In the United States, public space is splintering into shards. Poor urban planning and the demise of many institutions of civil society are two factors that are to blame. But newer technologies - like television - are usually also seen to be destructive forces in this shattering of public space. Can new media technologies be designed to engender community rather than undermine it?

Warren Sack, associate professor in Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will outline “discourse architecture,” an approach to designing software for community and then focus on one example of discourse architecture, Metavid.org, currently under development by Michael Dale and Aphid Stern at the Social Computing Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Metavid.org is a Web 2.0 site that hosts an archive of video footage of U.S. House and Senate floor proceedings.