Digesting the 2008 New Media Institute: Part 2

The NMI conference comprises different streams of activity, and changes format every year.  There are guest speakers, social events, and workshops, with the focus and theme changing each time.  One common element is a set of projects sponsored by NBPC, with each project produced or prototyped by a different team and presented at the end of the conference.

Here’s a rundown of the projects this year, starting with the two where we played a significant role.  These are all available on Black Public Media.

Virtual Letter to the President

We’ve seen a lot of open letters get published since the campaign gained steam, and especially after Election Day — from Alice Walker and Iraq War veterans, among a zillion others.  The idea of this letter is to be a living document, a compendium of individual voices that can serve as a creative channel of communication to the administration.  The principal producer is the amazing Anthony Marshall of Current.tv and Lyricist Lounge fame.  We had a great time developing a prototype for the conference, and are meeting with him and NBPC this week to plan the rest of the project.  Due to launch before Inauguration.  We’ll post when it goes up.

Fueling Voices

A WordPress platform that uses open-source and community-moderated content to track the national conversation on fuel, energy, and the U.S.’s oil problem.  Available as a prototype at fuelvoices.com.  This team was headed by Andrea Lewis, who was fantastic to work with.  We developed the design and WordPress implementation, and handled the nitty gritty of DNS and server configuration.  This, as with so many of our projects, is living in the happy, hyper-efficient clouds of a Joyent Accelerator.

Locative Media

Two teams produced projects where the media gets presented serially on a geographical layer, and the locations of the stories become part of the story.  One is about Haitian immigrants and produced with Roberto Mighty, another a historically-rooted, virtual “Welcome to Washington” tour for the incoming administration produced by KQED’s Leslie Rule.

Speak Out: The Kids’ Open Letter

Michelle Halsell of Missing Pixel headed the team for this project, which was produced in conjunction with PBS and allows kids to contribute their own voices and concerns, some serious, some hilarious, to the public conversation about the Obama administration.  This project is up and running on the PBS Kids site.

Collective Communities

This was presented in wireframe form at the conference, but we hope it sees the light of day.  Planned in partnership with Frontline, Collective Communities is a site meant to enable the archiving, categorization, and sharing of open-source documentary footage that would otherwise be left on the proverbial cutting room floor.  The possibilities are dreamy.

There’s more on Black Public Media, including an educational project in Secondlife’s Virtual Harlem and an issues-driven mobile media project.