Motivate Me!

It's pretty tough to get people motivated enough to actually do something these days.

We are dealing with increasingly savvy audiences, with more options, and less time to commit significant effort, to actively contribute to good causes.

Good online/offline campaigns rely on strong organizing, clear message, and recognizable outcomes. In addition, a successful campaign needs an inspirational way to motivate people to participate and engage. So how do we begin this process?

We know that community generated activity builds stronger bonds with a brand or campaign - having a hand in the creation of something makes people more likely to invest in its ongoing success. A community of actively engaged individuals are also much more likely to participate in collaborative myth creation, spread your message by word of mouth, and act as ambassadors, or brand evangelists.

How do we get peoples attention and motivate them to actively do something to participate in a good cause?

The following is a handful of ways commonly used to motivate us to engage with campaigns:

Boo! Arrgh! Use fear to scare people into action
Fear is often used to motivate engagement - particularly around issues of safety, health and your responsibilities to your loved ones.

Nice Booty Reward and incentivize through prizes or material gain
Pay to engage - prizes don't necessarily have to be cash value - they can be things that your target audience will value.

Game On Encourage competition
Engage that latent competitive drive: award points, challenge people to compete for a high score. Chore Wars is a great example of using a points system to get people more engaged in doing unappealing household chores. (I have long envisioned a challenge that pits homes/dorms/companies monitoring their energy consumption against each other in a game of conservation. Anyone want to build it with me??)

Stroke that Ego Spotlight talent and reward effort with praise and profile
We all like to get praised. And increasingly, online recognition can be turned into power and opportunity. If members of your community are participating for recognition, make sure there are good opportunities for them to build profile and portfolio.

Fun is Good(!) Make it more fun to do good stuff
Why not helping people feel good about doing good. It is important to be respectful of sensitive issues, but it is also important to let people enjoy themselves.

A great example of fun at work is RockCorps - a day of service working for a good cause, performed with friends, that earns you a concert ticket to an exclusive show. This is a winning model for engagement - By giving young people a way to feel like they are doing a good deed by hanging out with friends, and get rewarded for a day of service. The new initiative from Disney - Give Day Get a Disney Day - follows a similar model.

Power Hungry Offer opportunities to lead and organize
A recent McKinsey Quarterly survey has found that as companies tighten their belts and reduce fiscal rewards, employees can be motivated, sometime more effectively, by offering greater leadership opportunities, praise and direct attention. In online and offline organizing, the opportunity to lead a house party, or run a local event can be a great motivator.

We're all Dumb and Lazy Make the default option the best one
Make the lazy option the best option. Nudge highlights the little things we can do to change peoples behavior for the better. Instead of asking people to decide to opt IN, make your preferred option a decision to opt OUT and watch how many more people commit.

In Sympathy Put your audience in the shoes of those in need
Build empathy with your audience, tell emotional stories that people can relate to.

The Velvet Rope Get a glimpse behind the curtain
Nothing builds demand like limited supply. Exclusivity, VIP, invite only. Does anyone still need a Google Wave invitation?

Edutainment Teach through storytelling
Participant Media is a production company that makes great movies. Most people know them for their multi award winning films like the Soloist or the Kite Runner. Less people are aware of the huge social undertakings that go on behind the scenes of every film. Each one of their films becomes a vehicle to educate and engage the broader cinema going public in a range of issues explored through their stories. Eg. The Soloist launched a mental healthcampaign. By using popular cinema to tell well crafted and engaging stories, they are able to educate a broader audience of engaged individuals.

We're all in This Together Feel part of something bigger than yourself
Provide ways for people to collaborate and own a little piece of a bigger whole. Initiatives like seti or carrot mob rely on people working together to create something as a community. When there is a shared sense of ownership and responsibility for success - be it a community like The High Line, open source software, or a collaborative story - we rely on each others singular strengths to support the cohesion of the whole.

Good campaigning, advertising and engagement will use a combination of these techniques to entice, incentivize and engage people to participate.

Obviously, the core of a good social media campaign is based in a deep understanding and affinity with the issues at hand, the message, and the action required. Knowing the issue, the message, and the actionable ask will determine the most appropriate way to engage an audience to participate.

What other techniques are used to engage people in issues?
What are some other good examples of campaigns that use a combination of these techniques?

Originally published on EchoDitto.com on December 03 2009

Entertainment & Engagement Part 2: Choose your own adventures

Imagine a story, told in 6 different languages , from a myriad perspectives, that you personally have a hand in shaping and creating. Imagine collaborating with hundreds of people in countries all over the world to decipher a codex that ultimately reveals the location of lost artifacts physically located in cities around the world. Imagine building a network of explorers to visit these sites to unearth these objects. Imagine discovering the rules to a lost sport. Imagine teams of people all over the world learning these rules and training for months, participating in time trails and ultimately competing simultaneously around the world in a new Olympic sport.

Imagine following all this on blogs, youtube, twitter, facebook. Imagine communicating with the main characters – writing them emails, sending them video, and having them respond, having your contribution to the puzzle recognized and valued by your peers and becoming an active member of this community of adventurers and new athletes.

