Loveland - The Works

WDWOT Member Update 1

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 16:46:47 +0000

Dear WDWOT Members,

Thanks for taking the red pill and becoming the very first paid members of the service! You can see the little Pet Blocks starting to fill in at http://whydontweownthis.com/membership :-)

We’ll try to refrain from over-communicating via email but you can always follow what we’re up to and reach out to us any time through http://facebook.com/makeloveland and http://twitter.com/makeloveland .

Still, we wanted to let you know about some things going on one week out from the first update of 2013 and stay in the habit of updating everyone through one channel or another:

Visit Us:

Thursday, February 7th from 7 - 10 PM there’s an open house with food and drinks at the downtown Detroit office space we share with some other great projects called the Department of Alternatives. Info and RSVP if you want to come by and meet: http://www.facebook.com/events/395934023833651/?fref=ts .

Feedback:

Please let us know at team@makeloveland.com or the feedback forum if there’s anything at all we can do to improve your experience using the service. Right now we have lots of different kinds of general users and are trying to better define and serve different use-cases. Some of you are actively making maps and surveying properties, some of you are going over foreclosure risks in your neighborhood, some of you are looking up property owners, and others (most) just check in periodically when something in the world piques your interest. Maybe one of the biggest things we’ve noticed is that we should do a better job letting you know when you’re making notes completely privately for your own record, so when you do check in you can easily scribble a note just for yourself without talking to the world.

Meetings, meetings, meetings…

Earlier this week we met with the Wayne County Deputy Treasurer to continue our conversation about keeping our data fresh and helping prevent foreclosures. Next week we meet with the head of Detroit’s Planning & Development Department to see about updating our list of city-owned properties, and after that we meet with the Director of the Detroit Land Bank who will likely be taking ownership of the nearly 9,000 unsold 2012 tax foreclosure properties. You should know that part of our job is developing these relationships to help deliver you more and better information and utility.

Features & Data Updates:

We’re working to get our first mobile photo app up on the Members-Only Labs section of the site. The project code name is “Blexting” and is being developed for the purpose of quickly taking and posting pictures of extremely blighted things to the map. We’re also working on a few new data layers for you to view the city through, likely city-owned, land bank-owned, and bank-owned next.

Business & Block Club Packages:

Alongside individual site memberships, we’ve been developing private, customized, multi-user WDWOT packages for businesses, large projects, neighborhood groups and block clubs, and government departments. We just signed up a large custom project we’ll be working on and are meeting with more businesses and block clubs who are interested in having a version of the service focused on their jobs and communities. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, please let us know.

WDWOT In The News:

We’ve been excited by the number of people talking about the site, particularly the tax status view, which is something no one’s really seen before. A couple of neat articles in particular:

Huffington Post Detroit: “‘Why Don’t We Own This’ Site Maps Detroit’s Housing Crisis With New Tools To Battle Back” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/28/why-dont-we-own-this-detroit_n_2550299.html

The Atlantic Cities: “Detroit’s Property Tax Black Hole, in Map Form” http://www.theatlanticcities.com/housing/2013/01/detroits-property-tax-black-hole/4517/

Thanks:

Thanks again. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop the service beyond your expectations in 2013. Reach out anytime and share http://whydontweownthis.com with your networks when you see a need,

The LOVELAND & WDWOT Team

(Jerry, Mary, Larry, & Alex)

The Dead Dishwasher Dilemma & Other Analogies: Notes From A Recent Talk

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 22:57:00 +0000

This is a hopefully more eloquent summary of a short talk I gave at the recent Model D IdeaLab session at the Detroit Revitalization and Business conference at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. The analogies are some of the things that went through my mind as we worked on the new release of WDWOT.com.

It’s not an especially comprehensive list, but I think they’re interesting/useful little vignettes that I attempted to connect in a 7 minute talk. It’s maybe a little goofy in parts, but hey, who do you think is writing this? :-) And I typed it straight through, please forgive any typos.

