NEW PROJECTS
Good Works Projects
Good Works Projects is the community service extension of Independent Good currently under formation. In support of the GoodPhone project (detailed below) and other community service projects being evaluated, Good Works Projects is actively seeking a mission-aligned 501c3 partner to act as its fiscal sponsor to enable Good Works Projects’ to work as a nonprofit for the sole benefit of the common good.
GoodPhone
GoodPhone is a public-service project that provides free high-speed WiFi and VoIP phone service. For communities in need, the GoodPhone digital communications hubs serve as a lifeline for individuals forging their path from digital surviving toward digital thriving. For all communities, GoodPhone provides a publicly accessible platform to ensure all individuals have the opportunity to connect to the people and the digital resources they need.
M3
Inspired by Tom Bilyeu’s Impact Theory, Tim Ferris’ Tribe of Mentors, and Art21, the M3 project combines a blend of live interviews and text-only questionnaire-style interview questions. Both the framework (“how-to”) and content from this project will be released publicly with the goal of inspiring others to do the same to enable more inspirational stories to connect.
This Designed Life
This Designed Life takes inspiration from the M3 project above, Lifebook, and the countless vignettes about people’s lives on YouTube and other platforms. The goal of this project is to help individuals come to terms with the life they want by seeing real life versions of the “rich” life of others —the “rich” life here being defined by experiences and emotions. Content will be produced as blend of video, image, sound, and text and published across web, social media, and print platforms.
Edition Unlimited
Edition Unlimited is a production-orientated project focused on creating high-quality replica prints of original artworks. This project is the outcome of prior research and, once the current beta phase is complete, will spin off as a service to support galleries and cultural institutions.
Print works.
Print works. is a pro bono project focused on building the brand equity of print and, by extension, print services and technology. This comes, in part, from my previous career in higher education as I witnessed technology-focused areas of study (e.g. print, photography, etc.) diminish in value over time. The intent of this project is to help illuminate the value of print in its current context.
ON-GOING PROJECTS
Make History More
History: noun, plural histories. 1. the branch of knowledge dealing with past events. a continuous, systematic narrative of past events as relating to a particular people, country, period, person, etc.As soon as it happens, it’s history. When tethered together in meaningful ways, it is the story of our lives.
The perpetuation and accuracy of the stories individuals, families, and communities relies on the data available at any one time. These stories have long relied on the oral tradition, writings, keepsakes, photographs, home movies, government and church records, and other means to move forward. More recently, Instagram, Twitter, StoryCorps and other services have augmented each story. The problem is that these methods and systems are disparate, each necessarily incomplete and with limited or no ability to connect to other systems.
The Make History More project seeks to address this by radically improving the simplicity and scalability of how we capture, catalog, and ultimately connect records by:
developing and deploying high-tech and highly scalable metadata strategies through methods that are near-effortless for the end user to employ
using schools, libraries, and local history museums as community hubs to help digitize and store data
providing a network for sharing that allows users to manage rights and access to any asset
The success of this project relies on exponential processing of data to enable and grow connectivity between data points over time. This is intended to be a social network of content, connecting micro-components of stories to create new understandings and validate existing ones.
The impact would profoundly increase our understanding of our communities and the many contexts in which communities and individuals connect. This would be of benefit to all humanity by providing for richer connectivity, deeper understanding, and authenticated data.
Authenticated Edition Printing
Through a blend of color management, security printing, printed electronics, and database integration, this on-going research seeks to provide a platform for authenticated reproductions. The research for this project began as part of the course development for the Limited Edition Print course at RIT but is steadily evolving as more artists and more testing push the limits of these edition prints.
Ballot Un-boxed
Voting is central to our democracy but the process for voting is, in many respects, both unnecessarily complicated and prone to potential user error. If you consider your own experience as a voter, you have likely used vastly different technologies and interfaces over years and may have found yourself confused for a moment as you navigated to determine how to cast the vote that expressed your intention. In short, while “getting the vote out” is all important, insuring an accurate record of the voter’s intentions is simply assumed. Anecdotal evidence challenges that assumption.
This project looks to recast the balloting process by making its interface more familiar to other interfaces common in online commerce, ATM transactions and the like. The core technologies to enable this will be open-source, relying on protocols like HTML to insure information is presented as intended and can be readily adapted to present on multiple platforms (no special hardware required). For the actual casting of the vote, the transactional model built for BitCoin provides a well-tested and very appropriate baseline to insure a fast, secure and anonymous transaction. Voter fraud and ballot box stuffing will be addressed via a one-use token that provides a valid randomized private key to the user to cast their vote.
The goal of this project is to simplify the voter experience to insure that voters of all backgrounds and abilities can cast a complete and valid ballot that expresses their intentions accurately without the need for specialized technology, special instructions, or complicated processes.
Progress to date: Conceptual prototypes for all aspects of the balloting process have been outlined to determine the most appropriate models to meet all specifications outlined. The prior work of the multiple advisors to the project has been critical to vetting out the results of early brainstorming to distill down to the open-source and highly sustainable technology model currently being proposed.
