Big weekend

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Team Echo spent the weekend in New York City, where we met up with our designer and developer in a picturesque start-up-y setting: a giant, open, randomly furnitured office loft in Dumbo. (Thank you, News Groper, for lending a Saturday afternoon perch!)

We spent most of the day Saturday working out some tough questions from our developer Adam about the structure of the Echo database, and how the various pieces of data will flow between the web and phone systems. We also talked through the hierarchies of location data and organizational structures we need to give our stories. Like, what happens when themes begin to emerge among stories and across neighborhoods?  We’ll want to add in some new categories and connectors for, say, a civil war bike tour or a map of tales involving barbeque, on the fly without having to rework the database.

Basically we need to balance the competing needs of an organic, user-generated system with some bigger, flexible principles that will bind the pieces together in some meaningful way. Nothing bigger than the problems the great minds who built the Web in first place are still trying to solve, right? No wonder we wrestled so mightily through the afternoon.

We also got a peek at logo sketches from Ronnie, our designer, offered some direction on finishing them, and topped the evening off with a delicious dinner with the whole crew at a restaurant called, appropriately, Superfine. (Try the pork chop, it’s amazing.)

Sunday we spent mostly walking and talking through lower Manhattan, building lists of to-dos for the next two weeks (meet with our accountant, get wireframes to Ronnie and the first batch of stories and metadata to Adam) and feeling genuinely ecstatic that it’s really coming together.

Back to business

Monday, September 22, 2008

We laid low for a couple of weeks while we worked like crazy at our day jobs and did some lovely traveling (Seattle and fabulous Brazil), but last week Echo was back in full force.

The first order of business is a massive flowchart for the voice xml system that will power the mobile phone element of Echo. It gave us a new respect for those automated customer service lines (press “1” to get some help already, “2” to hear these options again ...). Our idea is fairly simple - hear a story or leave one - but thinking through all the options, and then mapping them out in a way that wouldn’t be completely confusing to someone standing on a street corner with a cell phone is anything but. We feel good about where we landed, though, and made an important decision in the process. We’re going to organize Echo stories around two main principles: neighborhood and emotion. More on that coming soon.

Also, we met an incredible woman at a little gift shop in Candler Park, very near where we started the Echo pilot program. It turns out that she’s the local neighborhood historian, the woman who spends her days running a gift shop and her nights poring over old letters at the Hargrett Rare Book Library at the University of Georgia. She’s kindly promised to give us and our tape recorder a walking tour of the neighborhood. We’ll try to set that up this week, and hope to have our first batch of pilot-ready stories for our first neighborhood shortly after.

Echo updates

Monday, September 08, 2008

Lila’s husband Brennan has found the perfect quote to capture the spirit of Echo, and we wanted to share it with everyone:

From Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

“I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go, pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.“

“Can other people see it?“ asked Denver.

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Someday you will be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came here, that place is real. It’s never going away. Even if the whole farm-every tree and grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what’s more, if you go there-you who never was there-if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can’t never go there. Never. Because even though it’s all over-over and done with-it’s going to always be there waiting for you. That’s how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what.“

“If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.“

Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. “Nothing ever does,“ she said.

—-

In other news, our night of interviewing in Lake Claire was absolutely amazing. We could have easily spent a year listening to stories from the wonderful people of that community. We’ve been busy transcribing and editing down hours of audio files. Listen to a sneak preview here - this story involving a rogue pony is one of our favorites from that evening. Thanks to everyone who spent some time chatting with us!

Finally, we also had the opportunity to chat with Mark Glaser from the MediaShift blog recently. Check out our interview here.

Getting started…

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

This weekend is going to be a busy one for us. We’re going to be conducting a series of interviews in the lovely Lake Claire neighborhood of Atlanta, where we plan to chat with members of a cohouse, someone who calls himself “Treeman” (he teaches people how to climb trees!), and folks attending a drum circle at the Lake Claire Land Trust. In addition to the stories we’ll be producing, we’re going to gather stories from locals about why specific spots are meaningful to them. We can’t wait to hear the stories from this neighborhood. The content we get from the Lake Claire community is going to serve as our pilot and proof of concept.

In the meantime, getting together to talk about Echo is often the highlight of our day! The two of us have been meeting for breakfast every other Wednesday at one of our favorite spots in Atlanta, Ria’s Bluebird (an institution), to discuss Echo. It’s definitely going to become a fun tradition throughout this project.

The response among our friends has also been enthusiastic. Every time we talk about Echo, someone comes up with a brilliant new suggestion or direction for us. As a result, we’ve decided to host a series of brainstorming sessions. The idea is to gather some friends and colleagues who are all creative in different ways, chat about Echo, and see what sparks. Our first brainstorming session is going to take place next Monday evening over dinner. The group will include artists, journalists, web producers, an urban planner, a philosophy professor, and a bicycle tour guide. We’ll share some of the great ideas that come out of these gatherings soon.

Introducing the Echo team

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Introducing the Echo team from J-Lab on Vimeo.

Meet Lila King and Karyn Lu and hear them explain their winning project, Echo.