ZAG, a wholly owned subsidiary of BBH, is focused on brand invention.  We invent brands by exploiting brand lags – where consumer activity outpaces brand activity.  The trick of course is not only scouring technology, media, breaking trends, and cultural & consumer insights for what consumers want and need, but then uniquely satisfying those needs in a delightful and profitable way.

ZAG is fortunate because via BBH we have a unique network of collaborators who provide expertise in areas fertile for brand invention.  Now, ZAG NY is looking to extend that network beyond the BBH walls and tap an even larger bevy of creators, innovators, entrepreneurs, and anyone else with a brilliant idea.

This slideshare serves as an official call for ideas which will be formally evaluated this November to feed the 2011 pipeline.  While we’ll entertain ideas throughout the year, this marks one of three annual formal reviews that will garner the most focused attention from the ZAG team.  Pitches will be heard live or by phone/skype/virtual meeting starting week of November 8th.

To stay up to date on ZAG news and thought starters follow our Blog.

(Presentation is best viewed by clicking MENU and FULL SCREEN)

As many of you know, I’m involved with a mass collaboration effort (more on collaboration vs. crowd sourcing here) to rethink the portable / disposable coffee drinking experience. You see, the vast majority of to-go coffee cups aren’t recyclable, and it turns out we really like our coffee. Tens of billions of energy-inefficient cups end up in landfills every year. This post isn’t about the issue, but if you’re interested, please visit thebetacup.com (there’s still time to vote, rate, and improve upon on the ideas submitted, which is critical to identifying a solution).

This post is about 3 key lessons I’ve learned regarding the engagement of crowds over the course of this process.

1. Money is … well, money.

Money is a wonderful incentive. We heard from a number of people solely motivated by cash. It broadened the audience beyond the group that would have turned up only for the purpose of environmental altruism. However, when money’s at stake, the group is broader, but less collaborative. Some people would accuse others of stealing their ideas; others would respond within minutes to a new idea posted claiming it was too similar to something they’d submitted. I’ve been a part of a number of efforts like this now and money has always been a core incentive. But tying it to a cause illustrated how it can actually work against collaboration on occasion. Specifically, it undermined the bucket brigade reward system we hoped would occur through our community management.

I’m not saying money always has a negative impact, but understanding its limitations is critical in retrospect. It was great for the first part of the process (number of ideas, effort put into submissions, pass-along), but it was potentially detrimental to the second half (refining unpopular but high potential ideas, collaboration across related ideas, gaming of the system).

2. Employ a boring governing body.

Our friend @faris has regularly made the comment that crowds aren’t inherently wise regardless of book titles that have infiltrated innovations culture, which I couldn’t agree with more. In fact, as someone who has tried to wrangle a crowd on multiple occasions, I’ve always assumed there was a dangerous herd mentality I had to police against. In the case of Betacup, I was determined to not let the crowd’s opinion keep me from reading every single submission as a jury member. However, the crowd actually did an incredible job bubbling up the best / freshest / most effective ideas. Startlingly so, in fact. However, the few times I deviated in opinion from the crowd’s most influential members were on ideas that were, well, boring.

Crowds tend to collectively take a “wow me” approach (explains the current state of news media, no?). That works really well at encouraging new types of thought on an ongoing issue like this one, but it actually does some ideas a disservice. Some simple, boring ideas were actually very effective at solving parts of this complex issue (for example, a collection bin shaped like a tube to reduce the probability that other junk or recyclables would be placed in it). Yet these boring ideas were ignored, generating few views, comments, or ratings. My lesson here was of the importance of bringing in a governing group that has a bias of their own, in the other direction. People who value simplicity and boring effectiveness. That combination can yield powerful results to solve problems.

