THE DIRTY HANDBOOK OF STARTUPS

Sandbox 10 - A side project: Exploring vehicles of transparency

Hackers, developers and grassroots activists in the U.S and in the U.K  building web platforms in order map connections between corporations, powerful individuals, banks and politicians. Betting on citizen participation, liberation of data and corporate transparency, people are creating spaces for data to be processed, understood, put into meaning.

According to Open Corporates’s ranking about openness in company data, Greece scores zero out of a possible 100, i.e. the central register cannot be searched without payment or register while this isn’t the case with most countries. Greece’s current economic state is not to be blamed on the people only, who are easy to control because of their controlled transparency and accountability.

It should go both ways though. If someone should be held accountable it should also be the politicians, banks, media and mighty individuals who have so much power over the economic, social and judicial systems, especially in Greece.

 

While I was reading a Tony Hirst blog post titled “Mapping the Tesco Corporate Organizational Sprawl”, I was intrigued by the sense of Tony actually building something that people could inspire from and try it themselves. Maybe he wasn’t necessarily thinking of its exact value at the time but just doing it for the heck of it, but he inspired me to start thinking of ways to create a place for Greek hacktivists to remix Tony’s methods so they can scrape the data themselves.

 

A project like this could be marketed with other media, for example creating a reply video for this very expressive action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiMqH0V46FU&feature=related

Tony Hirst- http://blog.ouseful.info/2012/04/12/tesco-graph-hunting-on-opencorporates/

·      http://maplight.org

·      http://blog.ouseful.info/

·      http://opencorporates.com/

·      http://www.opensecrets.org/

·      http://sopatrack.com/

·      http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/

·      http://mappingcontroversies.net/

·      http://transparencygrenade.com/

·      http://sunlightfoundation.com/

Sandbox 9 - Fun(ding) times !

To my excitement, the placement needs me for a second task. I was to get in contact with one of the organizers and the producer of MF and  it in order to ‘’seek crowd-funding using indiegogo.com’.

 

So what is indiegogo?  Some would say it is a crowdfunding platform that also helps users amplify their project through a special “gogofactor.” The more traction a campaign gains, the more eyes will see it.  The concept relies on “user democracy” — anybody can raise money for anything while funders are the one’s who, with their power can dictate what goes on the main site. Those looking to get their ideas or concepts realize can reach a whole new audience, while your chances of funding are increased due to handling with an audience that quite often funds, ideas and individuals who produce cultural and social value.

 

There isn’t a considerable amount of research on indiegogo, but there are some web guides that can lead me to the right direction. I shall be posting my research results below:

 

·       Cost: Indiegogo costs 4% if you realize your funding target and 9% if you don’t.  In comparison to Kickstarter, which is all or nothing I agree that it would be more practical to be placing our efforts in indiegogo since it’s funders are also part of a more underground, subculture type vibe that can help in establishing a greater sense of engagement and involvement, which is exactly what the MF needs.

·      Audience: Our audience needs to be based on active, involved individuals who will be able to bring MF to the main homepage of indiegogo, by engaging in conversation, sharing and promoting the project. To this audience we need to pitch ourselves, the ‘brand’ of scholars, artists, students, insurgents etc. In order to create a buzz around the project, we will need to take into account all the different angles the project is taking. Who are involved? How are they connected? 

·      Buzz: Tasters, trailers, photos, website with counter counting down to the moving forest ‘attacking’, creating web platforms for engaging users before the launch of the campaign. Maybe have a web platform where users are able to interact with other users’ submissions of what the project means to them (videos, photos, links etc.). We could involve London galleries, London lifestyle walks and activist groups to come up with strategies to create a buzz as well.

·      We need to be show that funding is not going to ‘just another art project’. Need to express the ‘big picture’, make them see that they’re going to be part of not only a multi-artist, multi-platform, multi-event project but also part of a deeper level of expression and communication.

·      People won’t give money to the thing you’re doing. They will give money to why you’re doing that thing.

