I had the very good fortune to sit down with Carlos Martinez, of NYC Parks GreenThumb initiative for further information and advice on how to go about engaging the South Bronx community for my project. Special thanks again to the Partnership for Parks Transdiciplinary Lab group Beyond Green, to Nelesi, Isabella, and Emily for their helping to arrange this meeting.
Carlos and I spent some time talking about the South Bronx community in general, and more places to attempt to collect data and interviews. Carlos suggested I also look into gathering data in the Soundview neighborhood. He recommended that I approach several community organizations like Rocking the Boat in Hunts Point, the Hunts Point Recreation Center, the Bronx River Alliance, and the BankNote Building. Carlos was under the impression that within the BankNote building there were currently several tech-related start ups situated there, but that he wasn’t completely sure and that I would need to visit there to verify.
He recommended that, beyond emailing each of these organizations, that I should actually go to each of them to present my project. Carlos also suggested that I may also want to extend my demographic slightly east into Castle View, an adjacent neighborhood to the South Bronx. In addition to all these recommendations, he noted that it would be a good idea for me to bring along Spanish, French, and Portuguese speakers to interact with these communities during the interview process.
We continued to talk about his impressions and perspective, based on his experience, of residents in the South Bronx and their perceptions and usage of civic or social technology. Carlos noted that residents definitely use social media to interface with their local community boards, but that he was fairly certain that most there would not know what “Civic Tech” is by that name. He suggested that perhaps residents in this community may already use civic technologies, such as the NYC 311 app, but that they would not necessarily refer to it as “Civic Tech”. Carlos recommended that I explore and analyze 311 complaint data by zip code, to explore whether or not residents use the app or the phone to register their complaints.
It’s looking like next week I will start to go into the community to attempt to collect interviews.
