connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by cyu06)

I don’t exactly know what gear I’m moving into, but I’m definitely popping the RPM’s as I write this.

My day-to-day has evolved from a free fall of focus two years ago to a full-time operation running dotmatrix, collaborating with more than a handful of clients with unique and challenging work, assisting with the planning of this year’s ConvergeSouth and attempting to get The People, Yes off the ground.

In between those extremes of exploration and consternation, I found myself using this spot for sharing, pimping, contextualizing, opining, pointing and anything else under the sun I found valuable and interesting.

Well, it’s about time I get focused.

Yeah, I had a similar “state of the blogger” moment a few months back, but this time I’m a bit more motivated to down-shift into documenting my various efforts, especially along the lines of The People, Yes.

I refuse to become myopic or dry — graffiti, lyrics, images, poetry; all have a place — but I am making a turn, hopefully for the better.

Hold on, please.

(originally uploaded by lisa scheer)

Today is day two of the voting for Netsquared’s Technology Innovation Fund. If you haven’t yet stopped by to vote for The People, Yes, please do so. If we place, we’ll receive solid funding and development resources desperately needed to get us off the ground.

If you’re a blogger, talk show host, stewardess with a captive audience, etc., I’d greatly appreciate your help pointing folk in that direction as well.

Thanks so much.

(shot by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

So the world has woken up and discovered Twitter.

I’m not gonna front, I’ve only been Twittering for a few months now. I sat on the sidelines for the last year or so and watched Tara and Chris pimp it, but I just couldn’t figure out how it fit into my world.

Well, I think I’ve finally got it… and then some.

While a bunch of people out west have large numbers of close friends that use Twitter incessantly, I don’t. Most of my peeps from the NYC and Greensboro area don’t view communicative technology through quite the same lens as left coasters (we’re all a step or two behind on that front). So my friend list — while filled with people I consider to be friends — aren’t folk that I know extremely well or interact with on a daily basis.

So I’m now getting a chance to familiarize myself with colleagues from both across the country and the other side of the world.

That’s actually quite cool.

Sure, sometimes their Twitters are as dumb as mine, but that just gives me more insight into their varied personalities. Those Twitts about eating PB&J or screaming at a cabbie only confirms that we’re more alike than different. And when they do drop science and briefly enlighten the world as to what they’re working on, well, that’s the gold mine of Twitter.

Chris Messina stuck that nugget of a thought in my head the last time we hung out at Citizen Summit. He implored me to use Twitter and keep him (and anyone else following me) in the know with what I was doing with The People, Yes.

The conversation got even deeper once we all started discussing ways to bridge the digital divide locally, and before I knew it, I was thinking about Twitter implementation within the TPY interface.

So check this out:

That’s a John Ford special for you.

He took Alex King’s Twitter Tools beta plug-in, tweaked the partially functional plug-in code to post Twitters to my Wordpress blog with an appended category and styled the category with a CSS class.

So now every time I SMS to 40404, not only do I add to the stream of consciousness on Twitter, I’m documenting those fleeting thoughts straight to my blog.

The term “live blogging” just evolved big time overnight, as did “citizen journalism” (and if they’re smart, so will the “mainstream media“).

Now imagine how this could impact folk on the other side of the digital divide — people without moment to moment access to laptops or desktop computers, but armed to the teeth with cell phones.

Did I mention that John Ford is the man?

A few weeks ago, Molly asked me if I would be interested in speaking with a group of students at Weaver Academy, a local high school here in Greensboro. Her friend, Meredith Newlin, is a teacher of rhetoric and writing at the school and Molly felt that our two worlds — full of words — were meant to collide.

I’m a teacher wanna-be, so I pretty much agreed to do it on the spot.

So after a bit of back and forth, Meredith and I were able to schedule yesterday as the day for the meeting. I made my way over to the school just after 1pm and was graciously received by her entire class.

Can I just say how cool it is to vibe with young minds?

I mean, we started in the typical lecture/audience model, where “Mr. Coon” began as the guest speaker for the day as the deliverer of wisdom. But after only 15 minutes of my back-story, the kids and I found ourselves immersed neck deep in a conversation about what it means to have a voice in the midst of the information revolution.