☆★✡✯

The Dead Dishwasher Dilemma

& Other Analogies

1. Dead Dishwashers

2. A Pair of Glasses

3. Taxes & Crowdfunding

4. Visions & Vacuums

☆★✡✯

1. Dead Dishwashers

As we study the scale and specificities of Detroit’s information, disinvestment, ownership, foreclosure, and land use problems, it becomes clearer and clearer that no city has ever had to face a problem this large before, with such a vast constellation of contributing factors and related problems. There can be an understandable criticism of city management when it comes to how these problems are being dealt with, but I want to help put you in a more empathetic and constructive frame of mind when considering the actions or inactions of various city, county, and state departments.

Imagine that you’re a dishwasher. When times are good and things are going well, you’re receiving dirty dishes, washing them, and getting them right back out into circulation.

When things are busy, the dishes start to pile up faster than you can clean them. You have to work harder and stay later, probably for no extra pay and certainly a lot of extra grief.

Then, suddenly, 5,000 dump trucks full of dirty dishes pull into the parking lot, back up to the building, unload all at once, the building collapses, and you die.

You just die.

And the mountain of dishes continue to pile up as the world waits for you to do your impossible job.

So what we have now isn’t a dishwashing problem, it’s a large-scale cleanup and emergency reinvention problem that involves more than soap and water.

I don’t want to torture the analogy too much, but it resonates with my general observation after talking to many different departments about why they haven’t yet shared public data with the public (they struggle to grasp it and keep up themselves), or been able to create new policies that effectively respond to the disaster (when a tornado hits your house, does it make sense to start vacuuming the carpet when there’s a hole in the wall?). I hope we can all empathize with dead dishwashers who were crushed on the job, and think about how we can help dig them out, revivify them, and get the restaurant going again.

☆★✡✯

2. A Pair of Glasses

[Note, you may need a pair of glasses to read this image, if so go here]

I was productively browsing Reddit the other day and clicked on a thread called “What medical condition do you have that you thought was absolutely normal?” One of the most popular reports was people thinking they could see perfectly fine until they put on a pair of glasses, and then having their minds absolutely blown by the new level of detail they could see in the world.

We use the glasses analogy a lot with WDWOT: we’re building regular glasses, x-ray glasses, magic glasses: something that helps you see deeper into the world around you.

I think that Detroit has a very serious vision problem, not just a vision like a long-term vision like the Detroit Future City project is trying to address, but an everyday vision problem that we really can’t see what’s happening right here right now before our eyes. Detroiters need information glasses. We give a damn, and yes, hustle harder, but we’re largely blind and think it’s normal. This means we can’t be as effective as we should be and that even if you understand the city in your bones through a long life here, there’s a whole world of understanding you are missing out on.

One of my favorite comments on the thread was this:

“Before I had glasses I just assumed that everyone saw the same as me. I remember the first time playing cricket with glasses and was amazed at how I could now see the ball after it was hit. It was like everything was in HD now, I spent ages just staring at grass thinking “holy sh*t”“

I laughed because we spend a lot of time looking at parcels of land in the city thinking the same thing. Holy shiz! There it is! The situation, in much more precise and actionable detail. Look at ‘em all! Wow!

To use a topical example where glasses would have helped everybody, recently there was a large land sale of 1,500 city-owned properties to the Hantz Woodlands Project. There was a loud debate about the merits of the deal that took place without anyone wearing their glasses. Actually I think a lot of the heat in the debate came from people’s frustrations that they don’t have glasses. Lots of stories were shared about people trying to figure out what the city owns in their neighborhoods and then purchase or use things just like a much more highly equipped and capitalized developer who was able to make their own pair.

It’s interesting to see the spread of the 1,500 properties, which is very different from what you might blur-ily imagine to be large, contiguous football fields of space. The properties are actually dotted and loose, ducking behind and around people’s houses and other privately owned lots. It’s buckshot. Not what you expect.