I’ll be looking more into crowdfunding in a bit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sandbox 8 - Understanding brands, connecting with audience

I’ve begun a placement with one of the most prominent figures in new media and multimedia art. During the next three months, I will be assisting one of the organizers coordinate and also help with research in a fantastic project.

Using the information on a) the wikis b) the mailing lists, I firstly need to understand the

project.

[ MF expands the last 12 minute of Kurosawa’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘Throne of Blood’ (1957), into a performance and broadcast saga with a prelude of 12 days and a scripted 12 hour live performance. It is multi-artist, multi-site, multi-media, harnessing crowd-sourcing & mobile technology in London and beyond.

Moving Forest, presented as a work by the collective AKA the castle, brings together commissioned and self-assigned acts and actions realized by diverse visual/sonic/electronic/digital/performance artists, writers, singers, coders, hackers, mobile agents, twitters, networkers and the general public.

Moving Forest maps an imaginary Castle and a camouflaged forest revolt onto the modern day metropolis. Derived from Shakespeare by way of Japan’s most respected film director Kurosawa, Moving Forest brings the classic play into the hyper-playground of London city on the eve of Olympics2012. The event takes place not only in designated locations and with dispersed units across the city, also virtually on the internet with audio/video streams.

Inside the castle, classic and contemporary tales of omen, remorse, betrayal and overthrow unfold. Each act is realized by collaborating visual, sound and performance artists making use of all mediums, elaborating operatic manoeuvre into an escalating scheme of conspiracy and its contemporaneous political manifestations

Outside the castle, the mobile forest, electronically updated with antennas, electronic magnetic waves, geolocation, armed with bytes and pixels, signals and slogans, is assembled for simulated insurgency measures. Mobilized urbanites, empowered by free network emissions, carry the camouflage tree antennas, in a spider-shaped movement, towards the Castle Central. As the sheer strength of signals forces an entry into the Castle, a final merging of forest and castle occurs; a moment of downfall, jubilation and loss.]

My first tasks involve locating and researching online groups to act as insurgent forces outside the castle. I am looking to check in with people/groups who already engage in works that relate to the city, not necessarily talking about particular radical acts. Some of the additions to the wiki include thinkers, organizers and activists. 

My plan for approaching these groups would be to :

·       Join mailing lists & forums.

·       Follow on twitter.

·       Follow on other social media – YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook.

·       Research groups that do not appear in electronic activist groups’ light.

·       Get in contact with these groups.

·       Explain the project and their possible role.

·       Get people to agree to be part of the project.

My first addition to the wiki is Nettime, consisting of mailing lists for networked cultures, politics and tactics. 

Based on my plan, I get a response from one of the list moderators, agreeing to be part of the project.

A screenshot of the wiki which helps me share Moving Forest texts to Shu Leang Cheang and the other coordinators.

Sandbox 7 - Success! Collaboration begins…

It hasn’t been even 24 hours since a web presence was launched and I receive an email by the founder and editor-in-chief of GH, a collaborative platform for ‘underground’ creative minds that is currently being developed in London. I’ve added this as sandbox assessment since it may impact future entries in the blog.

“Hi Yiannis,

I checked out your website, and must say, what you are studying sounds very interesting. I love what you say about living for everything that combines social, digital and collaboration. You seem exactly like the person I would like to work with, and I think joining our team would be exactly up your alley and could be a great opportunity for you. I’m looking for someone who has the necessary programming and developing skills, but also understands the brand and is excited about helping create a cultural media product that celebrates and fits with modern day internet culture. This might sound vague, so please let me introduce myself and my project a bit more. 

 …I

 We are well into building this first version of GH and know exactly how we want it to function, however are in desperate need of someone to join us in developing it. I would love to show you what we have so far, and explain more about how we are developing the community aspect of it. If all I have told you interests you, I definitely think we should meet as soon as possible and discuss it further.

 

My number: 07xxxxx. Please let me know your thoughts!”

 

Baffled, I read her email and reply.

 

“Hi L..  and thanks for your email. It must have taken a while to write but it was so nice reading it because I felt how passionate you are about this project. I’m always up for joining teams who believe in something that has value.

