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The Organic City is Recognized by the Interactive Media Awards
That’s right! The Organic City won an IMA Outstanding Achievement Award, with an overall score of 467. We received an email from the IMA stating:

The Outstanding Achievement award is the second highest honor bestowed by IMA and an extremely challenging award to win. Your website has excelled in all areas of our judging criteria and represents a very high standard of planning, execution and overall professionalism.

Happy New Year!
The Organic City team sends a big “thank you” out to all 2006 project participants, and we wish you all a happy and creative 2007. Now that we’re out of graduate school, we’ve been busy in the “real” world, but The Organic City’s website is still running strong and our virtual community is open for all to participate.

End of the School Year
The end of our school year is fast approaching… and we’ve been busy! We finalized The Organic City’s story tours section, released The Organic City Mobile, and posted new featured video tours. We’re also preparing for our final public presentation on June 7. For more information about all of these activities, please visit Seamus’ blog.

And so, as we reach the end of our thesis project, we plan on reemerging back into the real world. We have had a blast building this project from the ground up. We would like to offer our sincere thanks to everyone who has collaborated and helped to make The Organic City the vibrant and diverse community that it is today. We would also like to thank our thesis advisor and our professors for providing us with crucial feedback, advice and state of the art technology.

We intend to keep the site up and we hope that you all will continue to contribute more of your wonderful stories. We still intend to collaborate with the community and encourage you to do the same.

Recent Press
The Organic City is featured in an article written by Monique Beeler and published in the Tuesday May 9, 2006 edition of the Oakland Tribune. The article is titled “Techs and the city.” In the article, Ms. Beeler writes that TheOrganicCity.com “is a lot of things–a Web site, a storytelling center, a virtual community and a future source for downloadable digital tour guides.” Ms. Beeler expresses The Organic City team’s open invitation to the community. She quotes team member Seamus Byrne: “We’re a testing ground to see what (is possible)…The community can do what they jolly well like with it.”

Oakland Tribune Article
The Organic City is featured in an article written by Annalee Allen and published in the Sunday April 23, 2006 edition of the Oakland Tribune. The article is titled “Cloggers share Oakland experiences online.” In the article, Annalee writes that theorganiccity.com is a Web site where “…stories about Oakland abound, and new posts are appearing daily.” Annalee also quotes team member Seamus Byrne describing the new concept of clogging: “There is blogging and now their is clogging. . . Clogging is a community blog for people who want to talk to each other about where they live and what that means to them.”

Storytelling Competition Launched
The Organic City recently launched the “Oakland Storytelling Competition.”
The winner of the competition will have their story published in the Summer 2006 edition of Watchword Literary Magazine and will be interviewed as a featured author at The Organic City. Thousands of postcards announcing the competition have been sent to Oakland community members, including English teachers and students at Oakland-area schools. For more information please visit our competition page.

Webby Award Update
The Organic City has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Best Student Website category. Currently we are in second place, a mere 8% behind the leader. Looking at the latest positions we still have a chance at catching up. So if you haven’t already done so, please vote for us as the Best Student Website of 2006. It takes just a couple of minutes! Voting is open to the public from April 11th to May 5th at http://peoplesvoice.webbyawards.com.

Featured Story
The Cleveland Cascade was a stunning Italian-inspired water feature on the shores of Lake Merritt, built in 1923. Its water cascaded 100 feet down a steep hill– pouring through a sequence of ornate bowls– from the Cleveland Heights hill above almost into Lake Merritt below. Two flights of steps flanked the Cascade and are heavily used today by walkers, runners, and extreme exercisers.

In 2004, neighbors came together to reclaim the cascade– to revitalize it as a park, to restore the water feature to its original beauty and vitality, and to create some long-lived magic in their city.

On April 8th 2006, The Organic City film crew interviewed the two local residents behind the excavation and restoration of the Cleveland Cascade, Barbara Newcombe and Jim Ratliff. Check out the story’s three episodes:

• The Cleveland Cascade Story (Part 1)
• The Cleveland Cascade Story (Part 2)
• The Cleveland Cascade Story (Part 3)

Webby Awards

The Webby Awards, the leading international honor for Web sites, today nominated The Organic City for the Best Student Web site of 2006. The Organic City is a digital community storytelling project created by Seamus Byrne and Sarah Mattern, students in Cal State East Bay’s multimedia graduate program. Winners will be announced on May 9, 2006 and honored at The Tenth Annual Webby Awards in New York City on June 12th. The Tenth Annual Webby Awards received a record number of entries from over 40 countries and all 50 states.

