During the official VisionPDX launch on April 1st, 2006, E.C.O. coordinated with EcoTV, City Repair, and local community sustainability stakeholders who came together for Sustainable Community Convergence. At this event, visions of community members were collected with our original Vision Harvester Kiosk, and eventually presented to the City Council. Since increased community networking was an expressed value, this project puts a plan into action to directly engage and network the 4800+ households of the pilot Richmond neighborhood.
E.C.O. will establish the Empowering Community Organizer position to connect with businesses, organizations, and citizens face-to-face. In doing so, the resources, concerns, and visions of the community are mapped and made accessible online via the Eco-mUNITY website and through the six bike-powered kiosks that are to be implemented throughout the Richmond neighborhood.
While engaging the community in structured two-way conversations designed to educate citizens about existing and emerging tools for community collaboration, this E.C.O. will gather input and encourage businesses, organizations, and neighbors to participate by: engaging with existing entities; providing feedback about the project; providing demographic neighborhood information; developing applications or content for the kiosks; providing equipment, materials, internet, or labor for their local kiosk.
The interface will be an interactive 3-D world (metaverse), like Croquet and Wonderland. Croquet can best be demonstrated visually below:
Using free and open source software based on Squeak, the community is invited to develop plug-ins and content, though the out-of-the-box installations are robust and user-friendly. These kiosks display an interactive 3-D virtual map of the Richmond neighborhood to be used for education, communication, listing resources, and collaborative modeling of future possibilities for the Richmond community. This may sound difficult, but kids are able to create objects and content quite easily and intuitively.
Johnny Lee demonstrated the initial platform for this type of collaborative work using a collaborative whiteboard hack with the Wii remote and sensor.
The Open-Source movement has generated a quite effective foundation for economy:
Eco-mUNITY kiosks are collaborative community workspaces which include wi-fi enabled computer interfaces built into sturdy structures enabling a variety of different collaboration modes. The importance of such collaboration and the introduction of open-source software to these collaboration frameworks is discussed here:
Eco-mUNITY kiosks bring communities together. The synergy created by this simple fact has created the capacity for a new level of collective action. The purpose of the kiosk is to facilitate this collaboration between local and non-local communities. The structure is designed to bring people together to collaborate, produce virtual art, vote on community issues, teach classes, and exercise while generating power for the electronic devices.
The kiosk idea is powerful, freeing a person from having to buy and carry the electronic devices to create virtual content. However, the power of this next phase of the internet is that the infrastructure is being used to build and organize community, which is synergistic within eCo-Munity because the metaverse is created by visitors through an interactive 3-D interactive operating system. Below you will find an early eCo-Munity N-Power Station prototype, the predecessor to the Eco-mUNITY kiosk.