I’m glad you liked my website, it took  20 straight hours and it’s  still evolving.

I’m always thinking of ways to bring people together online and offline with the use of different bits and bobs that I find online, like engaging with people in the streets on twitter in order to map (and display) free wi-fi spots in central London. If you check out my site there’s a project section to see what I mean.

 

Like you, I believe the ‘now’ is in digital curation of media by users and the element of a strong and active international community that adds so much to the experience. There’s so many people out there who want to control the quality and freedom of media and they can do that by engaging, contributing and collaborating. Effectively this means bringing more power to the hands of those who can use it to make something good. (like you!)

 

The brand, which is the core of GH’s operation should be translated to all aspects of the business, organizational, strategical and promotional. Of course if you lose sight of your main beliefs then you lose your followers as well.

Definitely the under-the-radar scene is what people still live for. If it wasn’t for that then we’d be hopeless as I sometimes feel it’s a struggle against the designed, mass produced media.

GH sounds excellent and I’d definitely want to be part of it one way or another.

 

I understand that you’ve began development of the platform right?  What would my involvement be in this stage? I’m a bit busy at the moment with my Masters and an internship , so maybe I can contribute in other ways?

 

We can discuss it more if you want,

 

Warm regards,

Yiannis 

I feel really good about this. The way I’m writing about the underground scene makes me excited and hopeful.

“Hi

 Thank you for your reply. My number one source of motivation is when people understand what I am working on and believe in the vision, as you seem to do even with so little information.

You make some really interesting points, and I love how you talk about the ‘experience’ of media. I checked out your project on your website, and I must say it sounds extremely interesting and impressive.

 I understand that you are busy, however I hope that you would consider working on this with me and my team anyways. Rather than hiring someone who perhaps has the necessary skills and time, I would really like to work with someone who understands the project, fits in with the team and has interesting ideas to bring to the table. I am looking for someone who can spend a few days a week for about a month. I can compensate you either hourly, daily or on a task-by-task basic — it is all negotiable.

 I would really like to meet with you in person to explain more about the project and show you what we have developed so far. Would you be able to meet this week sometime for a coffee? Either way, we could discuss how you could contribute, as I’d really like to become part of the community.

 Let me know!

 Best,

 L..”

Joining a brand that has principles is basically my number one goal. Something like this could put me in a situation where I can use my understanding of liveness and media experience to make something useful and also, employ myself. 

Sandbox 6 - Moving to a different environment

I’ve decided to create a space to act as my personal website, which will be used to connect to brands, agencies and individuals. Flavors.me, an online point-and-click interface that connects all your content into one unified web page, seems like the way to go. It has the ability to organize content, stylize and publish with a customizable display. The benefit of this is that I can use it for more professional needs such as showcasing to possible collaborators and future employers.

The paid-version of the service also has site analytics and statistics that can be useful in the process. There is also a community evolving around websites built with Flavors, as you can easily find and connect with others based on interests, tags and keywords. This could prove very beneficial from a networking perspective.

 

The new web presence can be reviewed at www.yiannischrysouliotis.com .

 

Using Vistaprint, I’ve designed and printed 200 business cards to hand to people I meet during networking events, workshops, talks, in university and elsewhere.

I tried to give a creative edge that employers may connect to by using keywords to emphasize the industry, purpose and platform i.e, Telling a story using digital art and media to engage an audience and make an impact.

 Thinking about the future, if my mission will continue writing a dirty handbook of startups it will include an introductory section on how to make a Flavors.me page or something similar.

Wordpress is great for building on existing coding knowledge (like html and css), but for someone who wants to try and get himself out there quick by combining a ‘stylishly sound’ web presence with extreme networking, then this could be a solution.

Shots of the delivered cards:

Sandbox 5 - One way of standing out

What am I doing?

I’m writing up a collection of thoughts on the information available on start-ups, in combination with some possibly creative ways to stand out to employers.