And if you put on your x-ray glasses to look at the tax distress map and see what’s likely to go to the foreclosure auction this year, it opens a whole new vista on what’s happening here. It’s also interesting to look at the 2012 foreclosure auction and see that hundreds of properties in the area went unsold for $500, when absolutely anyone anywhere could have purchased them without question. Alex and I were at the Hantz open city council hearing and one of the council members asked, “Have we ever sold this much land before? I don’t think so.” Sure we did. Just a month or so prior we sold about 5 times as much to strangers from wherever with no real notice or mention.

That’s what happens when you don’t wear your glasses. I don’t think glasses are intentionally being kept from people, it just goes back to the dead dishwasher dilemma.

☆★✡✯

3. Taxes & Crowdfunding

We’ve done a lot of work and experimentation around the crowdfunding of projects, and plan to do more in the future, maybe even working on the crowdfunding and community ownership of properties. Somebody asked me not too long ago: “What is the biggest crowdfundraiser of all time?”

I thought hard about it, and my mind jumped the rails from things like Kickstarter to really thinking about what things crowds of people collectively pay for. Viewed that way you can see taxes as crowdfunding, and the United States of America as perhaps the world’s biggest crowdfundraiser (sort of ironic since when the US started it was to flee taxes).

Looking at the overwhelming tax distress map of Detroit and seeing the nearly half a billion dollar property tax and penalty collection deficit, you can really see why city services aren’t funded. The current situation combines broad poverty where people can not afford to pay what are some seriously high taxes and really crazy penalties, with a culture that doesn’t really see the point. What are we paying for again? We’re not even covering the salaries of city employees much less the actual things they need to do, which is presumably the point of paying them.

This is still a hazy thought, but there is huge room for innovation in how taxes are priced, targeted, and made transparent so that people feel ABSOLUTELY GREAT when they pay them. It’s a general problem of taxes and why no one likes them. You simply feel like money is being wicked away from you without seeing any direct benefit. Maybe Detroit can be an innovator here and use the opportunity of the current tax disaster to create a new, fairer, clearer, more localized system where payments are understandable and lead to direct benefit.

It’s a crude analogy, but right now the city is like a Kickstarter that no one wants to fund, even if they can. My money goes towards what again? Paying for dead dishwashers?

I don’t know what will or should happen, but tax distress is so deep and so widespread that something will have to be reinvented if we’re going to properly crowdfund the city again.

☆★✡✯

4. Visions & Vacuums

Aristotle gets credit for saying, “Nature abhors a vacuum,” meaning every space is required to be filled with something, even if it’s just air. As we talk about the future of the city that currently has so many buildings and places seemingly full of nothing, you can be sure that something’s coming.

It doesn’t have to be so scary if we can find a way to better invite and guide things into the vacuum, but let me present a scary thought to you.

As we all know from innumerable news stories and discussions and the felt experience of Detroit’s dire financial situation, we’re quite likely looking at an emergency financial manager or bankruptcy. It’s part of the physics of the vacuum that when things fall apart, some sort of corrective force attempts entry.

Recently a surprisingly serious pie-in-the-sky proposal was made to sell Belle Isle for a billion dollars and create a new commonwealth with its own rules, laws, tax system, and limitations on who can live there.

Setting aside the question of whether it’s a good idea or not (it doesn’t sound like a great idea to me, but it is an interesting vision, articulated more clearly than most), the whole thing sounds so impossibly nutty that you can’t even process the notion that something like that could happen. The thought enters the mind and then leaves. “Yea, maybe we can paint the sky purple, too. Now what’s for lunch?.”

But when you combine the earlier analogy of dead dishwashers, a lack of glasses, and the financial distress of an unfunded city full of vacuums, you need to consider what might happen if the city truly goes bankrupt under these conditions.

Bankruptcy is a situation where a new dishwasher who’s very much alive will sit down with his glasses on and review every vacuum in the city: a judge with total information of assets and debts looking at what there is to be sold off to repay what the city owes. It will be his or her legal responsibility.

