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…

Even more than philanthrocapitalism (and Shake Shack), Jason is into rebuilding soils with his company, re:char; I like knowing people whose work I don’t quite understand, and I may visit his workshop this spring to learn what “fast pyrolysis biochar system development” actually means.

This morning began with a croissant warmed in the oven, then spread with homemade butter and some of the honeycomb Nina brought from D.C. before I gathered vegetables and headed over to Bushwick, a somewhat remote area of Brooklyn, where my friend Dean lives.

For a relaxed lunch to celebrate the inaugural meeting of Coworking Bushwick, I sliced fractal cauliflower and purple haze carrots, roasting them next to a serious piece of pork shoulder we procured at the Union Square Greenmarket on Wednesday.

Dean made a chimichurri sauce with his serious knife skills (this is all chopped by hand),

and he programmed the rice cooker to handle freekeh (roasted green spelt) from Cayuga Organics, also at yesterday’s market. The freekeh matched the roasted pork shoulder, its crunchy crust, and carrots that retained their purple; the wheat contains a decent amount of protein, making the ancient grain a nice base for a vegetarian meal. Also, it’s fun to say ‘freekeh.’

Soon after lunch, keys were clicking again and code was implemented as the coworking continued into the afternoon, making me think about how nice it is to work from different venues, and especially places with bright, sunny kitchens full of people as attached to their computers as I am…

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This is a group of younger social entrepreneurs, many of whom are quite savvy online, who use and will use social content to serve larger organizational purposes. Note: I’m sipping raw milk as I write this; we’ll be back to food in the next post.

CC image by 2009 PopTech Teaching Fellow Eric Hersman

A Few Things About Social Content

* Have a voice. An interesting, honest, human voice when you post anything online. As Ben and Jerry say, “If it’s not fun, why do it?”

* Be valuable in conversations. Include a link in that tweet.

* Collect (media) assets. Build an asset database (pro tip: blogs count) you can query for specific content verticals.

* Hone your ninja powers for cred. Prepare to combat anything by showing up online and following conversations.

* Curate. The current verb of choice in some (underemployed) circles; give art direction for social media when leading your organization.

Social media is neither beyond you nor beneath you.

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In my next post, I’ll detail my Austrian adventures with this great group of digital activists and, of course, the food. For now, below is the video of my talk (also here), the slides, and a rough transcript.

You should definitely read through and watch the other presentations, particularly David‘s and Ethan Zuckerman‘s (Thank you to Ethan for also blogging my talk.) As I tweeted from the festival (all tweets on the symposium are tagged #arscloud), I was humbled to be part of this group and found presenting incredibly fun.

The Secret Life of Foodpaths

(this a rough transcript of what I said and a few things I wish I’d said)

I was out to dinner the other night with some friends from MIT, and they said “Kristen, why food?” And I responded that I think food has a lot to do with cloud intelligence. I always think of Clay Shirky and Kevin Kelly‘s work where they talk about how the internet runs on love. And that’s very different from lust, which is what we think of sometimes when we think about food representation online.

I am also a food pornographer—please don’t tell my mother that I just told you that.

What I want to talk about today is how we make online food back into real objects. If we have the internet running on love, and we have food lust happening online, and I really want to talk about the social future of food (for more food eye candy, check out tastespotting.com, the food porn aggregator that has attracted many copycat sites).

So we’re going to step away from food fetishism to talk about cooperative [food] communities. Stephen [Downes] talked this morning about moving away from collaboration and into cooperative communities. If you think about food coops, we’ve been talking about cooperative activity and food this way for a long time.

In the NYT a few weeks ago, Renato Sardo, an urban homesteader, was trying to explain the importance of food, and I’ll point you to the end, where he says, “food is the thing you do most.”

We’re not going to talk about politics today, though there is a lot of food politics and some food politics communities online (Civil Eats is a great one); we’re going to talk about politics in this way, instead: Yes We Can Food. What I’m really interested in is the how the products are often quite mobile, but the processing is local [and DIY food processing reclaims the word for food communities, another interesting topic for another time]. That’s what’s on the stamp—be it technology or food, we tend to read labels for where something is from, to have a sense of its place.

