Building a community
Since the MemoryMiner public beta announcment went out on November 17th, well over 300 people have signed up wanting to beta test the software. What’s most interesting to me so far, is the the breadth of the community that is beginning to appear. There are film/video makers, teachers, therapists, design students, professional photographesrs, digital storyetllers, adademics, fellow software developers, and “just plain folks” from all around the world. Many of you have really intersting projects, such as a museum exhibits, you’re working on. Others have told of deeply personal reasons for wanting to record family histories while there’s still a chance to use first hand sources. Some have just said “Dude, that’s cool!” Flattery will get you everywhere.
One of my fondest wishes for MemoryMiner is that it will allow people to connect via their shared experiences across time and place. What happened to the people who grew up around the corner from you? What about those that lived next to you when you were a student and you never even met. If you met them by chance tomorrow, I bet you’d have an amazing conversation. It seems as the MemoryMiner community grows and people share their stories, these crossing of people’s life threads will be uncovered, all to fascinating effect.
For those who might be going to MacWorld in San Francisco this coming January, MemoryMiner will be shown in a tiny little “pod” in a far end of the Moscone Center. I hope to eventually meet as many of you as I can to swap stories and to put faces to names.
In the meantime, here’s a very interesting article about a young rapper/playwright named Dan Wolf who starting with a single manilla envelope containing a letter written by his grandfather embarked on a journey that led him to Hamburg to discover the amazing parallels between the life and times of his grandfather and that of his own. It’s a fascinating story, that was turned into a theater piece called “Stateless” which I had the privilege of seeing earlier this yeat at the Bay Area Hip Hop Theater Festival.
Check it out:
November 21st, 2005 at 8:26 am
Hi John,
Just got the details on downloading the beta and I can’t wait to get home to try it out.
BTW, have you given any thought to putting up a Bugzilla instance to track the bug reports?
Being a prod manager in my day job, I can personally attest to its effectiveness in making RAD prod devt mucho easier.
If you want, I can help you setup an instance on the memoryminer website. I tried doing a netcraft ping on memoryminer.com, but its not giving up the Host OS. Regardless, it will run on Linux and OS X.
More power to MemoryMiner!
Joel