I’m guessing a billion dollar offer on a cherished but technically “non-performing asset” like Belle Isle, along with the promise of billions of dollars more in investment, would look like a pretty clear win. Pie-in-the-sky somehow becomes sobriety.

You might be aware of the current debate over whether or not to let the State of Michigan pay for and manage Belle Isle as a state park. To my understanding that hasn’t happened yet basically over the concern of losing something, even if nothing really changes and the loss is largely symbolic to some. You might also view it as an effort to keep something pretty decent-sounding of a vacuum that demands something.

There’s something really important here as relates to how Detroit manages its vacuums and invites investment. There’s no clear way to do it right, and hindsight is always 20/20, but as we put on our glasses and look at the city, we have to get real and become excited about guiding the things we want to see into our vacuums and less focused on pushing everything out. Because if we spend time pushing things out that are ready to go and seem pretty good, not only do we lose out on our best chance of helping make them good and feeling that shared thrill of success, but there will come a point where something less good appears, and choice won’t be a part of that conversation.

Playing chicken with a vacuum just displeases the chicken and covers the floor in feathers. And with that I have clearly overplayed my analogy quota. My apologies.

Some things to think about as we help bring dead dishwashers back to life.

"Excuse me, human! Which Way To The Detroit Dog Park?"

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:15:00 +0000

Nothing motivates like a deadline, and there are 2 weeks to raise $10,000 for the creation of Detroit’s first off-leash dog park.

Here’s what I’m asking from you, dear reader:

Check out the Detroit Dog Park project on Kickstarter and watch the video: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/370893558/detroit-dog-park

Look inside yourself and think for a second: Would you like to see a dog park in Detroit?

Since the answer is likely yes, please consider these 2 options:

If money is super tight (if…ha!) or you don’t have a particular dog in this fight, erm, park, pledge something really really small, like $1, or $5 or $10, or whatever you can muster.

Remember! There are 2 numbers that count here: The amount of money raised towards the goal *and* the number of backers: that all-important showing of love and support.

Every single time the number of backers goes up, a ripple of toothy smiles spreads across the entire dog park team and thereby to their dogs. Try it! It feels great!

If you *do* have a dog who will make use of the park (coming to Corktown, right next to downtown, easily accessible to many all around Metro Detroit), or support those who do, consider this:

What is it worth to you as a caring dog owner (or appreciator) to have a safe and inviting place for your dog to run, play, socialize with other dogs, and to meet other such caring folk?

As you can see on the Kickstarter page, the physical design of the park is going to be great, and if you or your business can donate at the $250 level or above you’ll get a beautiful custom brick like so:

Detroit needs more community spaces that give people a reason to stand outside with other people, meet strangers, and talk about the world, while surrounded by puppies.

While I don’t work on the project directly I know the people that do (and live with one…and her dog) and can vouch for their energy and organization to get this done.

Why? One simple lesson I’ve learned over the past 6 months: DOG PARK PEOPLE DON’T MESS AROUND!!!

Thank you very much, and please spread the word,

Jerry Paffendorf, Detroit Dog Park Fan and $250 Backer

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/370893558/detroit-dog-park

All WDWOT and Auction All The Time

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 19:25:08 +0000

For the past while it’s been all Why Don’t We Own This? and blogging with Alex on the WDWOT blog. Back here soon, but in the meantime…

20,000 detroit properties are being auctioned for $500 from october 19-26. see something and say something at http://whydontweownthis.com

it’s like x-ray glasses for the city

(•_•) ,

( •_•)>⌐□-□
(⌐□_□)

also on the twit circuit with a live feed at http://twitter.com/wdwot

Techonomy Detroit Presents "I See Tech People" Directed By M. Night Shyamalan

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 03:19:00 +0000

Yesterday there was a pretty big technology conference in town called Techonomy. Tickets were $500 so I didn’t really think hard about going (after all you can buy a house for that price around here, which is primarily what’s on our mind with the county auction now in progress and being tracked at whydontweownthis.com ;-)).