Hailed as the “Online Oscars” by Time Magazine, The Webby Awards are determined by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization with a membership that includes musician David Bowie, Internet inventor Vinton Cerf, Naked Chef Jamie Oliver, The Body Shop president Anita Roddick, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, and fashion designer Max Azria.

“The Webby Awards honors the outstanding web sites that are setting the standards for the internet,” said Tiffany Shlain, founder and ambassador of The Webby Awards. “The Organic City’s Webby Award nomination is a testament to the skill, ingenuity, and vision of its creators.”

As a nominee for a Webby Award, The Organic City is also eligible to win a People’s Voice Award. Voting is open to the public from April 11th to May 5th at http://peoplesvoice.webbyawards.com.

The Organic City is exploring connections between story, place, and community, as well as the ways new media can encourage personal reflection, reconnect neighbors, and help establish a sense of place. This is especially important as much of today’s media tends to isolate people from their own creativity, their local landscapes, and their local communities. To support our efforts, please vote for us!

Spring is here at last, although with all that rain it’s hard to tell! Sarah and I have been very busy over the last few weeks meeting members within the Oakland community, developing a mobile version of the site for the Pocket PC, and creating another issue of Organicity, your friendly neighborhood online newsletter.

On the 15th of March we presented the website and some of the new video stories to our thesis committee and a large group of students at CSUEB. We also demonstrated how to build a tour on the website and how to download it to an iPod. It was great to be able to showcase the project to our multimedia Professors and peers.

This week we have been busy planning the mobile experience for June, as well as preparing for our upcoming story competition (more on this next time). We just started our final quarter in college so we are going exert every joule of energy we have into The Organic City over the next 10 weeks.

The community response to our project has been fantastic. Thanks to everyone for contributing to the website, proving that Oakland truly is a hub of creative activity. If you haven’t yet contributed, please tell a story today.

Take or Create Your Own Story Tour
You are invited to explore The Organic City’s new Story Tours section. Here you can build a tour of stories tied together by a common theme. Then you can view the tour online, or download the tour’s multimedia content to your mobile media player for touring onsite. In addition, story tours are automatically created for all authors who submit stories to the site. Please visit The Organic City today to begin exploring story tours… or to create your own!

Black and White and Read All Over
The Organic City project is featured in the current (03-22) issue of the East Bay Express. The East Bay Express is an Emeryville-based weekly newspaper serving the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. The print version of the paper can be found (for free) in newsstands throughout Oakland or you can read the article at their website.

Team Entered in CSU Research Competition
The Organic City team will be one of ten student research teams representing CSU East Bay at the 20th Annual CSU Student Research Competition. This system-wide competition will be held May 5 and 6 at CSU Channel Islands. Our team is entered in the Creative Arts and Design category. We’ve submitted a paper on our work and will be presenting our project at the competition. Cash prizes will be awarded for the winning projects.

Featured Stories
Now that Organic City participants are able to submit audio and video media, the site’s multimedia content is flourishing. This week’s featured stories include three recently posted video narratives:

• Grand Lake Market, posted by Julian, documents the history, sights, sounds, and tastes of a popular farmer’s market in Oakland.
• On a Search for Alien Sea Creatures, a short story written by Christian, was adapted into a five-location video, which you can begin exploring at the 8th Street Bridge.
• The There! series, posted by Marc, a long-time Oakland resident, reflects on place and the influence it has on identity as Marc tours his six Oakland homes.

Call for Film Crew Volunteers
Over the next two months we will be out in the Oakland Community filming local events, interviewing local people of interest, and adapting stories from the site into short movies. Producing this kind of media takes many people. If you are interested in making films (or learning how) and you have even a couple of hours of your time to spare in the next 10 weeks please visit the participate page.

The Organic City Wins Graduate Student Research Grant
The Organic City was recently awarded a Graduate Student Research Grant from CSU East Bay’s Academic Programs and Graduate Studies department. The award notice stated, “The Research Committee was impressed with the significance and quality of your research and is pleased to be able to offer you some support.” Grant money will help fund mobile devices that will be used to develop, test, and showcase the project’s mobile experience. We are honored to receive the award and will put it to good use!