3. Don’t prescribe formats.

We made a bold choice when deciding what form Betacup submissions should take: any. It was why the highly flexible and open Jovoto platform worked beautifully for the type of problem-solving we needed. The coffee cup issue sounds like a design one on the surface: invent a design that’s recyclable but still fits in a cup holder, is cheap, can handle heat, and feels natural on the lips. But it’s actually quite layered. This problem is as much about human behavior and access to manufacturing and disposal resources as it is about engineering. By opening up the submission format, Betacup became accessible to people of all disciplines. When the problem is as ubiquitous yet unknown as disposable cups, it’s critical we have experts from diverse fields weigh in. Without it, we wouldn’t have had any intersectional innovation, and this problem demands it.

What’s impressive about crowds when they’re given opportunities like this is that individuals don’t introduce themselves as engineers, or designers, or marketers. They just solve a problem. And when you look at what they accomplished, you know different disciplines had to be involved, but the lines are too blurry to see where or how.

As I look back on the submission and collaboration process, I think we got a lot of things right, and certainly some things wrong. The lessons above were the most valuable for me as someone interested in such things. They may apply to a very specific collaboration environment: problem solving & innovation (not necessarily design or creative services), but they’ve changed the way I think about crowds. Now I just hope the 300+ ideas change the way we collectively think about our coffee habits.

thebetacup: 60 Seconds To Save The World from the betacup on Vimeo.

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To see, rate and comment on the submissions, visit the contest page. To follow our journey toward a solution, follow @thebetacup.

BBH is strictly non-partisan and typically avoids politics, but is intrigued by an independent candidate standing for Hackney South and Shoreditch this election who has taken mainstream digital behavior and applied it to politics, so offering a new model for voters.

Denny de la Haye is no career politician and has never had any party affiliation. He is instead motivated by a belief in a better political system. So he is standing with no policies and the promise of direct democracy; if voted in he will poll constituents before he votes on any issue or piece of legislation.

He believes that while there is apathy about political voting, people’s support for issues is rising – as digital has facilitated more activism and support for issue based organizations.

“If you allow people a forum and a say they will use it, but they are not motivated to vote politically as they are disillusioned by the system. The UK political system has people in positions of power who answer to a party, before their voters”.

De la Haye is aware that his system relies on people remaining consistently engaged, but this is where his experience as a web designer kicks in and he draws on participation models like Digg and Reddit.

For issues and legislation he will endeavor to get people reading around the issue to inform themselves. To do this he will post an objective synopsis of government’s texts online – inspired by Simplyunderstand.com ‘translation service’ – links can then be added to the synopsis by constituents, which can in turn be rated so the most valuable rise to the top.

It will be crowd-sourced information, without any party bias.

De la Haye’s model would become more valuable over time, as people realized the power of influence they could exert as exemplified by Obama’s election campaign and the model would build a representative picture of constituents views and how the constituency had changed over time, which can be tracked and learnt from.

If followed through it would also do away with the need for party politics, however it is still likely people would cluster around ideologies – but perhaps more their own, not those dictated by a small group of people.

So . . . back to BBH’s real interest here which is how could this work in the business and marketing world. What would happen if shareholders were done away with and there was a model based more on interest invested by people through contributions of time and/or ideas?

This suggests a world of crowd-controlled brands and an open dialogue where the brand does not assume a position of authority or expertise but is accountable to its public. It does not necessarily work for all sectors, but surely more brands could open themselves up in this way, know their place and just facilitate?

Where has this worked before and where has it failed? Could this ever really work? Love to know what you think.

www.getavote.org

Image taken from The Johnny Cash Project

The Johnny Cash Project has been doing the rounds on Twitter and the blogosphere recently, for good reason. Anyone initially sceptical (“another crowdsourced music video?”), very quickly realised it was something pretty special. Digging a tiny bit deeper, spotting Aaron Koblin was heavily involved, things started to click into place for us. It’s a well-conceived idea, beautifully done – textbook Koblin.

Something else clicked into place at the same time. So much talk about crowdsourcing, so much experimentation, almost all of which we’re in favour of. Nonetheless, there is an art to how we use the crowd.

