I sent this out to backers who were subscribed to my newsletter at the beginning of this month.

Just wanted to update the larger interwebs on the status of We Operate Best Together.  Been a while since my 2nd update so apologies on the late ping.  Here’s the latest…

Moved Back To San Diego

I returned successfully from Australia and within a week, got offered a full-time job at Media Arts Center San Diego!  I’m now the Lab Program Manager for our DIY New Media Lab and manage all aspects of programming, partnerships and fundraising for the Lab.  It’s hard work building a lab, but also something I’m very excited about.  I’ve always wanted to build one since I was little.

I blog regularly about my work at the Lab and live just half a block away in the beautiful neighborhood of Golden Hill.

Partnering With FabLab San Diego

Reflecting on My Time With CuriousWorks

Thank you!

Hello internet. I’m happy to say I won my goal with Kickstarter. Thank you everyone! I could not have done it without you. For those who missed the action, I decided to do a 4 hour marathon online DJ set (that’s part of what’s documented in the video above) to raise the remaining funds for my $1500 Kickstarter project goal. Throughout it, people were Facebook chatting me, Twittering, emailing and calling to wish me luck, spread the word of We Operate Best Together and make pledges. With just 7 minutes to spare before midnight, July 4th, I MADE IT. Had I not, I would not have gotten ANYTHING. Zilch. Nada.

Again, THANK YOU FANS, BACKERS AND SUPPORTERS!

That said, I am now taking a little bit of time to recoup, get grounded and prepare to ROCK Europe…

Not to mention that a server hiccup caused me to lose all posts from the past 7 months, shortly there after. HA! Seems a perfect time to do this before setting out on my adventure.

A strong ship makes for strong sailing, no?

If you like, check out my other cool projects below:

You can also visit me on Facebook or Friendfeed and Twitter.

Feel free to send a private message using the form to the right or leave a comment below. You can also download my resumé if you like – I’d love to have a few cool projects/websites to be working on while I’m traveling.

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We Operate Best Together is on Facebook. If you join, any links you post on the Wall there will appear here as well as over at Memeshift. Go ahead, post cool links to projects on storymapping, social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Here’s 6 sources to get you started:

• http://delicious.com/search?p=socialinnovation
• http://delicious.com/tag/socialentrepreneur
• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=socialinnovation
• http://search.twitter.com/search?q=socent
• http://delicious.com/search?p=storymapping
• http://delicious.com/memeshift/socialentrepreneurship

Note: According to the Kickstarter funding platform rules, this project will only be funded if at least $1,500 is pledged by Jul 04, 12:00am.  So go ahead, make a pledge!

Can’t make a pledge?

Here’s 6 ways *you* help make this project a success.

1. Email this post to a friend - know some people that should know about this? Send them a link!
2. Write me back! – Let me know of any cool places worth checking out in England, Holland or Norway!
3. Tweet about it: (using this link: http://bit.ly/V77BF)
4. Blog about my project (you can even grab a widget for your blog post)
5. Share my campaign on Facebook
6. Join the We Operate Best Together Facebook Fan page

And don’t forget, for anyone who does make a pledge, there are some goodies in store for you too (see the pledge rewards on the right hand side of the WOBT Kickstarter page).

Ready to do this?  Let’s.  GO!

Me and Marco Menendez at Laney College

Things are AWESOME right now.  After scaling back on a few other things, a whole series of awesome energy, love and support from strangers, friends, family and colleagues alike has flown in to my life.  For those that have been following my story, here’s the latest.

I want to go to Europe to document creative communities, but am low on funding resources.  I’m working on some cool websites while running a Kickstarter campaign to fund my project. I also have an AmeriCorps Ed Award as a possible funding source.  But I can’t use it unless I’m enrolled in school.  Why not do a study abroad program at a local college and apply the Ed Award?  None existed.  So, I created my own class *after* enrolling at Laney College, in Oakland.

In order for it to be approved however, I had to:

1. create a self-designed independent study proposal
2. find a professor to sign-on to oversee it
3. get a signature from the Dean of Instruction to approve it

And I had to do all this *before* applying for a Payment Request from AmeriCorps.