While not talking about government, we are going to talk about a government building. This is the official government building of Wellington, New Zealand: the Beehive, which has a great url, http://www.beehive.govt.nz/; I want to talk about honey today, and how honey can be a model for online activity.

This is another beautiful image, also of a beehive, but this beehive has CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. It’s beautiful and tragic, because if you’ve been following the ‘Save the Honeybees’ movement, you know that the honeybees are in quite a bit of trouble. We use honeybees to pollinate many of our crops; this is a global problem. The honeybees become like a traveling circus, and the same set of bees will be taken around a country, used to pollinate different things, and they become very weak and they die. This image is of a hive that’s been abandoned.

We see similar patterns in online activity; many of us belong to many online communities and as we distribute our attention, there often isn’t cooperative action as an outcome [of our participation]. The real promise of cloud intelligence may be the possibility of cooperative action. We don’t want to become like the [weakened] bee.

Two current buzzwords in food are relevant to our discussion–the first is “single origin”, and single origin honey comes from one specific place. When you buy honey, it says on the label what type of honey it is, like tupelo, wildflower, clover, avocado, which indicates what the bees ate, mostly. What you may not know about honey is that it is most healthful [note: this is unproven, but there is much compelling evidence indicating the benefits increase the more local the honey] if you consume honey produced closest to where you live. Although honey from around the world is wonderful, it won’t give you as many benefits as the honey produced on your block, on your street, in your town.

I live in Brooklyn, New York, where it is illegal to keep bees. There is an aboveground movement and people are keeping bees on rooftops. I have a rooftop. It’s sort of an open secret. Everyone is very into knowing exactly where the product, honey, has come from.

The other term I want to talk about is “source-verified” food. I think it indicates our deep level of distrust of labels, and it sounds very scary, almost governmental. This isn’t on genetically-modified food, this is on slow food, the kind of artisanally-produced food that we think of as the highest caliber of craftsmanship or craftswomanship. We need to focus on what we eat as well as where what we eat is from, on a more granular, local [geospecific] level. We have an alienation from production, and I think that’s one of the reasons for the DIY excitement in online food communities.

I found this image last week; the idea of mapping and elevation, and then pie and cake. We’re familiar with layers in a cake, but this made me think about Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian last week about cloud computing and using Amazon as a way to archive data in terms of the layers of data that we have.

Many of us have been online for some time now, and we have generated a lot of material that is out in various places online. If we start to think about this data as sedimentary layers, it will help us start to generate data that can have cooperative actions associated with it. This is my pie-in-the-sky question: how do we want to backfill the sky [the cloud]? What really is worth archiving? If the data never has actions or adds up to anything, where are we going?

Cloud intelligence may be your aggregated actions in context of coordinated, cooperative activities.

I don’t want to take this too far lest it become trendy; some of you may remember tall food from a few years ago. Chefs were creating dishes that were sometimes so tall that you could not see the person you were dining across from. The kitchen would cook ingredients that were then stacked in ring molds that were removed and the top garnish was added, heightening the drama as the dish is sent out. This gives little indication of what the food ingredients actually look like, as everything has been forced into this cylindrical container, this parameter [much like proprietary software, but that's another topic entirely].

To return to the ideas of movement, mobility, and maps as Ethan [Zuckerman] spoke about this morning, this is a map from Fallen Fruit.org of a neighborhood in Los Angeles with the different kinds of fruit trees. You can discover the fruit on a given street that, without the map, you might not see. The fruit becomes the treasure.

Thinking about fruit tree maps along with guerilla gardening and the fact that if [in the U.S.] food is planted on public property, the bounty is yours for the taking. That is, of course, if you are mobile; in contrast, the food itself can be mobile.

In New York right now, we have a food truck movement (this is also happening in a big way in Portland, Oregon); about a dozen or so popular, high-end food trucks. This is the French food truck, Le Gamin, and this is their lamb burger with strawberry ketchup, that I think is worth seeking out (told you I was a food pornographer).

The way to find these trucks is through Twitter. And when the food trucks tweet, they sometimes ask for help with parking, so this is your way to be a fan and to take an action (another very popular group of trucks on Twitter is in Los Angeles, the Kogi Korean BBQ trucks on Twitter here). The trucks also tweet at each other, creating a supportive community of mobile food vendors, and they often park near each other, raising the visibility of mobile food in a given area [that can, rather swiftly, relocate if necessary].

