Our partners and colleagues over at the Engine Room are dedicated to organizing the best practices and experiences in the world of tech development. Taking what they find and openly sharing it for all of our benefit. This is why it’s important for all of us to take their social tech census.
By pooling our knowledge together we can all benefit by seeing what has worked for us in different locations, and help avoid making the same mistakes over and over. It’s important that we take the time to step back and communicate with our peers on the work we’re all dedicated to.
Here at Small World News we’re looking forward to seeing the results, so be sure to add your voice to the census today.
With the growing momentum behind the Occupy Wall Street movement, I knew there would be a lot of press at the Occupy Portland march. Josh and I went over and watched as they kicked off their march to speak to the media who associated themselves with the movement, see what tools they were using, and if there were any tricks I might be able to learn from them as well.
A lot of dSLRs were there, it’s clear that shooting dSLR is the approach that most excites people. There were a number of high quality audio recorders too. Speaking to people it’s clear that these high bench marks are simply what they expect of themselves. There were a number of other cameras, standard def mini Dv, even a High 8 camera that I recognized from my high school days. But, the majority of the movement was using dSLR cameras.
The number of cell phone pictures taken was pretty startling too. Almost anyone the march passed would take a picture of it. To post on Facebook, twitter, or to show their friends later at the bar is for them to say. But I lost track of counting cell phones photos being taken after seeing 40 and we had only gone two blocks.
One particular interesting setup was the few people who combined the sophistication of high quality cameras with cellular modem technology. Here is one person who was streaming video live via a LiveU backpack.
Here is another, a kit setup by Dan Kaufman (of crank my chain!), using the same method of cellular modem transmission, but with a homebrew approach.
This brought me back to the use of TXTmob at the 2004 RNC. It was not common yet to use text messages for widespread but specific communication, but protestors were utilizing it to keep each other informed. Now tools like twitter are indispensable to journalists and activists for monitoring breaking news as well as communicating with each other.
I see these early adopters as an example of what we have to expect. Right now cell phone technology is the easiest way to do this. You can affordably communicate with the world instantly. But, the more technologies like EyeFi cards and cell phone modems become cheaper and more affordable, the easier it will be to be step around the quality limitations of our every shrinking cell phones and utilize more powerful tools for story telling.
If you’re still interested, you can check out a few unedited interviews on our YouTube Page too:
At SWN HQ we’ve been discussing creative ways Egypt might be able to ensure their upcoming elections are free and fair. At this point the love affair between the Egyptian people and the Web last spring is painstakingly documented. But the recent announcement that the military council will maintain the emergency law into next year, shows that they need to commit to a long term relationship. The rumored dates for the upcoming election are November 21st, which would mean this critical election would take place under the same atmosphere as they did under Mubarak.
Citizen media was crucial to kicking off Egypt’s revolution, and it will be essential for monitoring each step it takes. Election monitoring technology is available that can allow citizens to collect reports about problems via SMS, media will need to be more sophisticated, and information will need to be more clearly sourced.
Just as I hope the media campaigns step up in quality, it is likely that the reaction to citizens uploading video, posting tweets, and communicating over facebook will be more sophisticated too. Just as Libya has learned from Egypt, Egypt will learn from everything in the last year.
Written by: Steve Wyshywaniuk ~ Co-Founder
//photo credit: Patrick Baz/AFP/Getty Images
For the last twelve days I’ve been just like everyone else on the internet, glued to the news unfolding in Egypt. The entire Small World News team has been asking each other just what we might be able to do to help the people of Egypt. A few phone calls and constant Skype chatter lead to a lot of good possibilities, but nothing concrete enough to take action on. Until last Sunday, when Brian really came up with something great after seeing the new blog post from Google about their Speak2Tweet service.
Speak2Tweet is a really simple service that allowed anyone in Egypt to call a phone number via the still functional phone system and record a voicemail that would then be posted to the SayNow service as an mp3. This went around the internet being shut down in Egypt and provided a channel to allow Egyptians to call and hear other messages as well as allow people outside of Egypt to hear directly from Egyptians cut off from the internet.
