This summer, as I was on a sabbatical in Santa Cruz, I was also secretly building a geolocative mobile application.

Last night, the application went live in the iPhone store and now I can tell you all about Galvanize, the way to hide and find real gifts with your friends. (Our Twitter and Tumblr)

Please know that the Galvanize application is really in alpha, but we are opening it up so we can make it better faster! We need your feedback as we decide what to build into it next and how to make the game more fun.

As with all alpha (and most beta) projects, things will break and sometimes look a little wonky. We will be working to fix things just as quickly as we can, as we so appreciate your patience and specific thoughts as we improve the game and the overall experience.

And please forgive the length of this post—I have much to tell you about and some amazing people to introduce.

This is how big my smile was last night when I heard that the app was up in the store:

I was with my friends Sloane and Taylor (who is a very good photographer) in line for Ignite NYC when Taylor took the picture.

Thank You

This personal project would never have been possible without amazing friends who cheered me on as I leapt, once again, into the unknown, all of whom are pursuing inspiring personal projects and new directions of their own. Margaret Rosas, Kevin Slavin, Karen Barbarossa, Ethan Zuckerman, Catherine Bracy, Clay Shirky, Laura Hertzfeld, David Sasaki, Solana Larsen, Dave Coustan, Jessica Smith, Brian Oberkirch, Tricia Wang, Andrew Hyde, Nina Walia, Fil Vocasek, Keryn Gottshalk, Sarah Graalman, and my sisters Kat and Kass—thank you more than I can say.

UPDATE 9/28 6:15p: I knew I forgot someone important in the list above, and that would be Lisa Williams, who also gave me a wonderful piece of advice; “You can’t see the final destination with the headlights, but leave them on and you’ll see far enough ahead to make it all the way there.” (The other best advice I received was from Ethan, who encouraged me to do the thing that was scariest when I left my job.)

How Galvanize Works

Now, let me walk you through what Galvanize does right now, starting with the home screen:

There are two big things to do: hide a gift and find a gift. Both have notifications attached—e-mail for now, SMS as an option later, that arrive in your inbox when you have joined Galvanize, when someone adds you as a friend, hides a gift for you, and when you have new points in the game from finding a gift or when someone finds a gift you have hidden for them.

For hiding, choose your style of map (street view, satellite, or hybrid from the buttons at the bottom), go to your hiding location, secret the gift (be sneaky!), and then hit the “hide here” button.

The next screen (that we’re making more beautiful even as I write this) lets you title the gift, choose the recipient, and leave a hint.

When someone leaves you a gift, you will receive a notification, then be prompted to join Galvanize if you’re not yet a member, and after that, be taken to a map. The present icon marks the spot of your gift.

After you have located your gift, take a picture. There will be ways to share the story of how you found the gift soon.

For now, when a gift is discovered, both the hider and the finder are awarded points that show up in your dashboard. You can give these points to one of three featured organizations that are doing truly awesome (and serious) work making the world a better place.

Right now, we are featuring three social good organizations that I met through my time at PopTech as their Director of Community. Each of these orgs is part of the PopTech Social Innovation Fellows program; I so admire the work of Erik Hersman and Ory Okolloh at Ushahidi, Josh Nesbit at Frontline SMS: Medic, and Tevis Howard at Komaza.

Expect more in this part of the application after we work through a few wrinkles in sponsorship; ultimately, Galvanize points may become support from outside sponsors to these organizations and others that we feature. We want to reward your attention and effort with a gift you give to one of the featured organizations.

Who Made It Real

And now, let me introduce the really incredible people behind this first version. Galvanize is a bootstrapped group right now, and I’ve funded it out of what I have saved the past few years.

I cannot say enough about how Jason Wolfe of Technicolor Grayscale made the ideas and wireframes real. All the code is his, and I am so impressed with his passion for making things work and bringing the rest of Technicolor Grayscale into the project. If you’ve ever wanted a developer to stand beside you and be supportive of your strange and wacky ideas while figuring out how to code them, this is that guy. (I also know that the app is lightweight, all kinds of things are cached and others stored in the cloud, and other smart technical things to tell you more about in future posts.)

Matt Benson of TS directed design, iterating wireframes and solving for a way to make sure adults and kids both know this is an application for them–not an easy task. I asked Matt to make it feel fun and snazzy without being slick and he delivered.

Stephanie Ross of TS smoothed out userflow and used her background in social good (remember Hands Across the Sand this summer? That was Steph.) to think through how points in Galvanize roll up into support for featured organizations. We hope later this area will be sponsored and those points will become incremental donations, making everyone in the game a microphilanthropist.

The wonderful illustrations are Chris Bishop’s work. Chris is one of my favorite illustrators, a former colleague at PBS HQ, and I am so delighted that characters he drew show you how to hide and find gifts in Galvanize. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen his work recently, it might be in his recent illustration in Longshot Mag (more on the illustration and the prints in his Tumblr post).

Another former PBS colleague of mine, Cameron Nordholm, is also helping out in his free time on product development as we plan for the next builds; more about Cameron’s work in future posts too.

When I first had the idea, I met with my friend Aaron Taylor-Waldman, who came up with the original logo and first set of wireframes. I like Aaron’s tidy design sensibility, and I think his initial sketches are one reason we’ve being able to simplify some of the intricacies of geocaching and focus on the fun. (And a contact of Aaron’s, Adam Varga, did a proof of concept using a shared SMS service and some Symfony in the spring too.)

What’s Next

We are already hard at work on the next few updates for Galvanize and planning some exciting events in the coming months. If you have an idea for how to use Galvanize and/or you think it would be great to host a Galvanize gift hunt in your neighborhood, let me know! Let’s make those ideas happen.

