I apologize for being a bit delayed on the culture coverage this week; planning for the Women Innovators event in early December is ramping up and we’re excited about the interest in the first @IgniteBayArea to date. That said, November events of note this week include:
Art in Storefronts: The final edition of temporary art installations in vacant storefront windows takes place this Friday on 24th Street between Folsom and Potrero. A reception at Triple Base Gallery will celebrate the work of local artists Abner Nolan, Kelly Ording, Jetro Martinez, and Tahiti Pehrson before an art walk. It’s an interesting pilot program by the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development–I’d be eager to see if it’s moved the needle on move-in rates in the neighborhood’s it’s been in.
THREADshow: Fort Mason, venue for craft fairs and the Social Capital Markets conference alike, will host a fashion and trend extravaganza this Saturday and Sunday. It’s to include the wares of designers including Bootie Boutique, an area creator of one-of-a-kind belt buckles. The event will have the usual trappings–silkscreening, art show, and DJs–but a bike park is a nice addition if you’re able to get all your new (used) vintage wares home via cycle.
I’m bummed that I’ll miss tonight’s “Indie Spirit” soiree at Moe’s Books (but I can’t think of a better reason than Blog Out Loud). Local independent creators including Liz Lisle of Watchword Press, Nicole Neditch of Objet D’Art, and Noella Teele of KUSF (and the West’s best magazine shop, ISSUES) will be discussing the evolution and state of local music, art and crafting communities. Author Kaya Oakes will read from her recently published “Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture,” which I’m eager to read despite the publisher’s unfortunate synopsis:
You know the look: skinny jeans, Chuck Taylors, perfectly mussed bed-head hair; You know the music: Modest Mouse, the Shins, Pavement. You know the ethos: DIY with a big helping of irony. But what does it really mean to be ‘indie’?
…Why use workbooks and pens when serialized video can be introduced to adult students to create more engagement and better take home value?
A similar line of thinking led Oakland, Calif., organization CEO Women to create Grand Café, an educational video series that features four immigrant women helping each other grow their endeavors after meeting in a business start-up class. The characters speak English and their experiences are cataloged in a Latin Telenovela format, and the protagonists (including a jewelry maker from Haiti, a handywoman from Mexico, and an accountant from China) were based on the nonprofit’s own immigrant and refugee entrepreneur clientele.
The first four episodes of the planned 18-part series are currently being rolled out in Oakland and San Jose with lessons on separating personal and business expenses, seeking out computer skills, and securing bank loans. (And, this being soap opera-esque, there’s a love story thrown in.) CEO Women, whose main aim is helping women increase their business skills to become economically independent, is using the series to scale their current 16-week business training program, and at least 700 women have viewed the telenovela-as-curriculum since it launched in September.
Microcredit organizations’ efforts, GOOD Magazine and the Berkeley co-working center HUB Bay Area are no strangers to TheSanFranista posts, so I’ll get right to the point–international (and now domestic) lender Kiva.org is celebrating their fourth anniversary on November 3. The $20 tickets for the party at the Brower Center will get you organic treats and access to three floors of troublemaking (for a good cause, of course). I’m especially looking forward to headlining band Baba Ken and the Afrobeat Connection after they played a can’t-stay-in-your-seat show at Elbo Room earlier this year.
Two New York video producer pals launched the site for their digital video shop, LuckyNY, today. They’re the brains behind the previously featured Cool Capitals campaign for European travel and have a body of work that combined includes ads for Gucci, Audi, and Nike (but lest you think it’s all glamour, they’ve also done great work for UNICEF, Autism Awareness, and Advertising Women of New York). Congratulate them by visiting their production-oriented (and very humorous) domain.
I’m excited to be working with online magazine Notes on Design publisher Scott Chappell on a Women in Design series launching this week. The Q&As will feature female graphic, information, product, and application designers, and SF-based creator extraordinairre Timoni Grone (the brains behind an upcoming document sharing site Scribd redesign and local Chromatic meetups) is the first interviewee.
You can read the full conversation on Notes on Design, and I thought Grone’s ideas for improving Twitter.com usability were particularly interesting. How would you make it better, especially if you’ve been using a mobile or external app? (I, for one, would kill the long horizontal scanning first.)
NoD: Isn’t Twitter improving because of third party apps..and is that built-in flexibility not what makes it, in part, so hugely popular?
Timoni Grone: I didn’t mean to say that Twitter could improve only if third-party apps didn’t exist. Twitter started as an SMS-based social site, and a web interface has never been their priority.
Having said that, twitter.com is currently #14 on Alexa’s top 500–so, like it or not, a lot of people are *seeing* the web interface. And it’s still a bad experience. There’s a lot of functionality that you can get in third party apps that you simply don’t have on the site, and so far as I know, there’s no reason to not include things like:
Searching for a particular user name within your followers/followees (useful for @-replies when you forget a user’s nickname)
Options to sort followers/followees
Showing reciprocal relationships (particularly in the initial notification emails)
Showing @-conversations as a thread
Direct messages in a threaded “conversation” view
Expanding shortened URLs
An easy way to view media embeds (like Twitter-based photo sharing services)
Allowing users to save favorite searches
Showing the number of favorites on one’s tweets
None of the things I’ve mentioned would, or should, fundamentally change the way the site looks or behaves now. Twitter.com has the capacity to do all these things; it simply needs to make them available in a user-friendly way.