I had schnitzel the other day, this image is from the @schnitzeltruck–I was prepping for Linz, for Austria. The Schnitzel Truck shows up near where I work on Fridays, and we have the Dumpling truck come on Mondays, and the Cravings truck came on a Wednesday (they do Taiwanese fried chicken with secret pork sauce).

I was walking around the same area on a weekend with a friend who said, “You know, it’s such a shame. I used to work around here and there’s really not that many places to go for lunch.”

And I looked around, and the streets were sort of empty, and I though “hmm.” When I look at the same street, I know that the Schnitzel Truck usually parks on this corner. And the Dumpling Truck parks over there. Oh, and there’s an ice cream stand that sets up between these two buildings.

In the social future of food, we are the cooperative mapmakers.

Thank you.

I collect interesting examples of food, currency, and shelter experiments on culturemodding.com.

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Image by Emily Lerman/LAist. I’m in the middle surrounded all of these wonderful leaders–missing from the picture is my co-conspirator at GOOD, Max Schorr.

Two weeks ago yesterday, I flew to L.A. for an event that GOOD Magazine partnered with Knight Pulse, the community site I work on for Knight Foundation, to produce, tapping six community leaders with projects working to improve the city through design, urban homesteading, neighborhood interventions, community service awareness, and rights to creative storytelling.

You can read more about the five projects in the GOOD blog post, in Emily Lerman’s LAist post (she also took the picture above, and my friend Andy Sternberg of LAist was also there), and in my friend John Jackson’s post, where he notes Natalie Portman was sitting in the front.

This is an experiment for Pulse (you know how I like crazy ideas), and each of these projects will convene a community event this spring. I took video of their presentations (better video from GOOD will be up soon, and I’ll link to it here, but for now):

And each of the projects in on Knight Pulse in the new GOOD Leaders section.

I wanted to share with you what excites me about media and community: events like the one in Los Angeles to announce these leaders, where a crowd of two hundred stayed for two hours to listen and ask questions and think about how to make this community stronger.

Congrats to Alissa (her post on the event), Eric, Sonja, Edgar, Erik and Kelly—

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rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think of Malcolm Gladwell books as a sophisticated guilty pleasure.

He Who Must Name Patterns is the darling of airport bookstores (which I think amuses him; there is a part on airplane crashes in Outliers that is difficult to read on a flight, similar to beginning Ian McEwan’s Saturday while in the air), and the chapters are nicely organized for casual reading–each extended anecdote about the length of a New Yorker article, come to think of it.

Gladwell’s books belong in the self-discovery section of a bookstore that I imagine next to the self-help aisles, their cheerful covers in contrast to the signature manilla Gladwell titles with serious serifs and a centered object (Outliers has a colored orb, Blink an asterisk that makes me think of Vonnegut’s infamous doodle in Breakfast of Champions, and Tipping Point a match). Whereas in the previous books you might be able to slot yourself into one of the three special groups of people (Connectors, Mavens, Salespeople) or note your snap judgments, this recent book has fewer lessons that can be easily applied–aside from his 10,000 hours thesis.

Of more interest, Gladwell takes the signature Stewart Smalley line to pull apart specific examples of success; beyond the “smart enough” threshold, social savvy makes key figures (read: connectors) in your life like you enough to bend the norms and let 10,000 opportunity hours bloom.

The epilogue is an explanation of how Gladwell explains the community figures who paved his path to success, and I couldn’t resist marking the page lauding “divergence tests”–an alternative way of measuring intelligence through timed creative responses. In elementary school, I put in a good thousand hours or so solving problems with my Odyssey of the Mind teams, the brainiac Olympics for entitled children (Gladwell mentions entitlement as a key skill for success), and I do want to think those Saturdays spent designing PVC pulley systems and blurting out ten spontaneous uses for pipe cleaners will serve some larger purpose.

After spending years at a top ten U.S. university in a graduate program with disturbingly smart people, I will cite Gladwell’s book in this season of cocktail parties and feel entirely justified in my prediction that the wittiest of my friends are marked for success in that field. Comprehensive knowledge as well as a keen sense of timing in impersonations on John’s part, snarky classroom literary dissections on Ben’s, obscure musical categorization references from art historian/XML geek Dana, appreciation of rap and West coast culture from ascot-wearing Miltonist Eric, and Jordan’s inspired nudges in the Charlottesville underground arts recommend them for future renown.

