Getting Started and Initial To-Do List

[Aaron M. Renn]

Ok, let’s kick this thing off!

I’ll outline my initial thoughts and let everyone else chime in and/or volunteer.

My first thought is that we should probably pick one building such as Union Station and try to take it through the process end to end to a) prove out the implementation chain and b) show a real, tangible output.

Secondly, while I’ve got lots of ideas around a fully integrated new media experience, a simple audio tour is probably best to start with so that we don’t end up trying to boil the ocean and get no where.

Here is some of what I need that needs to be done.

1. Pick a list of possible tours. Here were some that came to mind for me: downtown landmarks (core of downtown from Union Station to the war memorial mall), Mass Ave/Lockerbie, Contemporary Architecture highlights, North Meridian St., Indy Cultural Trail. I personally want to work on the downtown landmarks one because I think it is the easiest to do since there’s probably plenty of information about the buildings one can get without doing a lot of heavy research.

2. Identify sites for the tours. I’ll post my suggestions for downtown landmarks soon as I already created a first cut at a list.

3. Research what other cities are doing or have done. What can we copy so reinvention isn’t necessary? Here’s a site that looks interesting: http://tatehandheldconference.pbwiki.com/ As does this one on Twitter from the IMA: http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2008/09/26/the-twitter-in-mind/

4. Talk to local organizations who might be interested in participating or contributing. Someone mentioned that Indiana Historic Landmarks has some tours. Perhaps they’d be willing to contribute their tours and even get their volunteer docents to record the audio. AIA-Indiana might be another. The ICVA might be another (and I’ll volunteer to contact them).

5. A volunteer, preferably with professional equipment, who would step up to record and digitize the audio.

6. Volunteers to record the voice overs, preferably architects, historians, or other similar folks. Some of you are already signed up for this group.

7. Volunteers to research and write scripts for each building to be covered. (Another reason to start with the downtown landmarks tour, where a resource like the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis probably has more of the information needed). It would be nice to have architects or historians to QA these.

8. Research how best to incorporate the content into iTunes. I know you can set up a sort of private iTunes store, but I don’t know if this requires a fee payment. The alternative is to somehow register a podcast there. I’d love to set up an iTunes storefront where you can just mark the tour you want and it downloads and iTunes does the hosting for us, but that might be a pipedream. I’d like to avoid spending money if at all possible.

9. Volunteers to take high quality photos of the landmarks in question These could go into flick and/or be used for “cover art”, for the maps, etc.

10. Someone to look at the best way to set up a flickr group or site for content. I think you can create groups there. It would be nice to come up with some sort of tagging scheme and group whereby people could contribute their photos to a comprehensive architectural archive.

11. Create a standard building template for Wikipedia (probably copying an existing one). And update the Wikipedia entries for all the buildings we create tour entries for. I don’t see why we wouldn’t bring Wikipedia up to par while we are doing this. There is a Wikipedia Indianapolis group, and they might be willing to help.

12. Film the buildings exterior and interior with high quality digital video. As a second wave, I’d love to create a film to go with the voice overs so you can either just listen to the audio, or download the full video version from iTunes or YouTube. I’d consider this a phase two unless someone is super-motivated.

13. Figure out how to incorporate GPS mobile technology for dynamic downloads. My understanding is that you can set things up so that when mobile phone users are in the proximity of a site, they can dynamically access content in some manner from their phones. I don’t know much about this, but assuming it doesn’t involve lots of setup or specialized hardware, that would be great. Why make someone download to an iPod in advance when they can just grab it real time from their iPhone?

14. Create high quality, printable maps (probably PDF) of the tours/sites, completely with services and attractions available along the route, particularly for downtown tours that are walkable. This should feature world class graphic design that would stand up in any city in the world.

15. Also we should set these tours up on Google Maps.

16. It would be nice if there were a place people could post their reviews or impressions of buildings. Maybe a Twitter site to capture it? How would that best be accomplished? It is something to think about.

17. A home page or hosting for the tours. If necessary, I’ll cough up the hosting account for some sort of home page to integrate this, but it would be best if someone else could do it. Maybe one of the aforementioned organizations might be willing to host the content for us. Frankly, if this can be put into an iTunes storefront, then putting a fancy front page could be phase two. But this could include the maps, the discussion boards or reaction sites, videos or streaming audio, etc.

18. All of the above is little more than integrating standard technologies today. Is there something else innovative that could really put this over the top? I don’t profess to have a monopoly on ideas, that is for sure.

As you can see, there's a lot that can be done, even for people without technical or architectural knowledge. Reactions? Thoughts? Volunteers?

[Jon D. Speer]

Wow, that's an impressive to do list and ideas. I'm interested in helping in some way but will need to get back to you (hold me to this).
j

[Aaron M. Renn]

Tim, SourgeForge would definitely be a more convenient platform for project management tools. And we may want to set something up there. One of the things that I had hoped to accomplish with this project is to try to figure out how to leverage the Smaller Indiana community and site. If everybody runs off to SourgeForge, then we are sort of leaving SI behind. Perhaps at some point SourgeForge becomes the content management system and this site more of a project homepage. The Ning software is definitely not set up for project management, document control, etc. I'd be interested to hear if Pat has any take on this.

Jon, thanks for the compliments. Now you know why I wanted to solicit help with this! Anything you can do is of course appreciated.