about WGIT
WGIT DC is a community project consolidating all sorts of local information at community member’s fingertips. Similar to a neighborhood bulletin board, WGIT aims to promote everything offered by local spaces, scenes, and organizations in DC. The platform allows users to discover new things to do and places to visit, while also propping up pillars embedded and curating our neighborhoods for ages. Our hope is WGIT is simply a tool that prompts readers to learn about happenings nearby, root themselves amongst their neighbors, and engage in our entangled lives.
Think of WGIT as the low fidelity starting point jump starting your involvement in DC and finding your scene(s). Use our rudimentary lists and maps of organizations to find your community. We make an emphasis on listing orgs and spaces promoting relationship based community over shared interests. Use our calendars to find small scale, local mostly free events in your neighborhood. We aim to be a free, easy to use tool providing you with all the information you need to make the most of living in DC.
why WGIT?
Instead of waiting for the algorithm to put a local event in front of you, WGIT provides direct and free access to information about local happenings at your fingertips. After all, sharing is caring. Using feedback from all walks of life in DC, WGIT aims to make it as easy as possible to answer the question, what’s good in town?
Like other platforms similar to WGIT, these tools can be a great way to connect people to their local community and encourage them to explore new places and experiences. We hope WGIT allows you to find events and activities you care about happening right in your neighborhood and draw more folks out to enjoy and engage with all their communities have to offer.
what makes WGIT different?
After realizing social media was a tool used to exploit human connection rather than nurture it and algorithms overengineered the task of getting involved and finding community, WGIT is an earnest attempt to connect residents and utilize technology as a tool to build community.
philosophy
Did you know your mortality rate over the next year is cut in half simply by joining one organization?
There’s a great feeling we get when we’re absorbed into things greater than ourselves and our communities can be just the fulfillment we’re looking for. Active engagement in your proximate community is one of the core pillars to a healthy lifestyle so the goal is to make it easier for everyone to get together. The magic happens thanks to all of the organizers putting on events, shows, and gatherings.
sources & inspiration
- Join Or Die Film: In this feature documentary, follow the half-century story of America’s civic unraveling through the journey of legendary social scientist Robert Putnam, whose groundbreaking “Bowling Alone” research into America’s decades-long decline in community connections could hold the answers to our democracy’s present crisis.
Flanked by influential fans and scholas as well as inspiring groups building community in neighborhoods across the country, join Bob as he explores three urgent civic questions: What makes democracy work? Why is American democracy in crisis? And, most importantly… What can we do about it? - Race After Technology, Ruha Benjamin: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code is a 2019 American non-fiction book focusing on a range of ways in which social hierarchies, particularly racism, are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies
- How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell: In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives.
- Saving Time, Jenny Odell: In her first book, How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell wrote about the importance of disconnecting from the “attention economy” to spend time in quiet contemplation. But how can we reclaim our time. In order to answer this seemingly simple question, Odell took a deep dive into the fundamental structure of our society and found that the clock we live by was built for profit, not people. This is why our lives, even in leisure, have come to seem like a series of moments to be bought, sold, and processed ever more efficiently. Odell shows us how our painful relationship to time is inextricably connected not only to persisting social inequities but to the climate crisis, existential dread, and a lethal fatalism.
- “Algorithms are breaking how we think“, Technology Connections