Still, it crossed my mind that this is the sort of event that doesn’t happen often in Detroit (which needs more pixels with it’s atoms) and I should probably be there shaking hands and kissing babies to represent LOVELAND’s projects.

Well, I didn’t make it, but I did have a really nice time driving conference-going tech writer Erick Schonfeld around town on a little sampler plate tour (connected via Twitter by mutual friend and cool dude Andy Weissman at Union Square Ventures — the technology, it works…sometimes!), and a tiny clip of me as a talking head shot by Erick on his iPad even ended up on the site along with videos of the conference speakers (which are all posted here). That was a cool surprise!

Here’s the video clip of me, posted first because it’s super short, and a couple talks I found interesting. One with Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, and another with Quicken Loans can’t-miss-Detroit-investor-skyscraper-fire-sale-family-mafia-man Dan Gilbert.

Jerry AKA me, taken from this post talking about ghosts, somehow — sadly the video ends before my eyes bug out like Large Marge, I disappear into vapor, and Erick wakes up screaming in a completely different city <— woo, working pretty hard to rap in the “directed by M. Night Shyamalan” reference there:

Jack Dorsey:

Dan Gilbert:

No Property Left Behind Invitation: Who, What, Where To Crowdfund At The Detroit Tax Foreclosure Auction?

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 14:08:00 +0000

The Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction touches every neighborhood in Detroit with more than 20,000 properties being auctioned citywide in September and October. In recent years more than 1/2 have not sold and been left behind even at $500:

This is an invitation for neighborhood groups, block clubs, motivated locals, and etc, who would like to take ownership of tax foreclosure auction properties near them that no one else bids on, to please contact me at jerry@makeloveland.com or on the telephone at 313-649-5263.

The nutshell premise is this: From October 19-25 thousands of Detroit properties all over the city will be auctioned for $500 (everything that does not sell for back taxes in September). You can see what’s coming up near you at whydontweownthis.com and if you have a clear, simple, trust-worthy plan for renovating, re-using, deconstructing, cleaning, selling, renting, or otherwise making improvements or productive use of some of these properties that no one else bids on, we’re interested in promoting you and your efforts and helping you raise the funds to acquire them.

Read on for more:

—-

Over the past couple months I’ve had some really great meetings and gotten good advice, I think, on the No Property Left Behind idea to crowdfund the purchase of $500 properties that no one else bids on in Detroit. See the original post and update here.

For those just tuning in, at last year’s Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction (link from whydontweownthis.com), more than 7,000 of the 13,000 properties being auctioned for $500 in Detroit did not sell (this year the starting number of properties is 20,000…). In rough numbers that means if someone had wanted to purchase 7,000 otherwise unpurchased properties it would have cost them $3.5 million.

That is not very much to many wealthy people and companies, and also, interestingly, not very much for a motivated crowd of people who care about Detroit.

Of course, crowdfunding the properties does not solve what happens to them on the other side. Still, it’s intriguing because in one fell swoop it would open the door to massive innovation in how Detroit does land, moving beyond the armchair question of what you would do with such an inventory if you were the city, the county, the state, or the various land banks and large owners right now, to *what are we going to do right now!* Eek!

There is value to that, and it would be amazing, for sure. If you put your daydream hat on and one, two, skip a few, the entire world would tune in for something so grand, and, the network being what it is these days, resources would likely start appearing to fund the many things that needed to be done. It could be the moment when the red tape is cut, the excuses run dry, and Detroit finally thaws in the light of increased transparency, donations, visitors, and investment.

Woo!

But. Recognizing that that is an awful lot of liability, guaranteed chaos, and a management problem quite likely above our current pay grade (mighty tho we be), there might be other options for getting at the same thing in more bite-sized chunks working directly with neighborhood organizations and hyper-local people who are interested in taking on auction properties near them that get left behind on a project by project basis.

