The Click Heard Round the World

Beth Noveck, White House Deputy CTO, talks about "Wiki Government" in Second Life on July 20th!

Please join a Second Life simulcast, from the Markle Foundation, of Beth Simone Noveck, now the deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House responsible for Open Government, presenting her new book, WIKI GOVERNMENT: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger, and Citizens More Powerful. The presentation will be followed by a Q&A, in which participants from both Second Life and in person can ask questions of the author.

In the digital age our lives are constantly being transformed by the way in which we connect and collaborate with one another, affecting the way we make decisions - on a personal level, an institutional level, and a national level. Drawing on her expertise, and more directly her experience in creating Peer-to-Patent, the federal government's first social networking initiative, Ms. Noveck's Wiki Government insightfully demonstrates how technology, along with citizen participation, can help the government become more open and effective at solving the complex social and economic problems we face today.

The event will begin at 12:00pm EST/9:00am PST on Monday, July 20, 2009 and will take place in Second Life on MacArthur Island (click here to teleport ).

(o.o): First Annual NYC Digital Youth Media & Tech Fest this Saturday (June 27) at New School!

I'm excited to announce that this Saturday, my group Global Kids is participating in the First Annual NYC Digital Youth Media & Technology Festival taking place on June 27 at the New School in NYC. The daylong festival will spotlight the growing movement among teenagers in New York and nationally to design video games, films and other digital tools to advance social causes in a youthful and technologically literate language.  There are a boatload of great groups involved in the festival, including MOUSE, the NY Public Library, PetLab, alongside Global Kids.

I love that the official name of the event is "The (o.o) Festival" with "(o.o)" apparently being the emoticon for "curious."  

The full press release for the event follows...

Digital recreation of Al Minns doing the charleston in Maya

This is a neat 3D digital animation recreating Al Minns awesome charleston steps from a film in the 1950s. Don't know how this was done exactly, but the character does seem to mimic quite well a lot of the subtle styling of Al Minns. I'd love to get this animation for my Second Life avatar!

Done in Maya by university student maggisv in Maya. Nicely done!

Here's another awesome video of Al Minns and Leon James dancing.

Appreciating my role as a "Connector"

Post-processing my experience being a "mentor" at the BAVC Producers Institute in San Francisco last week, I've been realizing some of the unique aspects of my own personal journey and how that has shaped me into the odd amalgamation of activist / technologist / educator/ dancer/ Quaker etc. This past week has helped me to appreciate my own unique perspective in a way that I never have before.

What I now see is that while I have fairly thin expertise in any given field, I have a broad enough understanding of very disparate subjects that I am able to see links between them in ways that are less obvious to others. And I'm fairly articulate at communicating those linkages.  As my lifecoach says, I'm a "Connector."

BAVC Producer's Institute Finale: Pitching your project!

The culminating event of the BAVC Producer's Institute is a presentation of the eight projects being developed here to a group of potential funders, partners and distributors. The challenge presented to each team was to develop and present a prototype of a participatory media project that creates social change.  It's an intense and nerve-wracking experience for the teams, who have only had five days to conceptualize, discuss, wireframe, and develop a prototype for their participatory media project.

Each team had a strict time limit of 15 minutes to present their project, which can incorporate film footage, photos, web site mockups, data visualizations, and other multimedia content to get across the essence of their work-in-progress. 

Virtual meeting with Claudia Linden at the Producers Institute at BAVC in San Francisco

I've been in San Francisco since Saturday participating in the awesome Producers Institute, organized by the Bay Area Video Coalition.  The Producers Institute is an intense week bringing together documentary filmmakers, technologists, activists and educators to brainstorm new forms of participatory media for social change.  I feel very lucky to be here as a "Mentor" representing Global Kids.

This afternoon, the team producing the "Virtual Mine" game had a meeting in Second Life with Claudia Linden, head of educational support at Linden Lab. From left to right that's SL citizen journalist Draxtor Despres, Claudia Linden of Linden Lab, myself in the miner hat, Ben "Buhbuhcuh" Batstone, Jennifer Gilomen, and Wendy Levy.

The "Virtual Mine" is a 3D immersive game intended to teach young people about the complex factors involved in the energy industry, from extractive processes to alternative energy sources.  The "Virtual Mine" is associated with "Deep Down," an upcoming documentary about the impact of coal mining on one Appalachian community directed by Sally Rubin and Jennifer Gilomen. Creating a game to elucidate some of the central themes of the film is a really neat idea. And Second Life is a great venue for this sort of game, which incorporates film footage, music, animated simulations, and role play.

It was good practice for the team to get to present their project to an informed outsider. And Claudia was very helpful in helping the team to think about where to host the game within Second Life, as well as how to outreach to relevant educational and nonprofit communities interested in virtual worlds.

Twitter as an Event Organizer's Tool: Our Experience with the Frankie 95 Birthday Festival

About a month ago my friend David sent me an email asking about how we could use the micro-blogging service Twitter to help spread the word and coordinate a swing dance festival that we were helping organize.  We started brainstorming and decided to try it out.  As it turns out, Twitter is a pretty effective tool for event organizers.  

I will describe in the post the three basic applications that we used Twitter for: public communications, volunteer coordination and tracking participant feedback. Perhaps it might help others out there thinking about how these micro-blogging services  can be best leveraged to make your event as successful as possible.

The Global Shim Sham compilation video: a labor of lindy love involving 5,000+ dancers from around the world

This video is the result of several months of effort involving an estimated 5,000 dancers in over 22 countries: the Global Shim Sham.  This was produced by a dedicated team of volunteers for the Frankie Manning 95th Birthday Festival, and shown to an appreciative audience of about 2,000 people on Saturday, May 23. 

Read on to find out how this was produced and who was involved...

Off to Producers Institute for New Media Technologies in SF next week!

Video about project to create social media supporting global justice, around documentary "The Reckoning."

I got a last minute invite to participate in the Producers Institute for New Media Technologies all of next week in San Francisco, run by those amazing folks at the Bay Area Video Coalition.  Running from May 27 to June 7, the Producers Institute for New Media Technologies "connects independent producers and their socially relevant content to emerging models of storytelling and distribution."

Through the Institute, documentary production teams from across the US, Europe, and South America spend ten days at BAVC working with technologists, designers, storytellers, and programmers to develop new models of participatory media. Mentors from leading technology companies, including Apple, Adobe, Google, Mobile Active, Phantom Compass, Pentura, Map Office and others, work in teams to design and develop working prototypes, which are presented to international funding and review panels at the end of the Institute.

Sounds like the perfect convergence of social issues, digital media, and storytelling -- right up my alley.  Can't wait!

The promise, tool and bargain of Yehoodi as a community website

I just finished today Clay Shirky's awesome book Here Comes Everybody, a cogent description of the sea-change in social organization that we are witnessing due to the advent of online social networking tools.

Shirky's book has me thinking about what lessons I can take away from it for Yehoodi, the swing dance community site I help run. 

Shirky describes three basic ingredients to successful online communities:

1. The Promise: What are you asking people to do?
2. The Tool: How are you enabling them to do it?
3. The Bargain: What do they get out of doing it?

The healthiest, most robust communities answer these questions well, through shared agreement and understanding.  The social experiments that fail are not able to answer these questions sufficiently.

I think Yehoodi as it currently stands only moderately well answers these three questions.