If success depends on your forbearing community, perhaps the next Gladwell treatise will be on how to sustain the communities you successfully choose later–

View all my goodreads reviews.

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In anticipation of the upcoming Tryptophantastic week, I offer this video (from Zachary Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard) to explain my job, which on this particular October night included a Boston gathering to talk about the Knight News Challenge:

Yes, Mom, I’m actually paid to talk online and offline about the incredible projects Knight Foundation funds. And in the video I’m sitting next to rock star community developer Lisa Williams of Placeblogger. At the Berkman Center. At Harvard.

On behalf of Knight, I talk in little bits and in bigger bits. Lately, I’ve talked with people I really admire about government transparency, alternative online video players, communities rallying around a protester, and volunteering using your phone.

It is a great job. Thanks for telling me that I could do anything.

Love,
Kristen

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A small group of the leading lights in digital innovation filled the magic cottage with laughter (Andrew was concerned not to find Shaq’s rap album in Pandora) and music, as the guitar was passed from David to Chris and back to George:

The cottage swelled with the energy of these wonderful experimenters, and then they were off to the airport to other coasts and colder climes—

I think I am happiest entertaining when I run out of glassware and silverware, and I spent the afternoon outside the cottage, thinking about possibilities,

how they uncoil in a multiplicity of loopy strands;

watching light glance off leaves,

I reflected that life subtly darts everywhere,

and that I must remember to look up, peer closer, watch for potential motion.

Facing the leaves, shadows layer in patterns;

from where the leaf faces, the future is blurry and sparkling…

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KnightPulse.org, a place to discuss the future of information—to talk about new ways to give, share, find, and receive information we need. We’re posting video conversations to start off, and we’ll build tools the community wants next.

All mistakes are mine, of course, and the site is very much in beta, a grand experiment, but I could not have launched this project without the mentoring and sage advice of:

Brian Oberkirch, who reminded me to build first for the users of the site and their experience,

Susan Mernit, who taught me how to include everyone in the process and has been an incredible and enthusiastic mentor,

Ethan Zuckerman, who has explained so many intricacies of philanthropy,

Lisa Williams, who outlined what potential community members may need and gave smart ideas for future iterations of Pulse,

Craig Stoltz, who asked the crucial questions about refining audience and expectations,

Andrew Pratt, who helped me think through the ‘about’ page and wouldn’t let me hide information within video,

Victor d’Allant of the Skoll Foundation’s Social Edge community site, who offered practical advice on adjusting for the community that powers a site,

and David Sasaki, who reflected it would be hard to choose between Pulse and the new Pop!Tech Hub, a project-based network for social innovation from that thoughtful community. I hope the two networks can inform each other in future phases, as I have enormous respect for the Pop!Tech community and am excited to see the good work the Hub will nurture.

Below is a Knight Pulse screenshot—we’re waiting for you…

And, a big thank you to the fine team at Development Seed, a Drupal shop I recommend highly and have really enjoyed working with building Pulse.

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This morning, my colleague Robertson Adams recorded my presentation of the News Challenge Garage (the incubator site I helped build for the Knight News Challenge contest to fund innovative digital news delivery ideas) at the Communications Network 2008 Conference in Chicago: (note: it’s 9:50 long; promise it’s slightly better than the video still below indicates)

And here are the slides:

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I’ve just posted some thoughts on the currency section this afternoon, and I’m reposting them below in case you’d like to follow along as the project develops.

Most of the dissertation thoughts I post here and on the new blog will be drafty and rough, and comments are especially welcomed—

———————————-
It’s been an interesting few weeks in the American financial sector, what with the AIG bailout and the Freddie/Fannie takeover.

Last night on PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal, Moyers talked with economic critic and author Kevin Phillips about this thoughts on recent developments and his book Bad Money (watch a 26:09 clip here); a troubled Phillips stated we were “a few innings” into what he suggested may be a disastrous game Wall Street has begun, facing off against bubbles from the past few US administrations.

Phillips mentions the rising price of gold in this week’s markets, and that made me think of local currency, which is backed by a community. In the innings to come in American economic stability, I think community is the new gold.

