Street Sounds

Sponorship as a force of good: Streets Sounds is an interactive way for users to upload various found environmental sounds to a rich media database of the US. Though it might not be useful in a professional capacity – seems like most sounds are recorded in a low enough quality for upload's sake that they're probably best used as tidbits – it advances the idea of a collective database of not just information, but experience. Taken together, it's a useful collage of what our country sounds like, especially if it gets popular. Up next: the Library of Congress' Archive of Smells!

The Ministry of Reshelving

Pervasive and Alternate Reality Game designer and theorist Jane McGonigal is the brains behind such "Serious ARGs" as CryptoZoo (with the American Heart Association, 2009), Superstruct (with the Institute for the Future, 2008), and World Without Oil (with Ken Eklund and ITVS, 2007), a collaborative simulation of a global oil shortage.

Both Serious and (I guess) Frivolous ARGs and PGs teach collaboration strategies and collective intelligence skills. Instead of merely challenging players to solve a gamemastered puzzle, Serious ARGs relinquish a great deal of narrative control to players, and encourage the development of a "collective imagination" among them.

Collective intelligence is useful, pragmatic; collective creativity is visionary. The former is what makes Pandora and Amazon's "Other Customers Bought..." functions work; the latter is what might save our collective ass one of these days.


McGonigal and compatriot during the Ministry of Reshelving game


Here's an item I wrote for the Boston Globe's Ideas section in August 2005 about Jane McGonigal's Ministry of Reshelving project — in retrospect, I think it was her first step away from doing ARGs as PR stunts for video games, and towards what she does now.

***

Earlier this summer, Jane McGonigal and three dinner companions were chatting about doublespeak, censorship, and surveillance when someone idly commented that George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 should be reclassified as Non-Fiction, or even filed under Current Events. "Five seconds later, I said, 'Wait — we could actually do that,'" recounts McGonigal. So last Monday she took the lead in launching the Ministry of Reshelving project, an ambitious, opt-in performance piece whose goal it is to secretly reshelve 1,984 copies of Orwell's book in bookstores in all 50 states.

Though such an undertaking sounds daunting, it's child's play for McGonigal, a doctoral candidate in performance studies at UC-Berkeley who earns a living working as a designer and "puppetmaster" for 42 Entertainment, an Emeryville, Calif.-based outfit that creates elaborate "alternate reality games" — played by thousands via chatroom, cell phone, e-mail, even billboards and want ads — in order to drum up excitement for various new products. But McGonigal's true passion, she said via e-mail from San Francisco, is "making games that give people a platform for changing social norms and public policy." As of this writing, she reports, some 55 "ministers" — from California, New York, Idaho, Kentucky, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and a half dozen other states — have relocated over 100 copies of 1984. Evidence of these hijinks is being posted around the clock to the photo-sharing website Flickr.

Is Boston behind the curve? By no means! On Thursday morning, McGonigal said, a Bostonian "minister" informed her that a copy of 1984 had just been moved from the Fiction section of the Borders in Downtown Crossing to the Political Science section, where it was reshelved next to a book titled Inside the Mind of Bush.

The Public School

A project of Telic Arts Exchange in Los Angeles, The Public School was begun by Fiona Whitton and Sean Dockray in 2008, and produces curriculum based exclusively on community-demand. Subjects may be proposed by anyone (via the website), and if enough people show interest (by signing up), the school finds a teacher, and a course on that subject ensues. Recent curriculum at The Public School includes, “Economies of Attention: Media Technology and Biopolitics” proposed by “caleb waldorf”, and taught by Kenneth Rogers; “Canning, Pickling, and Preserving” proposed by “cybelle”, and taught by Paul Pescador; and “Performance / Performativity / Enactment” proposed by “liz_gL”, and taught by Liz Glynn.

In 2009, The Public School began expanding internationally, and now has satellites in Brussels, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Philadelphia.

NYC BigApps

Today marked the end of voting at NYC BigApps competition – a sort of crowdsourced and collaborative project. The project aims to have developers create applications that take advantage of NYC's DataMine.

The city is using the contest format, which is becoming more and more synonymous with crowdsourcing in some circles, to increase transparency and utilize all sorts of publicly available data sets. The more interesting apps seem to be emerging where the developers are using multiple data sets instead of say, one set of public library locations. This approach enables the data sets to collaborate with each other (and the user) in a way that can offer much more value than a Google search would. The result is hopefully a perfect example of good collaboration, a whole that is much more than the sum of its parts.

Walkshed, an app that provides a walkable "heat map" based on your activity preferences, and Nexttown, an app that pulls data about your local elected officials and their efforts, are two entries that stand out to me as great examples of data collaboration.

The winners will be announced on February 4th, so stay tuned to see what NYC deems the most useful BigApps.

Sour's 'Hibi no Neiro'

Ok, ok, maybe a bit beneath the intellectual vibe we're fostering here about Big Ideas. But cute nonetheless.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we've got a time.

...and that's at 5:00 PM on March 15, 2010. Woohoo! Looks like we're in a prime spot, too; while there's people presenting at the same time as us, I think we're diverse enough that we'll attract a great crowd. Totes cool.


See the full schedule here!

Riley on Colbert!

Our esteemed colleague Riley was just on the Colbert Report last night, pimping the idea of collective action and it's robust way it can solve problems. 'Grats, Riley, you media hound.

The Colbert wedsite doesn't seem to allow embedding, so check out the episode here. W00t!