I would also love to know your thoughts and questions as we begin to test Galvanize.

Thank you again for supporting me in this new adventure…

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

rating: 4 of 5 stars

About a month ago, online buzz surrounded a “gender analyzer” tool designed to determine whether a Web site was written by a man or a woman.

I was reminded of the flurry of indignation and amusement caused by the tool (on my personal site: “We guess http://kthread.com is written by a man (58%), however it’s quite gender neutral. Is this correct?”) in the review my friend David posted of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex the other day:

Despite the fact that the author of the book is male – as is the narrator – I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself – like Cal – somehow transcended the very concept of gender.

For me, the story’s gender play nestles in poignant details–the unexamined mention that Uncle Pete’s suspect chiropractic practice in a 1959 Detroit wasn’t for clients “to free up their kundalini,” that the narrator’s grandfather chooses Sappho’s glyconic poetry to translate for decades.

Less playfully, the narrator observes restrictive male desire:

Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.

Eugenides channels earlier, Italian postmodernism to write an epic novel that undercuts the epic, grandiose authorial fashion of recent years. Middlesex is, at moments, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius because the reader watches as grandparents Lefty and Desdemona create their genealogical fictions (as the narrator “dutifully [oozes] feminine glue”).

Piscine metaphors stream through the text, schooling Callie/Cal in gender assertion–key scenes include bathing suits, sea anemones in locker rooms, battles between gravity and bodies of water, faked menstrual cycles marked by catacomb fish symbols on a calendar.

While the protagonist’s childhood years are charted by a procession of family Cadillacs (the ‘boys & toys’ model), the novel scolds Dr. Luce (and by extension, the reader) for wanting to read straight toward one event in Callie’s life without the greater familial context.

The future is in bed in Schöneberg, but that’s not the end of the book. There must be a return to the matriarchal line first, a presentation of self in a book about self-presentation. The scratchy intercoms in the Middlesex house without walls reconnect mother and child: outmoded technology delivers comic relief.

And harkening back to the reverberating rustles of her silkworm chorus, the reader joins the vindicated Desdemona in the last spoken word of the text, as she looks at Cal and says, “Bravo.”

View all my GoodReads reviews.

After a storm, suspended rain drops reveal hidden webs on plants, dot the insides of flowers.

On my way to the University of Virginia this morning, I paused at a small outgrowth that held up a canopy of interlaced threads, much like I was about to do for a small audience of colleagues in the faculty lounge of the English department.

For my dissertation presentation, I talked about food interactions and shifting patterns of consumption in online networks.

These are the slides from today’s talk,

and I’ve posted the working draft from the presentation on a new blog where I will, from time to time, post new working drafts and ideas.

The title of my project is Culture Modding: How We Play With Our Food, Money, and Beds in the Twenty-First Century and the blog is culturemodding.com.

After the talk, Dana and Will whisked me away to lunch (how I adore these two beautiful people), and then I walked back past the dewy webs to Ben’s, where the debris of a long night spent discussing theory, interventions, and counterpublics spread over the coffee table, my sense of gratitude renewed for this network of startlingly smart friends.

Here’s to a weekend of old friends, new areas of critical inquiry, and intriguing, flexible networks—

I went for a walk this morning, doing sun salutations,

looking at the dew,

laughing as spider webs swayed out of focus…

and this afternoon, digital scholar of note danah Boyd Twittered from the Knight Commission gathering in Aspen; “listening to madeleine albright talk about her pins. today: a spider since we are talking about the web. powerful women make me drool.”

I Skyped my boss Marc, who then took a video of Ms. Albright and said pin, posted it on Vimeo and Knight Blog, and I thought I’d share it with you:

Spiders often align with powerful, supernatural bodies, and I wonder what the spider means Ms. Albright’s mood was today. While Ms. Frizzle remains my fashion icon, Ms. Albright now joins her as my accessory role model.

All of which is to say, I’m a bit starstruck today and readying for the Perseids meteor showers tonight… (find your local star chart here)…

When not chasing spider webs, you might find me dodging grates in downtown Miami sidewalks as my high heels carry me toward the tall building where I work managing online community for the Knight Foundation.

As most of you know, I was hired three months ago to architect and implement a large community area that will span many the multiple project categories that Knight funds; I’ll share more about that closer to launch (likely late this fall).

For the past month, though, I have been working on another project that we’re calling the Garage. A brief overview:

The News Challenge is the contest most people associate with Knight Foundation; it’s a yearly contest that awards up to $5 million for ideas about local news delivery mechanisms.

This new Garage site is to help potential News Challenge applicants think through their ideas with the people in the best positions to advise them: past contest winners and expert mentors.

It’s an “incubator” site, and we (the Knight News Challenge team) hope it will be a place where ideas mature and strengthen, emerging from the Garage raring to apply, win, and implement.

Though an intentionally simple Drupal (an open source content management framework) site, this is an experiment that may serve as a model for how foundations can stage grant applications and help proposed notions solidify into ideas with longevity.

And I jumped at the chance to work with Susan Mernit, who continues to mentor me, and who let me lead the project.

An ambitious timeline, the chance to work with a tech diva I admire, projects that connect those who can improve local information chains for all of us—can you tell why I’m happy to dodge those Miami grates on weekday mornings?

The Garage lives at garage.newschallenge.org, and you should come have a look.

How can you pass up a chance to talk strategy with the venerable Brian Oberkirch, implementation with Mr. Messina, social media with Beth Kanter, video with Ryanne and Jay? And that’s not even half of the cool kids in Garage ready to mentor you.

Come hang out, and let’s see what kind of awesome local news ideas we can think up together…

p.s. The Garage stays open until November 1st for project mentoring–