P.S. This is the future of our entertainment. And the future is here.

The scenario above describes some of the activities performed by the community that participated in 2008’s The Lost Ring. The Lost Ring was a trans-media production or Alternate Reality Game (ARG) jointly sponsored by McDonalds and the 2008 Olympics.

In a few short years we have amassed the skills and hardware to become an active audience of trans-media producers. We have been trained to vote for the outcome of reality TV shows, are enabled by an array of personal media production and editing equipment, and have enough everyday online interaction to play over a variety of platforms. As a result, we now have the ability and desire to fully participate in our entertainment and shape its outcome through our own personal contributions

Events like The Lost Ring encourage participants to become active agents in the outcomes of their entertainment. Participants become deeply engaged with the story, and empowered to go out and explore, create, and evangelize.

To date, many of these trans-media productions have been created with clear civic motivations. One of the best known “future modeling” ARG’s is World Without Oil (WWO). It was created in 2007 by Ken Ekland with Jane McGonnigal (also creator of The Lost Ring). WWO challenged participants to augment their own lives in response to a fictional oil crisis and document the process. Part game, part user created survival manual, WWO has become the benchmark for community building using interactive storytelling. A layered mash-up of technology and DIY, the community produced an array of blogged, video and photographic content to personally engage with an entertaining fiction, and collaboratively brainstorm solutions to a very real crisis.

Working to build and engage active and participatory communities in important civic issues, I believe there is much to be learnt from and shared with trans-media entertainment.

Both require agile and responsive organizers with a clear vision and strategy and great skill for facilitation and direction. Both require building relationships of trust and responsibility, of fostering and encouraging curiosity, innovation, and creativity. Both require the sustenance of a public and collaborative narrative - audience and producer working together to build, sustain and extend a story that merges and overlaps with our everyday in a multitude of ways.

To keep citizens motivated to get and stay engaged in a civic society, we need to be ever cleverer, enthusiastic, entertaining and convincing. Gaming metric and collaborative storytelling taps into some basic part of us that is competitive and imaginative and childlike.

Audience created collaborative fiction builds an emotional connection with the audience that better facilitates action and mobilization. It allows us to build a more trusting community who, having co-authored the story, will allow themselves to be guided through it. As a new political consciousness takes shape in and around popular culture, and we master to the tools to write our own narrative, we will truly be choosing our own adventures.

Some other great trans-media productions:

WeTellStories is a fantastic 2007 project developed in collaboration with UK based sixtostart and Penguin Books. Working with up and coming Penguin authors, sixtostart developed 6 stories into web based interactive adventures. Using existing and familiar platforms like blogs and Google maps, the collaborations have opened up new possibilities in storytelling platforms. My pick of the bunch is the exquisitely executed The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming - A murder mystery translated into a cross London chase over Googlemaps.

SixtoStart are currently producing an awesome new transmedia game to teach young people about privacy issues in social media:http://www.smokescreengame.com/ is getting rave reviews. Check it out.

Why So Serious: Multi-Award winning ARG Why So Serious was used to launch the Dark Night in 2008.

Personal Effects: Dark Arts A recent novel by JC Hutchins – Personal Effects: Dark Arts – combines the traditions of a paperback with the gameplay of an ARG - allowing the reader to enter the world of the story through interactive elements.

Yellow Arrow gives the personal storytelling element a 2.0 perspective. In their words: “ Yellow Arrow is a global public art project of local experiences. Combining stickers, mobile phones and an international community, Yellow Arrow transforms the urban landscape into a "deep map" that expresses the personal histories and hidden secrets that live within our everyday spaces”. Begun in New York in 2004 Yellow Arrow has grown to over 35 countries and 380 cities around the world.

Originally published at Echoditto.com on September 25 2009

Entertainment & Engagement Part 1: Reality TV

Has voting for reality TV, trained us to vote in reality?

Have reality TV shows like Big Brother or American Idol - which challenge the audience to vote to determine the outcome of their entertainment - trained a generation of Americans to get to the polls and become more engaged citizens? Are shows like Big Brother responsible for the highest American youth voter turnout since 1972?

* Youth Turnout Rate Rises to at Least 52% with 23 Million Voters Under 30
* 3.4 Million More Young People Vote than in 2004
* Young Voters Account for at Least 60% of Overall Increase
* 18% of All Voters Were Young

From CIRCLE – The Centre for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement

According to a 2001 survey of over 2000 Americans (aged 8 to 54): "The No. 1 reason people watch (reality TV) is the thrill of "guessing who will win or be eliminated from the show." That thrill is the reason cited by 69 percent of all reality TV watchers, and 84 percent of regular viewers, who make a point to watch. The second and third most common reasons viewers tune in are to "see people face challenging situations" and "imagining how I would perform in similar situations," stated by 63 percent and 42 percent of all viewers, respectively.

It is easy to see how these motivations for engaging with entertainment could be transferred to the political landscape.