Last night I saw Ennio Morricone at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The maestro was conducting some of his best known compositions (including soundtracks to many of Sergio Leone’s films – last night The Ectasy of Gold from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly was unforgettably good). On their own, the soprano Susanna Rigacci, the Roma Sinfonietta orchestra and a 100-strong choir were all world class, together they were extraordinary. Morricone is famous for using singers less to tell a verbal story and more as an emotional, ‘human’ instrument. Last night was no exception: there was something completely mesmeric watching orchestra and singers working as one.  It was an act of collective creativity.

No question, a lot of us in the audience felt moved, even elevated.

In a similar way (although perhaps the reaction is less viseral, given there’s a little more distance when something isn’t live and in front of you), The Johnny Cash Project is elevating. There is something profoundly brilliant about making the work of many hands *entirely* visible. It feels 50 times as powerful for its sense of mass mobilization behind a creative act. Its strange quirks, differences, non sequiturs…versus how you’d imagine the same task performed by an individual working alone. Suddenly, one artist in isolation feels one dimensional, ironed out, as if the output would lack vibrancy and surprise.

Sure, centuries of art prove me wholly and irrevocably wrong on that last point. But when I think about how we might most usefully use the crowd, it strikes me crowdsourcing has the potential to be most palpably powerful – to lead to richer outcomes – when we use the crowd as a creative collective.

Right now, with the honourable exception of the likes of Aaron Koblin, a number of innovators in music promo creation (including early initiators Hal Kirkland, Masa Kawamura at BBH New York & their buddies Magico Nakamura & Masayoshi Nakamura – whose lovely video for Sour’s Hibi No Neiro is justly famous), our industry seems most interested in using crowdsourcing primarily to:

a) drive down cost
b) give the crowd something to do – in other words, the ‘crowd’ are in fact a target audience and we want them to feel ‘involved’ with a brand
c) broaden choice – lots of responses to a stated question or task, only one winner

Those are all reasonable things to attempt and we’re not suggesting there should be only one use of the crowd, it just strikes us that focusing on using the crowd as a collective creative resource is something we’re doing less of. And yet, oddly enough, it might be the most powerful use yet.

What do you think? Are there a host of examples of brands using crowdsourcing as collective creativity that we’re missing?

For more on The Johnny Cash Project, check out Maria Popova’s blogpost here.

For more on Sour’s Hibi No Neiro video and our interview with Rick Liebling about his e-book on crowdsourcing, see the BBH Labs posts here and here.

A version of this post was originally posted on melex.posterous.com.

We are so consumed by the communities that Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare (and our local knitting website) foster that we often forget to take a step back and think about the lessons to be learned from these communities. Within each of these online ecosystems, participants, aware of it or not, share some of their most intimate secrets with the world. Conversations about relationships, ridicule for certain social behavior from the night before, bragging about their new iPad, and most importantly simply being open all seem commonplace.

Coders admirably follow the same model however on a significantly different level. Most, I believe, have taken this notion of community and have truly found the value in it for what they do, and there is much we can learn from that. Coders who have affectionately adopted the open source mantra are out there sharing their code, encouraging others to take it and well pretty much do whatever they want. The idea is that by making the work available to be built upon and expanded, it will be built upon and expanded into something better and exponentially more worth sharing.

A piece of work created this way, where the sum of the parts is less meaningful than the work in its entirety, or gestalt, becomes very powerful when considered in the context of the open source philosophy. Projects made up of libraries, code blocks, classes, and ideas whose authors individually poured hours into creating are incomparably more notable than their preceding work which undoubtably made it possible. This is the key most important value in open source. And it is that value that can be translated to other media and have the same result.

Open source technology has given birth to a large array of projects, from everyday utilities to intricate and involved interactive art installations. Each has a narrative behind it that has an impact on its own.

