Detroit Music Box: Share Your Stories from the Cass Corridor

The Detroit Community Technology Project has been hard at work building out a community wireless network called CassCo, which will begin its adoption phase this fall. CassCo is a mesh network that allows communities to distribute and share Internet access from one or more gateways. Every community wireless network has an intranet, a local network in which users can send and receive information wirelessly without connecting to the Internet. This network can also host local applications, such as chat and text apps, file sharing, community wikis and more.

The Detroit Music Box

The Detroit Music Box is our first application on the CassCo community wireless network! This application will be used as a neighborhood radio station to broadcast stories and media from people living in the Cass Corridor. The shows will combine music from the neighborhood, audio from the streets and interviews with neighbors to make a feature track that asserts an identity and vision for Detroit. The Cass Corridor is the area bounded by Warren to the north, Woodward to the east, Mack Ave or Martin Luther King Jr Blvd to the south, and the Lodge to the west.

With the rapid development and changes happening in the city, we hope to use this digital space on the mesh network to archive people’s stories and the cultural history of the Cass Corridor. The Detroit Music Box empowers communities to claim this digital space in the midst of gentrification and revitalization. The intranet can be an organizing tool for neighborhoods, facilitating private communications to share community activities, alerts, and more.

Submit Your Story!

We are collecting your stories to broadcast on the Detroit Music Box application, which will be available on the the community wireless mesh network this fall.

Do you live in the Cass Corridor? Do you have stories about about the people, places, movements and changes in the Corridor? We want to hear them! Submit an audio piece such as poetry, music, storytelling or any other forms of audio media. It’s easy and you can do it on your phone!

Here’s how:

• Send an SMS or MMS (picture message) from your phone to dmb@vojo.co
• or call +1 (313) 451-7359 to record your audio story
• or email us. If you have longer audio pieces that you would like to submit, send the files to communitytech@gmail.com

You can check out the feed of stories as they are submitted here! We can’t wait to hear your memories, experiences and hopes for the Corridor.

This project was made possible with support from the Knight Arts Challenge.