The only way to find out is to gauge people’s interest, so I’ll use just a few quick one-examples, and hope you reach out if you’re interested or share it with people, groups, and networks you think would be:

• A block club discovers that there are 5 properties coming up at auction in their area and wants to raise the $2,500 to buy them all if no one else does. The properties are known to be dangerous and blighted houses that need to be taken down, so they additionally ask for deconstruction resources, either time, money, or equipment.

• A charitable organization focused on a neighborhood with 1,000 properties coming up at auction decide they can handle 100 of them that are either livable homes or vacant lots, with the goal to find renters and people that want to garden or otherwise maintain the land. They set an ambitious $50,000 goal knowing that their nonprofit status does away with property taxes and binds them to a trusted charitable purpose for the properties which they can extend to their existing network.

• A farmer identifies 2 contiguous lots near his existing farm and seeks sponsorship in purchasing them where funders will get some food in the next growing season.

Etc.

Again, if you’re interested in taking on specific auction properties that you’re familiar with and have plans for in areas near you, please write me at jerry@makeloveland.com or call 313-649-5263. No guarantees, but if you have a trustworthy idea and network, something really great could be sparked here!

Why Don't We Own This? Updates!

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 18:57:00 +0000

For those playing the home game, check out what’s new with Why Don’t We Own This?

As you may already know, Wayne County, Michigan is about to auction off another 22,506 tax foreclosure properties, with more than 20,000 of them in Detroit. Dang. (Round 1 is September 14 - 20 where bids open at the cost of back taxes. Round 2 is October 19 - 25 where bids open at $500. For official auction information visit www.co.wayne.mi.us/5143.htm.)

This post will do its best to quickly walk you through what’s fresh with WDOT, including:

• QUICKLY FIND YOUR STREET
• BUILD LISTS OF PLACES TO FOLLOW
• DRAW NEIGHBORHOODS & SEE WHAT’S GOING ON INSIDE
• ASK & ANSWER QUESTIONS
• TALK ABOUT PLACES
• SHARE PHOTOGRAPHS & SURVEY PLACES
• LIVE BID TRACKING & NEWS FEED
• LET US KNOW WHAT STINKS & WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE NEXT
• START OR FIND A PROJECT?

We are always a work in progress, so if anything is confusing or not working right, please please please reach out to us at team@makeloveland.com or 313-649-5263.

Hokay, so…

Last year LOVELAND created the WDWOT service to help make the auction more understandable. It’s not that we love auctions, but we love cities, we love Detroit, we love the internet, and we couldn’t help but notice that tens of thousands of properties were sloshing around for $500 each and no one had any idea what was going on.

At the outset I’ll ask that if you find this information useful, please share whydontweownthis.com with your friends and the people you think should see it. At a minimum that’s everyone living in Detroit where the auction literally touches every single neighborhood.

Also Note: WDWOT is entirely free to use but we do recommend that you log into the site through your existing Facebook account or by creating a LOVELAND account. You don’t need to be logged in to explore what properties are being auctioned in Detroit and Wayne County, but you do need to log in to interact with the site and save your work.

• QUICKLY FIND YOUR STREET

The first, simplest thing to do when you hit whydontweownthis.com is to type your street name or street of interest into the search box. The map will zoom in and you can see if there are auction properties right around you. (Here I am searching for Dolphin Street after reading that a U-Haul truck stolen from the US Secret Service with equipment for a Joe Biden event was recovered there… I don’t know, man, I just live here… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯):

• BUILD LISTS OF PLACES TO FOLLOW

Anyway, from there, if you’re signed in and see a property or area you want to follow and get updates on, just click it, then click the heart icon on its page, like so:

It’ll get added to the list on your profile (privately so no one else has to see what you’re following) and you’ll get an email every time someone posts a new comment or photo to it, or places a bid on it. Bam. Suddenly you’re in the loop.

