the long shadow

Last night was the March installment of Refresh Philly. It was a good time which started out with pitches from some projects born out of BarCamp Philly such as HealthCampPhiladelphia, BarCamp NewsInnovation, and HigherEdCamp. Its great to see more niche programs and projects grow out of social media using the available technology and its potential for good rather than just monetization.

Luke Crawford, CTO of muxtape, gave an overview of muxtape past, present, future. What i got most out of his presentation is picking the right tech for the project. It is such a simple idea that gets overlooked for ease and what is the norm. Sometimes PHP isn’t the right language to use to implement a certain idea. And its always cool to get a behind the scenes look at a project you admire and use.

Todd Zaki Warfel from message first was up next speaking on Rapid Design. The idea of getting a diverse group in a room and forcing quick, dirty design and implementation ideas intrigues me. Coming from a place with little to no cross departmental interaction and a long track record of not sharing information I can see a huge potential to break down barriers and get things done. It is so easy to butt heads and keep a stalemate in educational/institutional settings that this cuts through the vested interests and gets to the heart of an issue. I can see myself implementing this in the near future.

Most notable of the evening initially occured in the backchannel and that was throw out by @saturdave: “is waiting for when RefreshPhilly starts talking about how to make Philly better.” I agree wholeheartedly, the talent and energy in that room could totally take on something that we see as a problem and make a huge dent in something perceived as a problem. I have a few ideas brewing that im going to start hashing out a bit on these pages.

recently there has been a surge in coverage of twitter being used by corporations.i have to ask, why do people care? there are so many great museums/cultural orgs using twitter as a tool to connect in a meaningful way with their followers. using twitter as a tool to connect with your constituents is a no brainer but doing it right is often the hard thing. in my eyes most corps are doing it wrong but thats a post for another day. to be open i was the driving force behind @thefranklin until 12/31/08, which is also a post for another day about the lessons learned and what things i/we could have done to make more of an impact.

the smithsonian does a really great job on twitter. it took them a little bit to find their foot but their random pictures from around the museum trivia questions were a good time. once they finally broke down the institution speak and just using twitter to broadcast events i found their stream much more interesting.

NASA has a few active accounts, most people know of the phoenix account but there are a few other projects tweeting including the cassini project and the jet propulsion laboratory. yes the JPL twitter just spits out links from a RSS feed but i think for an organization like JPL thats ok at the moment. this is not a complete list of NASA projects just the ones i pay attention to.

the adler planetarium in chicago does a great job of dropping knowledge as well as directly interacting with followers by answering questions and linking to relevant information from around the web.

the exploratrium in san fran is one of my favorites. they take direct dispatches from scientists and pass them onto the public. not too much institution/PR speak just nerdy interesting tidbits from their projects worldwide and from around the offices.

in the near future i will be posting a something regarding my time as @thefranklin as well as possibly critiquing specific institutions about what they are doing right and what they could be doing better. i believe in the cultural realm you can not talk trash on what people are doing as they are up against far more than a comparable corporations PR dept that does takes on social media.

igoogle iwish

by hampering full access to the GApps i think google is doing a disservice to its users. by creating less usable shortcut apps and then opening the flood gates to inordinate amounts of tweaks and additions. google is watering down the essence of their applications. interacting with the GApps should not be as difficult as it is currently.

the mission that created the evening:
Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards.

The Refresh Manifesto:
Let’s Gather Great Minds
Let’s Share All Of Our Knowledge
Let’s All Grow And Learn
Let’s Promote Local Talent
Let’s Be More Than We Think Can Be
Let’s Make Our Cities Better

to start the night off was a dev from comcast going over a new tv based community called chirp. im not too interested in tv so ill just leave it as cool connections through a shared interest that hasnt really been done before.

second was a dev from local show p’unk ave going over symfony a php framework. great introduction, but a bit over the head of many in the room who were designers for the most part it seemed. ill be poking at it some but my main question is how to add it to my workflow/tools to aid in the adoption.

third was a couple of guys from brownstone a local firm i had never heard of that is focusing on IA/UX, which as an aside i think will become more and more popular as companies start looking for more traction in the market rather than just burning bright and then fading. rather than focus on the specifics of what they/their company do they wanted to bring their skillsets and apply them to the mission statement of refresh. the floor was opened to suggestions for using the group as a platform as a way to create greater change in philadelphia. initially the flood of comments were all reactions to negative things, which i thought somewhat off-putting. my take on refresh was to bring the minds together to make the place they love better and take the positives and make them shine.

focusing on the negative with philly is way too easy so im going to flip some of the suggestions:

bike commuting issues: highlight trouble areas - why not highlight the easier routes. the city has a maze of bike lanes. create maped routes that highlight specific routes to/from neighborhoods with stopping points for good shoppes/bars.

highlight road closures resulting from events to make commuting easier: why not take those events and highlight those and make the road closures a secondary warning. the events themselves are what make our city great. not the stupid road closures. there are so many events in the nooks and crannies of the smaller neighborhoods that go un-noticed.

a personal goal of mine is to make cultural events more accessible. we have so many institutions/museums/galleries that host great events/exhibits/etc that many times just get washed over by larger events with better PR and i find that to be a tragedy. with the economy and the country in such turmoil it is the arts and the culture should be given the time and attention it deserves because in many ways it is these that made this country what it is,

if you want to focus on the bad: how about making the services the government manages more accessible by cutting through the infinite amount of layers it takes to find the proper forms, phone numbers, guidelines. joe sickpack isnt going to wade through all of the annoyances to get help if its buried 8-10 layers deep in link mazes and lawyer speak.

lets keep the refresh positive and not focus on the negative because thats what everyone else is doing. we can step it up and make things better.

museums, cultural institutions and non-profits have a chance to benefit from the new internet. major strides are being made in what is known as web 2.0 but no one has been able to bring it together in a way that makes any kind of direct impact on society as a whole. its now the time for museums, cultural institutions and non-profits to take the reigns and make good things happen by taking these new technologies and applying it in new and inventive ways to their community, collection and constituency.