A Content Strategy Roadmap

In her presentation at An Event Apart in Seattle, WA 2011 Kristina Halvorson talked about how to integrate content strategy into a typical Web design worksflow. Here's Luke Wroblewski's notes from her talk:

How to Encourage Participation in a Shared Storyworld

8 steps to building a shared storyworld from the perspective of motivating someone to contribute to your world:

1. Inspire – first and foremost you need to capture attention and seek to ignite in the participant a deep routed creative urge to be a part of something amazing
2. Reassure - with many competing projects and opportunities, participants need to be reassured that their contribution will count. That is, that “something is going to happen”; that the project has momentum or endorsement or credibility or all of these otherwise many may feel their contribution could be a waste of time
3. Inform - tell the participate how she can contribute and describe the processes for submitting work and having it accepted. The process needs to be fair and transparent as this will help reassure.
4. Entice - tease collaboration from participants by offering a spectrum of ways in which they can contribute to the storyworld. Don’t just ask for “stories” or “illustrations”, also ask for small specific focused contributions. These are easier to complete and are more likely to be in canon.
5. Recognize - thank everyone for their participation whether it meets your quality threshold or not
6. Rally - be supportive of the community and ensure that comments from community members are constructive and not hurtful or spiteful
7. Reward - find a way to reward participation in addition to any commercial arrangement you may have agreed
8. Educate - if you find that participation is high but the required quality isn’t, consider ways to improve the ability of your contributors by recommending further reading or courses or even holding your own seminars or online discussions and courses.

Read more at Transmedia Storyteller

Open Access Animations Teach Poor Farmers

Something for the Digital Playroom folder...
Phone cartoons bring know-how to poor farmers - SciDev.Net

Tips for Curating an Online Museum Exhibit

Curating an exhibition online is the new ‘hip’ for academia and institutions. You get to showcase large sections of art work and couple it with multimedia elements such as sounds, music, images, specific background scores, mood elements such as lighting, etc. You can play around with text and words and make lengthy descriptions or signage easy on the eye with creative use of typography. And most importantly, you get more eyeballs! It’s free, fast and D-I-Y. Read more here.

Unleashing Stories; Engaging Communities

A compelling theme or narrative can drive an idea deep into the cultural consciousness, even when conventional wisdom argues otherwise.... Read more at Free Verse Media

Regional Development Australia

Under instruction from Simon Crean MP, if you have a big idea for regional development that includes cultural production, don't be shy: make contact with RDA.

Queensland Design Strategy 2020

Embedding design consciousness in the community.

Good design makes a vital contribution to the state's economy, culture and lifestyle. It has the capacity to protect our environment and positively influence the lives of all Queenslanders. The State Government wants to tap into the potential of our designers to increase the competitiveness of business and the public sector and improve Queenslanders' quality of life.

Read more about Queensland Design 2010 (PDF 692KB)

In 2008, the Queensland Government reaffirmed the value of design to the State's future development by announcing the $3 million Designing Queensland initiative as part of the Smart State Strategy 2008-2012.

To implement the priorities of Designing Queensland, The Queensland Design Strategy 2020 was launched in 2009. This Strategy is a whole-of-government framework dedicated to promoting the value of design and inspiring its take up by Queensland businesses, the community, and the public sector.

Through a series of four-year plans, the Strategy will support and guide the growth of the design sector nationally and internationally through a variety of classroom, boardroom and community initiatives, high-profile events, international exchanges and the mainstreaming of good design into government departments.

Arts Queensland - Queensland Design Strategy 2020

Simon says "Broadband to drive opportunity in regional arts"

Transcript of Simon Crean's speech to the #artsbroadband Regional Arts Broadband Forum here.

Pity there's no transcript of his answers to questions from the floor!

Inter-Arts Office Sector Plan 2010-2012 - Australia Council for the Arts

Interdisciplinary and hybrid artists are transforming contemporary arts and audiences. Experimenting across media, performance, spaces and networks, interdisciplinary artists generate new practices beyond existing artforms.

View the Regional Arts Australia Sector Plan here.