Related research and prior work:
graphic and interface design and implementation
the development and testing of touch-screen interfaces
extensive work with determining user-preferences
user preference analysis based on eye-tracking
the development of a mobile payment system integrated with BitCoin
the development of a random-generated machine-readable token used for game validation
extensive development in HTML, CSS, and related technologies
preliminary work in multi-lingual publishing via EPUB 3.0 (HTML)
publishing with affordances for accessibility via DAISY protocol for visually impaired
PRE-GOOD WORK (LEADING TO THIS GOOD):
OPEN PUBLISHING LAB at RIT
OVERVIEW
Housed within the RIT School of Media Sciences, the Open Publishing Lab was a cross-disciplinary center researching new methods of content creation and developing innovative, open-source applications for publishing across various medias. Guided by faculty and powered by undergraduate overachievers, the OPL has produced several award winning projects since its inception in 2007.
RIT BookBag
Sponsored by the RIT Office of the Provost, BookBag is an RIT-aware resource discovery tool to aggregate course assets, selected library resources and other types of content. The Book·Bag framework enables faculty and students to integrate research, content distribution and classroom interaction.
The Book·Bag framework is designed to work with the user. Faculty can search for new print or digital material on the web as they normally do and, with the addition of the Book·Bag tool, populate their syllabus, include required or supplemental material and include textbooks, eBooks, blogs, RSS, PDF, articles and other resources.
Students can use the tool to make contributions of their own but, for them, the tool's primary benefit may be its ability to help them locate required material listed in the syllabus or assigned by their instructor. Book·Bag makes it easy to access, download or purchase listed material. Book·Bag is optimized to help students discover lower cost options including library resources.
Book·Bag uses a simplified search interface to share readings for specific courses and is accessible via smart phone, e-book reader, laptop, or desktop. Book·Bag provides an integrated approach, leveraging diverse resources assets in a unified way
RIT Research Network
Leveraging RIT BookBag’s ability to share content linked to the framework, the Research Network enables users to discover other users who have common interests. Something akin to a Pinterest for research and education, RIT BookBag enables organizational self-discovery.
The Research Network also captured top honors at Campus Technology’s annual conference. Details here: http://www.rit.edu/news/story.php?id=50177&source=enewsletter
Page2Pub
Sponsored by HP labs, Page2Pub was developed as a browser plug-in to select webpage content as they browse and covert content to an EPUB format for compilation, editing, and republishing or export to PDF for sharing and archiving.
Technologies used in this project included XUL, JavaScript, XPCOM, XML, DHTML, CSS1 and 2, and DOM levels 1 and 2. The prototype was built using Adobe Flex Builder, Adobe AIR, and Java. The production version was released as 100% open-source.
Consensus Post
During the 2008 election cycle, volume of bias “news” stories promoted research into how news stories contributed by professionals and citizen journalists alike could be authenticated to determine the likelihood of bias and fact from opinion. During 2009, a collaboration with the RIT linguistics faculty resulted in a Python-based script to analyze story text. Preliminary tests proved the linguistic analysis of the software successfully detected bias from the sample set analyzed, providing a platform for future research in determining the “truthiness” factor of published content.
meetü
Initially developed for annual ImagineRIT festival, meetü is a Drupal-based platform for running games that encourage people to connect with one another, either at an event or as part of an organization’s ongoing effort to get to know itself.
Game Materials. Players receive gameplay materials, and printed on each of the stickers included is a QR code with the same unique identifier on each, which will be connected to the user when they register after the event.
Stickers/Game Card. Like gold stars, QR codes denote the successful completion of meetü missions. One of the player’s own QR codes is placed in the upper, left-hand corner of their game card, identifying it as theirs. The other QR codes to go on the game card are divided between the two types of missions. Codes received from booths contain a unique identifier, just like that of the individual.
Missions. Game materials in hand, players may begin completing either of the two types of missions intended to get users socially involved in the event.
Person-to-Person. These missions are intended to foster social interaction and networking with new people. The exchange of stickers upon interaction verifies completion of a mission as well as provides players a link to oneanother once the event has ended.
Person-to-Booth. Players are directed towards specific booths at a event, allowing them to be actively engaged in both meetü and the event simultaneously.
Scanning. When the game-cards are scanned, the user’s unique code is associated with the mission stickers on their card, and these pieces of information are compared against a database of its associated content.
Visualization on the Web. These connections can then be compiled and published to the web so that players can view the connections and “achievements” they personally made during the game.
Drop2Print
Funded by the Sloan Print Industry Center, Drop2Print was developedto provide an easy desktop application to allow print customers to input their print specifications, allowing them to:
See which print providers in a specific location are able to meet the technical specifications of their print job.
Upload their files to the print provider with their print specifications (“job ticket”) conveniently through a universal workflow.
Allow them to save these “job ticket” specifications with their PDF for production andfuture reference .
Enable users to always have real-time updates on the production capabilities of print service providers.
Allow print service providers an easy way to freely participate in the Drop2Print program to have their print provider included in search results.
The Drop2Print project was successfully beta tested with sample job tickets run against a database of technical capabilities for a group of print service providers (PSPs). The project was adapted for mobile, enabling users to select PSPs and send their print-ready PDF file directly from their desktop or mobile device.