Alex Polvi, friend of Miro and a community marketer for Mozilla, has won a Vidoop contest called How do you identify? with a very cute video (see below). Vidoop is a company that takes a cool approach to internet logins, with an OpenID service that gives you one universal login and an option for image grid based identification (take a look). Alex is donating his $1000 prize to Miro and Vidoop is matching that. Thanks so much guys!
Here’s Alex’s winning video (with a shout-out to Miro):
An excellent speech by Clay Shirky about participation with culture: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. He begins with the point that the amount of effort that goes into Wikipedia is tiny compared to the surplus of free time people have.
“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.”
“And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”
…
“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.”
I’m heading to Hong Kong next week, and I’d love to meet with anyone who has an interest in Miro or is working on related projects. I’ll be in Hong Kong from Friday, May 9th through Wednesday May 14. Please let me know if you’d like to meet up or send me email intros to relevant people. My plan thus far: conduct business, meet people, eat dim sum.
We have a great Summer Team in the works, and are excited to announce that we have space for 1-2 additional marketing / outreach interns. These are unpaid positions, but offer great experience with one of the most popular open-source programs in the world and a unique, fast-growing non-profit.
PCF has an office in Worcester, MA, but most of our staff works from home around the world and we expect the same will be true of our interns– you don’t have to live in Worcester. We will expect you to work 30 hours a week for at least 9 weeks and to file a weekly progress report. Following your internship, we will happily serve as job references and provide written recommendations.
Members of the summer team will focus on some of the following:
Engaging the blogosphere and general press
Improving user support and help systems
Fundraising
Web development and design
Open video outreach and education
Sustainability and business development
TO APPLY: If you are driven, self-motivated, and want to sharpen your marketing and outreach skills, please email jobs (at) pculture.org. Include a resume and a brief note about why you would like to work for us.
p.s. If your school gives credit for internships, we’re happy to work with you to make this count for credit.
