communities

The monthly get together for the organization that I’m the secretary/treasurer of the regional chapter of. If this sort of thing interests you, c’mon by.

Once a month, we get together to have drinks, chat, network, and geek out with fellow information architects, librarians, usability experts, user experience designers, and other like-minded user-centered professionals and students. It’s open to anyone, so bring a friend — especially those in other local organizations! The format will be casual, but all are encouraged to bring something to discuss — recent work, an interesting topic, or even your resume. This event is organized by the Pacific Northwest chapter of the American Society for Information Science & Technology.

What: Seattle Monthly Information Architecture Meetup
http://ia.meetup.com/57
Where: Elysian Pub, 1221 E. Pike St., Seattle, WA
When: 7-10pm, May 13th (2nd Tuesday of every month)

This and the next several are when the students will come in a big drove most likely, so if you’re looking to hire new grads in the information professions, it’s a good bet.

IMG_4018

Originally uploaded by javith

Last week, we went to rainier vista and had a reception with the Seattle Housing Authority, Ignition NW board members, and a lot of residents of rainier vista and members of other Seattle Communities.

This tree, designed by Seattle’s Iron Monkeys, is the first permanent art piece installed by a grant from Ignition NW. It’s going into Rainier Vista, a mixed income housing project in Seattle that is pretty much ideal as far as neighborhoods go, and right next to public transit.

Our efforts at getting involved in our local community are paying off!

Although, as the trainers noted, it sounds like the set up to a joke, Burning Man takes providing management training to its senior volunteers and staff members very seriously. As part of my Quinfecta of Frenetic Activity down in SFO, I went to the 2008 version of said training.

Because of BM’s nature as a largely community-driven and volunteer-based organization, their management priorities are a little different than other organizations. It’s very simple, really, and I can sum up the difference in three words:

RESPECT EMERGENT BEHAVIOR

This shows up in a number of ways, in respecting the ideas that volunteers come up with, in coping with what emerges from chaos every year, and in generally planning from middle-up or bottom-up instead of top-down when possible. The respect emergent behavior is a spin of mine on it, but it’s something that I’ve had as a part of my core management philosophy for a while, so I was suprised and pleased to hear burning man talking about it.

I was down in the bay area this weekend, so I went over to Yuri’s Night Bay Area 08, which was a party held in honor of Yuri Gagarin’s mission to earth orbit — the first time a human had left the surface of the planet in that dramatic a fashion. It’s turned into a somewhat generic celebration of humanity’s scientific achievements and hope for the future, at least locally, but it’s still held on an active NASA airfield at a NASA Base (Moffet field at NASA Ames.) I’m very much in favor of the idea of progress and not giving up on the future, so I’m pretty enthusiastic that there’s a party celebrating this sort of thing.

I’d heard about Yuri’s Night in previous years, and there was one in Seattle this year, but I very much wanted to go to the Bay Area one, so I was happy when my plans fell along with it. I was fortunate enough to be able to volunteer as security staff for the event, and got to hang out with a number of other friends of mine who were also volunteering. It was, all in all, an awesome time; although as someone who’s hilariously allergic to wheat, I need to remember to bring Lara Bars in infinite numbers to events when there isn’t easy-in, easy-out.

The exhibits were awesome, the theme was awesome, my friends were very much in evidence, and it was altogether a great time. I’m very glad that I was able to go.

Noted flaneur Tom Dobrowolsky of Urban Archives and Seattlest (and a friend of mine from grad school) wrote a poem about riding by me on the bus the other day, and I have saved it here for posterity.

I saw Corprew today
outside the window of my bus.
He was standing at the corner
stuffing a laptop or something like that
into his compact bag.                                       5
He looked intent.

This is my favorite non-ovary related poem written on, by, or about mass transit in Seattle.

It IS a fine morning. I was coming from a consulting gig I currently have going with folks whose offices are in the University District, and I’d just bought a plastic hardshell for my MacBook Pro.