Firefox and jQuery are wonderful examples of utility-based projects driven by the ideals of open source. Firefox, one of the leading web browsers, has a powerful community behind it, thousands-strong, and constantly pushing it forward. The source code and SDK are available to anyone who either wants to tinker with the core of the browser, or develop add-ons to be distributed throughout. jQuery is an example of a company whose purpose has made anyone using the Internet happier, conscience of it or otherwise. It is a Javascript framework which now has hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins creating rich Internet experiences for us all. It started with John Resig’s idea and has been progressed exponentially by the community that has organically grown around it.

The story of these projects are most relevant to us in understanding how to use the ideas of open source. The two projects below carry strong narratives of how they evolved, lending a learning experience on a much different level than the end product. Thinking about the path that these projects took and the backstories behind their creation is an exploration of the creative process that went into them; therein lies the most powerful ideas.

http://www.random-international.com/you-fade-to-light-philips-lum/

You Fade To Light is a beautiful project by rAndom International (with software created by Chris O’Shea), existing in large part because of people who understand the power of sharing their work and encouraging growth. This project was born out of projects before it, borrowing code, leveraging libraries and frameworks to bring it to life. Audience, a separate project also by rAndom International (in collaboration with Chris O’Shea) adds to the narrative and creates its own. Have a look at that here.

http://iwantyoutowantme.org/process.html; A wonderful exploration of the process of creating 'I Want You To Want Me' from start to finish

I Want You to Want Me (IWYTWM) by Jonathan Harris (http://number27.org) and Sep Kamvar (http://kamvar.org/) for the 2008 exhibit ‘Design and the Elastic Mind‘ at MoMA in NYC was created using OpenFrameworks, an open source framework in C++ for artists, interaction designers and creative coders. This beautiful work is in debt to all the work before it. Fortunately the IWYTWM team documented their process, their narrative. It is a prime example of the power that the evolution of these projects exemplify and the value in sharing them.

So, how can we leverage this power of sharing creativity in our business when we hold our ideas in such high regard and guard them so jealously? There is so much buzz around crowdsourcing at the moment because the ‘power of many’ has been proven. That is simply my argument. We need to adopt this powerful idea and understand how to make it relevant and practical for our work. How does the story behind the larger collaborative efforts fit into our business and make our work better?

The easy answer is it doesn’t. But it could.

We can open our ideas and leverage larger collaborative efforts. We need to start with sharing honest explorations of the process behind an idea. Again, IWYTWM illustrates this beautifully, and if we can embrace this idea and run with it we will come out with a whole new level of creative work – perhaps a new breed of creativity altogether.

We’d love to see more examples like the ones above. And we’re always keen to hear what you think.

Lightbulbs image by Goldberg, via Flickr

Our collective interest in crowdsourcing (the creative and commercial opportunities and challenges it throws up) seems to be on an exponential curve only matched by the controversy and misunderstanding still surrounding the topic. Cue Rick Liebling’s eBook, Everyone is Illuminated, out today, a compendium of constructive thinking on the topic to date. As experiments in crowdsourcing start to unfold and the world waits to see just how sustainable it is a marketing tool, his primer aims to shed light on the whole area by gathering (in part crowdsourced, of course) insight and hands-on experience of crowd sourcing together in one handy place. We were happy to make a contribution to the eBook and caught up with Rick to tell us more about the project. Check out his introductory post here too.

1. What inspired you in the first place to pull this together? Why now?

I had seen and read so much about crowdsourcing over the last part of 2009, and the term seemed to be becoming a bit of a “catch all.” People were using it almost indiscriminately, or using it for whatever seemed to suit their purpose. I thought it would be worthwhile to explore the concept a bit more to try to get an understanding of what people were really doing and how the concept could be leveraged effectively.

2. Naturally enough, you’ve crowdsourced parts of the book. That ensures there are some (dramatically in places) varying points of view. What challenges did this throw up? Have you unearthed anything that surprised you?