Arts Leadership

The topic of leadership - what makes a good leader, how to find, grow, and keep good leaders - is on the minds and lips of communities and businesses, both small and large. It’s also a hot topic for the arts.... Read more at The Australian Arts Portal

Eight ways digital technologies are changing the arts

elliottcountry.com

Strategy - Storytelling For Business Growth

The challenge for most companies isn't having a lack of stories to share—each has many. They just can't figure out a process for telling them...

• Conducting weekly interviews. Usually we had a phone call (30 minutes to an hour long) and email follow-ups with various people—resort staff and siblings Sam and Kristina von Trapp. We did interviews for 2-3 weeks.
• Writing test stories, with style and tone variations. That led us to a writing style that was personal, direct, and easy to replicate. It "sounded" like what we heard.
• Setting up our social channels, including a blog on the site, a Trapp Twitter account, and Facebook fan page.
• Using free monitoring services. We didn't want to invest a lot of money in a paid service before we knew its value. We used tools like Social Oomph, BackType, Topify, and Google Alerts to monitor what people said about the Trapp Family Lodge resort.
• Focusing on our e-newsletter as our main storytelling vehicle. With it, our stories became easier to write. We could then repurpose them to the blog and promote them on Twitter and Facebook.
• Monitoring our email responses, Tweet stream (using CoTweet so that multiple people could tweet under the same account), and Facebook insights.

Read more here.

Simple Shipping Container House Plans

Bland is not necessarily bad when the goal is to cheaply and easily reuse something industrial as a residential space. While a lot of cargo container homes delight the senses, these few dozen rather austere, bare-bones modular designs somewhat boldly focus on the nuts and bolts, so to speak, of living in a metal box.

Scroll to the bottom of the article for links to flash Shipping Container homes at Dornob

Open Data > Open For Business

Why is there a growing momentum behind open government data (OGD)? What are the benefits of making non-personal public data freely available? And what does it mean for both businesses and ordinary citizens? Read all about it at Think Quarterly

Resources for Evaluation of ICT Initiatives

EvaluateIT simplifies the task of reviewing or evaluating your IT project. It does this by leading you through four steps that help you decide how to begin, how to involve other people, how to do the review, and how to make the changes that will improve your IT project. As well as this process, this kit contains links to many additional resources, including more help with each step.

Read more at ICTWorks

Online Tools for Neighborhood Resource Sharing

The Sharehood is all about sharing resources within your neighbourhood and helps you to meet and make friends with people in your local area. All sorts of things can be shared, such as sewing machines, vegetables, wheelbarrows, tools, cars and books. Skills can be shared too: gardening help, bike fixing, language skills, childminding, how to make wine or dance the tango.

Ditto NeighborGoods

Landshare connects growers with people that have land to share

Australian Smartphone uptake driving mobile commerce

“The retail industry is evolving and retailers must move with it to both remain competitive and meet shifting consumer demands. Put simply, retailers must have a presence wherever their customers are – be they in store, online or on their mobile phones.” Read an overview at Computerworld Download the report here.

Open Source Ecology

Awesome concept: a suite of tools for constructing the global village. Watch the video here.

Meridian

A new location app that allows you to publish content for your museum / national park without the development costs. Check it out here.

Digital Africa: How smartphones are changing a continent

Thinking of the NT...

....There needs to be a move by game-makers to embed literacy, numeracy and logic skills into games pre-installed on mobiles: a kind of mass education by stealth. YouTube will take off. “We are a social species. We spark off each other,” says Chris Anderson, the curator of the ted conferences. He expects video to spread virally through Africa in the course of this year. That will produce dance crazes and superstar Pentecostal mobi-evangelists, but also circulate knowledge.

Finally, digital Africa will become a spoken tradition. African cultures are among the most oral in the world. Storytelling under the tree is still commonplace. Speaking is still preferred to writing and Africa happens to have timed its digital age to coincide with new voice-activated technologies. The generation gap between those who were trained to guide a fountain pen with their fingers, those whose kinetic memory is dominated by their thumbs, and those even younger who are used to the sweeping movements of the touchscreen, will give way to the return of voice—Africa’s voice.

