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Among the most imaginative of community civic projects online is
the website of the Community Information Corps of St. Paul, Minnesota.
This is an expansive site concerned with exploring, documenting, and sharing the riches
and resources that a neighborhood has to offer.
Community "mapping," or taking an inventory of local resources and plotting them in an online geographic
display, is at the heart of the CIC website. The site demonstrates both the varying applications of mapping,
as well as the Web's great potential to generate colorful, engaging and informative civic resources. For
example, young people conducted 98 interviews to identify "learning opportunities" in their neighborhood,
including schools, churches and health centers, as well as recreation centers and the Boys and Girls Club.
Other youth-created maps pinpoint St. Paul's West Side businesses and organizations, transportation routes, and an
aerial photograph labeled with street names and neighborhood boundaries. These maps are visible
at Summer 2001 Maps.
In addition, during the summer of 2002, CIC hired teenagers to work on a mural tour and storytelling
project about St. Paul's West Side. The result is a map of public art on display in West Side's parks
and streets and on the walls of houses and restaurants. Accompanying the map is a page of clickable photos
of the individual murals, linking the viewer to a closeup of
each. Many reflect the neighborhood's
immigrant roots, from its large Mexican-American community to its more recent Hmong arrivals. Most are
accompanied by fascinating accounts of the area's history from the mural artists or long-time neighborhood
residents.
In 2003, CIC merged with Public Achievement, an initiative of the University of Minnesota's Center for
Democracy and Citizenship, focusing "on the most basic concepts of citizenship, democracy and public
work." The CIC site, while no longer updated, remains online and serves as a model of identifying,
"mapping" and celebrating community resources and multi-ethnicity.
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