As to whether Twitter is improving because of third-party apps, absolutely it is. The API makes it easy for developers to do great things, which is awesome for all Twitter users, because then you have really brilliant developers who want to make apps, but maybe not work at Twitter, contributing to the overall experience and raising the bar for the next generation of Twitter clients. I’m not sure that potential users come to Twitter solely because they really enjoy checking out Twitter desktop clients, but there’s no question that using Twitter is a much smoother, more enjoyable experience if you use a third-party client rather than Twitter.com.
Sure this is an SF blog (soon to also be found at TheSanFranista.com), but there’s no reason admirable art on the other coast can’t get a nod from time to time. After all, it’s not everyday you get a note about “a vintage ice-cream truck turned mobile art space,” but then, not everyday is the debut of Mister ArtSee. The mobile arts lab is to serve as a traveling home to installations, sound-pieces, performances, and visual art following its September 10 introduction at NYC’s Half Gallery.
I’m eagerly awaiting a look at artist Elliott Arkin’s completed hybrid, which he describes this way: “Like a Swiss-army knife, Mister ArtSee will be equipped with numerous extensions—a platform stage, video projectors, a podium—with the ability to fold out and open up to facilitate such projects. The design seeks to achieve maximum versatility and world class artistry to fulfill the mission of bringing information and contemporary art to the areas it visits, especially neighborhoods, schools, playgrounds, parks and public spaces not typically served by traditional art institutions.”
Art-Z, the group behind the project, plans to unveil the fully functional version next April on National Arts Advocacy Day. I hope they’ll take a nod from the Weinermobile and start offering rides around the country in advance (in the name of arts education, of course).
With its well-curated exhibits and remarkable photo collection, the Museum of the African Disapora in SOMA should be an ideal location for the Project Heart event next Friday to benefit the International Cardiovascular Health Alliance’s disease prevention efforts in Ghana. I’d heard that cardiovascular disease was the main cause of death worldwide, but I hadn’t thought about the fact that billions of dollars annually get passed along to countries that are often ill equipped to cover them. In an effort to do something about it, a friend is helping fundraise for a mid-September trip to Elmina, Ghana, for a team of physicians, public health professionals, outreach workers, and educators. The September 11 event is a better chance to learn more, but I’m impressed with the organization’s efforts to provide communities with cheap and effective tools that could prevent up to 80 percent of the disease:
ICHA volunteer clinicians will train health workers at the Elmina Urban Health Centre, a local clinic that serves over 50,000 patients. Health workers will be taught to quantify risk of cardiovascular events, to promote stringent lifestyle modification, and to administer medications. ICHA’s community outreach volunteers will work with local community leaders to establish population-wide community initiatives including culturally appropriate campaigns for diet modification and exercise groups.
Put video cameras in the hands of four young Stanford grads and watch what they do with them (create highlights of the university’s research efforts with beautiful cinematography, to start). Former students of the school’s Persuasive Technology Lab are putting their interest in human psychology and filmmaking into practice for pay in the form of 30 to 90-second video documentaries for the SF company Songline.
The brief documentaries (micro-docs?) the company creates to showcase individuals talking about the impact of their work is an interesting approach to using technology to incite people to take action. At the SoCap conference this week, project partner Keenan Newman told me about the organizations that have commissioned Songline’s video production, including the Music Mural and Arts Project and Facebook Fund. (The best use I’ve seen is for visual donor outreach to young alumni. What better way to make chemical engineering lab innovations intriguing?)
Today’s second annual Social Capital Markets conference programming included a panel on Women in Social Enterprise that was one of the better uses of an hour I’ve seen at an event of its size. Kjerstin Erickson, founder of African refugee assistance organization FORGE, and Abigail Falik, founder and CEO of productive gap year placement company Global Citizen Year joined two of my favorite local leaders, Samasource founder Leila Janah and Women 2.0 co-founder Shaherose Charania. Shaherose talked about the accidental–and highly demanded–creation of the technology and entrepreneurship volunteer group in a panel moderated by strategic consultancy Saltcellar Group partner Regina Connell. I’ll let her speak for herself about our growth.
Art in Storefronts: The final edition of temporary art installations in vacant storefront windows takes place this Friday on 24th Street between Folsom and Potrero. A reception at Triple Base Gallery will celebrate the work of local artists Abner Nolan, Kelly Ording, Jetro Martinez, and Tahiti Pehrson before an art walk. It’s an interesting pilot program by the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development–I’d be eager to see if it’s moved the needle on move-in rates in the neighborhood’s it’s been in.
THREADshow: Fort Mason, venue for craft fairs and the Social Capital Markets conference alike, will host a fashion and trend extravaganza this Saturday and Sunday. It’s to include the wares of designers including Bootie Boutique, an area creator of one-of-a-kind belt buckles. The event will have the usual trappings–silkscreening, art show, and DJs–but a bike park is a nice addition if you’re able to get all your new (used) vintage wares home via cycle.
Sure this is an SF blog (soon to also be found at TheSanFranista.com), but there’s no reason admirable art on the other coast can’t get a nod from time to time. After all, it’s not everyday you get a note about “a vintage ice-cream truck turned mobile art space,” but then, not everyday is the debut of 