DIGITAL AFRICA | More Intelligent Life

Summary theses : P2P civilisation

Our current world system is marked by a profoundly counterproductive logic of social organization:

a) it is based on a false concept of abundance in the limited material world; it has created a system based on infinite growth, within the confines of finite resources

b) it is based on a false concept of scarcity in the infinite immaterial world; instead of allowing continuous experimental social innovation, it purposely erects legal and technical barriers to disallow free cooperation through copyright, patents, etc…

Therefore, the number one priority for a sustainable civilization is overturning these principles into their opposite:

a) we need to base our physical economy on a recognition of the finitude of natural resources, and achieve a sustainable steady-state economy

b) we need to facilitate free and creative cooperation and lower the barriers to such exchange by reforming the copyright and other restrictive regimes

Read more at the P2P Foundation

How user participation transforms cultural production

What has been called ‘participatory culture’ is actually a complex discourse consisting of the following factors:

• a rhetoric that advocates social progress through technological advancement
• a cultural critique demanding the reconfiguration of power relations
• the qualities of related technologies, and
• how these qualities are used for design and user appropriation
• the socio-political dynamics related to using the technologies

This book examines the constitutional aspects of contemporary media practice as they unfold and provides an analysis of participatory culture. In tracing the many aspects involved in the construction of current media practice, this research will identify and analyse the constituents of a participatory culture, thus providing a comprehensive understanding of the complex relations involved in the development of online cultural production. This research will also analyse the constituents of contemporary media practice, framed as a participatory culture, by exploring the relationship between material aspects of technology and the social use, the unfolding debates and the dissent that exists with respect to the use and implementation of new media practices. In order to address the question for the various constituents of a participatory culture as a whole, the following sub-themes is treated in five individual chapters:

1. Participation as the promise of new media
2. New practices of participation and how to analyse them
3. How technological design affects user participation in digital culture
4. How users appropriate software-based products, develop new media practices and innovate design
5. How new media practices and user participation transform markets and business models in the cultural industries

In the conclusion, questions are raised as to how contemporary media practice can be integrated into socio-political regulation, and whether it will be possible to connect it to a participatory democracy.

mtschaefer | bastard culture! how user participation transforms cultural production

Download the pdf here

Understanding the Mobile Telephony Landscape

The Mobiles for Development report focuses on mobile tech as an area of significant future opportunity for advancing social development around the word.

Social Media Tools and Open Innovation: An Overview

According to Wikipedia, a common thread running through all definitions of social media is the blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value. This fits well into what I see as the underlying concept of the intersection between social media tools and open innovation; it is about how we can involve various stakeholders in creating better innovation outcomes.

Kaplan and Haenlein, two researchers, state that there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual communities.

Within these categories, I find the below tools to be the most relevant for open innovation efforts... Read more at 15inno

A story-driven Web platform for communities

Bookmark this along with the Territory 2030 objective to roll out 5 Digital Playrooms across the NT by 2012. Don't forget to add a generous dolop of OpenIDEO goodness for transforming inspiration into action.

From the article: Active Voice conceived the vision of building a story-driven Web platform and brought together a team consisting of Free Range Studios, a creative services firm, and documentary filmmaker Kelly Whalen.

Over much of the past year, the parties combined efforts to create the ShelbyvilleMultimedia.org website while Kim A. Snyder directed and produced “Welcome to Shelbyville” (executive produced by the BeCause Foundation, in association with Active Voice) which has grown into an hourlong documentary that will air on ITVS’ “Independent Lens” series on PBS on May 24.

You can see the webisodes, produced by Active Voice in association with the BeCause Foundation, on the Shelbyville Multimedia channel on Vimeo. If you’re an educator, activist or community organization that wants to engage on a deeper level and host some of the webisodes on your own site or blog and invite conversations about the stories, head to the webisode discussion questions page.

New business models for apps: beyond the 70/30 revenue share

Getting customers to pay for your app is one way for developers to make money. In-app advertising is another. Neither model is without its problems. Could cloud-based APIs provide a viable alternative

Read more here.

Participatory Sensing

“Here’s an interesting idea for changing the political ecosystem of regulation: Use Web 2.0 platforms to let citizens participate directly, and let the data be seen by everyone, in near-real time, on the Web. Reinvent regulation as an open source project, as it were, so that everyone can participate and industry money and interventions cannot so easily corrupt the process.

