Although I insist that I’m implacable every time Archie jumps out from behind the door, there are several situations that make me nervous. Long days of separating from a young toddler is one of them. Talking to my personal heroines is another. Mixing my professional life with my crazy parenting life is a third. Combine all of these and I say some bonehead things. Take the final day of the Institute for example.

One of the JBMTI directors started talking to me while I was reuniting with Matilda. I was so thrilled to speak with her that my brain left my body and I became one of those parents– the ones who say things like, “well I don’t know about tantrums, because we don’t have any because I breastfeed,” “my child won’t have any trouble ever because I cosleep,” or, “my child won’t play with superheros because we’re a nonviolent family.”

I’m not saying I’ve never been one of those parents– when Carter was a baby I distinctly recall thinking those 2-year-olds were monstrous creatures and wishing their parents would do something about their atrocious behavior. I haven’t been that parent for a long time though- until last summer.

Maureen commented that her grandchild’s favorite word was “no,” and wondered if it was also Matilda’s favorite word. My response?

“Why no, I don’t know why it would ever be her favorite word. I mean, she hardly ever hears it.”

I have one good friend who has pledged to kick me if I say anything that dumb again, but sadly, she was in another continent while I had this conversation. All I can do is offer up this 90 second montage.

TED 2012 is crowdsourcing its innovation

Last Friday, TED announced they will accepting audition videos that could lead to a main stage appearance in 2012:

We’re holding this audition to give a chance to the undiscovered talent we know is out there—and especially talent that can help us continue to reinvent the ancient art of the spoken word. At TED2012, our whole theme will be devoted to this. We’re calling it “Full Spectrum”—the rich use of technologies, formats and styles to make an impact on an audience. And that’s what we’ll be looking for in this audition.

The public audition will be held on May 24 in New York. There will be a live audience of TED-sters looking for some crowd-sourced innovation in how to deliver interesting material. The best talks likely will wind up online, and a handful might also get an invitation to California next February.

TED has a few specific requests. They are hoping for some human guinea pigs to test ideas like:

• a talk accompanied by an imaginative soundtrack
• clever ‘choreography’ between a speaker’s words and what we see on-screen
• improv or audience interaction
• intense campfire-style storytelling
• a remarkable new invention

They are also expecting a few new innovations that they can add to the list, which is where the public search for stage talent doubles as a crowdsourcing project.

To be considered for the New York audition, you have to show your worth online first by making a one-minute video by April 25. The short video—which needs to land on YouTube or Vimeo, thus adding “free marketing” to the benefits of the public audition process—should describe both the proposed content and the technique for delivery. Sixty seconds isn’t a long time, so polish is not one of the evaluated criteria; the goal is to communicate your vision. There is also an entry form asking you to justify your choices with the “Full Spectrum” theme for TED 2012.

Winners of the initial online round will be contacted by May 9. If invited to New York, you have to pay your way there for the May 24 presentations, which will be 3-6 minutes each. That may keep the demographics from including economically challenged folks.

Dave Meslin calls himself a community choreographer, a term I find as endearing as his notion about the dynamics of political disengagement. He identifies seven barriers that make it difficult to participate in local politics, including:

• City Hall—An example of “intentional exclusion” is the overly verbose legalspeak in documents that make it difficult and uninspiring to take action. Meslin drives home his point by showing a retail ad with the same treatment.
• Public Space—We sell it to those with the most resources, rather than reserving it for the most important issues
• The Media—With movies, plays and other forms of entertainment, articles often include easy-to-find information about how to take action (e.g., a time, place and location of a show). In political coverage, there is no such follow-up opportunity.
• Heroes—A quick rundown on popular movies shows a pattern of heroes being chosen. This creates a myth about leadership that discourages the uninvited dreamer. In reality, being heroic is a collective effort that is voluntary and imperfect.

He wants to redefine our notion of voter apathy as this complex web of barriers. By doing so, we can more easily identify and dismantle those obstacles.
redefine apathy as complex web of barriers

Meslin’s talk is a reflection of his practice, which includes a number of creative ideas to combat political apathy. He has run a candidate version of American Idol to pare down a field of politicians to support, and his Better Ballots coalition is a citizen movement that focuses on problems with elections (low turnout, low turnover, lack of diversity, and lack of fairness).

Related: David Bismark has an idea for secure electronic voting that is verifiable and transparent.

