The following are excerpts from Joseph Russell’s South Jerseyist blog (Joseph is on twitter at @thegreengrass). Last week he attended my Camden class. My students have been working hard on producing the Camden Policy Project, a crowd-sourced resource to talk about and find info on Camden policy (and other cities relevant to Camden). Here are a few of Joseph’s thoughts: 

This past Wednesday night, I had the honor of attending the Camden Policy Project Kickoff, an event put on by Rutgers-Camden professor Stephen Danley and students from his Camden, Philadelphia, and the Region class. The event was an opportunity for his students to present their suggestions for how to tackle a wide array of issues the city is facing.

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All of these issues are available for much further reading on the wiki the class has created for these issues, the idea being to give their research and ideas over to the population in general so as to encourage a continuing dialog once their semester ends. You can find that at http://camdenpolicy.wikispaces.com/.

In the end, what really impressed me was the sheer number of people in attendance who cared deeply about the city. Not only were the students engaged with the issues, but every member of the community was too. They were interested in hearing what the students had to say and generous with their thoughts and advice for them. The honest discourse about the city was refreshing when you’ve been used to sensational newspaper articles that paint the city as some mysterious “other” you should never visit.

 You can read the whole thing (including summaries of the student suggestions) here. More on the Camden Policy Project over the summer, but I’ve been trying to find a “container” for so much of the info students gather on Camden. With “wiki” technology, it becomes easy for anyone (read: community members, students, non-profits) to update this info, making it more democratic. That’s a key issue here. It works, more or less the same as wikipedia.

It’s by no means a finished project (or even particularly useful now), but I hope you’ll join me over the next few years in playing around with it, adding to it, and pushing my students to help make it into something practical.