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Participatory Sensing as a new form of P2P Regulation

Cloud Computing: A Sustaining or Disruptive Innovation?

Organizations that run data centers and plan to implement private clouds will find that it is not enough to provide automated, self-service virtualization. Private clouds will need to offer the same level of scalability and platform services (e.g., highly scalable queuing functionality) as their public counterparts -- and will need to deliver it at the same kind of price points as they do.

A telling analysis of the primary cited shortcoming of public clouds -- security -- was shared with me by a cloud analyst at a leading firm. User concern about public cloud security, he said, drops away dramatically at around the two year mark -- once the user gets familiar enough and comfortable with the security capability of the public provider. At that point, he stated, the user organization begins to strongly embrace the public option due to its ease of self-service, vast scalability, and low cost. Those organizations that reach that two year milestone quickly turn their back on previous private cloud plans, concluding they are no longer necessary, given the increased comfort with the public option.

This tells me that the benchmark for private cloud computing will not be, is it better than what went before -- the static, expensive, slow- responding infrastructure options of traditional data center operations. The benchmark will be the functionality of the public providers -- the agile, inexpensive, easily scalable infrastructure offered via gigantic server farms operated with high levels of administrative automation and powered by inexpensive commodity gear.

Cloud Computing: A Sustaining or Disruptive Innovation?

See also: The Psychology of Collaboration - Technology Review Great idea in this article about sharing bookmarks...

Knowledge Management in the Age of Social Media

In order for a knowledge management system (KMS) to have value, employees must enter insight on a regular basis and they must keep the knowledge current (we can all agree that out-of-date information, which has reference value, is much less useful as the general desired state of actionable knowledge). Seldom are either of these behaviors adequately incentivized: updating the information requires effort, which is rarely a priority against the core responsibilities of the employee.

Read more at Reilly Radar

Facilitating Collective Wisdom

Collectively, we have the solutions to our most pressing issues: we are wiser together than we are alone.

We believe that conversation - authentic human interaction - is the core driver of social change and innovation. And we recognise that it's up to all of us to step into the leadership roles being called for today, by engaging the big questions and making our voices heard.

Group discussion in the real world process: http://www.deepdemocracyinstitute.org/en/vision-purpose-strategy.html
http://www.theworldcafe.com/hosting.htm

Group discussion in the virtual world:
http://openideo.com/faq

Psychology of Persuasion

Do you want to be an agent of change? Psychological research reveals how to tip the balance in your favour.

In a networked knowledge economy, co-creation is co-evolution

Our world is changing, so is the way we are thinking about it. The rise of online networks has not only modified our possibilities to connect and exchange knowledge with other people, but also has it given anyone with internet access a new, almost (not yet totally, but for how long?) unalienable, power. From charities to tyrannies, from companies to markets, a lot of this power is shifting to citizens and customers. Paradoxically, the more people gain access to it, the less we can think in terms of mass. Individuals, their diversity, their relationships, their interactions, matter more than the standardized bulk dynamics prevailing in the industrial logic.

To adapt to this change, organizations have to reinvent most of the ways they operate. Customers are no more passive buyers to target. Companies are no more fierce industrial strongholds aimed at infinite growth and bracing their back against long-term competitive advantages. Work is no more a clearly designed set of tasks, defined by roles and rewarded by career paths. Trees grow no more to the sky. Previous equilibrium between production, sales and profit is broken, and a new one is required, which embraces the evolving complexity of relationships between customers, companies and workers.

Read more at Sonnez en cas

Best multimedia exhibit ever...

Welcome to Pine Point has a lot to teach all of us who strive to design exhibitions and experiences that explore history in a meaningful way. Read all about it at Museum 2.0 then take the tour here.

