The Future of Collaboration

The Future of Collaboration hackathon was held intercontinentally in Silicon Valley and India on July 12 and 13, 2013. While demos necessarily focused on technical solutions (using communication-based APIs from WebRTC, Media Network Services, vLine, and Twilio (most of which do not yet work on most au courant wearbles computing platforms)), several other interesting qualitative considerations arose.

E-labor Marketplaces for Teams or Groups 
One team proposed the idea of elabor marketplaces for teams or groups. This could engender a new conceptualization of ratings regarding qualitative factors (for dating, friends, employer recruiting) – to develop a more specific understanding of how teams work well together. New dimensions and metrics could be articulated to provide detail about team forming, storming, and norming steps, group dynamics, how people develop affinity and respect for each other, and intrinsic and extrinsic reward systems.

Live Interaction MOOCs (massive open online course platforms) 
Another team suggested the next wave of functionality for online elearning environments: live interaction with two-way video for group discussions. Similar to elabor marketplaces for groups, the concept of the new functionality brings the underlying activity into sharper relief. Here the underlying activity shifts to ‘what it is to be a good discussant’ - the different qualities and roles that discussion participants may exhibit, become explicitly aware of, and improve. Some examples of good discussant skills are restating the issue, extending the topic in useful ways, bringing in resources and examples, empathizing, engaging in active listening, encouraging others to state their views, peer acknowledgement, and topic closure. One can imagine the ‘Top 10 Discussant Qualities’ certificate that could be peer-evaluated and useful to list on a resume or sought by employment recruiters.

Gaming Apps to Unlock Video Archive Footage

One of the leading digital media foundations in the San Francisco Bay Area, GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, held a hackathon for film-makers and developers March 21-23, 2013. The challenge was to come up with new uses for open-source video archive footage (for example from the Internet Archive).

One idea would be to merge mobile gaming, crowdsourcing, and video archives to make the archives a fun and accessible tool for telling new stories. Here are some app ideas:

App: This is not my story!
In this gaming app, person 1 (whose image or profile photo is shown) selects a video micro-clip that he or she feels is ‘not my story.’ Then person 2, matched randomly from the crowd of the app’s community members, adds a short caption to the video as to why the video micro-clip is not that person’s story. Humor would be tantamount. Other community crowd members could validate the caption (e.g.; police spam), and vote on it with ‘likes’ to determine game winners.

App: PostSecret Video
This gaming app is the video version of the successful, strikingly poignant, and deeply human PostSecret project. PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard which are then posted on the web and compiled and published as books. Instead of sending anonymous postcards with ‘my secret,’ anonymous participants would find a video micro-clip that corresponds to their secret. Other community members would guess what the secret is from the video micro-clip.

App: Exquisite Video Corpse Again taking advantage of the community to create crowd art, this gaming app uses the exquisite corpse technique invented by the surrealists. In a group story telling exercise, the first person selects a video micro-clip. The second selects a second video micro-clip that is the next few frames of the story. The third selects the third, and so on. Each new person selecting can only see the story 1-2 nodes back. Again the crowd could vote on newly created video stories.