The Wisdom of Play is a suite of community engagement activities taking place in May 2011. These projects are designed around the theme being used by our TEDx event and include geocaching, storytelling, art and an alternate reality game. We are trying to raise at least $2000 to cover the material costs using Kickstarter, a grass-roots micro-donation campaign site being used to fund interesting creative projects all over the world.

Our campaign will only last through the end of April, so we need to reach our goal by then or—under Kickstarter rules—cancel the project. More likely, it will mean scaling back many of the planned aspects of most of these activities, but some may be in jeopardy without some financial support.

There are some interesting rewards we have come up with to thank our backers for their financial contributions. These include:

• At least $29—A DVD documenting all of the projects and their outcomes.
• At least $59—A shirt from one of the Human Puzzles
• At least $99—A framed section of the story from Our Infinite Canvas
• At least $129—Personal branding for you or your organization in six projects
• At least $199—One of the toy boxes used in our geocaching game

There is also a single super-backer opportunity for $500 that will get all of those rewards plus the ability to influence where three of our projects will be located.

Ideally, this fundraising would have taken place in February, but circumstances didn’t work out to allow that to happen. We have a campaign now, through the end of this month. Less than $100 a day from the community will get us to our goal. More than that, and maybe we can get a blimp.

Check out the new video on our Kickstarter page and consider giving something to the cause.

The Raptor Resource Project is a non-profit established in 1988. RRP specializes in the preservation of falcons, eagles, ospreys, hawks, and owls by strengthening breeding raptor populations through the creation and maintenance of nests. RRP pointed a video camera at the top of an 80-foot tree near a Midwest fish hatchery to follow the progress of the new eagles as they entered the world. Infrared light, not visible to the eagles, provided a round-the-clock vigil in which the whole world could participate.

An international audience watched three eagles hatch

The video stream of the eagles has received over 32 million views. The first of the three eggs was laid on February 23. At any moment, up to 150,000 people checked in to see the eggs as they hatched, one by one, during the first week of April.

The eagle couple are getting to be old pros at this process of hatching and fledging a fresh batch of eaglets. The male and female have been together for four years, successfully contributing to continued population growth of the species with 11 offspring. Eagles left the endangered list in the 1990s, after pesticides threatened their survival.

There is a certain allure of being able to observe wildlife in this way. I can recall spending quite a bit of time during late night work sessions watching the ecosystem awake in Botswana near Pete’s Pond, which has since been taken offline. In general, we aren’t fans of zoos due to the inherent problems of captivity, even with the good ones. Webcams, though, are less invasive and allow the observation without disrupting their natural activities.

Well, modern gamer fans can play that game, too. Here’s an interpretation of a traditional Mario Bros. adventure from a first-person perspective:

It took over 60 hours to render this into a 88-second video. 3dsMax, FumeFX, and After Effects were used to make this interpretation of a familiar game. Well done!

Thanks to Thalith Nasir for the twip (tweet tip).

One of those humans happened to have a video camera on Thursday. Moving to the edge of his seat in the sky (actually the seat of a fellow passenger), he captured a few minutes of the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery:

This was a unique perspective of Discovery‘s final shuttle mission. There are a number of videos available from the ground view as well as the one we watched showing the camera attached to the shuttle. All of these people sharing the experience of a major technological achievement by documenting it with other major technological achievements.

When I was my eldest son’s age, the first spaceworthy shuttle—Columbia—had just been delivered to the Kennedy Space Center to prep for its first flight (That wouldn’t occur for another two years). Elsewhere in space: Bryan Allen pedaled the Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel, Voyager I completed a flyby of Jupiter, Pioneer 11 passed Saturn, and Skylab came back to earth. It was also the year of Three Mile Island, the Ixtoc I, NORAD’s false alarm, and a crash of a DC-10 at O’Hare. Science is hard.

We only have two more chances to see this again. My boys watched the last Discovery launch with me on my laptop, after being reminded on Twitter that the lift-off was imminent. We waited less than ten minutes before NASA flight command reported the shuttle was officially in space. It takes more time to watch an episode of Phineas and Ferb than it does to leave the planet.

Incredible.

TED launched a new forum to help spread ideas

The new social media craze is Q&A. Quora, launched in 2009 and opened to the public last summer, is collection of questions and answers created and managed by its community. It joined a field that already included Yahoo Answers and Answers.com. Although TED Questions isn’t quite the same structure, it will overlap the knowledge management domain by trying to become an online authority for specific topics.