Emerging Issues in the Museum's Mobile Business Model

The use of visitors' own devices for mobile programs in museums, which began with podcasts and cellphone tours some years ago, has enjoyed a renewed popularity in the age of the smartphone. Growing numbers of powerful personal computers in the hands of museum visitors hold out the promise of reduced overheads for mobile interpretation and information services. Obviating the costs of stocking and staffing device distribution on-site, the BYOD (bring your own device) movement has also fueled hopes that the Internet-connected phone will open up new possibilities to reach off-site as well as on-site audiences, beyond the traditional audio tour business models or even the cellphone tour and podcast. Sharing this optimism, new and more specialized vendors have made it easier for museums to buy the elements of their mobile programs à la carte, mixing in-house development of both content and technology with outsourcing. In the past few years, museums have also learned that they can create their own content, as well as enlist the help of script-writers and sound designers, and publish their content to multiple platforms.

So far, however, even as equipment and staffing overheads have been removed or reduced by reliance on visitors’ using their own mobile devices in the museum, new cost centers and challenges have been introduced: proprietary museum-built audio players have often been replaced by equally proprietary app platforms, and the museum that wants to reach the other 70% of its on-site audience is still faced with the question of how to provide devices to visitors who don’t come with – or want to use – their own phones during their museum visits. The museum that can manage a small stock of players on-site for the low take-up rates of permanent collection tours may be overwhelmed by the sudden spike in demand caused by the blockbuster exhibition. Are museums ready to take on responsibility for the mobile hardware/distribution model as well as content and software?

Read more at conference.archimuse.com

10 Awesome Videos On Idea Execution & The Creative Process

Check them out at The 99 Percent

Transformations of Myth Through Time

EXCERPTS FROM JOSEPH CAMPBELL’S “Transformations of Myth Through Time” at Emergent Culture

Transmedia Rising

Transmedia Rising (March 2011)

View more presentations from JWTIntelligence

Community Centered Collective Action Design Framework

Community Centered Collective Action Design Framework « Mike Arauz – The Blog

Mind Over Mass Media

The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

Op-Ed Contributor - NYTimes.com

See also: A Simple Guide for a Mindful Digital Life

Future of Screen Technology

Check out That Astonishing Tribe

Story & Place > MyStory

Imagine standing in a (Melbourne) laneway.

A laneway that you've never explored or one that you've walked down hundreds of times before, and from your mobile phone, an author reads you a unique story set in the very place that you're standing.

Welcome to MyStory.

Civic Engagement Research Group

At the Civic Engagement Research Group (CERG), we conduct quantitative and qualitative research focused on understanding:

• The nature of youth civic engagement
• The impact of civic learning opportunities and digital media participation on young people's civic capacities and commitments 
• The quantity, quality, and equality of civic opportunities and outcomes in public schools and other contexts

Download their reports  here.

NatureMapping Program

A model program for Territory 2030: increasing creative industries engagement and monitoring biodiversity... at the same time.
Check out the Washington NatureMapping Program

Transmythology: Digital Hollywood Review

Digital Hollywood Pt 1 – Starlight Runner Showcase | Transmythology
Digital Hollywood pt 2 – Fireside Transmedia Chat | Transmythology

Emergence As A Framework for Organisational Strategy

Does your organization work hard creatively on its strategies seeking new theories and insight, often visualizing and drawing maps and schemas as a way of understanding its strategies?

Emergence As A Framework for Organisational Strategy - The Creative Leadership Forum

Social Media in Organisations > Don’t control, curate!

In organisations we have a fetish for control and neatness in regards to information and communication; which is flys in the face of how we naturally behave.

You know how it goes, "this type of information must live here", "if you talk about this topic it must happen here", etc…

Now people naturally form groups and personal networks, they talk about various things and feel comfortable and confident in participating in circles of people they trust, have rapport with, have shared experiences with…

If you look at our lives offline and even on the web there is no person that mandates where you file topic-based content and where you are allowed to talk about a topic. Yes control has a purpose sometimes, but I’m talking about an equilibium, I’m talking about realising that management approaches have a fetish that sometimes do more bad than good…we need to stop and think, does the command approach suit a particular initiative or event.

Read more here.

Innovation and Value Networks

Value networks, and an introduction to value network analysis, are a key part of understanding networks. The term is in wide use today, but for many of us its origins and deepest meaning come from Verna Allee and her 2003 book, The Future of Knowledge. Her definition:

A web of relationships that generates economic or social value through complex dynamic exchanges of both tangible and intangible benefits.

