A Passion For 'Puters

After a truly fabulous “continental” breakfast which included an egg & bacon sandwich and a breakfast burrito (thanks, LITA!!), I went back to my room to pack. Now that all that is done, I’m in the ballroom, waiting for the closing keynote by Liz Lawley,of the RIT Lab for Social Computing. I’ve seen her give this talk before, at Internet Librarian, but I’ve heard this is an updated version, so I’m all ears!
The session title is Technical/Tangible/Social. She’ll be talking about a city-wide game (in conjunction with her local newspaper) as well as her traditional tech/tang/social presentation. She started with a quote that starts: “One day we will look back with embarrassment on this era when all of our virtual experiences are locked behind a screen”. She mentioned a USB doll that stands up when an IM buddy logs on, then falls down when they log off and the botanicalls product, which tweets when your plants need to be watered. She then showed pics of Make: and Craft: – I’d not seen the Craft: magazine… – both are put out by O’Reilly, the programming books publisher.
She mentioned Ravelry!!!! So cool – “object-oriented sociality”, you can do some amazing pivot searches – look up the yarn that you just bought on sale, limit to just knitting projects, limit to just type of garment… etc.
Next was Moo cards – nice because they are quality – they feel good to hold.
Go to where they are – not a good idea; make a place where they want to be. (not sure I agree with this, I still think it’s a good idea to get out there and be accessible)
Next she goes to the talk “Picture the Impossible: A technical, tangible, social game”. An alternate reality game – but calling it a city-based adventure game. “It’s non-trivial to come up with a plan for a game of this magnitude.”
Missions: learn the history of the city; explore the city itself; give something back to the community; socialize
“What are the verbs associated with your game?” -excellent question and a good way to combat scope creep.
Looked at places to go (public market in Rochester), looked at (and tied into) events that were happening during the game, included a big party at the end.
They did this with a $0 budget; created a narrative involving a secret society that was splintered into 3 factions (game players choose a faction; their points go toward that faction) and at the end of the game, that society would throw a party for those who completed the game (needed to get an invite to this exclusive party). They picked 3 local charities to involve in the game as well.
Making players choose the faction immediately makes them more invested in the game (WoW’s character/faction choice, etc.). They created a theme per week (7 weeks, with the celebration on the 31st of Oct.).
She did get some small amounts from newspaper and college with a bit more from MS to use Bing’s mapping features during the Bing launch.
Lesson learned: really clarify authority & responsibility before heading off to work on this kind of thing.
Picture The Impossible launch trailer – YouTube
Launched on Sept. 12 with 800 pre-registered.
She’s been spending the last 10 minutes or so showing us the games and such and it’s completely fascinating…
2000+ fully registered players (valid phone or facebook connect account). Many of the most active players are women and mothers.
She hopes that the model will be replicated elsewhere – especially in public libraries.
At that point, she finished and I have to run to check out of my room.

So, today I presented my “Collaborating In The Cloud” session at LITA. It went well – lots of questions about a number of different things, but, as always it seems, a lot of the discussion was happening on Twitter. One of the things that came up, both as an in-person question and as a Twitter topic, was the separation of work and personal in social networks. I mentioned in my presentation that I got a lot of pushback when I asked, back in my researching for the LTR days, about people using Facebook for work purposes. Many respondents said that Facebook was for fun and that they weren’t going to use it for work. Period.
That started a discussion about separating the work part of what you do on Facebook from the personal stuff. Groups are always an option, but one of the Tweeters, Maureen Kearny (mosylu) expressed a concern about leakage from your professional groups to your personal groups. I have to agree that it is something to be concerned about.
Creating groups in Facebook is pretty easy, but not particularly intuitive. The steps are:

1. Hover over the “Friends” link toward the left top side of the page
2. Click on All Friends
3. Click “Create new list”
4. Type in the name of your list and select people to add to it; click Create List
5. Hover over the “Settings” link at the top right of your Facebook page
6. Click on “Privacy Settings” after it drops down
7. Click “Profile”
8. Click drop-down list on each section listed on the page – all (except the general “Profile”) allow you to make things visible to all of your friends *except* whoever is in one of your lists
9. Rinse, lather, repeat until you have locked down your profile
10. Go To Applications Settings (also off of the Settings link at top right)
11. Edit any work-related apps to be visible only to work-related lists

This requires some thought, perhaps a bit of pre-planning (who goes into what list?) and some time to do right, but it is not too complicated to make it happen. It is also the only really legal way to do it – Facebook frowns on people who create personal and professional accounts… Of course, now that LinkedIn offers applications such as the Huddle Workspace app, maybe using that instead of Facebook would be better for you.
While Facebook is huge, and everyone (it seems) has an account, it’s not the only game out there. It may be the easiest in terms of learning curves (as in, people have already climbed that particular curve, not that it doesn’t exist) and passwords (oh no – not ANOTHER site that I have to maintain a user/pass combination for…), but if you are concerned about mingling your personal and your professional, learning a new application and keeping track of yet another password may be worth it to you. This is one of the benefits of choosing cloud collaboration – you have options!!