Ingenuity for the other 361 days of the year

One of my primary disappointments with the Ingenuity Festival was that their was no organized way of discussing it. (Was there?) Art is more meaningful when we have an opportunity to see it from someone else's perspective. There needs to be a way for Ingenuity spectators to congregate and discuss the projects on display and more generally the topics of community, of art and of technology.

It would be relatively easy to create an ad hoc online community discussion.

I'm suggesting this de-centralized approach because it suits the way that I participate on the internet and I hope that it will be convenient for you, too. It's easy because it's just an extension of what I already do. I already store articles that I've read on furl. I already bookmark sites that I visit on del.icio.us. I already post thoughts and ideas on my blog. Now when one of these activities is related to the Ingenuity Festival I can use a tag to associate the two and anyone can easily track and read everything. With coordinated tagging, you can have all of your thoughts, links and pictures automatically aggregated into the same pool and just as readily available to anyone who's interested. And just because I use blogspot, del.icio.us, furl and flickr doesn't mean that you can't participate with some other software. Let me know and we'll figure out how to integrate it.

I'll start by discussing some places where you might create your Ingenuity content and then I'll mention a couple easy ways to keep track of it - all of everyone's various sources in one place.

Cleveland bloggers should start tagging blog posts that discuss Ingenuity. Adding this snippet to your posts:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ingenuitycleveland" rel="tag">ingenuityfestival</a>
will collect all blog posts that discuss the festival at this url:
http://technorati.com/tag/ingenuitycleveland
More info about technorati tags.
and you can subscribe to it here:
http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/ingenuitycleveland

If I see a project's web site that might be an inspiration for Ingeneers then I tag it with "ingenuitycleveland" on del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/stu_spivack/ingenuitycleveland

If others tag likewise then the community's collection of links will be here:
http://del.icio.us/tag/ingenuitycleveland
And you can subscribe to it here:
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/ingenuitycleveland

I've also started an archive of documents that I think may provide some perspective on the Ingenuity Festival. These come in two distinct categories: 1)Blog posts that are explicitly related to the Cleveland Ingenuity Festival. (Incidentally, I hope the organizers know that the general reception for the festival was far less enthusiastic than the reviews in the local press.) 2)Articles about projects that may be inspirational.

My archive is here:
http://www.furl.net/members/sspivack?category=452245

If you join furl and add your documents to the topic "ingenuitycleveland" all our saved items will be collected here:
http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=ingenuitycleveland
And you can subscribe to it here:
http://www.furl.net/members/rss.xml?topic=ingenuitycleveland

If you took pictures at Ingenuity Festival 2005 hopefully you've already added them to the Ingenuity Cleveland pool on flickr. In any case, please consider tagging them with "ingenuitycleveland".
Subsription link:
http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=ingenuitycleveland&format=rss_200

Cyberspace is really convenient but the real world is fun. I know that there are Cleveland blogger meetups. This group would be a natural base for an Ingenuity meetup group. Next year we could have a meetup lunch or dinner on each day of festival. We could meet in one large or several small groups and share our insights into the meaning and significance of that days events. And all over a steaming bowl of noodle soup. I posted one very premature event announcement here just for the purpose of demonstration:http://upcoming.org/tag/ingenuitycleveland/

And now, as promised, an easy way to keep track of everything. I've created one blob rss feed of all these sources. Subscribe by clicking here:. If you're not into RSS yet, you can just bookmark that page and view the feed there.

This should be a good start to building a community that thinks about the Ingenuity Festival year-round. This de-centralized discussion might be augmented with a more traditional online community: a Yahoo! or Google group. I think a wiki might be a good idea.

ingenuitycleveland