Organised citizen journalism is here

Rachel Sterne is CEO of GroundReport, a global citizen news platform that empowers anyone to publish and earn money from original, intelligent reporting. She founded the platform in 2006 with the mission to democratize the media and help the world share its stories.

You can find a brilliant, if long interview with her at Breaking News. And no, it’s not yet another article that will tell you that newspaper are dying and that social media is the new game. Ground Report looks like a real cradle of organised citizen reporting that seems far more trustworthy than Twitter and far more diverse and interesting than mainstream media.

[Via Breaking News & Jonathan Stray]

It’s snowing!

It’s always amazed me with how much excitement and joy snow creates in people. I think seeing snow fall is the single thing capable of pulling everyone together out of the darkness and cold that persists every single day in our European winters. It’s something between a mass plunge into childhood and a promise of Christmas being just around the corner when the our cities get spun in flurries of snow.

Ben Marsh created an awesome Twitter Google map mashup of what’s going on with the snow in the UK (though I guess the site is so busy that I can’t actually get onto it now). Twitter users post the first half of their postcode and the state of the snow fall on a scale of 1-10 (as in 1/10 for light snow and 10/10 for a blizzard). The map is constantly updated with tweets for around the country and #uksnow is already trending on Twitter.

#uksnow

[Image courtesy of whole9yards]

Do you see what I see?

Danah Boyd is one of my all-time-favourite online gurus. She writes interesting and insightful content  on her blog while working as a researcher at Microsoft Research. This time she presents at Le Web a talk about visibility, privacy and the little worlds most of us voluntarily live in. A must-see again.

Seizure is back!

Seizure is an amazing installation by Roger Hiorns in SE1. Go see it, it’s on until January 10th 2010. The council flat that the installation is in was meant to be demolished last year, but I guess that the glitz of its interiors has gotten it out of the danger zone.

Roger Hiorns took advantage of a couple of the complex’s bedsits and filled one of them with 70 000 litres of hot solution of copper sulphate at 60 degrees centigrade. The liquid was poured into the flat through holes in its ceiling and was kept there until its temperature dropped to 30 degrees, thus allowing crystals to form on every inch of the flat’s surface. The liquid was then channelled into the neighboring flat, which is now used as the waiting site. The results of the experiments weren’t precisely known until the entire process was over. The flat had also been stripped of all furniture and reinforced by nets of steel to give more surface for the structuring of crystals. The results are pretty impressive.

The rooms of the exhibition are accessible only in rubber boots provided at the spot. The rubber boots also provide a good way of controlling the number of people present in the rooms, so at least you can have some space to enjoy it all. Seizure has a strange feeling to it – something between a post-disaster waste site to a luxurious glitzy night club. The floors are uneven and still wet with the chemicals used to create the crystals. The area of the council flat is all but impressive, so you are all the more impressed when entering rooms made of illuminated crystal.

1:00-17:00 Thursday to Sunday
Closed Monday to Wednesday

[Image courtesy of Nick Cobbing and art rabbit]

Museum of Everything

There are few places in London that keep me going back to them and Museum of Everything has definitely become one of them since it’s opened back in October. It’s located in Chalk Farm just off Regent Park Road, which is one of the most quaint streets in north London. The street serves as a good ‘afterparty’ location for the museum with its cosy cafes and little restaurants (one of my favourite discoveries is Troika, a medium-sized cafe restaurant that serves delicious Russian food, cakes and tea). When you pass the bridge at the top of the road remember to look to your right to see another sight – the lone standing group of skyscrapers against the bridge’s graffiti.

Museum of Everything is filled with what it calls ‘outsider art’, i.e. art created by people living outside of artist societies and anyone from jailbirds to janitors can be found among the artists. I really like the idea of ‘outsider art’ actually whether the museum is about it or not – in a way I think that seeing art created by those who didn’t have the luxury of being an artist is even more interesting than seeing the art conceived by those surrounded by it on a daily basis. Could it not also be more relevant to real life and have the chance of being more original since it’s not plugged into any art trends or pressures?

For these artists there are o studios, no press junkets, no art fairs, no magazine spreads. Instead there are treasure troves of untrained work, discovered under rocks, in basements and attics, its creators often unaware their art would ever see the light of day.

James Brett, the founder, says that the ‘outsider art’ is not much but a catchphrase and that the art that’s inside the museum is there because it’s just interesting. In our short phone conversation he also said that art is normally too pre-occupied with big ideas and that the art world might be too caught up in itself, perhaps like a patient who is so focused on analysing his problems that he becomes unable to overcome them.

The Museum of Everything is located in an old dairy factory and with its warehouse feeling really reminds me of Shunt in some ways. The rooms are filled with intricate decor, windy corridors and an impressive array of art pieces. The collection ranges from mosaic sculptures and miniscule illustrations to temples made out of transistors to somewhat resemble Lost City structures. The first exhibition includes the first public show of Henry Darger’s artwork and was curated by a group of renown artists from Nick Cave and Jarvis Cocker to Eva Rothschild.