Lets take last years election as example. With larger than life villains and heroes, a classical “sword from a stone” story arc, celebrity cameos, unlimited interactive trans-media, and MC’d nightly by Colbert, Stewart, and Fey, the election of Obama played out like a blockbuster series of American Political Idol.

Obama was able to build an engaging and relatable brand that people really cared about, his message of HOPE was able to become a generic vessel for peoples aspirations and he became a symbol for people apply their own beliefs to. Like many reality show contestants, he started out as just a regular guy, he let people imagine how they would perform in his situation.

We have now been exposed to about 10 years of reality TV. As a society we understand the format and what is expected of us as an audience. Audience responses demonstrate a sophisticated approach to what they are seeing that has been honed over long periods.

In a 2001 study of Big Brother fans, Jones writes: The fact that audiences apply a sliding scale of factuality to reality programs suggests one of the ways they have learned to live with this genre over the past decade. Audiences watch popular factual television with a critical eye, judging the degree of factuality in each reality format based on their experience of other types of factual programming. In this sense, viewers are evaluators of the reality genre, and of factual programming as a whole.

As savvy evaluators of our media, we are now versed to demand certain things from our entertainment. One of those things is the ability to participate in the outcome of events.

In 2005, the Super Girls phenomenon hit mainland China. Super Girls is a pop star making program modeled on the Idol franchise where contestants sing and are voted off by the audience. The final episode of the 2005 season was one of the most popular shows in Chinese broadcast history, drawing over 400 million viewers.

One of the main factors contributing to the show's popularity was that viewers are able to participate in the judging process by sending text messages with their mobile phones to vote for their favorite contestants. During the 2005 regional contest in Chengdu alone, 307,071 message votes were cast for the top three contestants…This was considered as one of the largest "democratic" voting exercises in mainland China.

Audience participation has been cited as the most crucial factor in its success. As winners were determined by cellphone short messaging votes... the show "blazed a trail for cultural democracy," said Zhu Dake, a renowned critic of cultural matters. "It's like a gigantic game that has swept so many people into a euphoria of voting and selecting, which is testament of a society opening up," Zhu argued… An even more noteworthy thing is that the Super Girls have stimulated the will to participate.

Politics as entertainment has the potential to both open doors to engagement and also trivialize important and serious issues. The key driver I see for encouraging a blend lies in the comment above – Stimulating the will to participate. If politics can act as entertainment, and the audience is taught to engage with their entertainment in a meaningful and critical manner, then people will learn the tools to increasingly engage in the debate, in the creation, and in the management of their society.

As we move towards increasingly interactive and pervasive entertainment, and audiences progressively demand the ability to influence and author the outcomes of events, it seems inevitable that we will learn to become more socially engaged in our communities.

This was originally published over on EchoDitto.com on September 21 2009.

Extreme Neighborliness

Local communities are organizing to become stronger together. Described by Allison Arieff as “Extreme Neighborliness” - a concept “so old-fashioned as to seem innovative” - this movement is gaining power as scalable local initiatives are applied to the social web.

Carrotmob.org from San Francisco, and WannaStartaCommune? from LA are leading the way in community organizing for local economic, social and environmental benefit.


So Easy
Carrotmob uses the power of the crowd to effect sustainable change through local shopping. By harnessing an action that people are doing anyway – grocery shopping - and organizes in a way that uses the power of the group to demand sustainable action. One customer, buying one carton of milk, may not be able to influence their local retailer, but 500 customers, buying 500 cartons of milk, have a combined buying power that would make any local store pay attention.

At no extra financial or logistical cost, customers are secure that their purchases are working for local sustainable good. Carrotmog explains it well: Carrotmob simply asks people to coordinate and plan the purchases they are already making. This model is not threatening, not expensive, not time-consuming, not uncomfortable, not “radical,” not confusing, and not negative. It’s the perfect level of involvement for most people.


How Organized Consumer Purchasing Can Change Business from carrotmob on Vimeo.

SoYouWannaStartaCommune? is providing tools for small groups of neighbors to organize the sharing of local resources to save money, time and energy. They provide a downloadable pdf http://www.wannastartacommune.com/store/cart.php?m=view guide that gives instructions for Getting Started, What's in a Commune, a Resource-sharing Guide, Potluck & Workshop Planning Tools, Simple Organizational Documents and Technology Tips to help you manage and grow your commune.



They too harness the assets available at a small community’s disposal when they work together – Linked back yards or disused land? Room for a vege patch. Limited car parking? Try car sharing. Combined energy usage? Solar or wind power becomes a viable option for a group of housing. Varied work schedules? Potential for shared child minding. These assets are already in the community. All it takes is to come together in an organized way to take advantage of them.

win + win = WIN
Carrotmob challenges businesses to compete for consumer loyalty. As a result, these stores get a ready made fan base willing to support them. Though they pledge a percentage of their profit to sustainable improvements, they increase their customer base and increase total sales. By implementing sustainable improvements to their stores, they will also reap the reward of long term cost savings from increased energy efficiency.

Carrotmob can put rewards in place that will make environmental responsibility the most profitable choice. Companies will do what we want, not because of negative pressure, or morality, or a boycott, or a petition…there are enough sticks out there. We need a big juicy carrot. They will do what we say because they won’t be able to resist the profits.