• DRAW NEIGHBORHOODS & SEE WHAT’S GOING ON INSIDE

To get a little fancier — and I think this is probably the coolest new feature with a lot of future potential, too — you can now draw a neighborhood or area boundary on top of the city, name it, save it, and see exactly what’s going on inside it.

Let me show rather than tell, using the “100 Houses Project” area as an example. A couple weeks ago radio host Mitch Albom and others hosted an event in Detroit’s Osborn neighborhood where volunteers boarded up 100 houses in a day. Detroit Free Press reporter, Megha Satyanarayana did a write-up here and used an earlier version of this tool to pull some numbers.

See here what it looks like when you draw an area outline and give it a name:

Underneath that, WDWOT automagically shows you data about the area like how big the area is, how many total properties it has, how many of those are at auction, how many are structures versus vacant lots, how many have bids so far, how much it would cost to buy them all at round 1 (the back taxes round) and at round 2 (the $500 round), and who the top owners of property and of foreclosed properties at auction are:

This can be quite revealing, as in this case what the volunteers (not to mention the residents!) could not possibly see with their eyes is that more than 1/3 of the 100 houses they boarded up are going to auction, likely purchased for $500 if at all, and that more than 1 out of 10 properties in the entire area will be at auction as well. Sheesh! Nor could they see that amongst the top owners within the area are the City of Detroit, the Michigan Land Bank, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Fannie Mae, and Deutsche Bank.

You can also toggle between all comments and photos posted by others within the area. But moving on!

• ASK & ANSWER QUESTIONS

There’s also a new Question & Answer section where you can ask anything about the auction, land ownership, rehabbing or tearing down properties, Detroit, etc etc. A lot of questions come up again and again, or can’t be satisfactorily answered by us as an independent group who is far from expert, so this should be helpful:

• TALK ABOUT PLACES

You can comment on properties, which can be about all sorts of things. I like to point out when I see houses at auction that are occupied (and whenever I can I ask the person if they know their house is at auction). If you have a story about a property or neighborhood, or an idea or concern, why not share it? Letting someone know that something will be a difficult investment or inviting someone to take something on can be helpful in creating best outcomes for everyone.

I do want to point out that we currently moderate comments on the site because we want to keep it a safe, friendly place for discussion. Our listed conversation policy may seem a little funny, but if you’ve been around the comment block we hope you appreciate it (you’ll get an email confirming your comment was received, and another email when it’s approved):

Conversation Policy: Keep it constructive. Comments containing foul language, attacks against people or groups, racism, bigotry, defeatism, overt negativity, haterade, holier-than-thouness and/or general jackassery will not be posted. Please address others like you were standing in the same room. This is a safe place.

• SHARE PHOTOGRAPHS & SURVEY PLACES

You can also post photos to properties, which is something we’d love to see more of. We automagically link to a Google Streetview image of every property, but those are often years out of date. Now you can take a current picture of properties and share them through the site. For example, here’s a photo set I made of all the unoccupied auction properties in North Corktown (my personal rule is to note places that look occupied and don’t photograph them):

• LIVE BID TRACKING & NEWS FEED

Well that was fast! Just after posting this, Larry got the feed up that shows all public site activity (comments, photos, questions, answers, neighborhood drawings, bids, etc), check it out: whydontweownthis.com/feed!

Right now the Feed section is set up to start showing bids and winners when the auction starts, but soon it will also show public contributions as they come into the site (comments, photos, questions, answers, new neighborhoods, etc) to help you discover what all’s going on out there.

• LET US KNOW WHAT STINKS & WHAT YOU WANT TO SEE NEXT

For the rest of what’s there, please click around, and please please PLEASE tell us when you hit any snags or dislike anything whatsoever. Cold, constructive criticism is needed to improve the service and you will not hurt our feelings (we’ve been beaten down many times before and know we have polishing to do :-)).

You can write us any time at team@makeloveland.com or call us at 313-649-5263.

• START OR FIND A PROJECT?