I must say I’m very fortunate to know, or know of, some very intelligent people who are quite generous with their thoughts and time. Several of the people who contributed were ‘friends of friends’ at best, but they were very enthusiastic on the subject. I tried very hard to gather a variety of viewpoints and even amongst those who have positive feelings, they are using crowdsourcing in a variety of ways. I thought that would be beneficial to readers, to see that crowdsourcing can be utilized for various purposes.

2. Having digested this topic as much have you have, what are the key conclusions you draw for the marketing communications industry?

For me the key distinction is this: Aggregating hundreds or thousands of contest entries from consumers – perhaps the most common form of crowdsourcing – is really just an exercise in consumer engagement. I would strongly recommend against that tactic if you are looking for a new logo or campaign concept. I’m far more intrigued by the idea of a loose network, or Guild, of talented creatives with specific skill sets that can be called upon for a project that requires a high level of craftsmanship. So rather than asking everyone from a group of 1000 to submit work, it’s about having one person in your group of 1000 with the specific expertise to solve your problem.

3. Commentators still like to draw battle lines between what might be called the Creative Minimalists (who believe truly great creative inspiration can only come from the few) and the Creative Maximalists (who believe harnessing the creativity of the masses is the way forward). Is it really as simple as that?

I think the easy answer here is “you’ll still need that creative expert who can curate the masses” which is a bit of a compromise answer. I’ll plant my flag in the minimalist camp. I just don’t think you come up with things like Blade Runner or Mad Men (or Apple’s 1984 ad) by taking the best of whatever comes out of a crowd. Truly great creative work comes from the minds of those who are invested in the process in a way that is unlikely to be the result of a creative cattle call in my opinion. Now, that being said, I think it’s incredibly hard for one person to maintain that level of genius over an extended period of time.

4. When might crowdsourcing be a genuinely ‘better’ route to any other? To the naysayers, when is it not just ‘spec work’ (with all the associations of poor quality work done cheaply that phrase carries with it)?

I think there are times when you can find yourself going down a creative rabbit hole and after a couple of years a campaign has painted a brand into a corner. At some point a fresh perspective can re-invigorate a brand. I think this would work best for a brand that has a really strong identity. The Nikes, Starbucks and Cokes of the world, where even the average man on the street has an understanding of what these brands stand for.

4. What do you think we should be excited by and what should we be worried about?

More than the specific of crowdsourcing, I’m excited by the notion of new models being adopted or at least tried. Where, as an industry, we get in trouble is when models become calcified and standard ways of working are accepted as the only way of doing things. Conversely, I think we have to be careful that clients don’t misunderstand concepts like crowdsourcing and start to use them indiscriminately. I expect that several brands will spend quite a bit of money in 2010 on crowdsourcing, use the concept for the wrong purposes and there will be a general backlash that sends agencies back to the “tried and true” which would be a mistake.

5. You talk about the likelihood of crowdsourcing projects failing in 2010, not through any failure of the concept per se, but of how they are managed. What are the pitfalls people should be looking out for?

Like everything else in marketing communications, the first question has to be “what does success look like?” 1,583 mediocre logos are a failure only if, “we want to have an award-winning logo” was your goal. If success was “we want to engage consumers in a new and interactive way that will be the start of a more intimate relationship,” then those logos may be a success.

6. Looking forward, what do you see as the potential future scenarios for crowdsourcing and its role for brands and marketers?

There are a couple of interesting things I’d like to see crowds be utilized for by brands. I’d ask people to come up with solutions that involve other brands. Most brand marketers can figure out that their ‘chocolate’ brand will go with a ‘peanut butter’ brand. But a consumer on the outside will bring a perspective that says, “combine your ‘chocolate’ with this ‘chipotle chili’ brand for a unique and unexpected combination. The other goes back to using the crowds to find that one person with specialized expertise. Get the right crowd and you’ll solve problems not by receiving hundreds of so-so solutions, but by receiving just one or two brilliant solutions.