My impression of Quora is poor, partly because of the expectations I had going in to my first use. According to a report from Experian Hitwise, the people who have flocked to the site are college-educated or ready-to-graduate young professionals. While any early community is going to be dominated by a particular demographic as it grows, Quora gives off a needy job search kind of vibe. My rejection of the service, though, comes from not allowing its use to grow organically. Rather than being an open community of Q&A, Quora is heavily moderated to accept only certain kinds of questions (e.g., no survey inquiries).

Presumably, TED Questions is also curated from above—much like the TED and TEDx events themselves—by virtue of the video archives that will be catalysts for discussion. It remains to be seen if, like Quora, the site will remove posts over wording. Conversations will take three forms (Questions, Ideas, and Debates) and have the option to be tied to up to 10 video talks. The posts will also include an important setting. As TED describes its service:

We believe that conversations, like talks, benefit from time constraints. So just as TEDTalks are limited to 18 minutes or less, TED Conversations are set to last one day, one week or one month. When you start a conversation, you also decide when it will end; afterward, you can summarize the discussion with a closing statement.

This is key. Ad-hoc communities who come together knowing when they will disperse are more likely to be meaningfully engaged while they are together. This was definitely true for Web Lab’s Small Group Dialogue forums a decade ago.

Since each discussion includes participation by the thought leaders who have taken the stage, there is a level of expertise around each topic that is enticing. That can be a double-edged sword. As with Quora’s high-profile question-askers, access to someone like game designer Jane McGonigal is a big draw to get participants involved. If the resulting conversation evolves into an online press conference—with people deferring to the expert—it becomes less valuable as a discussion forum than as a supplement to the video talks.

The timing of this works out well for our local TED initiative. Bloomington will host a series of TEDx talks on May 14, 2011 around the theme of “Wisdom of Play.” (Apply to attend the main event at Buskirk-Chumley.) The lineup features a mix of locals and national speakers, many with ties to Bloomington and Indiana University. We will also be running events around the mainstage conversation, including some simulcast sites that Saturday and an unconference activity—”Playing With Wisdom”—on Sunday, to process the content in the previous day’s talks. With TED Questions, there is a potential to better connect our event with the rest of the TED community and give people a destination for continuing conversation.

10questions asks voters to select and critique candidate Q&A

10Questions invites its community to pose and vote on questions to ask candidates, and then critique on the quality of their responses. The philosophy is that this process fosters broader involvement of voters—potentially gives voice to traditional also-ran candidates—and bypasses the bias of media machines and campaign spinsters by allowing the content to be framed from the bottom up. Through the candidates’ video responses, voters are exposed to answers and scrutiny that might be difficult to extract from a live debate.

Iterating on the CommunityCounts project, the site is the product of partnerships between Personal Democracy Forum, The Knight Foundation, Google, YouTube, and a number of national media partners, like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Miami Herald.

When 10Questions launched in September 2007, the experiment was about the Presidential campaigns. During the mid-term elections of 2010, 10Questions identified 43 competitive races in 11 states. The site has focused on the two major American political parties, but minor candidates could participate, too, if they met base criteria (ballot status, have a website, competitive in polling numbers). The results varied, but the organizers behind this method of political discourse are encouraged about its potential as a platform.

There is a little road-not-traveled undercurrent for me here. Some of the people associated with 10Questions and projects like it were part of the RootsCamp meetings in SecondLife in November 2006. My academic interests deviated from politics by the time 10questions was launching in time for the 2008 elections, but it is the kind of project that could have been a focal point of my dissertation.

Less Than Ideal

I got the gig just before the new semester began, which didn’t allow for much lead time in creating new material to match my approach to teaching. I wanted to emphasize how to approach understanding and implementing application development rather than trying to achieve expertise in this particular language. Since I was coding assignments, quizzes and exams from scratch each week, I managed to produce a few lemons that didn’t serve either learning or evaluation well. This included a final exam in which I greatly overestimated the ability of my students to make sense of complex code enough to debug and comment it, let alone enhance its features. There was also a revolving door of associate instructors in the first half of the semester that presented scheduling and continuity issues.

The class was much too big for a coding class, in my opinion, with 80-90 students taking this required course. The size prevented us from working together in front of computers and turned both projects and assignments into logistical nightmares as the instructors tried to give everyone enough support. Most importantly, the skills and interests among the students clearly divided them into two groups, each with quite different expectations for the course and abilities to pick up this material. Being a designer by training, I iterated throughout the semester, helping most but sacrificing the attention of some of the more gifted programmers in the class.