SoYouWannaStartaCommune? challenges neighbors to pool their talents, assets and expenses to find sustainable and communal solutions.

Scalable
Carrotmob have big plans. They are using the power of the local to effect small changes in family owned businesses. The power of their movement now is firmly rooted in a block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood engagement. With a little organization, they see potential to move up from local grocery stores, to big shiny corporations. As the consumer communities they create grow larger, the more power they wield.

SoYouWannaStartaCommune? needs to be based in smaller local groups. As a community grows, and the less personal contact you have with each other, the less likely you are to go out of your way to compromise or help someone out. Working in groups based around culdesacs or apartment blocks defines a community and connects them with a strong bond of locality. That said, the suburban commune concept is infinitely scalable as communities form block by block, apartment complex by apartment complex.



Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Using the power of the group requires an organizer. Someone who is willing to lead and schedule and mediate. As demonstrated by these two initiatives, there are an increasing number of people out there willing to teach you the tools to organize. To enable you to harness the power of your local groups and challenge communities to effect change. In the words of Carrotmob – to “do it with the carrot not the stick”.

(PS. thanks to Will for the heads up on Carrotmob. x)

Reality TV & the Will to Participate

Is Big Brother responsible for the highest USA voter turnout since 1972?

• Youth Turnout Rate Rises to at Least 52% with 23 Million Voters Under 30
• 3.4 Million More Young People Vote than in 2004
• Young Voters Account for at Least 60% of Overall Increase
• 18% of All Voters Were Young

From CIRCLE – The Centre for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement


Have reality TV shows like Big Brother or American Idol - which challenge the audience to vote to determine the outcome of their entertainment - trained a generation of Americans to get to the polls?

Has voting for reality TV, trained us to vote in reality?

I went to a Communications Forum at MIT last week that focused on: Popular Culture and the Political Imagination. The panel included Johanna Blakley, David Carr, and Stephen Duncombe, with Henry Jenkins as moderator. The conversation focused on the new political consciousness taking shape in and around popular culture and raised the concept of the election as entertainment.



With larger than life villains and heroes, a classical “sword from a stone” story arc, celebrity cameos, unlimited interactive multi-platform media, and MC’d nightly by Colbert, Stewart, and Fey, the recent election played out like a blockbuster series of American Political Idol.

According to a 2001 survey of over 2000 Americans (aged 8 to 54): "The No. 1 reason people watch (reality TV) is the thrill of "guessing who will win or be eliminated from the show." That thrill is the reason cited by 69 percent of all reality TV watchers, and 84 percent of regular viewers, who make a point to watch. The second and third most common reasons viewers tune in are to "see people face challenging situations" and "imagining how I would perform in similar situations," stated by 63 percent and 42 percent of all viewers, respectively."

It is easy to see how these motivations for engagement could be transferred to the recent election. As the panel discussed, Obama was able to build an engaging and relatable brand that people really cared about, his message of HOPE was able to become a generic vessel for peoples aspirations and he became a symbol for people apply their own beliefs to. Like many reality show contestants, he started out as just a regular guy, he let people imagine how they would perform in his situation.



We have now been exposed to about 10 years of reality TV. As a society we understand the format, the tricks and what is expected of us as an audience. Audience responses demonstrate a sophisticated approach to what they are seeing that has been honed over long periods:
"The fact that audiences apply a sliding scale of factuality to reality programs suggests one of the ways they have learned to live with this genre over the past decade. Audiences watch popular factual television with a critical eye, judging the degree of factuality in each reality format based on their experience of other types of factual programming. In this sense, viewers are evaluators of the reality genre, and of factual programming as a whole."

As savvy evaluators of our media, we are now versed to demand certain things from our entertainment. One of those things is the ability to participate in the outcome of events.

In 2005, the Super Girls phenomenon hit mainland China. Super Girls is a pop star making program modeled on American Idol where contestants sing and are voted off by the audience. The final episode of the 2005 season was one of the most popular shows in Chinese broadcast history, drawing over 400 million viewers.




"One of the main factors contributing to the show's popularity was that viewers are able to participate in the judging process by sending text messages with their mobile phones to vote for their favorite contestants. During the 2005 regional contest in Chengdu alone, 307,071 message votes were cast for the top three contestants, each vote costing 0.5 to 3 yuan. This was considered as one of the largest "democratic" voting exercises in mainland China."

Audience participation has been cited as the most crucial factor in its success. As winners were determined by cellphone short messaging votes... the show "blazed a trail for cultural democracy," said Zhu Dake, a renowned critic of cultural matters. "It's like a gigantic game that has swept so many people into a euphoria of voting and selecting, which is testament of a society opening up," Zhu argued.

A further comment: An even more noteworthy thing is that the Super Girls have stimulated the will to participate. The SMS voting seems to have introduced a new form for direct election. It is direct, it is convenient, it is fast and it works. It can simplify the voting process. It can be done in a few minutes' time. It seems to be just a technical problem to make it become the main means of voting.

