Echo Update
Echo Atlanta is a project by NMWE winners Lila King and Karyn Lu. Though still a work in progress, King and Lu have provided a comprehensive update on the site.
Prepared by Karyn Lu and Lila King
In the nearly five months since winning the New Media Women Entrepreneurs grant, Echo Atlanta has made steady progress toward creating a beta site and a platform for mobile, digital, place-based storytelling in our city.
Starting Somewhere
We decided early to focus initially on a single neighborhood, where we could explore and develop the platform along with a limited set of real stories, places and use cases. But which neighborhood? Since one of Echo’s goals is to provide incentive for people to get out of their cars and experience the city on foot, it was important to us that we pick a neighborhood people could actually walk to, or at the very least take a bus or a train to. So we looked at neighborhoods near MARTA (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) stations. We also wanted to start with a place we knew, and where we had enough friends and acquaintances to help us get informal introductions to lots of the neighbors. And, since one of the things we love about Atlanta is its occasionally kooky Southern charm, we wanted to start in a place where we might unearth some of that local color and help set the tone for the way Echo stories would unfold.
So we settled on Lake Claire, a quiet neighborhood northeast of downtown, with huge oak trees, friendly front porches and an amiably wild landscaping aesthetic. It’s conveniently located on the east-west MARTA rail line and is home to a handful of good friends. Also, it just happens to be the next neighborhood over from the Echo Atlanta headquarters in Candler Park.
Tell Us a Story
Before we could begin to design the details of our platform, we needed some real content to work with, so we scheduled interviews with interesting people who live on Arizona Street, one of the most colorful stretches of the neighborhood. But even before that we needed a temporary infrastructure for storing and organizing whatever we came back with. So we stood up a very simple Web site at echoatlanta.com by placing it on a WordPress blog. We integrated an interactive Google map, purchased a Skype phone number and mailbox and rigged a system for extracting MP3 audio from voice-mail stories.
With all that in place, we headed to Lake Claire one evening in early August with a tape recorder and printed note cards. We recorded fantastic local tales from a family living in co-housing, a long-time resident and favorite local landlord, and participants at a monthly drum circle held at the neighborhood land trust. Later we edited the pieces and placed them by location on our simple Google Map.
Becoming a Business
The steepest learning curve we’ve faced is on the business side of Echo. Developing a new infrastructure for collaborative storytelling is tough, but at least it’s familiar territory. Starting a brand-new business and navigating the legal and financial details that go along with it is largely new to both of us. We met with an attorney recommended by a close friend, drew up articles of incorporation and an operating agreement and applied for a state tax ID number. We also set up an Echo Atlanta bank account at a neighborhood credit union and have signed on with a local accountant. We’re taking pride in becoming a small local business in Atlanta, with the aim of serving our local communities, and we look forward to potentially partnering with other local businesses to further the reach of Echo.
Gathering Ideas
The response to Echo Atlanta from our friends has been enthusiastic. Every time we talk about Echo, someone comes up with a brilliant new suggestion or direction for us. As a result, we 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 took place in mid-August over a home-cooked dinner and included artists, journalists, Web producers, an urban planner, a philosophy professor and a bicycle tour guide. One of our core philosophies—that we will categorize Echo stories organically by emotion—came out of this session. As we continue our work and encounter new challenges, we look forward to more help from our brilliant and diverse group of friends and to forging new relationships with people we meet along the way.
Platform Design
We hired Adam Varga, a freelance Web developer, to build the technical infrastructure for Echo’s voice/Web storytelling system, and Ronnie Ting, a Web designer, to develop the look and feel of the site and the physical signs we’ll place around the city. Both happen to live in New York. After a kick-off conference call and several rounds of e-mails about the system design, we traveled to New York for a face-to-face working session in the kindly donated offices of another Web startup. We reviewed initial logo designs and spent most of our time on the challenging task of working through the information architecture for the voice-mail system, as well as on how the various pieces of data will flow between the Web and phone systems. We struggled mightily over how to develop the platform in a way that provides enough flexibility for an organic, community driven content pool, but that also gives enough structure to provide an organized, clear experience for our users. Ultimately, after rounds with our patient developer, we decided that we’ll use neighborhood as the primary identifier for stories since every one will share that attribute. On top of that we’ll add a dynamic tag vocabulary to each story that will let us organize down the road by, say, decade, location within a neighborhood, emotion or storyteller. We also decided to provide Echo Atlanta stickers so users can dynamically tag their own locations of significance.
We came out of the meeting with a revised version of the system flow document that spells out the user flows for the VoiceXML system.
Next Steps: Toward a Prototype
We’re currently at work on a matrix of story attributes for each of the pieces we recorded in Lake Claire and wireframes for our new site. With that in place (and scheduled to go live in early 2009), we’ll be ready for renewed outreach in Lake Claire to generate new community stories and to tackle our next neighborhood!
Press
- PBS MediaShift blog: Locative Media Project Aims to Collect Stories of Atlanta
- Working Press, Society of Professional Journalists: Journalism Project Would Connect Atlanta Foot, Bike Traffic
Attachments/Links
- EchoAtlanta.com (preliminary site)
- Echo system flow document
- Notecards
- Echo story map (preliminary version)
