aaa-S.+White-civic+hero

Craig Newmark:



Nerd Hero

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In our modern world technology is changing faster than ever. From cell phones to the internet our innovations have changed the way we communicate with each other. One man on the forefront of this change is Craig Newmark. Most of us know him as the creator of craigslist, but his contribution to communities and the “common good” is perhaps less well known. Craig Newmark is an advocate for many social causes and certainly a man that practices what he believes.

The “common good” according to Craig involves ideas like treating people how you would want them to treat you. He practices this through technology by staying in constant communication with the people he is trying to help. Craig lives his life simply without many luxuries. He humbly represents himself when speaking to universities or technical audiences. Craig’s high moral standard and simplistic lifestyle makes him an excellent candidate for a modern day civic hero.

Originally from New Jersey, Craig currently lives in San Francisco where he started his website in 1995. Previously he worked as a software engineer for 17 years. He claims he has always been a nerd. He believes that the nerds are transforming the future through web-based software engineering. He currently does customer service for many non-profits and for-profits to benefit the public good. He works to help veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to receive the things they deserve such as education benefits and healthcare. His hard work and numerous causes have benefited the public in many ways.

The idea behind the craigslist concept was one of community. He has always been interested in people helping other people. In an effort to help those people get things done he set up a space where people could find others with similar interests/goals. He did this for the San Francisco area and the site gradually expanded to what it is today (over twelve billion views per month).

What truly makes Craig Newmark a hero is not that he just created a successful website, it’s because he created a whole new way of getting things done. His motives were not to get rich or famous. He simply wanted to help people use this new technology in effective and productive ways. Figuratively, he launched an idea onto the web, and after time the public essentially created the website for themselves. By looking out for the common person Craig should be recognized more for his humble ideas and not just for his creation of a website.

With that being said, we should also admire him for the ideas behind craigslist and his determination to keep them simple. The philosophy behind craigslist has relatively stayed the same since its creation. The website is about simplicity (little to no graphic design just straightforward information). Also, the site gets constructed from the “bottom up.” There are very few people that actually work for craigslist since the site is constructed by the people that go and visit the site, not by upper management. The website is also mostly free for users (there is a small charge for some job listings and real-estate postings) and free of banner advertising. Another idea that craigslist reflects is transparency and <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">customer service. This involves constantly listening and responding to the suggestions of the users. Although the website is constantly changing, the philosophy and dedication to the common good has remained the same.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Outside of his success with craigslist, Craig has advocated the use of these same ideas in areas of journalism and government. He supports the idea of “participatory journalism” or community journalism. Specifically this idea involves motivating individuals to act as “fact-finders” rather than simply trusting the mainstream media. A big idea necessary to make this kind of thing work is trust in the community. Craig strongly believes that most people are trying to do good in the world, and by developing technology we can allow these people to come together and reach their goals.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">Transparency in the government is another issue that many people including Craig are trying to push for. Craig provided technical support for the highly successful Obama campaign. Part of his philosophy is to be in constant communication with customers, to help them in what they are doing and then to get out of the way. The internet can provide a useful tool for a democratic government since unlike any previous technology everyone can have a voice. Getting the government to use this tool and helping people come together to be more critical of the government is something ongoing in Craig’s current efforts.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">The internet is a vast new technology with <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">infinite possibilities. This generation has seen it expand and become more powerful a tool than ever. It continues to grow at a rapid rate, but its potential is still unknown. For most people it is a tool to find information, products and people quickly and efficiently. However, like every human invention it can be used for malicious purposes. The internet should continue to be used and created by the average person, not a tool for control. This is why we need nerds like Craig Newmark to push the expansion of this technology to <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 18pt;">serve the common good. media type="file" key="tranparency.m4a" width="300" height="50"

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 14pt;">Sources:

http://craigconnects.org

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Craig Newmark attends many interviews that are posted online. The research for this project was spent watching many online videos of these interviews as well as his many speeches. I watched all of these sources and more but selected these as the most useful and informative for this paper. Also, from Craigs own website, Craigsconnects.org, I learned of all the beneficial customer service projects Craig promotes. In choosing Craig I have also learned to have more confidence in my own networking skills. Things just need to be simple and honest.

I carefully selected the pictures for this paper to coincide with the topics in each paragraph. One challenging aspect about this project was the many glitches on Wiki and its limitations as far as design goes. To compensate for these setbacks i spent more time on the text, font and varying the size.

The most challenging problem was creating a multimodal aspect to the page. I originally tried to edit a video of Craig Newmark. However this failed since I was unable to find online videos that I could download and use in the video. Instead I tried to make just a sound mix using the different speeches and interviews from my sources. This proved to be difficult since i still had the same problem as with the videos. I was able to watch them online but unable to download them. In order to get the audio I eventually recorded it straight off of the computer in a quite room. Since the two audio players here are made of multiple sound clips taken from different sources, finding and editing these clips was the most time consuming part. I eventually was able to put clips together that made sense. After this I had fun exploring Garage Band and adding music, fades, and effects so that the audio made sense and was relevant to my paper. Finally I exported the audio's to an MP3 file and uploaded them to this site.