wow, what a great week that was.
MASSIVE thanks and WELL DONE to everybody involved for making it such a positive experience.
Julian, Ali and Nat kept smiling throughout, despite the uphill struggle to organise everything - workspace, socialising, schedule, conference and festival. and those damn wifi codes.
it was great to meet the whole team of hackers, and a particular joy to get to work with Ben and Kev on our little project.
i'm glad we kept the project simple, using already-existing tech and re-contextualising it for our benefit.
the PlayARK day yesterday at WMC was buzzing, despite the weather. our PlayDance booth had around 100 people using it, from the ages of 2 to 62, and it generated a smile on all faces. i didn't get chance to go up to TeamOne's installation but i heard really good feedback about it. TeamTwo's web app was looking good all day, and constantly updating - i'd like to spend more time with the archive and witness how the story changes with different users' input.
now we've got this little network, we should try to find ways to utilise it. Jorge has set up a dropbox folder to share memories of the week - which encouraged me to find a way of hacking simultaneous dropbox accounts on my mac. (thanks: Daniel Mann) and maybe we can connect in different ways.
hope to see you all soon,
john x
Wednesday - the day in the middle of the week. and the day in the middle of our 3-day hackathon to make something for sharing at PlayArk2013. a day where creativity ran in waves of expanding ideas and complexity, then simplifying everything and starting again. regularly. setting up new websites and twitter accounts, and finding out that actually, sometimes the best technology can be a friendly face and a finger on a button.
we ended the day with Mr Hyde doing a birthday dance for me. in a large cardboard box.
what a great way to turn 44. creating creative stuff with creative people. with extensive use of post-it notes, TeamThree came up with a set of aims and objectives for our little project. its a good team - we have one person who tends to specialise in real people, one who is keen on real things and one who has faith in the virtual. its a great collaboration, and in no time at all we had come up with an idea and started running with it.
diversions came in the form of Rob telling us about his fascinating project called Conducttrrrr, or something, and offered it to us to play with, which was nice, and Ian telling us more than i imagined i'd ever need to know about L(A)RPing. which was also nice.
another hour of testing and developing and we had a very botched together prototype system.
at the end of the day, the three groups generously shared their ideas and gave feedback before disappearing off into the chilly Cardiff night.
after that, it seems as though Wednesday might prove to be the difficult second album.....
here's a nice blog from Germany, highlighting the fine art of Urban Hacking:
http://rebelart.net/
Why not come along to our meeting on Wednesday evenings and see how you can get involved! Click here to view our calendar.
