Here’s an idea. In a recent chat, I was told recently that the bar I’ve set for reviews is prohibitively high (fair enough), and that even folks who loooove and are interested in participating in the blog are a little scared of the Cliffs of Insanity that is reviewing a whole movie at once. (Special Man-in-Black tip of the hat to Clayton Beese for being the only other person to date willing to scale those things solo.)
But today I was thinking of running an experiment in Nerdsourcing. What if I picked a movie, identified the interfaces in it, and then asked for volunteers to pair up to review one or two of those interfaces? I’d provide the screen caps, teams would work in Google Docs initially and then move to Droppages (or some other live web-hosting solution) for the final markup. I’d be the editor, working asynchronously with each team to maintain voice, offer my thoughts, help answer questions, scheduling the final posts, etc.
This way you would not be faced with the monumental task of doing an entire movie. Instead of committing weeks, it might just be a handful of weeknights, depending on how quickly you worked and the complexity of the issues you are your partner uncover. At the end you’d have a good time, a fun post to share with friends and maybe put on a resume, and of course full credit on the post itself. (Stuff on the site is Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0) If you want to stretch your creative muscles you could even create a comp of a better solution. We’d have a first nerdsourced scifiinterfaces review. Who of this rag-tag readership is interested? Hands up in the comments.
The follow up question is for which movie could we run this experiment?
Cool idea! Although most of the visual interfaces in Pacific Rim where just hilarious. Somehow Gypsy Danger was “analog” but had holographic interfaces 🙂
count me in!
I would love to participate, I hope I can review Star Trek Into Darkness soon! (Did I just try to manipulate votes? Yes, I did.)
I would be interested.
This is a stellar idea, and I’m now spreading the word.
Above and beyond that, though, I had no idea Sci-Fi Interfaces was CC BY-SA! This is tremendous news, and would actually probably catapult the site into near-mythic echelons of open culture fame, if only it were more clearly stated and widely known. Heck; I’d probably be spreading the word about that fact even more widely, to a wider audience.
But, I can’t find a standard footer or header CC BY-SA statement to save my life. Could this be stated more plainly and more widely across the site?
Thanks for the support, Heath! And the kind words.
Yeah, I guess I didn’t want to make a big deal about it, partly since I just think it’s the way things ought to be, but also because if I invite people to participate, I can’t claim the rights to it.
Since I’m using the default WordPress instantiation, I don’t know if I can make custom footers or headers, but I’ll look into it. Word of mouth is of course appreciated while I research. 🙂
Ah. Figured it out.
Count me in as well! I´m not native english speaker but I think I can handle well enough, plus we have an editor. Now that I think about it, to translate some of this -to spanish in my case- would be awesome.
Having given this a week for people to respond, it looks like you 6 are the pilot group. That’s not a big group, so I’m wondering if you’d be interested in pairing up together into three teams (it might mean doing a number of interfaces) or in finding someone who hasn’t commented, and cajole someone else you know into being your pair. Think you can all find a partner?
Hey there. I´m Technical Evangelist at Razorfish in Frankfurt. Inspired by you book we set up a SciFi Movie Night this year where we watch a scifi movie, evaluate it and extract scifi interfaces from it. Finally we write together some lessons that we think the movie conveys. We think that’s an perfect method to learn and interact with scifi interfaces in a playful way and additionally improve our daily work. I like your idea of nerdsourcing. Maybe we can also participate. We would simply watch the same movie chosen here in our next movie night. What do you think?
I love it! (And would love to participate with the group sometime.) If you’d like to share any of them, I could even work with you to post some of your results to the blog if you’re interested.
We should get in contact via email. We also would love to work closer with you.
I would be interested in participating in the next round of nerd sourcing. I’ve also been tossing around the idea of setting up a scifi interface group to help the younger generation of high school and college kids get interested and excited about design and innovation.
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