Talk:Story Jam New York

Potential locations

• CUNY Macaulay Center
• UNICEF office in Manhattan

Possible activities

• Record stories using OurStories and other programs (not sure what the limitations are for what you can record with OurStories)
• Record lectures - get profs and teachers and experts to come in and talk for half an hour on something they're passionate about
• Record life stories from random people - adults, kids, everyone - wandering by on the street
• Record conversations, debates, discussions on difficult topics
• Record screencasts and demos of cool things people have done with their XOs
• Record musicians playing - XO music videos
• Record theatrical productions
• Record language lessons (see colingo.org)
• Subtitle and translate when possible (DotSub?)
• Morse code input peripheral
• Roscoe (USB radio peripheral, UNICEF)
• Accessibility peripherals - think mice, keyboard, joysticks for children who are disabled that can be made from a few dollars' worth of components - an mcu and supporting circuitry and a simple sensor, hooked up to objects that you have on hand (instead of using a plastic molded piece for a joystick handle, use a stick, etc)
• Datalogging sensors - the mic in port of the XO is an analog in port as well, so temperature, pH, light, etc. modules for logging science experiments (and then get some coders to work on a Measure activity add-on to make data collection easier, and put up a site where it's really easy to share the results of those experiments and data)

'Course, the "record!" part implies there's something to record, so some groups will spend most of the weekend making something and only a little time filming it, others will spend the entire weekend shooting or writing. We can hold a public screening of the results on Sunday afternoon - a little film festival of sorts, and screen OurStories stories from other parts of the globe as well. Filming stuff would also be less bandwidth-intensive on your wifi than a software-development Jam.

What we need

• Space ( and a date and max # of people ) - DONE -
• Equipment (film, video, sound, editing... screening)
• People (and people to coordinate people)
• Food. Plenty of it.
• Swag, if we can get it - tshirts? silkscreen-your-own?

Tech development

Mizizi and roscoe sound like the primary targets here. How many new developers (temporary, 3-day) can you accommodate, what can they do, what knowledge/experience should they have (we can require a quick test in the application to screen for this but it shouldn't be a problem), and what kind of development/resources needs to be done so they can hack?

If you have trac instances or some other type of "developers' center" for people to go to, with some tutorials, this is probably the easiest way to get started. I can help you find programmers to beta test these resources in the weeks leading up to the Jam.

For hardware hacking, NYCresistor is an excellent group to talk to (also: the local Make group, Dorkbot, and folks at NYU's ITP, and other places). Checking to see if they're interested - but ditto on the "where are schematics? where is code" type questions, above. We need to make sure folks have something good and solid to hack on.

Point people

• Space - cfabian
• Registration/communication - mchua
• Filming/showing - NEEDED (
• Food/open-space - NEEDED (Julian?)
• Tech development - ???