Announcing Naptown Architours

[Aaron M. Renn]

Back in January I gave a Pecha Kucha presentation called “15 Quick Easy and Cheap Ways to Make a Big Urban Design Impact in I...”. People liked it I’m happy to say, but sadly none of those ideas got implemented. I’d like to change that.

One of them was to create self-guided architectural tours that are downloadable to the iPod. This could include all sorts of interesting stuff like pictures and videos, downloadable scripts and maps, and more. But the core of the idea is pretty simple and should be reasonably straightforward to do (knock, knock).

I could see how I could do this all by myself, but it would probably take forever and not be all that cool. So I am asking anyone who is interested in contributing, whether or not you are an architect, to help. I’d like to see if we can unleash the power of the creative community in Naptown to really make this happen. If you don’t know what you can do to contribute, I’ll find something.

The first piece of help you could give would be to tell me if someone already did this. No sense in reinventing the wheel. I couldn’t find anything via Google or various conversations I had, but you never know.

Assuming it’s not done already, my idea on this is:

o Set a high ambition to create something “beyond unbelievable” for the community. We should try to create something really first rate and super-cool for Naptown. I’d love to do something so leading edge with new media that we get international press for it.

o Work on the principles of “open source” where we are open to all, collaborative, bureaucracy light, and focused on delivering output not process and fluff, with “rough consensus and running code”. I created a Smaller Indiana group called “Naptown Architours” as a project homepage.

o Results made available under some sort of free license to encourage spreading far and wide. The idea is to do something great for the city, not to create a commercial product.

What do we need? We need a list of tours, sites on them, people to volunteer to script up a brief “audio guide”, someone to do voice over and do the recording and conversion to digital audio. We need to figure out how to create some type of iTunes interface, potentially some sort of ancillary web site, and maybe other things too. In other words, a mix of content, technical know-how, and just plain doing stuff.

I have some ideas on a lot of these areas, which I’ll use to seed the discussion in a few days after giving people a chance to sign up. Then we’ll see what it takes to make this happen. In the meantime, post your thoughts and ideas in the group.

[Pat Coyle]

Great idea...but couldn't we call it "Indy" instead of Naptown?

[Aaron M. Renn]

Pat,

Now that's a discussion worth having! Another one of my "15 ideas" was that the city should embrace the Naptown label. By including it I kill two birds with one stone and avoid looking like a hypocrite.

I happen to believe that Naptown is one of all time great city nicknames in America. As I like to say, it beats the heck out of "Beantown" or any one of a number of others. It's origins are in dispute, but let's assume it was in insult. So what? Reputedly so was the "Windy City" originally. I'd guess any number of city or personal nicknames started out as insults or diminutives. And what the heck does the "Big Apple" mean, anyway?

I think Naptown has an absolutely cool sound to it. It's not hard to imagine a "Naptown jazz" sound that is considered awesomely cool. Circle City doesn't mean anything to anyone not from Indy, but Naptown already has a great association. I think that, if embraced with pride by the community, it could really be great. Cities like Columbus, Ohio would kill to have something so cool.

I think the branding of the resulting product is certainly open to discussion. That's part of what makes this an open source project. I'd be interested in hearing what others thing.

[Jessica Young]

I was on the phone with an author today, actually, who is from the Midwest area, specifically Grand Rapids. He referred to us as Naptown and the association was not the least bit meant as an insult :)