And I just got the Dean’s signature today.

YES!!!!!!!!!!   This marks the key to unlocking the treasure chest of my Ed Award to further support my trip!  All I have to do now is enroll in the class I just made and I’ll get the award sent to me!  This is like personal entrepreneurship and I’m so excited.  AND, there’s even a possibility the college could pull me in to assist with workshops on new media/broadcast journalism when I get back via classes that Noemi Zeigler (a.k.a Madeline Minx) teaches…

I totally WORKED my AmeriCorps experience too – ‘built capacity of media arts centers’, ‘led and developed digital storytelling workshops’, ‘developed social network campaigns for non-profits’….

I feel so awesome right now.  And if I’m able to reach my Kickstarter goal by July 4th, that’ll be the icing on the cake…  I’ll be able to:

• travel safely
• travel well
• be well fed
• document cool communities and people (and have cool gear to do it with!)
• have fun WITHOUT HAVING TO WORRY ABOUT MONEY

Darlene. She's awesome.

I also want to give a big shout out to Darlene Cruz.  She’s awesome.  She was soooo helpful the first time we met, told me which professors to track down and even shared some of her own aspirations with me (she wants to do volunteer work in the Philippines one day).   She’s a real connector this one.  Did I mention she rocks?  She used her sweet talking skills to get buy-in from necessary staff and faculty *and* introduced me to some great folks who further gave good feedback on my project (thanks Marco!) – certainly my hero(es) for the day.

The many times in the past where I’ve attempted to go to Europe, money and maybe even my own fears have always held me back.  It’s now looking like I’ll have something far more valuable (money not withstanding!) in going out there – the support of people who believe in my project.  Thanks folks!

Oh yeah, I’m still plugging away on getting more funding for my project.  If this is successful, I wonder what this project could evolve into?

Sooo, don’t forget to make a pledge on my Kickstarter page or become a Fan of the We Operate Best Together Facebook Fan Page!

Yesterday, I attended a collaborative brainstorming session on some future Storymapping initiatives of the Center for Digital Storytelling (disclosure: CDS has also given me some seed/partnership money for the project that this blog is hosted at).  This project is seeking to develop a series of national projects for organizing digital story projects based on the link between narrative and place.  Led by Joe Lambert, our session had some great folks contributing their thoughts as well as a nice overview of some other projects running under the Storymapping umbrella.

In the session I learned about participatory action research as a framework for collaboratively affecting community/social change by direct and reflective engagement with communities – communities determine the inquiry and outcomes of learning about themselves together.  I really like the collaborative nature of this approach and it seems really fitting to my project – I just didn’t have a name for it:)

Here’s who was in attendance and the projects they are connected to:

• Ariel Bierbaum: from UC Berkeley’s Center for Cities and Schools joined us. She had some great insight in to the importance of community inclusion in any city planning process. Currently, she manages Y-PLAN which is a good network of young people working on community issues across the country.
• jesikah maria ross: she currently heads up UC Davis’s Art of Regional Change project.  And brought a lot of great insight through her work with the Saving the Sierra – a project that uses public media and citizen storytelling, to document community efforts to conserve the environment, culture, and economy of the Sierra Nevada.
• Robert Kershaw: who’s currently at the Center for Digital Storytelling as well as Cows and Fish – Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society.  He fosters using digital storytelling to communicate the value of the land, it’s history, culture and need for conservation.
• Gianluca Corinaldesi: joined us from Italy and is currently working on iPortraits.
• Daniel Rizik-Baer and Emily Jameson also joined us, both grad students in urban planning, having some fresh perspectives how to best move forward.

Joe Lambert, Director of the Center for Digital Storytelling was of course there and went over a great introduction to location-based media and how it could best be used to synergize storytelling efforts around the world.  We covered similar projects that the Center For Digital Storytelling ran as well as some other great resources and even a training on building our own Google maps.