After the final grades were submitted, I started to work on a different way to structure the class that would address a few key needs:

1. Emphasize both individual mastery of the language and social application development
2. Allow students to work at their own pace
3. Learning through explanation
4. Reward participation

Gaming as a New Approach

In the first half of 2010, a class was taught using a gaming metaphor to determine grades. Indiana University Telecom professor Lee Sheldon tried this last spring for a course on multiplayer game design. Sheldon’s syllabus focuses on students earning experience points (XP) for “fighting monsters (Quizzes, Exams etc.), completing quests (Presentations of Games, Research etc.) and crafting (Personal Game Premises, Game Analysis Papers, Video Game Concept Document etc.).”

While I hadn’t seen the specifics of this syllabus until after I had prototyped my own course redesign, I was definitely inspired by the idea. There are some notable differences between my approach and one Sheldon implemented. The T366 class focused on multiple individual and group activities, but the end result appears to be a single point metric—XP—that increases with each student’s ability to master a particular task. My version of gaming-as-grading tried to value multiple resources and tie these elements together. For example, experience points may get you the leveling that translates to a letter grade, but students also have to manage “coin” and “honor” … each of which can be used to facilitate different activities. My course is also being designed to make it possible for a student to succeed while emphasizing or de-emphasizing group work. Finally, while the course has a regular meeting schedule (ideally, three one-hour sessions each week throughout the semester), the pace at which each person works is dictated by a combination of personal and social negotiations.

A flowchart for the game dynamics of a programming course

My initial descriptions of the course structure can be downloaded as PDF

I’m anxious to try this method out, even as I’m aware I may never get a chance to do so (eventually, I need to graduate and move on). However, I think there is value in exploring game dynamics as a mechanism for both productivity and learning in the workplace, too. At the very least, I’ll consider my reflection on Fall 2010 complete.

What do you think?

UPDATE: I’ve also posted this on Quora.

Sound consultant Julian Treasure’s TED talk

Treasure’s consultancy is attempting to take this insight and turn it into increased sales, customer satisfaction, and productivity for businesses. At one point in the presentation, the speaker mentions that the noises in open office spaces can reduce productivity to one-third (recommending the use of earphones to decrease cognitive load). This is interesting to me not for possible gains in business efficiency, but because of the way Treasure treats sound as a material for the design of shared spaces.

When we consider how physical space is designed, the focus might be about objects to sit on or how much light the windows allow into a room. Designers are showing interest in sound as material, however, exploring aural systems and how they impact human experience. The Intelligent Street, for example, was an installation that allowed people walking through a public space to text commands to change the audio playing there.

According to Treasure, sound affects people in four ways:

• Physiological—chemical reactions to kinds of noises, such as the release of cortisol when hearing a fire alarm.
• Psychological—emotional reactions spurred by music or sounds from nature (i.e. birdsong makes us feel reassured)
• Cognitive—we have trouble following two conversations at the same time
• Behavioral—our tendency to do or not do something are, in part, a reaction to sound

Knowing who is planning to use a space and what they intend to do there is important to understanding how sound can be used to support activity. That’s one thing Treasure’s productivity advice does not seem to consider: the context of productivity. Individual task-oriented folks may be distracted by background noise, but creative or collaborative activities may be inspired by ambient noises.

There is also an important distinction to be made between common spaces that are physical and those that are digital. Sound in a physical space is the norm, whether it’s a mechanical hum of machinery or the rustling of wind and insects. Like when the birdsong disappears, there is something unsettling about truly silent places. Websites, though, are usually without sound. When you arrive at a cyber-place and are greeted with sound, that may be off-putting. On the computer, we often choose our own soundtracks through iTunes or other media play that has nothing to do, typically, with our choice of digital space.

It was an interesting TED talk and worth five minutes of your time. In addition to writing a book about sound and business, Treasure occasionally blogs on specific aspects of sound, such as his insights on silence and the negative impact of Muzak.

The long-awaited application process for induction into the Evil League of Evil surfaced last week. The Makices responded with a Sunday afternoon video project at the Informatics Design House.

Selected Applications to the Evil League of Evil

Evil never rests, and neither will I after sporking my writing schedule right before a televised Bears game. But then, the hammer is my penis.

Joss Whedon’s uber-popular Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog showed what some creative people can do with their time and technology. Strike.TV is another outgrowth for disgruntled writers looking for something creative to do.

Strike.TV is the byproduct of striking writers looking for projects

Made entirely by artists donating their resources for the cause, ten original web shows and short-form films are being released on Strike.TV this month as part of beta testing. The project also has a great blog with the back channel stories about how these movies got made.