Thoughts on the ‘dirty’ handbook of start-ups
Since the handbook is something that is arising from my own reality, it feels like I’m living the project, documenting its momentum. Its usefulness lies in that I’m trying to achieve something, to learn and to get employed and also to realize what I can and can’t do, a feasibility study for other project or ideas that I come across.

Theme
I’d like to explore the subject of applying for jobs in digital media and the start-ups industries. Creativity is a must, and employers want to see how you stand out to the thousands of CVs they receive in their mail. Several case studies of ‘standing-out’ can be found online:
➢ Gareth Cashs’ Cover letter

➢ Ulrike Schulzs’ Find a job project

https://twitter.com/#!/thelondonjob

➢ Sean Frasers’ CV

➢ Employ Kyle

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/850468-kyle-clarkes-employkyle-com-website-nets-him-a-job-in-new-york

What I found inspiring from these projects were the people themselves. Ulrike Schulzs for one created something that stands out while managing to connect to people on her behalf.
Sean Fraser and Gareth Cash both showed an understanding of what the industry how the digital industry works and what it wants. They proved their relevance by using the tools available to them to show capability, applicability and most importantly managed to create a buzz around them.

Therefore, for this sandbox I explore the possibilities arising from using JavaScript in html to create animations. This is done by:
1. Taking 78 photos with a stop-motion technique in mind.
2. Renaming them from photo0 to photo77 in order to use them in a JavaScript function.
3. Uploading them to the server using FTP, then had to use photobucket.
4. Copying, hacking and testing the code.
5. Embedding on the website.

Issues

➢ Need to have a more stable camera fixture for more realistic results that have better flow.
➢ Renaming photos can be time consuming (And 78 photos is peanuts compared to the number needed for a ‘real’ project.
➢ Still haven’t found a way to directly embed the animation on the site without the need of linking.

This is what I coded. The source code can be seen by right-clicking on the animation and do View source. (Needs compatible browser)

Click to download the .html file [it’s perfectly safe]

Conclusions:

In the handbook, I want to show how exactly to do similar projects like the ones mentioned earlier using JavaScript, a camera and a little bit of imagination. I also would like to answer the question “Why do this?” more explicitly.

Sandbox 3 - An idea with a friend

 

What kind of preliminary thinking happens when talking about new social networking platforms?

 I tried to think of something that friends and myself would use and take it from there. I also thought about combining the element of a game with a social network. The game goes like this:

 The platform is a group of people. They’ve been selected for being ‘cool’ or ‘in the know’. Everyone has social value in certain connections in their daily lives and what we propose in this platform is ways of bringing these values to each other.

You will be able to connect with people and share their power and social value they possess in different places. You start playing the game by locating people around you who you feel have something to offer, by browsing peoples profile showing their strengths and benefits they have from their social ties. For example a person may lead you to an interesting bar that you hadn’t heard before, with the added benefit of ‘knowing’ the manager at that bar. There couldalso  be a friend’s friend bartending there. The whole idea behind it is that there should be a ‘hook up’; this would arise by harnessing the strength of weak ties. It could be that the person invites you out to meet his friends, meet a girl or make a business contact. The connections/results are documented, and people receive Badges for their work.

Badges are a sort of recognition in the community, just as boy-scouts have. A badge for ‘Business connection of the week’ could be an example.

 There would be unique/special badges for specific tasks such as arranging a business connection, a romantic date or just for sharing a friend’s power position at a place etc.

If someone takes you on a really good night out, he receives a badge for his efforts. This correlates to your status level. When you’re rated positively, your status accumulates up and you receive certain benefits e.g. More invites.

To get initiated you would need to offer something that has social value to one of the existing members.

It all about knowing the right people, not how many friends you have on Facebook. And knowing the right people can lead to all sorts of positive interactions.

 

It’s based on the idea that people are willing to travel to find things they already enjoy. Locally it could be the case of just driving a couple miles to find someone who shares your interest for underground graffiti tagging. The value arises from the things that person can teach you: Underground graffiti spots, new techniques etc.

