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The First Night of Blog Party

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Last night was the first night of Blog Party, a biweekly get-together hosted by me and Josh. Blog party aims to bring bloggers in the Windsor and Detroit area together to discuss ideas, get inspiration, and learn about blogging in a collaborative environment.

Since Blog Party is of course a party, we decorated accordingly.

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The first meeting was all about getting to know each other and discussing why we blog and what we can do with our blogs. As a collective, we agreed on a meeting format consisting of a 15-20 minute tutorial to begin each session, followed by group “studio time” where everyone can work on their blog with help from me, Josh, and the rest of the group. Everyone had a lot of really great advice about what does and doesn’t work in the blogging world. It will be really beneficial to receive advice and opinions from such a diverse range of people.

We talked about what we want to see in tutorials; we’ll be covering information from how to take better photos and make web graphics to social networking and promoting your blog.

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At the end of the meeting we all crowded around my computer and did a show and tell of blogs we all liked. Everyone who came got a stamp on their membership card and was sent on their way.

We plan on having accessible tutorials via Google Drive, just in case you miss a meeting. The next Blog Party is April 25, and even if you missed us yesterday, we hope you come!

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Blog Party: A New Biweekly Get-together

block party!

Blog Party

We’re very excited to announce a new biweekly blogging night, Blog Party, starting Thursday, April 11th here at CIVIC SPACE! Blog Party aims to bring together local bloggers to discuss ideas, inspiration, and issues in the city and beyond, providing a time and space for writing, learning, and creating together, regardless of skill level.

Hosted by Sara and Josh, Blog Party is both an opportunity to learn and teach, and ultimately make great blogs. Blog Party works like a pot luck — you bring something you know how to do, and everyone else gets to sample it — together, we’ll learn how to blog better, faster, and smarter.

Upcoming Dates

June 6th & 20th

July 4th & 18th

August 1st, 15th, & 29th

@7pm, Civic Space – 411 Pelissier Street, Windsor

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Working at & on (forgetting) the Border, Next Week is Show & Tell

Meeting outside is the greatest. There’s talk of building some kind of mobile table / bistro to make this possible in other locations, but I suppose that’s further down on the to-do list.

For now, we’re immersed in bringing together research and inventions around our How to Forget the Border Completely project to pull into a publication.

Above, we brought lots of reference material on Friday night.

Continue reading “Working at & on (forgetting) the Border, Next Week is Show & Tell”

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Postopolis!

Imagine a marathon of idea sharing. Now imagine this marathon was held on the roof of a skyscraper in Los Angeles. This is basically the idea behind Postopolis. “It is a public five-day session of near-continuous conversation curated by some of the world’s most prominent bloggers from the fields of architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, music and design.” What if we were able to host an event of this size on a Windsor roof? I think the unconventional location of an event like this probably breaks people out of familiarity and keeps their minds thinking creatively. For this reason, I think more creative events should be held in odd locations.

Via We Make Money, Not Art

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Expect More Activity + How Do You Collaborate Online?

Be it resolved that we’ll be a lot more active on here starting now.

We’ve been overly involved in communicating on Google Wave while trying to keep our brains together for Save the City. With that project winding down, we’ll be shifting more of our research and communications back on here. We’ve missed it.

And Josh said it best when he suggested that we should’ve been using the blog instead of Google Wave the entire time. He’s completely right.

Using that fancy collaborative tool that Google seemed to suggest would be the future of email never really fit into our work flow all that well, but it seemed the most convenient for having notes and research in one place. At first, maybe kidding ourselves, we thought it would do away with multiple emails back and forth, but then we kept forgetting to check our waves, so then we opted-in to receive emails when a Wave had been updated, and so it became really no better than a bunch of emails and some Google documents.

We’re always looking for ways to make this process better. We seem to lose so much in translation from discussions to the next time we meet up or begin working on something new. Should we be saving Word documents to Dropbox? I know Cristina and I have been using it to pass photos back and forth and its fairly convenient, though we haven’t tried working on the documents from there — I suppose we’re using it as a glorified FTP. Google Docs kind of works, but is somewhat annoying to have documents in two places (as I don’t think anyone is really truly committing to the cloud yet). What do you use when you’re working on something with someone else? How do you resolve multiple files with the same names?

With our goal (really this time) of trying to put together some kind of publication soon(ish), what’s going to be the best way to keep ourselves on the same page, or at the very least, merge everything together at the very end?

Any regular readers — what’s your method(s) for collaborating online? BCL, any suggestions for how we should move forward with this?

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Our Blog is 1 Year Old

Windsor

A year ago today, the first post was made on BrokenCityLab.org – Broken City Lab is Alive.

Last night, Josh and I went for a walk and we thought, for a moment, we were in a real city. On our walk, we saw that there were people out walking, riding bicycles, enjoying the view alongside meadows and wildflower gardens, the downtown streets were shutdown and open to pedestrians to walk and sit outside of bars and restaurants without the traffic. For a few hours last night, the city didn’t seem quite so broken.

The post that I made a year ago had a picture that, for me, kind of summarized the general sense of the city for a lot of people. I’m not sure that anything has changed, and in all likelihood, things are worse than ever, but last night I had a feeling of hope for the city that I haven’t felt for a while.