The first working meeting attracted over 400 pioneers who wanted to create during a time of turmoil. This working meeting was covered by The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and over 70 formal proposals were received. Through its online social network and community Strike.TV guided 40 projects into development with many more coming in following the strike.
Source: Deadline Hollywood Daily

Some of the more familiar names credited as writing the short films include Mary Feuer (lonelygirl15), Jonathan Robert Kaplan (JAG), Rob Kutner (The Daily Show), with help from the likes of actors Bob Newhart, Joanne Whalley, JoBeth Williams, Aasiv Mandvi, and Timothy Dalton.

Six shows are available now, with four more and a few second episodes following this week:

1. The Challenge—Bob Newhart tries to open a DVD. [comedy]
2. Global Warming—Love needs all the support it can get. Aasiv Mandvi comes to the aid of his long-distance love. [comedy]
3. Life in General—The world of daytime drama. [comedy, soap]
4. Unknown Sender—Tim Dalton is the man scorned, recording a message to his cheating wife. [anthology, drama]
5. With the Angels—God, fame, love, sex, cars, music, TV … and all the other things we put our faith in. An introverted girl from Arkansas moves west to Los Angeles, using a video camera to make sense of her new surroundings. The second episode will be released on August 28th. [comedy, drama]
6. 5 or Die—Three high-school friends get caught in the middle of a deadly chain email. Personally, Buffy and Angel are the upper limit of my tolerance for horror films. This one has a nice quirk, but still out of my range of interest. [horror]
7. Daryl from OnCar (August 25th)—In traffic, someone can hear you scream. The second episode will be released on September 2. Read behind the scenes. [comedy]
8. House Poor (August 26th)—She’s just a girl with too much house. [comedy]
9. Joe & Kate (August 27th)—[comedy]
10. Greenville General (August 28th)—[comedy]

A trailer for Daryl From OnCar, released Aug. 25th

Giving something back
The direct-production content of Strike.TV was created by members of the Writers Guild, who were challenged months ago to create original programs for the Internet. The first three months of ad revenue profits will be donated to the Actors Fund’s Entertainment Assistance Program (EAP), a safety net of programs and services for entertainment industry professionals negatively impacted by the strike.

The collateral damage from the writers strike is still being felt today by the camera crews, technicians, wardrobe workers, carpenters, set decorators, makeup artists and a host of other below-the-line workers. Recently, the Los Angeles Times documented the effect of the work stoppage on below-the-line workers in a sobering article. The ongoing threat of a SAG strike and the “de facto actors strike” that has resulted from the tenuous negotiations between SAG and the AMPTP has only hurt industry professionals more, and made the Actors Fund a much-needed resource for financial relief and assistance.
Source: About Strike.TV

Normally, EAP disburses around $200,000 annually. Thus far in 2008, the program has exceeded $1.3 million in assistance. In addition to the ad profits, viewers are encouraged to help by sending tax-deductible donations to the Actors Fund.

The beta launch gave 1000 people a chance to preview the films and provide feedback. The site is gorgeous, including some no-click interactions that encourage exploration of the cast and crew while the credits run. There are a few bugs in the UX—like lack of effective feedback when profile settings are changed, and the soap Life in General wouldn’t stream—but they are minor hiccups. The project makes good use of online social tools, like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, casting a wide net that should attract an audience quickly.

The production quality of the films is quite high, but the storytelling is wide ranging. The anthology series Unknown Sender shows the most promise as a concise Twilight Zone kind of schtick, and many will gravitate to With the Angels for another serial drama. At the other end, the Bob Newhart skit was more like the kind of material that surfaced and entertained during the writers’ strike. There’s plenty of in-between.

Earlier this week they were playing with friends Robby and Teddy and creating their club.

Carter: (waving a big stick) This is my staff of leadership.

Robby: So, does that mean you’re the president?

Carter: Well, we could vote. . . .

This conversation resulted in several unusual voting moves, documented in our special investigative report- How many votes is fair?

Later this week, Archie and Carter got back to work sorting out leadership for their newly formed club, G.R.O.W.P.- Get Rid Of Weird People. Carter later admitted that he liked the sound of “Get Rid Of Weirdos” better, but had already drawn the shirts:

G.R.O.W.P. official t-shirt

Archie: I’m the president.

Carter: Yes, you’re the president.

Archie: So I tell you what to do.

Carter: Well, I am the supreme leader of all eternity.

Archie: So does that mean I tell you what to do, or you tell me what to do?

Carter: Let’s just not worry about hierarchies and stuff like that.

