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ITP has received a grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation to collaborate with Xavier University in New Orleans to do digital storytelling and community development workshops. The goal of the project is in part to explore the institutional responsibility to community and to discover how to document the idea of 'home'. freeFormed has been invited to participate in this project by offering an initial workshop on how to use the freeformed site. As part of the grant, ITP will be giving Nokia phones and SIM cards to the ten undergraduate Xavier students that will be visiting New York on February 19th. When the students arrive, members of freeFormed will be meeting with them to introduce the site and participate in their documentation process. At least one member of freeFormed will also be traveling down to New Orleans during the ITP spirng break on or around March 12th to further contribute to the project and hopefully to meet with community groups in New Orleans and other students at Xavier to teach them about the possibility of mobile posting and to learn from the participants about their specific needs involving online documentation. We are very excited to be part of this project, to meet the students, faculty and community of New Orleans and to discuss the documentation possibilities of the mobile phone.

Posted by Cat at 01:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For the last three months, freeFormed.org has been working with Witness.org on the Human Rights Video Hub Pilot. The Human Rights Video Hub Pilot is a collaborative project between Witness.org, Global Voices and freeformed.org created with the intention to encourage people to record the human rights abuses they witness with their mobile phones and submit the videos via MMS messaging or through a J2ME application to a witness review board for curation and publication on the globalvoicesonline site.

The project is expected to go live on December 17th, 2006. To view more information go here.

The project is also being exhibited at the ITP Winter Show 2006.

Info:

ITP Winter Show 2006
Sunday, December 17 from 2 to 6pm
Monday, December 18 from 5 to 9pm

A two-day festival of interactive sight, sound and technology from the student artists and innovators at ITP.

An oversized Greenwich Village loft houses the computer labs, rotating exhibitions, and production workshops that are ITP -- the Interactive Telecommunications Program. Founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media, ITP has grown into a living community of technologists, theorists, engineers, designers, and artists uniquely dedicated to pushing the boundaries of interactivity in the real and digital worlds. A hands-on approach to experimentation, production and risk-taking make this hi-tech fun house a creative home not only to its 230 students, but also to an extended network of the technology industry's most daring and prolific practitioners.

Posted by Cat at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Unfortunately, due to a myriad of hosting/server problems and a slight re-direction in functionality, freeformed.org will not be launching today. In order to provide our new users with the best and most functional experience, we have decided to release a first version of freeformed next week, implementing our brand new BLAST network, followed by full implementation of freeformed circles. We are certainly unhappy about the delay, but very excited to introduce our new technology. Check back next week!

Posted by Cat at 03:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Thanks to a brilliant paper writen by Yonatan Kelib and co-authored by all of the freeFormed.org developers, freeFormed will be presented at the 2006 Young Investigators Forum In Culture Technology in South Korea at the end of this month. Naturally, we are all incredibly excited about this opportunity, esepcially Yonatan who will travel to South Korea for free as the freeFormed representative. More on this to come.

Posted by Cat at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On October 20th freeFormed.org (alpha) will officially go live with a new design and improved functionality. We are expecting to release the site initially to the ITP community. In order to sign-up you will have to text a message from your mobile phone to join@freeformed.org and fill-out a very simple questionaire online. If you already joined freeformed during our intial stage DON'T WORRY, your media, username and password are all still the same as they were before the redesign. However, you will have to text a message to join@freeformed.org in order to reactivate your account.

If you would like to receive more information about the site's release, enhanced functionality or be notified immediately when we go live please send an email (or text message) to contact@freeformed.org. As always we appreciate feedback, so please feel free comment on posts on this blog, or email us with your ideas at the above address.

We are all very excited and we hope our users will be too!

Posted by Cat at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We are very excited to be presenting our ideas and concepts behind the creation of freeformed at this graduate student symposium being held at NYU. We will be presenting tomorrow at 10:45 alongside two well respected people in the field of social networking online. If you are interested in attending, here is the schedule. Hope to see you there!

Posted by Cat at 03:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)