Politics as entertainment has the potential to both open doors to engagement and also trivialize important and serious issues. The key driver I see for encouraging a blend lies in the comment above – Stimulating the will to participate. If politics is entertainment, and people are taught to engage with their entertainment in a meaningful and critical manner, then people will learn the tools to increasingly engage in the debate, in the creation, and in the management of their society.

As we move towards increasingly interactive and pervasive entertainment, and audiences progressively demand the ability to influence and author the outcomes of events, it seems inevitable that we will learn to become more socially engaged in our communities.


Note – I would love to find some more recent data to dis/prove this. Who can help?

Freeconomics

Before the economic collapse of the world as we knew it, there had been a little early freakshow interest and media coverage on the growing Freegan movement in the UK. Freegans are urban foragers who stalk the overflowing bins of supermarkets searching for tasty food just past its sell-by date.

Though they share some values, Freegans are not to be confused with Urban Foragers, who hunt through parks, gardens and roadsides for edible plants and berries to make a meal.


Sky Full of Bacon 07: Eat This City from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Once held up as radical examples of alternative lifestyles, they are now part of a growing movement of people seeking separation from the mainstream capitalist market economy. They join a growing group of people who are living a lifestyle based not on buy buy sell sell, but on barter and trade, on skill share, and on a currency of goodwill.

Called a Shareconomy, a Goodwill Economy, a Moneyless Economy, or Freeconomy, these people are forging a new way of living more communally or “off the grid”.

A Goodwill Economy can work in a number of ways. The simplest is through basic barter and exchange – I need a cake and I have a pair of shoes, you need some shoes and have a cake. We swap. We are happy. Hooray.

This is a long proven model that works in localized and engaged communities worldwide. In co-operatives and community farms food is often exchanged for physical labor. Between groups of friends clothing is pooled and exchanged to update wardrobes. What limits this as a more formal economic model is the direct relationship between the two parties – if our needs don’t align, then it doesn’t work.

As societies become larger and more complex, the model of barter and exchange limits expansion and growth. The introduction of a standard measurement or currency allows for greater scope for exchange of goods and services. Once we measured the worth of goods and services in gold weight – for example, a pair of shoes is worth so many grams in gold. Over time, this has evolved into our modern system of currency. Though modern paper money and coinage is, in itself, practically worthless, it is given value through the belief of that which is represents. So a five dollar bill is merely the idea of something given the value of five dollars.

What goodwill economists are experimenting with is changing the ideology of the currency. Instead of paying for a cake with dollars and cents, or trading it for a pair of shoes, the cake becomes worth a value of goodwill. This goodwill can be traded for other goods and services, or stored and accumulated for later use.

This still sounds like money right? Well it is, kind of. It performs the function of currency, but also has a collective effect of working to build social capital.

Robert Putnum, expert in social capital and author of Bowling Alone, writes about how more socially engaged communities perform acts of kindness and community action with a trusting belief that these gifts of goodwill will be returned at some undefined point in the future. Not valued in monetary terms, the act of giving time to community pursuits and taking part in communal activities are critical ways to sustain a more healthy and engaged community.

In a goodwill or share economy, these acts of kindness and generosity generate status for the individual, and contribute to a more efficient community. In a goodwill economy, wealth is redefined through active participation in your community, being rich means accumulating goodwill status through your engagement with others. These are communities defined by trust, participation status and personal experience.

Wikipedia works on the principles of a shareconomy rewarding the community as a whole for the input of individuals. Web based recommendation and rating models, as popularized by Amazon or Ebay, reward engaged users with higher status and build connection and trust among the community.

Goodwill economy websites have potential to combine similar status models with online banking hybrids to track personal progress. People are rewarded with greater opportunity the more they meaningfully participate, to create insular economies of highly engaged individuals on a broad and complex global scale.

Examples:

The hub for international Freeconomists is justfortheloveofit.org – you go to the site to give and get given – build up goodwill, engage with a global community of like minded individuals, and feel good about spending up big!



Couchsurfing.com is a site that uses community status to generate an economy of sleepovers and short stay accommodation. Couchsurfing founder Joe Edelman has recently launched his new venture Groundcrew.us, a mobile tool designed to mobilize crowds with individual missions and messages. Joe has aims of using Groundcrew to create a new goodwill economy of mobile experiences generated by a community of engaged individuals.



Swappler.com is a highly anticipated new site from the Portable Content crew that acts as

“an online fashion portal and brand that takes designers, stores and consumers online. As an entry level it allows style and eco-conscious people to upload their clothes and swap them with other people from around the world.”

Even the Freegans, early radical activists against over consumption and economic excess, are now touching a mainstream audience more broadly concerned with living a socially engaged and sustainable lifestyle.





Who would have thought that digging around in bins would be a precursor to a new age of social engagement and enlightenment!

PopUp

The craze for pop-ups has spawned temporary restaurants, stores, cinemas, landscapes, magazines and hotels.

A recent evolution in New Zealand saw YellowPages team with local businesses (all listed in YellowPages obviously!) to create the Yellow Treeehouse – a pop up restaurant located 10m up a tree.