Yeah, 11th graders.

Meredith was great, as she guided the conversation from the back of the room, making smart bridges of relevance to her curricula — how rhetoric and solid writing skills can lead to both personal growth and new opportunities in the age in which we live, but it was the kids that led the direction of the conversation.

As we bounced from idea to idea, we spent a decent amount of time talking about social networking (every kid is on MySpace) and blogging (only a few kids actually blogged) and the power both hold nowadays, which quickly segued into a conversation about The People, Yes.

A Little Ditty About…

Over the past month or so, I’ve been hitting the library every Monday night at 6pm to catch the Food not Bombs homeless dinner, with laptop in tow to both present to the group when possible or pull people off to the side to introduce the ideas behind generating a voice, blogging and building community.

After giving the kids a bit of such context, I ventured into sharing some ideas and direction that I’ve yet to share with the majority of my board — such as opening up The People, Yes to all Greensboro residents, while diving deeper into more areas on the other side of the digital divide, like the city/county jail system (a Ndesanjo idea, I must confess).

I also mentioned that at some point in the near future, we’ll be looking to sign up volunteer blogging mentors, acquire digital cameras via donations and open up the project for either individual or local business sponsorships of bloggers.

Within minutes of sharing the nuts and bolts of the project, kids began asking about how blogging actually worked and one even volunteered to work on the project itself (what up, Cory!). Quite honestly, the amount of interest in the project was amazing and proved consistent with the feeling I have that once I can focus on TPY with all my attention, it’s going to be an extremely rewarding experience.

Until then, I’m relying on the folk who have stepped up to date, and that list is growing each day.

Back to yesterday: To give a bit more context surrounding the afternoon, here’s a few links to illustrate some of the ideas that we rapped about:

• Bruce Sterling’s closing speech and reading from Carl Sandburg’s, The People, Yes! at SXSW last year (my influence to start TPY)
• Introducing the notion of tagging meta-data to information these days through poetry
• How we can watch our rhetoric and writing grow and evolve through simple constructs like tag clouds

Just as we began to dig in and discuss different options for starting a blog, the hour and a half came to an end and the kids left for their next classes. Meredith asked me to speak a bit to her next class of ninth graders, which I was all too happy to oblige — we even have a Where’s Waldo-type photo to prove it:

Meredith and I are going to arrange another time for me and her kids to get down and dirty with blogging software, which will hopefully empower her class with a collaborative blog and/or individual ones for any of the kids who want to start publishing their Peter Bradyesque voices.

With the passion and curiosity of these kids, Roch won’t know what’s hitting him. ;)

Lisa and I hunted around Greensboro yesterday afternoon for locations and people, as we’re looking to illustrate a number of sections of the eventual The People, Yes interface. I’m not sure how successful we were, but Lisa will be heading out again on her own soon.

Would you like to help?

We’re looking for landscape images (they’ll be used mostly in the header, so think wide and short) of a number of subjects:

• Memorable locations - it could be an abandoned lot or City Center Park, just try to include people, in some fashion, within an interesting composition
• Everyday folk at work - from the local barber to an insurance agent, capture them doing their thing
• Homeless people - stay away from stereotypical images (i.e. beer bottles, strewn clothes, etc.), go for portraits and contextual settings

So if you want to help us out, simply tag your Greensboro-based images on flickr with “thepeopleyes.”

I’ll subscribe to the feed and contact you if we’d like to use your shot (we’re a non-profit, so you’ll have to apply a CC license that allows reuse with attribution). I’ll probably setup a flickr group as well in the near future.

Thanks.

every man has a vocal chord
but not every man has a voice
some choose to live life that way
others simply have no choice
with too much to think about
too much goin’ on
too much tryin’ to survive
too much watchin’ their own get gone
so what’s the worth of words
these mere utterances in time
these rearranged thoughts
in both rhythm and rhyme?
i’ll tell you their value
but you probably won’t hear me
being caught up in the matrix
you’ll just craft reason to fear me..

when i’m struggling to get by
and trying to fly
but instead i get high
and dance that fine line
it’s the words that come save me
like dry turkey in gravy
i flip back to my quest
and push along like scorsese
to craft a moment in time
script the next one to follow
not some hollow ass production
of bling pursuit do i wallow
in the mire i find the depths
the inspiration
the desire..

to live by the pursuit of the grade
A
performance bonus
A
white picket dream
A
life with no compassion
A
way to drown out the screams
the shit just ain’t for me
and i know i’m not alone
so pick up your pen
your pad
your phone
dial me into your realm
put on your friday night best
cause when we hit the streets
it’s all about the people
yes..