Other CDS Storymapping Projects:

• The Placemeant Project: Stories of Why Where Matters
  Throughout the Spring and Summer of 2005, stories were collected from communities around Ukiah, and in October of 2005, they were integrated into a stage production featuring 21 stories, many performed live by the authors. In 2006, an additional workshop collected stories from other parts of Mendocino, leading to a touring production in August and September.
• Save Our ShorelineWalking through the Wild of the Albany Bulb
  Local to the San Francisco Bay Area, this project suggests ways to think about values that we need to sustain in our idea of recreational space, including the idea of a raw space that children and artists can explore.
• Mondo Bizarro’s I-Witness Central City: this project has a sign-posts indicating a number that people can call in to to hear stories of a particular place in their city.  Future plans for this project aim to have numbers where people can call in to leave their own stories for others to listen to – all via cellphone.

Other Locative Media and Related Resources:

• The Center for Locative Media:  The Center for Locative Media works with different cultural and educational communities to enable the creation, delivery, and distribution of narrative histories of people and places using emerging and locative technologies.
• Networked Publics:  From September 2005 to June 2006, “Networked Publics,” a team of thirteen scholars at the University of Southern California‘s Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are reconfiguring how which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
• Infrastructure for the New Geography: This is a downloadable PDF from the Institute for the Future that forecasts the emerging ecology of the ‘geoweb’ and the importance for ‘geospatial literacy’ – how will we, in the future, make sense of place to write our own stories and shape our own futures and destinies?

Resources:

• GPS Visualizer – a free, easy-to-use online utility that creates maps and profiles from GPS data (tracks and waypoints, including GPX files), street addresses, or simple coordinates. Use it to see where you’ve been, plan where you’re going, or visualize geographic data (business locations, scientific observations, events, customers, real estate, geotagged photos, etc.).
• PlaceStories – PlaceStories is a software system for managing digital media, creating digital stories and publishing online through Google Maps.  PlaceStories is supporting the storytelling, networking and digital communication needs of community organisations, government agencies and others who work with communities, particularly rural and regional areas.

Might you know of any other projects to link here?  What other locative media + storytelling projects do you know of?  Why is place important?

After serving in AmeriCorps for 2.5 years (with the awesome CTC VISTA Project), I have an Ed Award I can use towards post-secondary expenses at an accredited Title IV school.  I want to be well supported money-wise during my travels, so I enrolled at a local college (Laney College), met with a college counselor,  and am now designing an Independent Study while waiting to hear back regarding my Education Award Payment Request. Yes!

While at Laney, I had a *great* conversation with Darlene Cruz at the Dean’s office who was really supportive of my plans (thank you Darlene!).  She gave me the Independent Study Proposal Form to fill out and referred me to Dr. Leslee Stradford to serve as a (mandatory) Faculty Advisor.  Leslee was generous with her time (right before running off to teach a class!) and agreed to at least look at my proposal.   If she accepts and approves, I’ll just need to get the Dean’s signature and can officially enroll in a class I designed!

UPDATE: She just agreed!  Now I just have to get the dean’s signature!

UPDATE: Marco Menéndez, the Dean of Instruction, just signed!!!  I can now apply to have my AmeriCorps Ed Award applied to the project!!!

Here’s my class design proposal:

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Title of Independent Study Project
Global Entrepreneurship, Innovation & Collaboration in Creative Communities

Course Description:

We operate best together.  Working from this premise, this course seeks to answer the question:

How is global social change made where media, technology and creative people meet?

Through blog posts, photos and web video accessible at http://travel.memeshift.com, this travel abroad project will document the stories of creative communities found in European galleries, international events, meetups, barcamps, fabrication labs, and innovation competitions.  The successes, challenges and ‘best practices’ of these communities will be recorded and ‘shared back’ across social networks and other online communities here in the United States.

At it’s core, this project serves as a practicum to promote cross cultural understanding through cross sector collaboration.

Other key questions include:

• How is community-based innovation related to the economic development?
• How do artists, entrepreneurs and other ‘creatives’ support themselves doing the work they do?
• How do creative communities, spaces and networks support and sustain innovation?

Method of Evaluation
Weekly editorial blog posts on topics of collaboration, social innovation and entrepreneurship will be used to gauge the success of the student’s activity while traveling.  Interviews and stories of people engaged in relevant local communities and networks are also amenable to evaluation.