The world of marketing has long relied on metrics like “frequency” and “impressions” to gauge the success of its projects, but that’s all changing: just announced, the new measure will be “engagement.” Intending to reflect “the complexity of today’s media choices and consumer-empowered media consumption” (in the Advertising Research Foundation’s words), the term is a bit iffily defined: it seems to have to do with how invested you are with a product or company (do you subscribe to emails or RSS’s? tell your friends? buy regularly?). “Civic engagement” has been around for awhile too, and looking at how often “consumer engagement” appears in a Google News search, perhaps the time is fast approaching when engagement–civic or otherwise–could benefit from some new terminology.

Following up Reggie’s post linking the Walker’s conceptual Civic Engagement map with Ecotrust’s pattern map of a Conservation Economy, WorldChanging offers a fascinating link-dump on the aesthetics of geographical and conceptual mapping. Of particular interest are a “What if” map that depicts how the actual life of its creator could’ve deviated–or still could as he moves forward, and a French site that correlates the country’s vote on the EU constitution with bloggers and websites that supported the “no” campaign.

Another great mapping project/social critique comes from the Institute for Applied Autonomy: “a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments,” iSee helps users “find routes that avoid these cameras (”paths of least surveillance“) … allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being ‘caught on tape’ by unregulated security monitors.”

More on mapping at Future Feeder.

Since the publication of Art and Civic Engagement: Mapping the Connections, I’ve been especially interested in powerful examples of conceptual maps and pattern languages – tools that can help organizations and individuals navigate in difficult mental terrain and complex conceptual environments. So, I was delighted when my friend Paul Schmelzer hipped me to Ecotrusts’ online pattern map that provides a framework for creating a “Conservation Economy.”

One of the most difficult mental terrains to navigate these days (mostly because of all the smoke and mirrors laying about) is the environment. And Orwellian initiatives like “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” aren’t helping to clear the air. So, what are we to do? How do we create a sustainable world? How do all the pieces fit together to create “an ecologically restorative, socially just, and reliably prosperous society?”

Well, thank the Green Goddess that Ecotrust, a conservation non-profit dedicated to the creation of a “Salmon Nation” has web-published a dynamic and multi-pronged concept map that shows 57 patterns that form “a visual and conceptual framework that can be used to inspire innovation, focus planning efforts, and document emerging best practices.” Exactly what the Walker hopes to accomplish with the Art and Civic Engagement concept map…only in the context of a contemporary art center.

And, can art and artists make meaningful and esthetic contributions to the creation of a more ecologically sustainable world? I say yes…but then perhaps I’m some sort of utopian.

(For an especially ambitious example of an art and environment project check out Rirkrit Tiravanija’s “The Land” or peep the many “eco-art” projects listed on the Community Arts Network)

“Civic engagement” is an incredibly broad term, running from get-out-the-vote drives to the Walker’s interest in linking contemporary art with community concerns to… cell phones? Apparently. The global conference MobileActive: Cell Phones for Civic Engagement, to be held in Toronto September 22-24, will look at how this not-quite ubiquitous technology can be instrumental in participatory democracy, human rights work, and community building.

Sound far-fetched?

USA Today reports how SMS (short message service) has been used in political movements from South Korea to the Middle East to the Phillippines, where in a beautiful case of “mobile democracy,” text messages were used to organize the demonstrations that contributed to the downfall of President Joseph Estrada in 2002. WorldChanging catalogues other examples where cell-phone technology has been pivotal in social change, from ways the technology can spark bottom-up economic development in poor nations in Africa to the use of textmobbing as a form of political protest. And Howard Rheingold links to a story about how the poor in the Philippines use “texting” for the collective good:

Finding that his family has run out of its supply of rice, Nestor Santos (not his real name) pulled out a cellular phone from his pocket, keyed in the order and promptly sent it via short message service (SMS) … to his order taker. A few hours later, the ordered sack of rice to be shared by Nestor and his neighbors arrived.

This account may sound like just another technology-assisted lifestyle story, except for the fact that Nestor collects garbage for a living, and lives in a former dumpsite that still has a huge mound of compacted decades-old filth — and a much-reduced stench outsiders still find overpowering — to remind residents of their even sorrier past.