hosting data for neighbors and friends. A co-operative model might be used to administrate such a cloud. Community cloud computing isn’t really that crazy an idea.
What is crazy is that Verizon, Comcast and a variety of other companies, want to charge us for accessing the internet as individuals. The private sector is poised to make billions off of expanding cloud services. Our collective energy is what makes the web awe-inspiring. Though we might not all be connected directly, our participation in networks, social and technological, makes us part of something bigger than ourselves. Hence, we cannot resist the flow of truth, freedom of information, and transparency. With Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and other digital service providers (i.e. Google) as the gatekeepers, it is our responsibility to make sure that we develop alternatives that can keep the web free. As businesses continue to colonize online space, we have to think even more about what freedom really means when so much of our lives are online.
Alternatives to Google
May First/People Link – “May First/People Link is a politically progressive member-run and controlled organization that redefines the concept of “Internet Service Provider” in a collective and collaborative way.”
Electric Embers – “EE is a worker cooperative providing Internet hosting services and support to nonprofits, cooperatives, artists, and others contributing to the common good. We’re here to help you create a more just, sustainable, and beautiful world.”
RiseUp.net – “Riseup provides online communication tools for people and groups working on liberatory social change. We are a project to create democratic alternatives and practice self-determination by controlling our own secure means of communications.”
By Barrett Jones, on August 20th, 2013 
On an early morning in the third week of June we packed a mixer, a pair of speakers, a microphone, and five mini-synthesizers into our car. We were on 270 heading west as the sun came up. By late afternoon we’d reached Detroit. We went there to participate in the Allied Media Conference and to present Beat Club, a digital music workshop that travels to neighborhood libraries and community centers in the DC area.
On Friday we set up our gear in a classroom in the Education building of Wayne State University. People began coming through the door. They headed for the seats but I invited them to stand around the table. As I demonstrated how to play the instruments, more people came in and joined the group. Everyone took a turn playing. Pretty soon a beat was going, bass lines were squealching, chords and notes began to come together. Grouped around their instruments, people laughed and encouraged each other. Freestyle raps began flying. Like any good party, it got too loud and after about half an hour we began receiving complaints about the noise from neighboring classrooms.
The next morning the streets around the campus were filled with marchers marking the 5oth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s 1963 march in Detroit. We set up at the campus conference center in a room designated as a play area for kids. Over several hours all sorts of people- kids, teens, adults – came by to play and ask questions. Parents snapped pictures of their kids making music. Eventually a nice man who was leading a session next door came over to ask me to turn the volume down.
I mixed down the recording from our Friday session and brought it to the temporary radio station set up for the conference so it could be broadcast. They were interviewing Quese IMC (who later hosted a great session). We left the next day, grateful to have met so many good people, both at the conference and in the city of Detroit.
Watch a vine of Beat Club at AMC2013 or listen to the recording
By Ben King, on August 7th, 2013 
People from Washington, DC report back on their knowledge and experience from the 2013 Allied Media Conference in Detroit. Find out how to share your story below!
The Allied Media Conference (AMC) brings together organizers and technology buffs every summer in Detroit. Celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, the AMC has earned a reputation among community media makers and grassroots researchers for highlighting positive solutions for social movements, not just stating problems. In addition to providing an inclusive space for sharing knowledge and skills, the conference is tons of fun!
Due to a strong presence of people and organizations from DC, some AMCers coined the term “DCtroit,” a phrase of solidarity between DC and Detroit. After my first AMC in 2012, I started saying that I connected with more DC people in Detroit than right here at home!
Now, we want to stay connected and share the love. A group of media producers from Grassroots DC is putting together this series of blog posts in order to reflect on our experiences and bring the AMC back to our communities.
Contribute!
This is an inclusive effort to share perspectives of anyone from DC who attended AMC 2013. We want to hear from you! Contact Grassroots DC Coordinator, Liane Scott (liane[at]grassrootsdc.org), to post your story about the AMC to this blog. We will compile posts and cross-post them to the Allied Media Project’s Talk forum in order to stay informed and stay connected.
Next year, we hope to recruit and fundraise so that even more people from DC can attend the AMC. Beyond the conference in Detroit, we are thinking about how to organize a similar convergence of local media creators and change makers in DC. How do we create a strong network of like-minded people to work together? Ultimately, we are stronger together than apart. Comment or contact us, and let’s build a more beautiful DC!
By Judith Hawkins, on July 13th, 2011 
The Allied Media Conference (AMC) http://alliedmedia.org/ was held in Detroit Michigan at the McGregor Conference Center at Wayne State University from June 23 – 26, 2011.
Allied Media Conference, June 23-26, 2011
The AMC was founded in 1999 to cultivate strategies for a more just and creative world using both traditional and new forms of media to communicate more effectively. There were representatives of grassroots media organizations from all over the US and Canada, poets, artists, singers, dancers, rappers, actors, burlesque dancers, clowns, farmers, computers techies and Dee Jays. This broad range of people made for a marvelous display of fashion, hairstyles, piercings and tattoos which were as memorable as the sessions themselves.
The AMC had over 120 caucuses and seminars here are a few examples:
Video Blogging to Expand Your Message detailed the steps needed to reach a wider audience through your blog by using comedy, surprise and even shocking pictures to get your point across.
Cooking as a Form of Media was a seminar for using food as a media tool, where the facilitator shared recipes for pickling different things to give participants ideas about media making with food.
There was a seminar called Text Messaging for Activists which detailed how to contact a large number of people and to formulate your message to get the most out of your message with as few words as possible.
Bypassing Internet Censorship was a seminar on by-passing the Internet using a Program called TOR http://www.torproject.org/ which enables a user to hide their Internet footprints.
The Cyberskills for Elders seminar was a basic how-to for people over 40 to learn how to utilize digitized and computerized media to continue to organize and advocate their causes and share their insights in inter-generational communities The classrooms had both MACs and PCs.
The Detroit Youth Media and Social Justice Network Science Fair http://talk.alliedmedia.org/sessions/detroit-youth-media-and-social-justice-network-science-fair had a wealth of ideas from young people about how ecosystems are interconnected with digital media systems.
The Seminar This Ain’t a Peep Show taught participants techniques to involve the audience in their presentations.
There was a discussion on Generations of Black Lesbian Brillance, this discussion specifically highlighted generations of black lesbian media makers in Detroit and their contributions to the furtherance of media in Detroit.
There was a seminar called Narrative Campaigns, Storybanking and the Restoration Campaign that asked the question, what if artists, community activists, former and current prisoners, family members and justice groups worked together using cutting edge web tools and street smart organizing. Click on the link to see – http://www.kitescampaigns.org/campaign/community-restoration-campaign/
The common theme of the Digital Justice coalition http://detroitdjc.org/ is to put people back into the center of any discussion involving digital technology, innovative strategies involving digital literacy people centered policies and community ownership.
This conference was a great place for activists, advocates, artists, farmers, and computer techies to get together and brainstorm ways to use media to make the world a better and more peaceful place. Hope to see you there in 2012!
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