About Us

From MobileAppLabSite

Welcome to Youth Radio’s Mobile Action Lab, a 2010 winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning global competition!

Youth Radio’s charge: Oakland-based young people partner with pro developers and entrepreneurs to propose, develop, and market apps that serve community needs.

Why apps?

Because it’s time to build on what Youth Radio’s best known for: producing award-winningmedia stories by young people for global outlets including National Public Radio, The Huffington Post, and iTunes’ Public Radio Player. Given challenges in public education and transformations in media worlds, young people need to be creating the digital tools that determine who knows what, how news travels, and what makes change possible.

Our Lab’s approach applies everything we’ve learned from working with youth to produce stories. That means young people drive the creative process, and youth-adult collaboration is key. Our partners and advisors include developers who’ve helped create some of the most popular apps on iTunes, a Facebook co-founder, a world-class expert on copyright and Internet law, and scholars working to promote and understand how young people learn — and how schooling needs to change — as a result of digital culture. NSF has also come on board to support this work.

Here’s the video we created to pitch the Mobile Action Lab concept.

Who Are We

From MobileAppLabSite

The Apps

We divide our app portfolio into two categories: market bound apps and learning apps.

Our market-bound apps are long-term projects created in partnership with users  as well as professional designers, developers, and advisors based at start-up companies and universities. These apps will be distributed through the iTunes and Android markets and in some cases via the open web.

Our learning apps are developed and programmed by young people in-house with App Inventor, a web program designed to help non-programmers develop Android apps.

Headlines on some of our market apps (scroll down to later posts for details):

1. Forage City (currently in beta)

This web app enables users to share bounties of free, fresh food with others in their local community, whether it’s fruit from backyard trees or delicious leftovers from markets, food trucks, Community-Supported Agriculture boxes, or farm lands.

2. Vox Pop (currently in beta)

VoxPop is call-and-response mobile radio, inviting users to record geo-tagged audio segments that play on the phone and on the air.

3. AllDayPlay (download now!)

This 4.5 star-rated Android app streams Youth Radio’s one-of-a-kind online radio station, All Day Play, featuring an eclectic mix of music and talk.

4. Ally Alert (currently in beta)

An Android app that enables users quickly and easy to notify allies when they don’t feel safe and need help.

For all of these apps, young people are deeply involved in every stage of iterative development, from needs assessment through talent identification, ideation, design, testing, launch, and promotions.

How We Work

In 2010 when the Mobile Action Lab launched, it was among the first youth-led app development projects world-wide (others included Apps4Good in the UK and fellow DML 2010 winner, YouthAppLabs in DC). Even in the last year, similar efforts have sprung up across the US and beyond. In part to support best practices within this growing field—and prodded to do so by Google, which wanted documentation of educators’ uses of its App Inventor software—we wrote up our curriculum. You can find Youth Radio’s full resource here. The resource is organized in ten parts.

1.    Program Structure: Who we serve, how we organize class time, etc.

2.    App Inventor Intro and Tutorials: How we introduce young people to the app universe and get them making apps early and often

3.    Conceptualization: How we identify the community need an app addresses, its “value proposition” and emotional heart, and why an app would make sense as a solution

4.    Speaker Series: How we connect young people and technology professionals through hands-on demos and dialogues

5.    Market and User Research: How we scope out what’s already out there and get to know our users

6.    User Flows, Wireframes, and Prototypes: How we define, represent, and experiment with what the app will do

7.    App Inventor Development: How we circle back to App Inventor to program apps based on the design process to date

8.    Development for Publication: How we partner with pro developers to build apps for market release

9.    Community Engagement, Promotions and Marketing: How we mobilize users to test and spread the word about our apps, and how we cultivate interest in the press

10. Launch, Analytics, and Iteration: Publication and beyond

We view the curriculum as an dynamic document that will continue to evolve with our own efforts, and as we learn from colleagues carrying out related work with youth in contexts including schools, after-school programs, community-based economic development corporations, libraries, and museums.

Forage City

From MobileAppLabSite

What’s the App

That’s Asiya Wadud, our collaborator on the Forage City app. She created Forage Oakland, a fruit bartering system she set up to gather and redistribute produce that would otherwise rot and go to waste (here’s a NYTimes story about her work). It got to be a ton of work for Asiya, riding around the neighborhood on her bike, harvesting fruit from people’s backyard trees, and delivering the free, fresh produce around town.

So we got the idea that we could create an app that crowd-sources the harvesting and distribution of excess produce, and that even engages sites like schools, food banks, and youth organizations as destinations for food delivery.

The community need this project addresses is food justice and equity, by providing access to affordable healthy produce in low-income urban areas where that important resource is hard if not impossible to find.

Our Process

This app started with a pre-existing community. That’s a good thing: we’ve already got users and momentum. But it also presents challenges. What if the app pales by comparison to the warm, face-to-face attention Forage Oakland members have traditionally gleaned from Asiya herself?

User Research: That’s the kind of question that forced us to start by developing a survey and interviewing Forage Oakland participants and other relevant parties–people into Community Supported Agriculture, food equity activists, even mushroom and fish foragers–to figure out what need the app would serve, and what communities we could tap to make it a success.

From MobileAppLabSite

Pretty soon, we realized we couldn’t base the app entirely on the “analogue” experience Asiya had created by going door-to-door in her local community. We wanted to capture that spirit as best we could through our app, but also broaden the user-base, to include networks of people with food to share, whether they have fruit trees in their backyards, or have  leftovers to give away from farmers markets, groceries, or even food trucks. And we wanted to make sure the app served those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to these kinds of fresh goods, by notifying non-profits when food becomes available nearby.