‘Everyone is Illuminated’ by Rick Liebling – check it out here on slideshare

Photo: Dunechaser, Flickr, http://j.mp/c6kd2o

I went to the ‘Crowdsourcery Potions 101′ event at JWT yesterday as part of Social Media Week in NYC. Not so sure about the event name, but the content was great, and the panel line up was genuinely stellar.

We watched John Winsor (Victors & Spoils Founder) lead a discussion that featured Ty Montague (Co-President & CCO, JWT North America), Saneel Radia (Alchemist / Chief Potion Master, Denuo), Michael Lebowitz (Founder & CEO, Big Spaceship) and the inimitable Faris Yakob (Chief Technology Dude, McCann NY).

Thanks to the appliance of science, the whole thing is viewable at the bottom of this post, on video. Lots of useful, practical discussion around the kind of cultures, systems, and processes that would enable new forms of creative collaboration. I particularly liked the metaphor of ‘scaffolding’: the structures that are required for successful collaboration efforts (the filters, the creative direction, the incentive model, the access requirements, and so on).

Anyway, I was struck by one area of the debate in particular, and I’ve been reflecting on that since. There were a number of observations about how business models (around agencies, and how they construct themselves, most specifically) were being challenged, and indeed how the definition of what constituted ‘the agency’ was evolving rapidly in new and interesting ways.

As Ty Montague suggested, ‘we’re on the verge of a remaking of business and what a company is’. Bold and exciting words from the leader of one of the largest and most powerful agencies around. In particular, Ty was talking about a point John Winsor had made just a moment before, around the idea that the distinction between JWT and *beyond JWT* was blurring, and would continue to blur. As creative businesses continue to experiment with new models of creative collaboration, and explore different approaches to maintaining a creative arsenal comprising the highest quality individuals and partners, it is inevitable that which was once almost wholly contained within an agency will become, to some extent, located outside the formal confines of that business.

Creative agencies need to move towards becoming permeable organizations. Those in networks need to be reconfigured as networked organizations versus simply organizations within networks. Creative business must be able to draw on not just the talent within the building, but the many skills and areas of expertise that lie beyond those walls. And they need to be able to draw on this external resource. Like immediately. Certainly within BBH Labs we believe this is the *only* way the future can look; and of course it comes with challenges.

For us (probably like many, I’m in no way suggesting we’re unique here), this means building and curating a broader group of people and companies with whom we create and produce ideas, and of course, we’re busy doing just that. It was an ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems who once said, ‘no matter where you work, most of the smart people work somewhere else’. Whilst challenging to orthodoxy, there’s definitely something in that.

Back to Crowdsourcery Potions . . . Ty was hinting that one logical manifestation of this philosophy would be the formation of a broader pool of potential creative collaborators, perhaps more akin to the curated creative group put together by the team at Victors & Spoils. I also sometimes think the Alessi example is helpful here. Alessi occasionally put together hand-picked ‘crowds’ outside their company to help them on specific projects. So for example, on their program to create new ‘postmodern’ style product designs, they curated an invite-only ‘crowd of around 200 postmodern architects to submit work. This seems smart. It also signals a potential way forward for agencies looking to innovate new modes of creative collaboration.

But it also raises what for me is *the big question*. In fact, two related sets of questions.

1. CULTURE: If the culture of an organization is one of the key elements of differentiation between one agency and another, when does the definition of an agency blur to the point of intangibility? When does JWT (or BBH, or Victors & Spoils, or IDEO for that matter) cease to be JWT? When does JWT become Victors & Spoils? When does it simply become a set of senior and experienced curators of skills, talent and partnerships? And does this matter, if it does happen?