Archie: Okay. (heading out to play)

Carter: But I am still the supreme leader of all eternity.

After all, he does possess the staff of leadership.

Word of this came to me through a tweet from one of my favorite never-met friends on Twitter, Cindy Stanford, a Ph.D. student in human factors at Wichita State. At 11:53, “Qik” the footage is not.

Noel Hidalgo got deported for this

Noel Hidalgo—an activist I once met online in 2006 while attending RootsCamp in Second Life—had a camera as he walked through Tiananmen Square and happened upon some people protesting the human rights violations in Tibet. He wound up on a plane back to the States. Fortunately, Noneck twitters:

02:06 AM August 09, 2008
I’m qik’n an awesome video of a protest i saw in t sq. The frosting came from a cbc camera man who got his passport stolen by police.

03:50 AM August 09, 2008
now i’m back at the hotel and realize that i have some really sweet footage

05:53 AM August 09, 2008
damn, this is down the street from my hotel. http://tinyurl.com/5btqjc

06:23 AM August 09, 2008
fyi my friends, i’ve moved back to my china mobile sim.

08:27 AM August 09, 2008
FINALLY! after 4 hours of mucking with FCE, i have a video that my friend is going to send around. i’ve i’m lucky it might get onto the wire

08:30 AM August 09, 2008
@RachelSterne i’d be happy to travel the world traveling for @groundreport going live is gonna be hard but fun!

09:46 PM August 09, 2008
wow, the pictures of the war broiling in georgia is mystifying.

01:11 AM August 10, 2008
holy shit my t square video has had over 13k views!!! http://tinyurl.com/6mdcmr

About 21 hours ago
I’m getting deported for filming. Everyone safe. tibet will be free!

About 17 hours ago
I’m with americans and canadans we are safe & on our way to la. Pema missing, they said she will be on the next flight to germany. Unsure of her safety.

Earlier in the trip, Noel had also experienced his way onto the ESPN blog, advising the reporter to clear out before things got ugly in a different protest on August 5th.

On the plane, heading home

The travel is not new for Noel. One year ago, he started a wandering journey around the world he dubbed The Luck of Seven:

for seven months, i will stand on the seven contents, dive into the seven oceans, and contemplate seven topics of freedom. while on the way, i will document the journey through stories, photos and videos. this is not my story, this is our story. though your hospitably, donations, projects, connections and friends, our stories will merge into one.

He kept a regular journal, with videos and photos to document his experience, focusing on seven topics of freedom:

1. Free Culture—originally a book by lawrence lessig, free culture is now a movement to break through the walled gardens of our minds and share information.
2. Free and Open-Source Software (F/OSS)—examples include firefox, open office, wordpress, and drupal … “the agents of open-source software are diverse, eclectic, and highly lovable.”
3. Couchsurfers and Bloggers—imagine opening up your house and letting a complete stranger sleep on your couch? That’s the norm for the social network of couchsurfers.
4. Agents of Progressive Social Change—searching for global agents of change.
5. Barcamp & Coworking—two places where physical conversations are organized through the internet. BarCamp is a grassroots technology unconference where attendants are presenters and presenters are attendants. Coworking is the workplace equivalent.
6. Happenstance—the art of random interaction.
7. Our Environment—spotlighting locations and people who are protecting nature, looking for the destruction we don’t see on the evening news.

At least the video ought to be easier to upload now. Welcome back to the West, Noneck.

Episode 1: Horrible is engrossed in his latest obsession—a treehouse.

Episode 2: His latest diabolical invention—the Juvenile Domination Ray.

Episode 3: Young Horrible addresses some audience feedback

Keep ‘em coming, little Doctor.

The Process

The funny video was tweeted to my attention by Mike Stelzner, a white paper guru with some experience operating in this world. If it isn’t true, then it feels true.

But, seriously …
Even though Team Stop Sign worked together in a group, they were still operating in isolation. Demographic surveys aren’t a replacement for getting the end consumers involved with the process of design. Businesses may be embracing collective wisdom, but it still seems from a business perspective, developing a user experience up front—with the user—is a luxury.

The video reminded me of a blog draft that has been sitting idle for a loooooong time about a now two-year-old article by Scott Berkun, “The ideal designer & project manager.” Berkun is also the author of great O’Reilly book, The Myth of Innovation, that came out on my birthday last year.

