mulaz

Avatar is one of those movies that you see in cinema in 3D and all you have to say is – wow. Stunning effects, rich and beautiful (although a bit color crazy) scenery and a story that works for most for the movie. It’s very much worth the hassle of going to the movies.

The trailer doesn’t do it justice, but maybe it will help you see it. (yes, I’m that psyched about it)

It’s snowing around Europe at the moment and Twitter is trending with term #uksnow. Nothing special about it, besides the fact that’s is a beautiful orchestra of crowdsourced tweets that get aggregated to the #uksnow Map 2.0

Why is this important?

While this is a single focus application, that will probably stop getting attention in a few days, there is no reason why anyone couldn’t go out and build generic mobile and web platforms that would enable such crowd-sourcing and trend aggregation around important public happenings.

We already have great open software for this, e.g. Ushahidi could be a great platform to build on top of.

For the last few weeks, I’ve tried to figure out how to tell a story of different communities around me. They’re all doing great things, but the general perception, within them, is that the public is not recognizing their efforts and that getting more recognition will help with other aspects of their work (getting funding, members, more feedback, etc.).

Very much inspired by Jono Bacon’s book – The Art of Community, I’ve started analyzing different public pitches, strategies and road-maps that they have. The answer that I hear often or at least is implied is that they’re open spaces and that people make of it, whatever they want.

In case of Kiberpipa, it’s very usual to hear: “Kiberpipa is something else to everyone” and as such it is a very complex idea, that’s hard to communicate clearly.

Which is perfectly fine, if you’re in there for last five years and are practically a founder. The problem is that this is not the story that we can go out and present to upcoming and promising teams. It’s too vague, if feels to big and it’s scary as an empty wiki.

So the big plan for the upcoming weeks is to talk to many people and artificially set constraints on their projects. Not in a way that would prevent them from doing whatever they’re e doing now, but it a way that would home their pitch at least in one direction, making it easier to attract new people and upgrade existing ideas.

In short: let’s decide on one thing that our project is to a few people and build a solid foundation around that, before moving to the next one.