 

You may also stretch distance, by taking a flight to Berlin only to find that it’s just like home, by hooking up with the right people for the right kind of night. Hooking up with someone who ‘knows’ the city, so you don’t feel like a tourist. It’s very different when you have someone who knows his way around the area and it’s that exact notion that we want to explore. This differentiates from other travelling websites, where you only get a place to live for example, and not the inside-information of the area around you. 

 

To build a social networking service, you need active people who go out and do things. You would explore structural holes in your social network and try to shareyour social value with other individuals who have other things to offer to you in terms of the people they know.

 

 

 

Their connections would start joining, expanding the network with ties that are considered to be ‘cool’. The invite system is based on What.cd’s example. The invites you sent out effectively have a mark on you, as you are responsible for their proper usage.

Another element I came across during this research is the rise of social trust clouds. Since the emergence of peer-to-peer marketplaces, social trust cloud services are popping up to complement these market places. Could it be used here? 

 

Thoughts

Building something that comes from within you isn’t easy. Sometimes it works for you, sometimes it doesn’t.

There are so many different sides of you that want to speak their mind, say what they feel. Suddenly, while you’re thinking “I want to build a social networking service”, you realize that you don’t know the first thing about it. So I started researching, collecting material and storing it on Evernote. This could become my final project. I would need to think how I would like to build this, what kind of team I would need to organize and how I would fund it.

 

I would like to understand how a business plan is made, how the industry works with social media applications and what it takes to create a platform or an application.

I would like to do some research on building a social network from scratch which would include the stages that need to be completed to reach a prototype, the decisions that need to be made regarding intellectual property rights, functionality, security and privacy.

 

Why I chose this path for the assessment

I feel that the MA we’re doing could also touch a bit on Start-ups and Applications development. Since it hasn’t (yet) I thought it would be beneficial to think about the subject myself. What I came to realize is, everyone’s got ideas. And that ideas are just ideas. Now actually going through with developing ,evolving and sustaining an idea, well, that’s a whole different ball game.

 

 

I believe that i am in the early stages of understanding the inner working of the still-developing social media platforms and there’s much food for thought regarding the way people connect and share aspects of their lives that were unable to do so in the past.

.

 

Sandbox 3 - time for an intervention

Defining my mission as ‘using, promoting and creating social media tools’ may have certainty been ambitious, but as the whole experience of this course is concerned, that’s exactly what I have experienced so far.

 

I find myself drawn to events unfolding live on my screen, putting a journalist mask on and fearlessly getting into the ring.

Protests and riots are always magnetizing; but it’s the live coverage of them that fascinates me.

I choose to follow two separate events that were unfolding first in Cairo then in London. My aim is to try and make an intervention that would lead to a social change, however small it may be.

As the first event occurs (the stealing of supplies in Tahrir Square) I started recording my computer screen. The result you will see is an improvised effort that occurs real time and uses freeware software namely Ushahidi’s Crowdmap and Twitter, enabling me to ‘ride the wave’ of live coverage of events. The speed has been distorted to emphasize the element of problem solving, speed and reflexes.

Watch in High Definition.

https://vimeo.com/40331091

 

https://need.crowdmap.com/

Using Crowdmap, the needs website was launched less than 25 minutes after incidents of thugs stealing supplies in Tahrir Square, Cairo started hitting Twitter. The site maps locations of field hospitals (converted mosques, churches, roundabouts, a KFC). Information is gathered via Twitter messages using the #TahrirSupplies hash tag, email and from direct reports.

 By having a site where the location of supplies is mapped, the people of Cairo can monitor them and strategize methods of defending these hotspots more effectively.

Also, locations where there is a need for food, blankets or medicine can be identified and mapped in order to aid the movement #TahrirSupplies

 

A second attempt to improvise on live events was made on November 30^th in London. https://n30supplies.crowdmap.com/

 

During the November 30^th strike, I followed the live storytelling of the days’ events, while pinpointing sightings of violence, anti-raid police and plain-clothes police officers on a Crowdmap project.