2. INCENTIVES: What kinds of models are right for incentivizing the crowd? If the model of the future is going to involve fluid boundaries between ‘working for’ and ‘working with’, what does that mean for how people are incentivized? Not just in the crowd outside the agency, but within the crowd inside the agency? And linked to the first point, what value does one place on the cultural DNA found within agencies (which surely *must* have a commercial value) versus the more flexible and emerging skills found outside?

Early days, but exciting days.

All ideas, challenges, thoughts or builds welcome.

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Notes

For more coverage of the debate check out Jonny Makkar’s (@jsmakr) neat summary blog post here, Faris’s here, or John Winsor’s short but kinda sweet piece here.

For more on the critically important role of culture, see Grant McCracken’s excellent and provocative new book: “Chief Culture Officer: How to create a living breathing corporation“.

One of the things that caught our eye last year was a blogpost from Len Kendall sharing the plan for a simple, yet audacious lifestreaming project. Every day for 365 days, Len and co-founder Daniel Honigman were going to get a different person to write about their experience that day. If you will, a crowdsourced diary for 2010: the3six5 Project.

Just under a month in and c.250,000 site views later, the project is growing into something with real currency AND potentially long lasting value. Before we get into the interview with Len and Daniel, here are a few early thoughts on why we think the project is turning out to be so interesting. As always, we’d love to hear other points of view, so please let us know what you think.

1. Currency: the3six5 mashes up three communication themes – crowdsourcing, curation and lifestreaming – neatly in one idea. (At the same time it’s a simple journal. The combination is very seductive: it feels experimental and familiar at the same time).

2. Cultural value: if the entries continue in the vein set down so far, it’s a time capsule of intensely individual thoughts. One year seen through 365 different minds, gathered in one place.

3. As communication models go, a continuous, virtuous circle. Fresh, surprising content, which in turn its originators & their supporters want to promote and propagate.

4. Great content: none of the above would mean anything if the words didn’t leap off the page. And boy, do they. A lot of writers have taken Daniel & Len at their word and taken risks, others have brilliantly evoked the day and their state of mind, often to profound effect.

5. Success or failure depends on the community: The project has the chance to go wrong at any point, all it takes is a missed post. If we’re honest, that adds to the frisson around the project. It also proves yet again that crowdsourcing is no cop-out for the curators. As wonderful as everyone is, we suspect it can still feel like herding cats at times. As one of the contributors so far, I can also testify to a what-if-you-fail-to-come-up-with-anything? feeling in your gut as you sit down at the end of the day to write a post to an immovable deadline.

We caught up with Daniel and Len, to hear how it’s going so far from their perspective, as well as their hopes and expectations for the rest of the year.

The 3six5 project is nearly a month in. What’s surprised you so far?

LK/DH: We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how personal these posts have been. Often when it comes to blogging, people write about their observations of the outside, or what they suggest OTHER people should do. We encouraged our authors (listed here) to examine themselves on their day and share something that would let the reader walk away knowing a bit more about who THEY were. This is something we feel is lacking in today’s world of “social media” and are happy to see our writers are stepping outside of their comfort zone while they have the spotlight.

How are you personally finding it running the project? What have you learned?

LK/DH: One might think that having other people write a blog for you is really easy. It’s not. In fact it’s probably 10 times harder to do it this way because managing 365 people is quite difficult. Not only are we in constant flux in terms of our schedule of writers, but some of our more “famous” writers are hard to get a hold of when quick deadlines are approaching.

One of our most recent challenges was receiving a post from one of our authors in Haiti. He was there helping with providing medical treatment to a rural village (one day before the earthquake) but didn’t have access to the internet. We ended up writing the post for him as he dictated his writing to us via the local phone. Things like this put us “on call” quite a bit. It’s extremely important that we don’t miss a day because it will take away from the macro result this project is aiming to produce.

That being said, there’s a laundry list of things we’re learning (only 22 days in) about this project, by the end of this, the case study on how we managed it will probably be just as interesting as the 365 day story that ultimately was created.