I went to the gaming session of Seattle dorkbot last night. I went to two of the sessions, and then spent the third in the bar. The third session was a real yawner, correctly identified as such by Ario, that made me sad, as I’m very interested in the topic of “Games for Social Change.” Here’s my notes from the thing, as it might be of interest to readers, I mainly took notes on Jordan Weisman’s session on Alternate Reality Games.

To some extent, it was a marketingish presentation, although as you can see JW is particularly rife with geek cred.

So, the notes:

ARGs tell stories interactively. The premise began for them, based on the Kubrick/Spielberg movie AI, because they’d been licensed to make a number of games based on the product, but the movie wasn’t particularly given to making games. Instead of making games based on the movie itself, they made it based on the universe that the movie took place in.

Their question was, how to tell that story. But they came up with an idea based on the narrative structure organic to the web.

I’m not sure I didn’t replace Jordan’s point with one of my own here: Different models of disseminating information have different methods of telling stories that are organic to them; bards, epic poetry (e.g. Iliad, Odyssey); books, novels; television, sitcoms; movies, summer blockbusters; What is the native activity of the internet at time circa now? JW says looking through a ton of crap looking for relevant partial pieces of information.

What if one were tell stories through scattered shards of information? Deconstruct a narrative, create all the evidence that the story had taken place, and then hide the evidence and throw away the story.

What is the device on which this story will be told? The ‘media sphere,’ which JW describes as ‘all devices with electricity and some without,’ but I think it’s easier to say all information-bearing objects, here, which is a metaphor from InfoSci that is similar in scope.

This is essentially a community effort, the people who take place in the exploration form a ‘hivemind‘ in response to finding shards, and tell stories to each other. The story goes from being the original narrative to being a consensus narrative that comes from the audience’s experience.

The community effect produced is that the hivemind has every skill on the planet, and it can go everywhere and do everything and anything. It has essentially any skill on the planet. It is also, by that same factor, smarter than the people writing the game.

Sample: Ilovebees

• Use life as a game board — it took place all over the world.
• radio drama told on payphones — fragments of the story were released as people talked
• Name of game… campaign for prerelease of Halo 2

This is, in its essence, pop culture hacking, it’s about about the audience crwating fiction and inseminating your references into their everyday consciousness. However, this is against the everyday experience of marketing staff — they want to put up as much collateral as possible and advertise it’s existence as widely as possible to get as many people to notice as possible. But that turns out to not work well with getting people to want to experience this, what you want to do is draw people down the rabbit hole.

How to get audience in? Spend time creating content, not telling them about it.
Allow communication about shards of content to draw people in… People will start looking with a few small clues.

highlights of their work
All of their big campaigns have led to marriages, because collaborate and share rahter than compete, story drives communities, competition drives individualism. This is, to a large extent, their goal — the building of a temporary community, possibly tied to awareness of some product or service that people make them make the game for. It’s an interesting balance between entertainment, advertising, and ‘using the real world as the gameboard.’

Pattern Recognition
William Gibson

William Gibson’s Pattern recognition was a tip of the hat to I love bees. I’m wondering if WG’s perception of ARG makes this a must-read for anyone interested in ARGs. I’m probably going to pick up the book in the next couple of weeks to find out. If anyone has any opinions on that, please feel free to let me know via email or comment.

One thing that JW mentioned at the end of his talk, and I suspect that this was a deliberate seed effort of his, was to say that if you were in front of the Bellagio during CES on 1/6/2007, you might see something interesting in the fountains. Anyway, in the spirit of thanking him for coming to the event, I thought I’d pass this on.

Technorati Tags: alternaterealitygames, community, deconstructednarrative, dorkbotsea, ilovebees, rabbithole, socialengineering, storytelling

For those of you who don’t know, one of the things that I’ve been doing outside of school these years is serving on the board of what’s currently unfortunately called the PNW LLC Thingie. This board was elected by a large community to form an LLC to do a number of things, potentially including arts grants, curating art events, building community centers, overseeing events, and other things.

It has meetings every other Thursday, and the various committees on topics like naming, board representation, and stuff like that. It’s an organic outgrowth of stuff that’s been going on for the last couple of years, and I think that it will grow to be useful and powerful over time. At the moment, the wheels are grinding exceedingly fine, though.

pnwllc