Verna’s insights led her to develop a mapping methodology, Value Network Analysis (VNA), which centers on a few basic differentiations:

* Separating people, titles, and job descriptions from roles. In a social network map, a node is a person. In a value network map, a node is a role, the actor responsible for a specific activity or set of activities.
* Focusing on the content of exchanges between roles. In a social network map, a link represents an aspect of a relationship; in a value network map, the link is the exchange of a named, identifiable deliverable.
* Distinguishing tangible and intangible deliverables. The flow of tangible deliverables in a business ecosystem result in the exchange of hard currencies, especially revenue, among members of the ecosystem. The flow of intangible deliverables represents the benefits of the relationships that keep things running smoothly and that overall contribute to a viable, and effective system.

Read more here.

Transmedia Framework

The fundamental mechanics of this framework:

It is non-linear.
We can build as we go. We can course correct. We can reshape and redefine.

It is participatory (in varying degrees).

It is recursive.
Everything we do ties into, or back into, the core narrative(s) and builds intelligence.

It is scalable.
Everything we do can grow into other forms or properties to some extent.

It is indefinite.
At any point in time, a narrative can plateau, merge, reemerge or converge around new or old ideas.

Read more (much more!) at ThinkState

The Art of the Business Model

The Art of the Business Model

View more webinars from Bolz Center for Arts Administration

Follow Andrew Taylor on Twitter here. 

Apply this perspective to Territory 2030 objectives to raise participation in the Creative Industries to the highest per capita level in the nation... we might get there!

Dropbox – the best way to backup and synchronize your data

Dropbox – the best way to backup and synchronize your data

A Field Guide to the Commons

This book is an excellent introduction to the Commons: “All That We Share" covers the full spectrum of the commons around the world from water and wikipedia to streets and public spaces.

Read more at the P2P Foundation

All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons is a wake-up call that will inspire you to see the world in a new way. As soon as you realize that some things belong to everyone—water, for instance, or the Internet or human knowledge— you become a commoner, part of a movement that’s reshaping how we will solve the problems facing us in the twenty-first century.

Read more at On The Commons

You Are What You Do

When you look at spiritual life in an evolutionary context, you cannot see yourself and your own development as separate from the entire cosmic continuum of the life process. And this creates a profound moral context for your own spiritual evolution — a moral imperative to transform yourself. Why? Because you and the process are one.

Read more at Intent.com

The Spoken Web

A paradigm shift > we're no longer bound to the cultural construct of text. The spoken web promises to deliver #ICT4D to everyone with mobile phone access.

See also: MobileActive.org
See also: The Telecom Web

Operational example:

DGR status: example

Looking to Do More Social Good, IDEO Launches a Non-Profit Arm. Read more at Co.Design

DGR status : OurCommunity.com.au

Principals for Open Government

Open government goes far beyond transparency. Opening up how institutions work to enable greater collaboration – open innovation - affords the opportunity to use network technology to discover creative solutions to challenges that a handful of people in Darwin might not necessarily devise. By itself, government doesn’t have all the answers.

In the network age, twenty-first-century institutions are not bigger or smaller ones: they are smarter hybrids that leverage somewhat anarchic technologies within tightly controlled bureaucracies to connect the organization to a network of people in order to devise new approaches that would never come from within the bureaucracy itself. By using technology to build connections between institutions and networks, we can open up new, manageable and useful ways for government and citizens to solve problems together. Everyone is an expert in something and so many would be willing to participate if given the opportunity to bring our talents, skills, expertise and enthusiasm to bring to bear for the public good.

Read more about the 10 principals of open government here

Planning for Participation

Perhaps we had better turn what is at best an art and at worst an afterthought into something approaching a science... a roadmap here.

The Marginalization of the Commons and What To Do About It

I see great potential in the commons because it goes beyond political ideology to propose a paradigm shift, a different worldview. It knits together the economic, political, cultural and humanistic into one coherent discourse. It empowers individuals to help themselves. It helps reconnect people with each other, and with the earth. It helps regenerate personal meaning and social tradition. It helps foster sustainable management of ecological resources.