In the blog post, Berkun asks what is the ideal designer. What I liked best about the answer was that it focused not on the individual but on the relationship with the team, in particular the project manager. The ideal designer is a thought leader, communicative collaborators with well-rounded ideas. The other side to that coin is the dysfunction of ego without a practical track record (we tend to build concepts, not products). Project managers are built for deadlines and balancing resources, but they can also succumb to power plays and emphasize team control at the expense of good collaborative decision-making. Success is attributed not to finding the ideal but in working the relationships.

Experience is still a hard sell
At the IU School of Informatics, the human-computer interaction group has made a point of emphasizing design and leadership as the key parts of our training. There are some graduates who will opt for usability or continue to construct systems and web applications. Even at the masters level, though, there is a strong emphasis on research and doing the legwork up front to better define that development space.

There have been some successes among the HCI alumni in changing business culture with this approach, but most will still tell stories of struggle to validate a true UX strategy toward the creation of better products and services.

Undoubtedly, it will get easier with each class of new alumni hires. The best argument, however, is to be able to translate early user involvement into that world of deadlines and bottom lines. That may be more efficient to do with a startup company.

Any startup will tell you how strapped they are for resources and how pressured they feel to get a product to market, particularly if investing has begun. That situation isn’t ripe for “experimenting” away from the perceived straightest and fastest line to completion. However, startups by nature are much more open-minded and willing to look for an edge. Those lucky few who start new companies with some financial security may be the best places to send our graduates to prove our process, rather than to the larger corporate organizations that might suffer from over engineering the stop sign.

Secret Pants Sketch Comedy asks, “Bush or Batman?”

Secret Pants—”one of the longest running sketch comedy groups in Philadelphia”—went to Independence National Park in Old City Philadelphia, daring to ask the question: Bush or Batman? The comedy team pulled a bunch of quotes from our President’s two terms and Adam West’s campy 1960s T.V. version of the Dark Knight to see if people can tell who said what. Mostly, they couldn’t.

According to one of the troupe members, Bryce Remsburg:

Originally there was a college class in the spring of 2004 at Temple. About six or seven or us met in the class and we were goofing off and hanging out all day. And at the end of the semester we said “hey, we enjoyed doing this, let’s keep it going.” So we met after the last day of the last class and we talked about stuff we like: The State, Kids In The Hall, stuff like that is what we had in common. So we decided to form a comedy troupe.”

A few friends were brought on board for weekly meetings, and they are still doing it four years later. The group has been as large as 16 but currently operates with about 9 members doing sketches and shows.

It proved more difficult than I thought to separate the current Leader of the Free World from the Caped Crusader of the 60s. I suppose that is because, some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.

Best. Movie. Ever.

Now in Bloomington, we’ve taken to a free and worry-free commute to the front yard.

Because Amy plays in the Community Band, the Picnic with the Pops is a Makice tradition, and we have managed to stay long enough to see some fireworks there. Unfortunately, not only is it usually a looooooong ordeal to get kids (and dad) from the setup to the pretty sky show, the Pops have progressively restricted where the boys can romp. Not so much fun as work.

We tried—once—to make the trip to Memorial Stadium to see the annual 4th of July show up close. Carter, then 4 and the proud owner of a little baby brother, demanded we get closer and closer and closer to where the fireworks would be shot off. We had just made our way through the crowd past Assembly Hall when the first rocket fired. One boom later, and Carter was bolting in the other direction. We couldn’t get far away fast enough. Never went back.

I loved the view from atop our porch rooftop as a kid. There were some trees in the way, and we always missed whatever was happening on the ground show, but it was free and easy to get to bed later. (Five year olds talk big, but by the grand finale I was lucky to still have my eyes open.) My dad was more relaxed about it all, too, since he didn’t have to worry about entrance fees, parking, and publicly keeping his two kids in check for a full evening. All he had to worry about was one of them sliding off the shingles.

I’m not letting Carter near the roof, but no need. We look northwest over University Elementary from ground level, waiting for the sky to explode.

Fireworks 2008, Part I (“Chameleon” by Rebirth Brass Band)

Fireworks 2008, Part II (“Captain Jack” by Billy Joel)

Happy Mother’s Day (from the boys)

“Supermomma vs. the Grumpster” is the outcome of a brainstorming session with Carter in which we tried to think of all of the things Mom does for us and how we would feel if she weren’t around. Being partial to the superhero genre, we made Mom into the super person she is and gave her an adversary, the Grumpster, capable of sucking the joy out of any day.