User Flows: Building on our survey and interview research and lots of conversations with Asiya, we came up with a basic outline of how the app could work. Our design partners, George Hayes and Thomas Schluchter, taught us how to translate a messy word document into a proper visual user flow.

From MobileAppLabSite

Demo: The video below shows a paper prototype we put together to simulate the way the way users can use the app to share produce. Voice-over coming soon, but the basic scenario is this: a young woman is boxing up the excess fruit from her backyard tree, letting the app know what she’s got and when and where it’ll be ready for pick-up. Meanwhile, the guy who shows up midway through the video is playing the part of the recipient. He uses Forage City to locate the fruit he wants in the vicinity of his home, and the swap is made through a neighborhood drop-off spot (which happens to be Youth Radio’s front lobby!).

Update: The app is live and in beta! We’re in the process of cultivating partners and gearing up for a full-blown launch during early harvest season, 2012.

From MobileAppLabSite

All Day Play

AllDayPlay is Youth Radio’s unique online radio station and music site where more than 30 of the freshest DJs in the Bay Area blog, podcast, and stream live from our downtown studios in Oakland, California. It’s a signature Youth Radio production, featuring emerging and established artists including Davey D, Sake, and Krazy Kids Radio, as well as YR interns and grads who are pursuing careers in music.

Until now, you could only listen to All Day Play online. Then a couple AllDayPlay contributors took our App Inventor workshop (see more here), and when it came time to decide on an app the group would create, quick-and-dirty style, using Google’s open source platform, it was unanimous: they’d make an Android app to stream AllDayPlay.

Community Need

 

Ben Frost- Music Director ADP

“ADP’s unique and eclectic collection of DJ’s, musicologists, collectors, and artists curates a steady supply of content to local and international audiences that is sorely lacking elsewhere.  The listenership of the station, and the hosts of the shows, have long hungered for an app, so that there can be wider accessibility to what we do here, whether in the car, or just walking down the street.   AllDayPlay creates a space and an outlet for the local DJ community to regularly come together and play the music that is absent in commercial settings.” Ben Frost

Brandon McFarland- Editor/ Producer ADP

“Apps are better than webradio, they’re better than terrestrial radio, because they introduce new artists to the user and that’s what people are trying to find out. And if you can listen to the new songs and find new artists versus the same 12 songs you hear on terrestrial radio over and over again, it would make the world a better place.” Brandon McFarland

Kenny, Austin, Christian, and Sam at the Developers Workshop

“I wanted people to be able to listen to it anywhere. AllDayPlay gives really good DJs from all over the Bay Area the opportunity to have all of their mixes heard. This way you don’t even have to be at a show. You can be in your car and listen to it.” Kenny (AllDayPlay Contributor and participant in the app developer workshop)

AllDayPlay App is Live!

The AllDayPlay is now available for download in the Android Market–and it’s got a rating of 4.5 stars! Some highlights from the press release:

Oakland, California—Internationally recognized music tastemakers can now be heard any time and place on AllDayPlay.fm’s streaming radio app, available for Android phones.

AllDayPlay.fm on Android is the premier youth-created mobile source for eclectic, cutting-edge programming out of California’s Bay Area. The AllDayPlay app enables music fiends and fans to access AllDayPlay.fm’s live stream of 34 mix shows on the go. “The app provides one more way for listeners to discover that AllDayPlay provides the most exciting, dynamic and original programming of any radio station in the Bay Area,” says world-renowned DJ Matthew Africa.

Touring DJs and artists, as well as those who call Oakland and San Francisco their home, make a point of making guest appearances at ADP’s studios. “ADP airs an authentic representation of Bay Area music, culture and taste. In a massively trend-setting region, this is no small feat. I am proud to be involved with alldayplay.fm!,” says DJ Sake 1.

These music celebrities are part of a one-of-a-kind community-based collaboration. AllDayPlay.fm is hosted by the award-winning youth media company Youth Radio. Youth Radio’s high school interns are part of the publishing and promotions staff of AllDayPlay.fm, and a group of teens co-created the app’s prototype. Using App Inventor, a tool launched by Google and now housed at the famed MIT Media Labs, young people working in Youth Radio’s Mobile Action Lab developed the app during a workshop led by engineer Drew Mason, who then coded it for launch.

“It’s just not possible to get this kind of feng shui out of terrestrial radio.  The new app will be an excellent way for folks to explore new music,” says Bay Area DJ Zumbi (Zion-I).

 

VoxPop

Check out the Oakland-based Mobile Action Lab team “meeting” (via Skype) with our Stanford-based VoxPop collaborators. This is how the work gets done!

That’s members of our Oakland team, surrounded by a dynamic duo we call “The Nicks.” Nick Kruge and Nick Bryan are grad students at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. They’ve joined forces with us and other fantastic developers (including Jorge Herrera) to build VoxPop, an app aimed to create a new platform for youth expression and citizen journalism by exploiting all the affordances of mobile technology.

Truth is, that’s about all we can say about this particular app at the moment, because we’re working with a partner that’s asked us to hold off on divulging details until the time’s right. For a bunch of journalists used to protecting anonymous sources and scoops, this work-mode isn’t entirely unfamiliar. But we sure are looking forward to sharing the app very soon! We’re in the process of testing and populating the app with a world of compelling audio before its official launch.

Look-and-feel

Like all our apps, we care *a lot* about what this one looks like. Our artist is…

… and here’s the color scheme we came up for VoxPop.

From MobileAppLabSite