On May 21, 2011, at 1:26 PM, John Sessoms wrote: > Before I joined PDML, I used to participate in a Usenet discussion group > "alt.binaries.photo.original". > > One of the things that group did was engage in "Challenges". Anyone could > post a challenge, and anyone else could post an image in response to the > challenge. Some of the challenges I remember were "yellow" and "song title". > > It might be possible to make this work similar to the a.b.p.o challenge. > Anyone who has an idea they'd like to collaborate on can post their challenge > to the list and anyone on the list can opt in to the challenges they find > interesting. > > Because a.b.p.o was a binaries group on usenet, it was possible to post the > challenge images directly to the group. That would not work for PDML, but I > think we could find a work-around. > > I know Flickr has a way to organize groups so that members of the group can > post to common "page" (?), although I don't know how it works ... haven't > needed to know before now. I'll have to take a look at how Flickr groups work > and get back to y'all on that. > > But it might be possible to create a "PDML Collaborative Group" on Flickr or > one of the other free image hosting sites to organize the postings by theme. > Interesting notion John, like a cross between the PUG themes and Larry's scavenger hunts. However, I think it misses the element of collaboration. Working together. It might inspire individuals to work in parallel, and you could get a nice collection of individual images around a common theme, but it is still a bunch of individuals each doing their own thing. What I took Christine's idea to be was a call for collaboration, for working together on projects. At least in my understanding of the idea, that would mean a handful (2-5) from PDML would first agree on a general topic. Beach maybe. There would be some initial negotiation to define the limits of the topic. Does Beach include Shore? As I write this, a bunch of kayakers floated down the river past my window; would photos of such activity fit within a Beach theme? That would need to be worked out among, and agreed to by, the members of the work group. It might be that they original author (Christine in this case) of the Beach topic could be the final arbiter on the meaning, focus, scope of the theme. Once the group composition is pretty well settled and the scope of the project decided, then the collaborators would go off in a corner and huddle. OK, so it is a virtual corner, a virtual huddle; same difference. They would work out their ground rules for how to collaborate, e.g., email everything back and forth to all in the work group? Does the putative leader serve as the central node? Do they set up a private Facebook or Posterous group as a shared space? They would proceed with their photography, sharing interim products with one-another, brainstorming suggestions on extending and/or refining the topic, in the process developing a script of sorts for the essay they are working on together. At some point they have enough content, they edit the content into a photo essay, and put it in a gallery someplace where all can admire and critique.
For me, the exciting aspect of what I think I heard from Christine is the notion of collaboration. In my professional life most of my work was in collaboration with others, whether it was defining research issues, planning and executing projects, preparing presentations, or writing articles and books. Christine's idea for me served as a jumping off place to think about how collaboration might be possible in this domain as well. stan -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