All in all it seems to be both a terrific example of a branded popup, interesting design exercise, and good restaurant: Word of mouth buzz – check! Architecturally inventive – check! Decent food – check! Like Melbourne’s’ Greenhouse by Joost or Londons Flash by Bistroteque , it is the popular new kid on the temporary block.

However, as an interesting twist on the traditional popup, Yellow Treehouse also offered a popup job. A job to present the process of design, construction and running of the restaurant through video and daily blogging.

Tracy Collins was selected from a pool of applicants with experience in presenting, project management, restaurants and piano accordion and her job has been central to the message of the campaign. Tracy gives a very likable 2.0 face to the campaign, in a professionally structured and edited way.

I heard about this amazing project when my flatmate Matt spotted it in the Rodney Times. I’d set the goal of challenging myself this year and thought ‘why not?’. I auditioned, then got a call a couple of days later saying I was shortlisted. I turned up thinking there would be ten of us and there were only three. Wow. Two days later I got the job. Yay!

The timing was great. Just the other week I was sitting in an Indian restaurant thinking I really need more work before Christmas as money was a bit tight. Obviously someone is smiling on me. Otherwise I’d be playing my accordion which I do professionally (honestly) which is great but has its ups and downs. I also do a bit of presenting and have trained in Film and TV make up. This project couldn’t have come at a better time but is definitely going to be a challenge. Not only do I have to find all of the people we need on Yellow but once the restaurant is built, I’ll be helping run it. Brilliant eh?

In another pop-up job opportunity, The Queensland Tourism Board has recently launched The Best Job In The World Campaign.

They are calling for applicants for a job to live on Hamilton Island (above the Great Barrier Reef) for six months. The job carries a salary package of AUD$150,000 for a six-month contract.



They are looking for someone:

with an adventurous attitude, passion for the outdoors and good communication skills. A broad range of experience is considered and Tourism Queensland will be selecting applicants based on: - Enthusiasm for the role, Entertainment value (personality and creativity), Presentation skills (being media-friendly), At least one year's relevant experience.

If you think you fit the role there is still 14 days before application close.

You will however be facing competition like Osama Bin Laden – The Guardian reports - The people at Queensland's department of tourism were still a little taken aback when the world's most wanted man sent in a video explaining why he was the perfect candidate to act as caretaker of Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef.
In the 30-second clip, which is available on YouTube, a prankster with a questionable sense of humor has overdubbed footage of Osama Bin Laden and used subtitles to make his case for the job. "I enjoy the outdoors and sandy areas," the subtitles read. "I've got experience with videos, delegating tasks and experience with large scale event co-ordination."

Osama has been showing up in other strange places recently – most notably joining Idi Amin in a (risky/questionable?) campaign for the Samsung i450 Music Phone.



The association of Osama with these campaigns – both unexpected and intentional – shows an interesting shift in his pop mythology as he continues to elude capture for his crimes. Like the Branson/Guevara pairing, its sure to be controversial.

Now it will be interesting to see who and what pops up next!

Call to Action

You have the power to make a difference. Yes You.

All around the world, individuals and organizations are making it easier for you to get engaged and get active in making the world a better place.

A great big call to action has gone out to the world - In fashion, music, education, gardening, public space, art, politics etc. The concept of user generated experience (or just getting out and doing stuff), of volunteering time, energy and innovation has re-infiltrated our everyday lives and people are getting together online and on the ground to make incremental changes to their communities in fun and adventurous ways.

Now is the time to take matters into your own hands. Are you ready to get involved?


The Call To Action: Crime Fighting - Mexico City
Mexico called, and Super Barrio answered. Maybe a little to much action for most, Super Barrio is the real life masked crime fighting hero of Mexico City’s working class.

He can be seen in the 2007 feature documentary film Super Amigos where he is joined by companions Super Gay, Super Ecologista, Super Animal and Fray Tormenta as they fight against evil slumlords, corrupt politicians, homophobia, pollution, animal rights abusers, and poverty.

Wearing the traditional Lucha mask of Mexican wrestlers, the heroes patrol the streets of Mexico city fighting injustice. The masks are magical devices that represent the community. With them, the superheroes can be everyone and no one at the same time. The masks are symbols of collective hope.



How You Get Involved: Go see the film, Buy a Tshirt - $8 from every sale goes to help their causes, get inspired into action by their theme songs, or don a lucha mask of your own and go bust some injustice! Kapowee!


The Call To Action: Art - Montreal
Actions: What You Can Do With the City presents 99 actions that instigate positive change in contemporary cities around the world. Held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture between November 2008 to April 2009.

The CCA is challenging citizens to be part of the movement and take actions big or small to change the everyday life of their cities. Whether old or new, submit your photos or videos and share the story. All entries will be displayed on the website and reviewed by the Actions team. Only a handful might make it to the CCA’s Shaughnessy House.

An example of a submission is Michael Rakowitz's paraSITE project using ventilation shafts to create inflatable temporary shelters for the homeless.