Entry to the museum and all events held there are free – in fact, the entire organisation runs on donation. The setup has its flaws though – the museum is not getting enough donations at the moment and might have to start charging for tickets in the future.

So anyway, hurry up, go see it, have some tea and be generous when you leave!

You can find the Museum of Everything on Twitter too at @Musevery.

[Image courtesy of Christoffer Rudquist]

(…)

I’m ill…still…

[Adorable pills by [ .. FaISaL .. ] ]

Microbeauty

There are all kinds of ways of looking at the world, which is what makes photography so much fun – it captures just how others see people, their environment and everything in-between. It effectively allows us to see through others’ eyes. Natasha Wheatland is one of the most inspirational photographers I’ve come across lately. Her attention to detail around her is really different – her ability to see beauty, patterns and textures we normally skip out of habit or hurry is really refreshing.

Natasha diggs deeper than most photographers with finding fantastic objects in anything from pieces of dirt and cracks on walls to patterns on her couch. Apart from now keeping a closer eye on the subtle details around me, I’ve also decided to keep her images with me (on my next set of the little moo cards), so next time you see me you can have a peek at her work yourself

The Digital Cloud

I’m way too busy to blog this properly, but you must read about this. There is a new project from an international team of architects and designers to create a giant floating connected and publicly accessible cloud in the London skies. The project will be sponsored on a donation basis, which has some chances of failing, but then again, could inspire some rich pockets if they get sufficiently inspired by it.

The construction would include 120m- (400ft-) tall mesh towers and a series of interconnected plastic bubbles that can be used to display images and data. The Cloud, as it is known, would also be used an observation deck and park.

Its designers plan to raise the funds to build it by asking for micro-donations from millions of people.”It’s really about people coming together to raise the Cloud,” Carlo Ratti, one of the architects behind the design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) told BBC News. “We can build our Cloud with £5m or £50m. The flexibility of the structural system will allow us to tune the size of the Cloud to the level of funding that is reached.”

‘Data streams’

The Cloud was shortlisted in a competition set-up by London Mayor Boris Johnson. The structure draws on work by artist Tomas Saraceno, a German-based designer who has previously shown off huge inflatable sculptures.

It is envisaged that the spheres would be made of a plastic known as Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), the material used to build the Beijing Aquatic Centre. The different spheres would act as structural elements, habitable spaces, decoration and LCD screens on which data could be projected.

“We could provide a custom feed of…searches made by Londoners during the Olympics to give a real time ‘barometer’ of the city’s interests and mood,” said Google, one of the supporters of the project, which has also offered to provide the information feeds.Ramps, stairs and lifts would carry people to the top of the structure to look out over the city.

‘Zero power’

The inflatable elements of the building would sit on top slender, lightweight towers, stabilised by a net of metal cables. Damping technology, similar to that used in Japanese skyscrapers to resist earthquakes, would prevent the towers being buffeted by the wind.

The structure would also be used to harvest all the energy it produces according to Professor Ratti. “It would be a zero power cloud,” he said. As well as solar cells on the ground and inside some of the spheres, the lifts would use regenerative braking, similar to that in some hybrid cars. That way, the designers say, potential energy from visitors to the top of the tower can be harnessed into useful electricity.

The team have launched a fundraising website called raisethecloud.org and are now looking for a site for the tower.

 

Wrap rage

Dear TrustWilliam, how does your packaging system make sense in your head? Seriously, I got this in the mail yesterday and I could easily fit a bulky academic book in that box that is in addition filled with heaps of styrofoam. Honestly, you can’t find a better way to pack a bottle the size of a thumb? Please back off with your goodness statements till you figure this one out.

Just as this happens and I spill my guts here, I read Amazon’s latest Wrap Rage statement and feel even fuzzier at heart about their brand as a result.

All those moments of rage when you try to use anything from your teeth to scissors to a screwdriver to get through a piece of plastic to be gone forever and less crap to dispose of? Oh, how I wish.

[Via @tobeconfirmed]

Public-centered design (please!)

I’m from time to time thoroughly startled and unimpressed by how public services and businesses work around time. Businesses and public services exist by getting money out of the public. In other words, the public (yes, we), pay their wages and allow them to exist. The question I have is then this: why don’t public services in particular serve the public in times of day that are more appropriate for the public? How is it meant to be agreeable to not be able to see a doctor or register at a GP in the UK without having to take off work? Seriously, something is way off here.

I can let go of why businesses work 9-5, it is their decision about when and how much money they want to make and what kind of customer relationships they want to build. Nevertheless, I don’t quite understand why they stick to their working hours as they do – opening your shop for longer or different hours would give you a better competitive edge over other businesses and possibly make your customers happier. Businesses already ‘get it’ in the south of Europe – it’s nothing unusual to find shops open at 2pm and closing at 10pm. To sum it up, later opening hours could bring businesses:

1. higher income
2. better customer loyalty
3. better competitive edge

Any thoughts? Is it too much to expect people who want to profit from me to let me give them money when I choose to? Or having public services available when the public is?