My Conversation with Ben Sheldon

I sat down with Ben Sheldon today (pictured right - photo by Ben Sheldon) for the first Community Media in Transition conversation.

Ben is a CTC Vista Project Leader at UMass Boston and formerly of Lowell Telecommunications Corporation. You can listen to a radio interview from WUML in Lowell with him talking more about the CTC Vista Project.

Next week, I’ll be posting a short video with excerpts from our conversation. So please check back then.

In the meantime, here’s a peek into our conversation:

Ben is involved in a number of projects focused on moving Public Access Centers forward into a online participatory space in order to realize community media’s potential and possibility for distribution and collaboration.

I asked Ben to tell me what Mapping Access is and to explain his role in the project and its development. He talked about how Mapping Access, using Google mapping technology, has helped to create a better picture of the existing community media landscape. He also talked about how Mapping Access is connecting public access centers across the country by providing them with an online forum for communication and collaboration to benefit access centers and the communities they serve.

Ben also talked about how open source technologies like Drupal - the power behind Mapping Access’ Content Management System - provide unique benefits to community media projects like Mapping Access.

I look forward to sharing video from our conversation next week.

Stay tuned . . .