I learned that most features that I employed on the map weren’t of a huge importance. What seemed to take off though was the gathering of information regarding free Wi-Fi spots in Central London. This idea came when thinking of the necessities of the people in the streets, and among protection of identity, human integrity, medical assistance and available toilets, I wrote down Wi-Fi as well. A huge part of marchers were using their smartphones and social media to broadcast their marches to the rest of the world. Those without a 3G or 4G connection would be unable to provide us with real-time posts, tweets and uploads. By pinpointing free Wi-Fi spots around the city we could be able to help solve this problem.

Data is gathered by using twitter and the hash tags #n30supplies and #WiFi, SMS texts, email and from direct reports on our Crowdmap site.

 

 

 

Thoughts 

The element of speed was an essential factor for the timing and improvisation that occurred during the design stage.

Overall, the importance of this project was to try and be part of a moment, make connections, participate and find a way to intervene.

To be honest, the sheer adrenaline rush I had when other users shared my requests for information, getting feedback (negative!) and trying to ‘ride the wave of events’ was exhilarating.

This whole process of being offline, getting involved online and then trying to produce action offline again connects to my mission of bringing the streets online.

 

In the future, I may want to repeat this motion of following a live incident as it happens and making a social intervention through the use of online mediums and tools.

What started off as just an experiment ended up receiving my full attention and commitment to something occurring both online and offline in different spaces i.e. the streets of Cairo, #occupyLSX, the Piccadilly Circus ‘clashes’ and so on.

 

I’ve attached snapshots of twitter and email conversations to highlight some problems I’ve encountered. Tweeting the same thing with different hash tags and information may have caused confusion to the Twitter community, especially when using different accounts.

The feedback I received for the n60supplies.crowdmap project was mostly positive, as witnessed by the high number of retweets. I did have some negative feedback, which was based on not providing a secure gateway for users to import data while protecting their personal information. This was caused by not realizing that there would be sensitive information at the time.

At the stage of concluding this project, I feel that I may have crossed a line with pinpointing plain-clothes officers on a map, although I did not manage to succeed. The inspiration for pursuing this feature came from the website Fitwatch, and I felt that I should include it since I believe provocative instruments have no place in public demonstrations, as they are dangerous. (Fitwatch publishes information on plain-clothes police officers around UK protests).

 When dealing with sensitive information in the future, I’ve decided to use an anonymous profile or at least use a fake identity.

 

Twitter accounts used:  j2thej13, n30supplies

Email accounts used: n30supplies@gmail.com

YouTube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrgsJ2CV7tU (watch in HD)

Crowdmap sites: https://need.crowdmap.com/,           https://n30supplies.crowdmap.com/

Sandbox 2 - testing the waters

Digital Sandbox 10^th February

Research

It’s interesting to see how the rise of the sharing economy, collaborative consumption and peer-to-peer marketplaces are changing the way we think of materials, value and ownership. For my digital sandbox I will try and research the models of such innovations and experiment by considering my local network and how to benefit from collaborative consumption. I’ve drawn up on a number of online sources to create a deliciouspage, in order to organize ideas about these issues more effectively.

 

 

 

 

Initial Idea

·      If a house has mice, probability wise I would imagine that the houses next to it might suffer from mice problems. This is just an example. Similar problems could include broken water pipes, a need for installing better theft alarm due to increased crime in the neighbourhood etc.

·      If we could somehow connect these households that share similar problems, they could share the cost of the solution.

·      This could be achieved by contacting local businesses e.g. pest exterminators and try and get a better price for doing the job in 2 households that are next to one another. The workload may not be reduced, but the distance and time moving from one job to another is minimized.

·      Neighborhoods may benefit from the positive externalities that occur from collaborative consumption and a sharing economy, such as lower costs at a time where they are needed and keeping income locally by dealing with local businesses only.

 

 

Data gathering

For this part I chose to concentrate on Yahoo Pipes, as I felt that they would be suffice in gathering random tweets of mouse sightings around the world. Having to manually separate mice sightings from “mickey mouse” and “computer mouse” is too time consuming but simple Filtering operations may lose results.