Last Sunday, Ndesanjo, Andy and I attended an event over at A&T, which we thought was a discussion about the digital divide in the African-American community. Well, it turned out to be a much broader conversation — one steeped in collaborative progression towards building stronger community.

What we stumbled upon was The Dean’s Book Club, and this particular meeting was to discuss the ten covenants found in Tavis Smiley’s book, The Covenant With Black America.

As we attempted to get our bearings straight — not quite understanding the format of the discussion — Will Hall approached us and pointed out that his table (one of eight) was the setting digital divide discussion. Once the room filled out and Sharon Hoard, Dr. Ioney James and Dean Lelia Vickers gave their opening remarks about the book and the importance of Smiley’s covenants to the African-American community, each table turned inwards and began discussing the underlying concepts behind a particular covenant.

Will Hall moderating the digital divide conversation

While the discussion was centered on Smiley’s perspective of how the digital divide affects African-Americans, each person at the table had a unique perspective to share.

Barbara Davis of HandyCapable, spoke about how computers have changed the lives of disabled individuals — specifically by providing them with the opportunity to gain skills be repairing computers themselves. She also told the story of how a local woman — grandmother and matriarch of her family — received a computer with an internet connection and soon became the connectivity and application hub for her entire family.

To the right of me sat a number of students and teachers who provided a perspective about technology in the university setting; how it needed to become more infused in the curriculum across all of the schools at A&T in order to improve computer literacy.

Student participation was the centerpiece of the evening

When I mentioned the concept of blogging and how it’s already empowered so many local voices in Greensboro, especially through our local aggregator, the kids (as well as the adults) stared back with blank expressions on their faces — knowing nothing of either blogging or Greensboro101.com.

Living in a town nicknamed Blogsboro, that reaction was somewhat disappointing, but not completely unexpected. It would be foolish to think that all of Greensboro is tracking the latest personal publishing developments, especially when sitting at a table discussing the digital divide. Our blogging community is nowhere close to being representative of the entire community.

Such an obvious divide in local, amplified voices is the primary reason I began working on The People, Yes in the first place. With this reaction as impetus, I’m beginning to consider avenues for expanding our sub-community focus beyond the homeless — post-launch of course.

But I digress… back to the discussion at hand.

Professor and student reading from The Covenant With Black America

Another perspective regarding technology in the African-American community emerged from the two professors at the table. Both men seemed to focus more on the negative aspects of today’s youth, stressing that the desire for excellence with the youth isn’t consistent with the rest of society, which affects the ability to compete for advancement in society. One professor went as far as to blame mainstream media — violent video games, music, etc. — for the degradation of African American youths.

Man, I wish we had more time to explore that one.

Ndesanjo attempted to deal with the issue, as he touched upon his work at the Boys and Girls Club, expressing the importance of teaching the youth to view the web as an opportunity to participate in an upload culture by creating media — even their own games — for distribution. It was a poignant message, but I don’t think it quite stuck as the conversation quickly moved to hit the major points of Smiley’s covenant before our student representative reported our discussion back to the entire room.

As we moved from the digital divide conversation into the presentations of the various covenant discussions, I began to get a sense of how this particular community of professionals, educators and students approached building strong, supportive, humane community. Tavis Smiley might have set the framework in motion, but the pragmatism, compassion and righteousness of the participants in the room exposed me to yet another dynamic aspect of Greensboro community.

I’m telling you, there’s gold in these yonder hills; nuggets of community I’ve yet to experience living elsewhere.

I had a great meeting today with CM, where we landed our first blogger for The People, Yes. And now, thanks to the ever-talented Anthony Piraino, we have the identity mark as well.

The initial blog is being designed as we speak and I’m crossing my fingers for a soft-launch sometime over the next week or so. More to come soon…