Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

by Alicia Schmidt, Marketing Strategist

Apparently attendance at SXSW Interactive nearly double this year as evidenced by the fact that there have been long, long lines to get into most of the parties. Last night, I wanted to go to The People Powered Party hosted by Moo, Threadless, Etsy and SF locals Timbuk2 (some of my favs), but the line stretched around the block to get into a bar the size of my living room. No thanks. Seems like the party lines have been one of the biggest topics about the conference this year. Off to a late dinner instead where we gossiped about how the SXSW crowd turned on Bay Area journalist Sarah Lacy who interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (a painfully inept communicator - thus the need for him to create a system to “help people connect and communicate more efficiently”). I’m not taking sides on this one, but you decide for yourself by watching the video on TechCrunch. I’m sure there is an interesting blog to be written about gender and SXSW Interactive, but I don’t have the energy to write it today.

The next day, it was off to a panel called Games for Change (coincidentally the name of the organization that was moderating the panel). The panelists described the challenges of trying to make games with social impact, including the fact that games are not typically simple carriers of information, but interactive experiences that include multiple points of view whose impact can be hard to measure using traditional methods. They also mentioned that about 80% of new games fail - in other words, only about 1 in 5 games actually garner a significant audience. Hard to hear for non-profits who typically don’t have R&D resources to spare. Most interesting to me on this panel was Mary Flanagan from Tiltfactor Lab at Hunter College. She described a process that developers (and nonprofits, and youth) can use to develop a game that is a fun, user-oriented experience that also has cause-based and issue relevant design (harder than you think). Called “Grow a Game” cards, I was intrigued by how they simplified what could be a complex and confusing design experience. I also imagined that the process could be adapted for any non-profit interested in using new technologies to create online campaigns around their issues.

Finally, Greg Stokes from the MacArthur Foundation gave the skinny on the challenges of developing measurable outcomes for educational and social issue games (the short of it - its hard, we’re still learning and funders don’t necessarily expect you to have all the answers), and also talked briefly about some of the competitions sponsored by MacArthur around digital media and learning.

If you want to check out some of the games talked about on the panel, check out these links:
Games for Change
The Redistricting Game

Day Four: lots of “pimping” . . . I went to two panels with “pimp” in the title. No surprise I suppose since SXSW uses a public panel picker to choose its panels. Anyone can propose a panel and it is up to the community to choose the ones that sound interesting. Which means if you ever wanted to propose a panel, you should do it in 2008, and you might want to include “pimp” in the title. The geeks seem to like that.

One of the “pimp” panels was Pimp My Nonprofit. Unfortunately, I wanted this panel to be better than it was . . . Most helpful might be some links to inspire . . . so, here are some examples of “pimped” non-profits: I Love Mountains, Invisible Children, Maplight.org, and the Brookyln Musuem. Or check out TechSoup or the blog of Beth Kanter.

BAVC is helping nonprofits think about ways they can launch online campaigns using new technologies through the new Nonprofit Institute for New Media Applications. If you’re interested, find out more at http://www.bavc.org/nonprofitinstitute. The deadline is April 1.

That’s the quick and dirty for now.

P.S. If you don’t Twitter, you’re just not cool (according to SXSW).