How You Get Involved: Submit an entry. Submit a Challenge.


The Call to Action: Fashion – New Orleans
Prom Dresses For New Orleans has a simple goal – help the young ladies who lost everything in Katrina get to the prom.
Many of the residents of New Orleans lost everything... Help make prom possible for the young ladies in Louisiana who no longer have a dress to wear to prom. Share your past prom and party dresses, so that others can experience the joy these dresses brought to you. They still need our help! Your generosity is greatly appreciated!



How You Get Involved: Give another girl the chance to regret wearing puffed sleeves and pink satin. Send your worn prom and party dresses to a new home and another night of self conscious dancing.


Call to Action: Politics – Australia
Get Up! is an independent Australian political action group aiming to build a progressive Australia.

GetUp! brings together like-minded people who want to bring participation back into our democracy. GetUp.org.au is providing Australians with the tools to fight back, and take innovative and effective action on important issues facing our country. GetUp members are building a ground-up movement of real people who are putting the participation back into our democracy.

GetUp.org.au members take action. By signing up for updates, GetUp.org.au members receive emails alerting them to new campaigns and providing ways of affecting positive change. Whether it is sending an email to a member of parliament, engaging with the media, attending an event or helping to get a television ad on the air, GetUp members are always only ever asked to take targeted, coordinated and strategic action.



How you get involved: sign up, participate in campaigns.


Call To Action: Education - USA
Once Upon A School is the result of Dave Eggers’ 2008 TED Prive Wish. It is a collaborative online initiative developed to inspire and collect the stories of private citizens engaged in their local public schools.




How you get involved: Tell stories, Get involved in your local school.


Call to Action: Music – USA & UK... more to come
I should just come out and say that I love Rock Corps. It’s a terrific balance of social action, good solid community work, high profile engagement and damn good fun.



RockCorps harnesses the power of music to inspire volunteering. We produce concerts for which the only way in is to volunteer 4 hours at a project we organize with non-profit partners. You can't win a ticket; you can't buy a ticket; you have to earn a ticket to a concert that becomes a celebration of giving back.

In 2005, we launched a national movement and since that time, more than 30,000 young people have been directly involved in one of our projects. Millions more have heard the message that "Volunteering is Cool".

Rock Corps is partnered with BoostMobile in the USA and with OrangeMobile in the UK. Stay tuned – I’ve heard rumors of new collaborations coming in China and Australia in the next year.



How you get involved: Sign up with friends, work for 4 hours, party.


Call to Action: Leisure – San Francisco/Global
One of the earliest action games, SFZero is a Collaborative Production Game. Players build characters by completing tasks for their groups and increasing their Score. The goals of play include meeting new people, exploring the city, and participating in non-consumer leisure activities.




How you get involved: Sign up, join a team and get started.


Call to Action: Gardening – London and beyond...
Guerilla gardening is an emerging form of public space reclamation using plants in illicit cultivations on publicly owned land. Lead by Richard Reynolds, author of Guerilla Gardening – A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries, this growing global movement encourages you to get out a trowel and plant a few seeds in any space that needs a little herbaceous helping hand.




How you get involved: Check out Guirilla Gardening tips at any one of the growing number of specialist blogs, make a seedbomb for some planting pandemonium, grab a trowel and some seedlings and set out on a landscaping mission.


Call to Action: Volunteer – Global
A few years ago I was talking to a friend about how she wanted to volunteer to help out some sort of nonprofit organization. She didn’t know what she wanted to get involved in, but knew that as a financial analyst she had some critical skills to offer. However, as a busy professional she had no way to she could find no way to find out who needed her services. We decided that there needed to be some kind of dating agency for volunteers and organizations that could match skills, locations, availability etc. Unsurprisingly, someone else had the same ideas and created the extremely excellent Volunteer Match.
It does what it says on the tin. It matches volunteers to organizations.

How you get involved: Check out http://www.volunteermatch.org/ and find an opportunity that’s right for you.

Up Up and Away!

Years ago a friend gave me a hot tip – When traveling, always carry some party balloons.

This seemed like rather odd advice at the time, but has since proved invaluable. On my travels I have used balloons as emergency water bottles, rubber bands and pillows, but have found that they are most valuable as a way of engaging with people.

As a joyful gift to a begging child, as a welcome diversion for a whole carriage of people playing “keepy uppy” on a crowded train, as a distraction for a crying baby silenced by a magic ball of color floating through the air, as a make-do for a spontaneous game of beach vollyball.

Balloons embody a sense of wonder and magic that doesn’t diminish with age, wealth or geography, and enable people to come together in a somehow neutral way to share in a fun and magical experience.

The magic of balloons was harnessed for a large collaborative performance piece in Singapore and later for London by Haque Design and Research.

The Burble is held down to the ground by the combined weight of the crowds holding on to the handle bar. They may position it as they like. They may curve in on themselves, or pull it in a straight line - the form is a combination of the crowd's desires and the impact of wind currents varying throughout the height of the Burble.