Brian just wanted to add a simple layer of transcribing and translation to this, so that non arabic speakers could hear from the callers and also so we could give a platform to the callers and highlight some of the more useful information coming out of Egypt. We reached out on Twitter and Facebook about the idea and the reaction has been huge. After a few hours we had a impressive team of volunteers, a shared spreadsheet that was actively filling up with translations, and Alive in Egypt was up and running.
Over 50 people have volunteered their time to help with different aspects of the site. From working on the technology behind it, to working on the actual transcripts and translations of the phone calls. Over 700 messages have been transcribed and translated since we’ve begun. On the transcribing and translation side of things I’d like to publicly thank @Arabzy @joshmull @BadrGirl @habibh @emanhaly who have all worked tirelessly in one way or another to translate messages, organize our 50+ volunteers, spread the message about the project, and support everyone along the whole way. It’s been inspiring watching you all come together so closely so quickly.
On the tech side of things, I’d like to thank Kevin Hart, long time Small World News contributor, who has setup and continued to develop another great platform for us in record time. Working right along side him as been Aaron Huslage (@huslage) who has been volunteering his services and has really come through on helping speed up a lot of the development work with Kevin. He’s looking for work too, so if you need a good developer, I’ll give you my personal recommendation. And don’t think they’re done yet, the site is going to continue to grow over the next few days and weeks.
For those interested in the raw data, today, just eight days later we’re on track to break 200,000 pageviews and 60,000 unique visitors. Not bad for a site that didn’t even exist 10 days ago. An interesting point to me is the amount of time on the site, which has gone up from a low of just above 2 minutes last Wednesday to a high of over 3 minutes today.
We’ve got a lot of work left to do, but it’s been really amazing working on all of this with everyone. We have some ideas to go forward from here, but we need a little more time before we make any of that public. Keep an eye on Alive in Egypt, this team is going to surprise you.
Small World News began developing a pilot for a new show this past weekend. I can’t go into any of the details yet. But to create the show we had to finally break down and buy some software for screencasting. (There has to be a better name for this technology/idea then this right?) Our primary editing machine is our fancy MacBook Pro (Thanks Vloggies 2006!) so staying in the OS X software pool was a requirement, although Captive did make me drool when I stumbled across it.
About 6 months ago Snapz Pro X was the popular program among all the cool kids. Maybe it’s the stinginess my father instilled in me, or maybe I just was trying to avoid the actual task at hand. But when I saw it would cost $70 dollars for Snapz Pro X (it’s only $30 to take still images, but we need video capabilities) I couldn’t help but think there has to be a cheaper way to do this.
Using the amazingly intuitive keywords “OS X Screencast Software” I found a thread on 37 signals from last year. There was a lot of talk about Snapz Pro and a couple of other key players. But the early link to IShowU from the folks at ShinyWhiteBox was everything I wanted and it only costs $20.
No, it doesn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles that Snapz Pro has, like creating trails or any other visual effects. The biggest feature it has though is being able to encode directly into a native DV format. This allows to be able to inter-cut captured clips inside of Final Cut Pro without anymore encoding beyond the initial recording.
The interface is really simple and highly customizable, without any of the annoying over sized buttons and or hidden complex options that plague a lot of software for the mac. So if you’re looking for a cheap alternative to SnapzPro look no further then IShowU, display capturing pure and simple.
I showed up late to work today, and then I had to let a certain someone back into their home so by the time I started working it was already 2:00 in the afternoon. I spent a large portion of the day fighting with a translation which still has yet to be subtitled because I was entirely too easily distracted by the million other things we need to do.
We got around to recording the second N3 show sometime around 11. I think they’re coming together quite well, we’ll put together an intro over the weekend and it should work out fairly well. I got it edited and online for a few folks to check out (sorry, you’re probably not one of them) and I was still wide awake, so I cleaned up the office. And now here I am, a little after 6 in the morning Saturday, informing you, the good people at SWN.TV about it all.
Lets hope I’m able to function by noon tomorrow.
-Steve
Yesterday we started recording the commentary tracks for the N3 show. They’re going well but there’s plenty of work left to do!
Small World News is lumbering to life, we’re still a little too busy over here to document things properly. But enjoy this shot from the first night in the new digs.
I finished the basic design of the AiB DVD jackets this week, did some tests at Kinkos, a couple of kinks to work out but they look pretty good.
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