Like the first part of this project (see the previous culturemodding.com entry about food), I’m concerned with a social object—here, currency. And I want to focus on the thing itself, the watermarked bills in your wallet that can be tendered in a specific geographic area.

Like online networks of food, we can consider local currency an alternative visible to those seeking it out and largely invisible to those who do not. We may also consider local currency a complement to national currency; it can be used instead of national within an area, making it an alternative, and it can be used in conjunction with (and traded back for) a national currency, making it complementary.

I started thinking about local currency a few years ago when I lived in Carrboro, North Carolina, an area with high levels of participation in local governance, farm-to-table cycles, and flow of capital. It is comparatively easy (compared to large suburbs and many major metros) to be chain-free in Carrboro—buying and consuming products from local stores instead of from big-box retailers. (I’m thinking especially of perishable products like food that need to be purchased almost daily.) There is an abundance of farms that participate in markets held in multiple locations three days of the week, and much of the produce is also sold at the Weaver Street Market, a co-op that accepts the local currency, which is called the PLENTY (Piedmont Local EcoNomy Tender).

Many local currencies in the US (here‘s the Wikipedia list) tie the currency to an hour of labor at the living wage rate for that community. The PLENTY does not, and was a good way for me to experience how local currency works in daily transactional use when I lived in Carrboro.

It was a few years ago, and I remember being in line at Weaver Street buying North Carolina catfish (caught in the Outer Banks), garlic from Peregrine Farm, some local lettuces. In my wallet, there were a few half-PLENTYs (worth $5–I find it interesting that there is the notion of a whole with PLENTYs) and a $20 bill. The PLENTYs wouldn’t be accepted at the chain grocery store across the parking lot, but then again, neither would the $20 dollar bill, if I used the automated checkout lanes—the computers operating the automated checkout lanes weren’t programmed to accept the new $20 bill when the bill was first released.

The interaction with the cashier at Weaver Street Market was sometimes markedly different using the two currencies. When I used the local currency, it triggered sort of a half-smile from the cashier as she slid it under the tray where the regular currency was lined up. To use the currency, even as a part-time member of the community (before I moved to Virginia, I commuted back and forth on the weekends), indicated a deeper-than-casual knowledge and engagement with Carrboro community economics.

Significantly, though, I didn’t take it with me. When I moved permanently to Virginia, I kept one whole PLENTY, one half PLENTY, and one quarter PLENTY, mostly to prove that the currency actually existed. I still have these notes, and I felt twinges of guilt it in ways that I don’t feel for, say, the Hungarian currency leftover from a trip a few months back in an area of the world I don’t know when I’ll visit again.

Taking local currency out of its geographic region can hurt the currency, as you have then effectively removed it from circulation and it becomes an empty object—one of novelty and beauty, but not of utility.

On September 9, 2008, the Lewes Pound was launched, and the Web site now says that almost all 10,000 “have been sold.”

The issue is that many have been taken out of circulation:

One of the reasons for this success is that the LPs are so admired and inspiring that everyone has wanted to get their hands on them, and not just in Lewes. That’s great, but for this initiative to succeed and benefit our community, people need to spend their Lewes Pounds, not frame them!

So, as a a member of this community, the best thing you can do to support this initiative is to spend, spend, spend your Lewes Pounds as soon as possible! This is getting easier every day. As of today we have over 85 traders on board, as well as the Lewes Farmer’s Market.

I’m curious as to how the consumption of this currency will play out in Lewes proper and online, whether we’ll see the currency so widely supported (geographically) as to devalue it—for, like with food in online networks, the sustaining mechanism of the community is in trading the social object imbued with the resonances of community interaction.

Do you agree that local currency needs parameters to be viable as a complementary currency? Other thoughts?

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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—

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2. miami rain is a drama queen
3. community is the new gold

Salmon, wildebeest, locusts. Storks, swifts, snow geese. What if the torrents of animals migrating past us every year left behind traces of their routes? What if Arctic terns sketched lines through the sky as they poured out of Antarctica and back; what if steelhead trout left thin, colourful filaments behind as they muscled up our rivers? The skies above our fields would become a loom; the continents would be bundled in thread.

Bracing and speculative, this is network theory.

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1. very certain slants of light
2. b is for bokeh
3. the fastening points