As people on the ground shake and pump the handle bars of the Burble, they see their movements echoed as colours through the entire system. Part installation, part performance, the Burble enables people to contribute at an urban scale to a structure that occupies their city, albeit for only one night.

Burble London from haque d+r on Vimeo.

The Atom Performance from Electric Moons, Christopher Bauder and Robert Henke builds on the concept of Baloon Ballet and creates a moody performance using gas balloons, lights and sound.

“A room is filled with deep, evolving noises from a four-channel sound system. An eight-by-eight array of white, self-illuminated spheres floats in space like the atoms of a complex molecule.”

Like this somewhat sinister performance, clearly balloons aren’t always benign - as demonstrated by the recent Superbowl Coke commercial - these guys clearly have their own agendas.

They’re not really balloons, but the menagerie of inflatable sculptures from Joshua Allen Harris, seen recently in the streets and subways of New York, share similar characteristics. Created mostly from garbage bags, his works are tethered to vents and fans, and lie dormant until the shifting air currents of the city breath life into them - then they come alive with movement and action as they draw attention to the hidden systems of the city.

A similarly elegant and organic sculpture debuted recently at the R/C airship regatta in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Air Art from flip on Vimeo.

FinFish seems like it might be an early version of a new version air ship as envisioned in Manned Cloud by Jean-Marie Massaud (as seen in Dezeen) - Perhaps showing greater opportunity to not just travel the world with balloons in the future, but in them.

Inauguration Special

The 5 things I'll remember most from the 2008 election.

1. Yes We Can Engage

A report by the PEW Internet & American Life Project on the Internet and the 2008 Election states that: a record-breaking 46% of Americans have used the internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.

It goes on to say: 35% of Americans say they have watched online political videos, 10% say they have used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved, 6% of Americans have made political contributions online, 39% of online Americans have used the internet to access "unfiltered" campaign materials, which includes video of candidate debates, speeches and announcements, as well as position papers and speech transcripts.

A deep and pervasive message of the Obama campaign lay in rebuilding peoples trust in a fair and evenhanded government. To do this they reached out through a variety of channels to engage people in the campaign, the issues, and the race to the white house.

Small donation funding through Changedotgov, online video messaging, mobile text messaging all played a role in campaign engagement strategies. Youtube dominated every aspect of the presidential campaign. It was used heavily by both campaigns, then by the transition government, and looks set to continue to be the preferred means of communication in the new administration.

Outside of the political arena, the election still dominated many online campaigns, with individuals and corporations soliciting for user generated content and comment around increasingly tenuous links to their products and the political landscape. Debates, formal consultation, music, and virals engaged millions, made multiple 15minute stars, and launched a new president with intimate knowledge about his fellow Americans.

Obama Girl kicked things off by telling B and us, just how much she is crushing on Obama.



And the Ron Clarke Kids just about wrapped things up by explaining how we can vote however we like.



Meghan McCain reached out to millions of younger voters with McCainBlogette.com sharing her musings on pop culture and the political trail.



Even Pepsi got in on the act with its Refresh Everything campaign – Dear Mr president...



As the PEW study confirms, despite the growth in the number of people who are politically engaged online, internet users express some ambivalence about the role of the internet in the campaign. On one hand, 28% of wired Americans say that the internet makes them feel more personally connected to the campaign, and 22% say that they would not be as involved in the campaign if not for the internet. At the same time, however, even larger numbers feel that the internet magnifies the most extreme viewpoints and is a source of misinformation for many voters.

It also provides a limitless record of all the gaffs and blunders made by the candidates during endless months of 24 hour news cycles. The following - McCain forgets - is possibly the most painfully awkward moment of the election.



2. Michelle Obama

Michelle Obama brings a little Abbey Bartlett sizzle, a little Onassis style and whole lot serious education and career credentials to the White House. She is a hugely inspiring woman, as a successful lawyer, public servant and nonprofit exec, a caring mother and supportive wife. On the campaign trail she has been a moving orator and stimulating advocate. Democratic Convention Speech:




3. I’ll See You in the Debates Bitches!



When the McCain team started trash talking with the Obama Celebrity Ad they probably didn’t count on the unlikely and bizarrely coherent response from the Hilton camp(aign?).


(NB. Luckily, lest we be confused by her coherence on energy policy and apparent dry wit, Hilton decided that one short inspired moment if irony could be spun into a hugely annoying and inane musical parody/grab for attention and balance was restored to the world.)


In other unexpected celebrity partnerships, Mike Huckabee teamed up with Chuck Norris to tell America how its gonna be.



and Will.I.Am teamed up with a whole lot of musicians to tell us that Yes We Can.



4. Palin



She came out of nowhere, she polarized opinion, she shocked, she horrified. She provided some of the most engaging and terrible sound bites of the election. She shattered the remainder of John McCains already tarnished reputation. She was “one step from stealing” from the campaign. She can kill and skin a moose. She inspired Tina Fey to new heights of comedic genius. She could have been president. There is little doubt that she’ll be back.

Katie Connolly, the McCain campaign Newsweek embedded reporter on Palins spending spree:



Matt “like a bad Disney movie” Damon says it best:



5. Daily News