Got Video?
Now when you write a story at www.theorganiccity.com you may also add video files. If your story has an accompanying video, or, if your story is a video, all you have to do is upload your video to a server (for free video server space we recommend http://www.youtube.com). Then, simply link your story to the video file via our new user-friendly “video” button. Check out two video submissions by Oakland_ear, “Women’s Rowing ~1950” and “Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace”. We are also making steady progress towards allowing you to download media from the Organic City website to your mobile devices.

Organic City Team Speaks at Oral History Workshop
Sarah and I had the pleasure being guest speakers at Mills College, Oakland on Saturday the 11th of February. We presented an overview of the Organic City project to a group of enthusiastic people at The Oral History (OH) Workshop. The introductory oral history workshop is taught twice a year (semi-annual) and is open to the public. The workshop thoroughly covers all aspects of oral history including legal and ethical issues, recording and cataloging. We would like to thank all involved at the workshop for a very memorable day. To be notified about future workshops, please contact Nancy MacKay, Oakland Living History Program Coordinator, mackay[at]mills[dot]edu. The Oakland Living History Program (OLHP) at Mills College is dedicated to recording the stories of individuals who have witnessed substantial change in Oakland, California.

Stills from Our First Shoot
Check out photos taken by Del and Christian during the shooting of “On a Search For Alien Sea Creatures” a short film adapted from a story by Christian. The film is currently being edited and will be available on our website in the upcoming weeks.

Featured Story
Our featured story for late February is “My Lake Merritt Story“, a short but sweet account of author Jenny’s life lived near the lake in the seventies. Thank you to Jenny for submitting such a beautiful story. It looks like the “Nature” genre is full of budding writers.

Call for Urban Myths
The Organic City’s Urban Myth section is empty! I know that there has to be somebody out there with a city fable, a tale of hearsay, or a far-fetched rumor or two to add to the Storybase. If you do have such a story (or any other for that matter!), please go to the Write A Story webpage.

The Organic City Film Crew Begins Shooting
After months of web development, The Organic City team is finally venturing into the great outdoors to film the first Organic City mobile story. This weekend we will be out and about in Oakland with cameras, lights and a clapperboard, creating a digital film adapted from one of the stories submitted to the website. This film will be the first in a series of short movies that will be featured on the Organic City website over the next few months. The digital films will also be available for viewing on various mobile devices during the project’s mobile experience at Lake Merritt in June 2006. We start shooting on Saturday the 11th Feb in the morning and it should be a lot of fun. If anyone would like to volunteer to assist in any area of production, please let us know.

Digital Storytelling Blog Features this Site
The Organic City was featured on the popular group digital storytelling blog “Grand Text Auto” this week. Nick Montfort, author of the acclaimed book “Twisty Little Passages” gives The Organic City website his thumbs up. “Grand Text Auto” is an online digital digest featuring the latest news on interactive storytelling and games, as well as a thorough compendium of useful links relating to digital storytelling. This site is a favorite of The Organic City team, and it is an honor to be featured. Check it out at http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/2006/02/05/the-there-there/.

Beta Version of Audio Player Available
You now can attach audio to stories posted on The Organic City’s website using the story formatting buttons. Sarah has been tinkering away behind the scenes making audio playability for the user a reality. The overall goal is for users to be able to podcast stories and play them back on their mobile devices at the place where the storypoint is located. Over the next few weeks we will keep you posted on the other exciting website developments.

Call for Stories
We are always looking for a good story, so if you know of any, please share them with the community at http://www.theorganiccity.com/wordpress/write-a-story/ . There are many genres to choose from, including love, mystery, journal, and poetry. There is even a category for lies! There is a very good chance that if you submit a story, it will be produced into a digital film or an audio vignette for an mp3 player.

Featured Story
Please take a few minutes to read this week’s featured story, Calm Lake to Combat Crazy Office. It was written by Miriam and is from the “nature” genre.

After a summer of research and conceptual development, and a fall of web design and programming, Version 1.0 of The Organic City’s website was released today. We recommend you use the free Firefox browser when experiencing this site. Thank you for participating!