Posts tagged greenbelt09
Processing Greenbelt 2009
Sep 8th
We did, in fact, make a newspaper. The hour or so after my last post were more than a little stressful, but the results (a few typos and a printing hiccup that most certainly wasn’t our fault) more than made up for it.
And the response has been wonderful. Thousands of people now have our little artifact as a souvenir of a wonderful weekend, numerous conversations about post-digital concepts and the like ensued, people tell me they’re exploring the URLs we printed, and we might get to do something like it again. There’s talk of a supplement for our next Sunday paper. Matt and I even got a mention in the Church Times!
I may expound on the way the ideas came together and spilled out another time.
(thanks again to James Governor, Ed Gemmell and Hewlett Packard for making this happen)
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the activities my team got up to at Greenbelt this year was, as Steve kept pointing out, that we did a lot more with less. Certainly we didn’t bombard qik with videos in last year’s fashion. I took a lot less photos. The tweets were fewer and further between. But our reach goes further, our skills are (a little) more developed and we were able to be more selective in how we played with the tools.
The 2008 festival was essential for us to see how our “social media” tools worked when we were sat in a field for a few days. As I noted at the time, there’s a lot of complexity in effectively covering and communicating an event on this scale and you need a team with diverse strengths. This year I once again ended up spending most of my time as a runner/co-ordinator, able to organise passes, manage some communications and tie it all together, with the aim to free up the rest of the team to play to their strengths and produce the raw material.
It was also very noticeable how much the tools have matured in the past year. Even in August 2008 there was some fiddling to do to ensure everyone had 3G sims and to download the right software. A year on, the underlying technology hadn’t changed much, but there was a far greater degree of comfort and we all arrived on site fully equipped. For me, having the facility to capture and share video and audio from my iPhone saved a lot of hassle — no more switching devices or fighting the Nokia N82’s abysmal UI.
There’s plenty more to do. The newspaper brought a lot of new people to the content, as did a new festival homepage that functioned as an aggregator, but it also demonstrated to us that we’ve got a lot further to go in raising the profile of all this content even amongst festivalgoers who are clued up about the technologies but may not be immersed in our attempts to communicate what we’re doing.
If you want to catch up, you can find it all spread around AudioBoo, Qik, Flickr, and the like. You can download a PDF of the paper here. And you can see Jenny Brown’s team’s excellent videos on the Greenbelt site. I also wrote a little on the Ket Lai site.
And in case you’re wondering why we do all this each year, Jenny and Steve’s chat on AudioBoo is well worth a listen:
We’re making a newspaper for Greenbelt
Aug 30th
We hadn’t expected to get to do this. Arriving on site we didn’t know we’d have funding, but the call came in late on Thursday and the planning began.
Matt–given his background in typography and design for print–handled negotiations with the printers. A deadline of 7pm on Sunday was set, if we met it we’d be the first thing on the press that night and should be able to have the paper on site that night.
In an early meeting we decided that items on twittter tagged #gb09 would be key content and so began one of my weekend tasks of reviewing all the posts and marking as “favourites” any that seemed appropriate to include. Meanwhile Matt fired up InDesign on the iMac in our office and started designing a grid and photo layouts so we could quickly drop content into place.
Post-it notes were acquired and our wall soon filled with ideas of people who might contribute, whether through their own blog or the festival blog, and of other content we could source. Our crack team of official photographers could be counted on and we made sure they were briefed on our plans.
I’ve been glad of my backup iPhone battery as I’ve spent the weekend running round site to talk to potential contributors while tracking twitter traffic. It’s no easy task persuading a group of busy Greenbelters to do some writing while on site, however willing they may be there’s no telling when a key phone call will destroy any chance of their having a moment to spare.
Sunday morning was when it started to get really serious. Moving all those post-its (and the ideas that had never quite made it onto paper) onto a mock layout up on the wall of our grandstand box, we could finally see the paper taking shape. Art for ads was acquired, pieces were emailed, and a roving trip around site with a laptop secured a little more content.
As I write, there are 70 minutes remaining before this thing has to hit the press. It’s looking manageable, but tight. If you see this in print, chances are we’ll be feeling very relieved.
Greenbelt has an iPhone app
Aug 24th
I’ve been watching the recent furore over Apple’s iPhone app review process with some concern. Partly, of course, I want the process to be clear, to make sense and to provide us all with good access to the apps we want. But the slightly more selfish reason was that I was waiting for the Greenbelt app to be approved for sale, hoping fervently that it would make it through in time for people to buy it before the festival.
With a little under 6 days to go, it was approved, appearing for sale on Saturday night. What’s more, they tell me they expedited the process in response to a pleading email earlier in the week, to help us meet our target.
I can’t take credit for the coding, which belongs entirely to pab. I played around with some of the code, tidied up a little javascript and provided some feedback, but he did all the hard development (and data entry) work. My role was managing the release and dealing with Apple. The app upload system is far from their finest UI work (it probably ranks amongst the worst apple interfaces I’ve used) but all in all the process worked well for us. The one rejection we did get early in the process was for a fairly clear bug that we quickly fixed.
There’s a lot more we’d like to add to the app, but it’s hugely satisfying to have it out there and it’ll be interesting to see how it affects peoples’ habits at the festival.