Loren Sonnenberg signing on.
I'm a resident Buffalo activist (media and otherwise) with two particular
projects I'm currently working on. I do a lot of collaborative video work
with activist / labor groups in Buffalo and am also the catalyst for, and
one of the four founding members of, a local youth empowerment / infoshop
space called Access. Access is a 600 sq foot public space located in a
high-traffic, easily accessible area and contains a designated public
meeting space, four free internet terminals, an art gallery for local
artists, a free store (open barter system), a radical library, and a media
screening room. The basement of the store (an additional 600 sq feet) is
also in development and when complete will offer a biodiesel lab, a
screenprinting shop, a digital classroom, and a secondary meeting room.
Anyone is free to use the store as long as they respect a few basic
guidelines and we've been getting a considerable ammount of youth /
community traffic in the 7 months we've been open. The site is currently
between servers but I'll definitely be posting a link when we have it up and
running again.
Of more interest to this particular web of individuals though may be the
United Front collaboration we currently have under way. This is a video
project that aims to unite a variety of activist groups through video as
well to provide a powerful outreach tool for all of the involved groups.
United Front is designed as a sort of ?serialized field guide? to activism
and we have already created several videos documenting local activist groups
and compiled them in DVD format. Ideally this would expand to also contain a
web component, but for now the primary goals of the project are to (1) break
down social barriers that exist in all tightly knit activist groups by
making new individuals comfortable with the people / surroundings that
compose these groups before their entry into the group and to (2) create a
field guide to different groups in the area that is capable of compiling
detailed information about many different groups in one place and packaging
/ distributing this for mainstream consumption. So far things are
progressing very well with the first edition of the experiment currently
nearing completion and new groups for an expanded edition already being
contacted.
Sorry this isn't exactly a quick bio, but the projects are relatively
complex and neither of them have a very fully developed web presence thus
far so a bit of explanation was necessary. Other interests of mine include
sustainable urban living (solar, geothermal, insulation technologies), the
human body as an ecosystem (probiotics, homeostatic soil organisms,
hookworms), and, of course, community media applications for solidifying /
expanding resistance movements.
Hopefully as someone with a strong focus on collaborative work capable of
producing concrete change and as someone with less of a web focus (but still
harboring large web ambitions) I'll have a lot to offer to
[freecooperation].
Looking forward to further conversation,
-Loren