The boys acted out the scenes we had storyboarded, with Carter even taking a turn behind the camera for a few shots. My eldest also gave the video comic an added touch by drawing some images of Supermomma and the Grumpster to help move the plot along. Thanks to some timely tips from Zach Legend at last month’s BlogIN, we had a blast with iMovie on Saturday editing our gift to Mom. Archie makes his composing debut as well, with a short clip of his Garage Band song used as the soundtrack for a scene midway through the piece. It’s the first YouTube contribution I’ve ever made, a milestone that threatens to slow my dissertation given how easy it was to publish.

After uploading the video, I got sucked into a few other mother-themed clips. The two below were my favorites: comedian Rob Paravonian singing an all-to-honest chilrden’s song, and Barats and Bereta with their own Mother’s Day tribute.

To mothers everywhere, we hope you have a great day filled with afternoon naps, crooked ceramics, and the absolute best tasteless muffins grateful family can bake.

Rob Paravonian offers up a realistic children’s song.

The ultimate M-Day card: Barats and Bereta

Zach Legend
* ISU grad – took name from “Larry Legend”
* didn’t like to write, but found YouTube was a great outlet for expression
* got a contract doing videos for the Colts
* keep it 2-3 minutes (“get it done”) – short, for viewers (“how short can you make a video”)

Capture sounds and images:
* Tech is great: small digital camera w/ mic – no lights, higher tech (“I don’t even know what an audio feed is”)

Get is off the camera:
* connect device (typically with USB)
* copy file to hard drive, into separate video
* import into a video editor (Windows Movie Maker, iMovie, etc)
* edit stuff – lots more footage than what is used
* save movie file to HD (Windows = .wmv)

Publish it:
* YouTube allows 100 MB max
* “The internet is a whole new beast.” – trying to capture things and get it out faster and faster
* get account, log in
* “Upload” link – title, description, select video category
* Tags are important
* browse to video movie file – click upload, “and go have a drink” (it can take a while)
* embed code, so you can blog it (but it may take a while longer until it is available)

Future
* looking for more opportunities, expand away from Colts (only 20-week seasons)
* “worked my tail off” to get to a point where I can ask for money
* a wedding video takes about 20 hours
* look for product placement – “It’s a new medium, trying to get money out of these things”
* Can edit tags – sometimes, change tags to people in the news (“sure, you make some people mad, but what do you have to lose, it’s just YouTube”, “try to keep hot”)
* you can turn off comments – “YouTube are mean people” (go to their page, and they don’t have a single video)
* You’ve got to have a thick skin – “you made it, it is your expression”
* video is under my control – if I stutter, trip, etc you’ll never see it on the video

* “At Notre Dame, I twice caught ticket takers not saying ‘Welcome to Notre Dame’” – head usher saw it and apologized, got to go through the tunnel and into stadium – usher had been using Zach’s videos for the last two years as a training video (“Notre Dame Blue Gold 2008“)

Oh, the things one can do with some archival video and an editing app.

Twitter is deep enough that the LeFevers could do a couple follow-ups.

I just realized, btw … I haven’t blogged in over a week. Hurmm.

In a November post in TechCrunch, creator David Hissami described it this way:

At the end of every clip, someone gives a direction. The first person to follow it makes it on the show, and gets to direct the next person.

Basically, this is a collaborative movie of sorts. Substitute a visual game of Truth or Dare for a substantive plot.

The first community movie—First In Action—is only up to clip #9. Clearly, this young community could benefit from one of Jeff Bardzell’s lectures on amateur creativity. After the initial command was issued, the action thus far has been limited to:

2. A guy modeling his mom’s clothing
3. A woman bowing down to that guy, saying he’s a god
4. “something random,” which turned out to be a woman putting peanut butter on her face and then rubbing pets on that
5. A guy shaving his legs
6. A woman showering with her clothes on
7. A guy doing “something funny and exciting with chocolate syrup“
8. A guy acting like a hooker
9. A woman with “a juicy ass” shaking that booty and doing the splits both ways
10. Next? … Someone has to eat a bowl of ice cream with mustard.

Nothing to write Cannes about. Indications on the blog and comments for the movie segments give no indication that will change anytime soon.

The Whoa Show might be a more interesting creative community to watch if it weren’t constrained by the rule of first-to-post getting the honors. There is only one thread progressing at a time—although the site does indicate two others, “Opposite Line” and “The Count Drop,” are in the works. That limits the amount of community innovation that might occur. I don’t think it would take that long to get out of the string of sexually-latent dares and into real storytelling, perhaps a video version of the twittories, where each person has to advance plot as well as length.

Without the pace of community creativity speeding up, it is a better use of time to just browse YouTube Bubbles.