The Marginalization of the Commons and What To Do About It | David Bollier

10 Artists Explain How They Became Entrepreneurs

There's a certain belief that the only way for artists to make money is to sell their artwork, preferably through a gallery. But the truth is that an artist can use his or her creativity as a jumping-off point for creating a business. Check out what these 10 artists-turned-entrepreneurs have to say about their experiences making the leap at American Express OPEN Forum

UK government putting mobile at the heart of the tourism strategy

New Government Tourism Policy published - Strategy sets out blueprint to grow industry and create new jobs

Holocube

Holocubes are a fully integrated 3D projection platform and use a number of different technologies to create their holographic images. The new HC70 Holocube is now capable of creating full-sized human projections within its six foot tall box with a 70″ diagonal screen. Read more at Geeky Gadgets

How is Brazil's approach to Digital Culture unique? And what can the rest of the world learn from it?

Dear Territory 2030 overlords: this article is for you...

Free Technology for Teachers

Dear Hugo, how's that proposal coming along? Thought this might help >11 Good Digital Storytelling Resources

Open Innovation > reading list

The 57 essential books for understanding the open innovation here.

40 hashtags for social good

Sending a tweet into the Twitterverse without a proper tag is like stocking a library with no regard to author or subject matter. Your messages may go unread and opportunities to connect with others may be missed.

Make room for a hashtag in your post — that will add your tweet to an existing (if somewhat hidden) thread, given that Twitter now turns hashtags into links. Bottom line: When used judiciously, hashtags are definitely worth the precious extra characters.

Last year we wrote about how nonprofits can use Twitter hashtags. But hashtags have evolved a bit since then. You may want to download and print out our new 40 hashtags for social good flyer so that you always have the right tag ready for your tweets

OpenIDEO

Here’s how the current spread of OpenIDEO features cater to different tiers of the ecosystem. They range from bite-sized interactions (click to applaud) to more involved interactions (submitting a concept).

You can also see that converting someone from a Visitor to a Regular is a bit of a hurdle (raised higher by the process of actually having to sign up for an account). I’m not sure if I’ve seen any sites that do well at helping users level up from the bottom of the pyramid, except to make the value of the site so high as to drive signup.

As OpenIDEO is in this current phase of Living in Beta, it means we’re also trying to level-up users across all the tiers, through building intermediate features that turn Collaborators into Passionate Contributors and Regulars into Collaborators. Our latest Inspiration Assignments feature is an attempt to turn the rather nebulous Inspiration phase into more specific questions so as to overcome the hurdle of a blank piece of paper, where guiding questions can prompt Collaborators to start contributing.

So whether you’re a Visitor, Regular, Collaborator, Passionate Contributor, or social design geek, what are examples and ideas you’ve seen to level up user engagement?

Contribute to the discussion here.

Check out the OpenIDEO solution here.

Field Guide to Victoria Fauna app

Explore south eastern Australia’s unique and diverse wildlife at home or in the great outdoors with Museum Victoria’s new Field Guide app. Available in both iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch versions, the app combines detailed animal descriptions with stunning imagery and sounds to provide a valuable reference that can be used in urban, bush and coastal environments.

The app holds descriptions of over 700 species, from animals found in rockpools, minibeasts in your garden, to birds, mammals, lizards and snakes you might see in the bush. We’ve put in a lot of species, but it’s still a fraction of the complete fauna of Victoria. Our scientists will continue to add additional species and refine descriptions over time.

Read more here.

What Motivates a Transmedia Audience

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: What Motivates a Transmedia Audience

See also: How Does Transmedia Storytelling Work? (video)

Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning

Worth subscribing to their RSS feed if you're in the Youth Services/ Education field. Two articles caught my eye straight up:

•  Ask Not What Digital Media Can do for Kids, but What Kids Can Create With Digital Media

• Digital Media and Democracy: How Time Spent Online is Training Tomorrow’s Active Citizens 

  See also EdTechInsight for consistantly good information
  

Against Attention

People who daydream more are also better at generating new ideas... Read all about it at Wired.com

Authenticism in Branding

In the context of branding, maintaining one’s authenticity faces some unique challenges. This post discusses 7 points you want to consider in developing your authentic brand.

Embracing Social Media in Health Care through Digital Storytelling

Webinar registration here.