Content-wise, do you think there are some themes emerging?

LK/DH: There are two themes emerging in this launch month.

The first is the past. We’ve stressed to our authors that we don’t want them pre-planning their posts or picking days like anniversaries, birthdays, etc because it will cause them to write about something that happened earlier in their life, rather than what is happening that day. As the project is meant to be a chronological story, it is key that people reference how the present influenced their life and thoughts. That being said, we cannot escape the past either. People have done a great job with taking anecdotes from their earlier lives and weaving them into the present.

The second theme has been technology. Based on our set of authors, and the age we live in, the topic of technology is going to show up. It’s a utility in our life just like water, electricity, or transportation, it’s just a lot more fun to talk about because it evolves faster than any other utility out there.

What do you hope to achieve by the end of the year with this?

LK/DH: We have a few basic goals for this project right now, but they will obviously continue to evolve as we learn more.

First of all, If we reach success by day 365, then that will not be the last day of the project. We’ve received far more applications from people wanting to be authors than we could possibly fit into a mere 365 days. That being the case, if the demand to read/write these posts is still high, then we will begin again in 2011. (That’s when interns become a very serious consideration for us in effort to maintain our sanity).

Secondly, we want to be able to create something tangible out of this digital project. We’re already having discussions with other artists about collaborating to create a creative mash up of our words and their visual/audible works of art. Additionally, if it is financially viable, we would love to turn the end project into a book for all our authors. The 365 people who create this story deserve to have some kind of memory on their shelf. It would be incredibly rewarding to be able to give them that for free.

Thirdly, we want to walk away knowing 365 people a little bit better. This current iteration of the web has made it incredibly easy to meet people, but it has made it much harder to KNOW people. Through the posts, and the correspondences we have with our authors on the back-end, we’re developing new relationships with people that we never would have encountered in life otherwise. This alone, makes the project worth managing.

**

Check out the 3six5 project here and follow the project on Twitter here

Follow Len on Twitter

Follow Daniel on Twitter

Look out for Ben‘s post, due up on February 2

And, for a great introduction to the project ahead of its launch, we strongly recommend you also check out @Brainpicker’s interview last year with them both.

Taped Together entry for December 17

2009 undoubtedly has been the year when the ‘crowd’ really came into its own.  As the year drew to a close, it seemed like it might be a fun (okay, also possibly foolish) idea to attempt to create the world’s first crowd-curated holiday playlist.

Whilst I’d tinkered with this in fairly samizdat fashion at the end of November, the idea properly came to life when Maria Popova (@brainpicker) – the undisputed queen of online cultural curation and author of, amongst other things, Brain Pickings – got in touch. She suggested we create an audio tumblr together and see if we could find 31 people to curate one, great, vaguely seasonal track for every day in December.

So far, 24 days and around a 1000 plays later, it’s a fairly diverse collection of music and commentary: by turns happy, nostalgic, darkly funny, triumphant, moving, warm, sad and – if you ask us – all of it pretty downright wonderful.

We hope people have had as much fun as we have getting involved and watching it unfold.  Maria and I will say thank you properly to everyone when the project completes at the end of the month, but in the meantime please keep checking out the site, listen to the smorgasbord of tracks we’ve had in so far and read what the curators have had to say about the music they’ve chosen.

For more about Taped Together, check it out here.

The full and final playlist will be made available as a download to anyone who’d like one, please check out the site for details at the end of this month.

Happy Christmas and Happy Holidays Everyone.

GOOD Magazine are asking people: “If you were to invent anything to push the world forward, what would it be?”

The jury’s still out on whether collaborative creativity can provide a viable business model (high enough quality; low enough costs) for creative businesses, but this seems to us to be a smart way of focusing the minds of artists, inventors and other thinkers on some of the more important questions.

We’ll watch with interest – what would your idea be?

(Thanks to John Winsor of CP&B – @jtwinsor – for the heads-up).