previously: Design for UNICEF – Detextive*, Mobile Tech for Social Change Barcamp, Design for UNICEF – RapidSMS and Mechanical Turk

Textonic.org is now live!

Recognizing that Textonic was a larger project than I was going to be able to finish in my free time over the summer (or that my group was going to be able to finish in our collective free time), I decided that the project would benefit from a more formal web presence than a handful of blog posts and a GitHub page. I registered a domain, set up WordPress, presented what we had accomplished, laid out what there is to be done, and tried to create a place where people could express their interest in getting involved.

The Conversation page on the new site is of particular interest. I’m using a Twitter search for the term ‘textonic’ as a sort of guestbook or message board. People who find the site and are interested can look to see who else has been there as well as when they expressed interest. Twitter itself can serve as a way for them to get in touch. The intransient¹ and public (since all of a user’s followers will also see the tweets) nature of these expressions of interest will help to catalyze the formation of a community around the project.

Credit for this idea goes to @n8han (who writes the blog Coderspiel) — I first saw it on his site for Databinder Dispatch. In addition, recent ITP graduate @joshbg2k created something similar for his Überbaster project.