Moving on, I will use Yahoo Pipes in order to gather some data:

 

·      Get tweets regarding mice issues

·      Get twitter names on that data

·      Get friends of those twitter names

·      Get locations of all twitter names

·      Match twitter names within ¼ mile

·      Make a CSV list

·      Visualize on Gephi and show connections

 

What do I want to accomplish with this task of scraping information about mice?

·      I want to show the locations of the people talking of their mice problem

·      I want to geo-locate their friends (primarily those who live quite close to them)

·      I want to get in contact with everyone and propose the idea of sharing mice exterminator costs.

·      It would also be useful to map local exterminators to calculate distances and present a better proposition to them in terms of cost saving. (both to exterminators and to users).

 

 

 

 

 

What I have accomplished.

·      I have a pipe that is able to do a basic Twitter search.

·      I have a pipe that is able to give a geo-location of a Twitter username (which would be based on the previous pipe’s result).

·      I’ve realized that although some ideas are good, technically I don’t have the capability to make them into a product or a service.

 

I have not built these pipes from scratch, but just browsed already existing pipes and modified some elements to make them work for this project and to have the element of simplicity.

 Unfortunately, I was unable to combine the tweet about the mouse sighting directly to their location, but manually took each username and placed it into the location pipe.

 

In the future, the pipe would be complicated enough to do the operations they’re supposed to without needing a second pipe.

 

 

 

The 1st sandbox - building a site

                                     04/11/11

Manifesto

Our goal is to create a web presence that is devoted to the exposure, usage and creation of social media tools. By designing and maintaining digitalstreets.org we aim to bring together individuals in a constructive environment, promote sharing and collaboration and release open source material. Our aim is:

·      To explore the limits of online collaboration.

·      To aid the construction of social media tools.

·      To provide an online platform where social media students, developers and enthusiasts will be able to demonstrate ideas, discuss, and create prototypes of tools that in turn can affect and are affected by social media.

·      To provide hosting for collaborations and projects, making them available for testing and feedback.

·      To present readily available social media tools and other useful software that can be found on the web.

·      To promote networking and connect with like-minded individuals, organizations and bloggers.

 

 

Inception:

 

When the Cypriot anti-Government protests erupted in July 2011, a friend took a photograph of me facing police officers in front of a raging fire, in the midst of the clashes. I chose this shot to be my background, because I feel that the right to protest is something as important as water and air. I chose this photograph because it reminds me of how individuals like myself, a mature Masters student, is one of those many who fight for their rights, in the streets. That’s how I came to the name, ‘Digital Streets’. It is an effort at looking closely at what happens in the protests, online and offline. It is also an effort to organize media that is circulating online. Ideas about new ways of how to connect, organize and support the social can be shared here. Projects may be developed collaboratively in our online space.

 “ Where Social Media is our playground ” is a way of communicating this to our visitors.

 

 

Technical:

 

Online Identity:

Theme used: Custom Community

Background: Personal photograph

Favicon: Loudspeaker

Logo: Photoshop; made with smudge tool

 

Issues:

·      During development, I had many issues with getting the right size background and the right size header right. Through trial and error at changing image sizes on Photoshop I was able to overcome this.

·      The mission for the website was initially the creating of an online social media tool. It has now evolved to a more exciting function, which is to create a space to design and present ideas.

·      Since one of our goals is to host projects, online prototypes and perhaps high volumes of data, it is viable to purchase the right hosting package.

 

 

Layout:

The layout will be simple in order to have visible and better-organized content. It will be arranged in a number of categories. Each post will be directed into its own category with its own tags.

Example categories could include:  

 

·      ‘Ideas’ could be just discussions between users regarding someone’s idea, brainstorming and feedback.

·      ‘Prototypes’ will hold first versions of software, code and applications.

·      ‘Influences’ will give a space for users to share their influences and inspirations.

 

Communication between users and visitors of the site will also be available at both the Chat space and at our Open Forum.  A Twitter account has been created under the name digital_streets which will connect, interact and share content with the Twitter community.