The only other thing I’ll tease and ask for ideas on is a “Start or Find A Project” section to the site. If you’ve been following our work you may have seen me write about an idea to crowdfund properties: “No Property Left Behind”. We’re still trying to find the perfect area of the city to focus on for a pilot, and it seems like a section of the site where people can propose projects and connect with others either to co-purchase properties or pool resources to deconstruct or rehab or grow something etc would be powerful.

Anyway, that’s more than enough, thanks for reading! If you want to follow general updates on our work we post at facebook.com/makeloveland and twitter.com/makeloveland. To be continued…

Detroit Vacant Property Coalition -- Area Boundaries, Foreclosure Stats, & Questions

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 18:20:00 +0000

Detroit has the measles. In the black box are 290 tax foreclosed properties coming up for auction within the Warren Avenue Community Organization boundaries:

Last week Janai Gilmore from Michigan Community Resources reached out and asked if I’d meet with and present to a group called the Detroit Vacant Property Coalition at 6:30 on September 11. Sure, sounds like something I’d do! :-) The point is:

“to talk about the work Loveland Technologies is doing to make property ownership information as well as information about tax foreclosed properties accessible for residents. Our members also have questions for you such as what you feel are the most effective ways to work with the city and the county to get information; how you update your data sets; and whether you are open to working with the community to address their data needs.”

I’m excited for this, so I went ahead and used Why Don’t We Own This? to draw boundaries over the areas of the city each of the coalition’s 17 member groups represent (minus a couple I couldn’t figure out) and calculated how many properties they each have coming up at the tax foreclosure auction. Between 15 of them there are 3,450 of Detroit’s 20,032, or just over 17% of all auction properties in Detroit.

If you click the links you’ll see a boundary map with all the properties at auction:

• Grandmont Rosedale Development Corp = 294 tax foreclosures at auction

• Warren/Conner Development Coalition = 894 tax foreclosures at auction

• HELCO Block Club = 10 tax foreclosures at auction

• Barton MacFarlane = 376 tax foreclosures at auction

• WACO (Warren Ave Community Organization) = 290 tax foreclosures at auction

• University District Radio Patrol = 16 tax foreclosures at auction

• Focus: Hope = 901 tax foreclosures at auction

• Greater Woodward CDC = 214 tax foreclosures at auction

• CDAD = citywide

• Grandmont Community Association = accounted for Grandmont Rosedale Dev Corp

• Westtown Radio Patrol = unsure of boundaries

• Creekside CDC = 127 tax foreclosures at auction

• Yorkshire Woods Community Organization = 272 tax foreclosures at auction

• Greenacres Woodward = 10 tax foreclosures at auction

• North Rosedale Park Community Association = 45 tax foreclosures at auction

• Arden Park East Boston Association = 1 tax foreclosure at auction

• 200 Lakewood Block Club = unsure of boundaries

Total: 3,450 tax foreclosures at auction

Round 1 of the auction is where 20,032 Detroit properties will be auctioned for their back taxes is just a couple weeks away, running September 14th through September 20th. After that what doesn’t sell will be auctioned for an opening bid of $500 from October 19th - 25th. In previous years more than 50% of properties did not sell in either round, leaving a ton of vacant, uncared-for properties.

I’m asking Janai to share this information and area maps with the groups this week and hopefully get to hear back from each of them what would be most helpful to them in getting on top of the auction problem.

✁✁✁✁✁✁✁✁✁✁

Some questions from the coalition:

I also asked there were any other particularly interesting questions or issues to think about beforehand and she responded:

• Increasing accountability for speculators who purchase properties at the Wayne County tax auction and subsequently neglect their properties

•Raising public awareness about tools available to access property ownership information; improving access to property ownership information

• Developing a relationship with Wayne County

Lots of thoughts here to be continued in a follow-up post. Anyone else?

✁✁✁✁✁✁✁✁✁✁

First question for the coalition:

In a return question, one big thing on our minds over here that I’m hoping to hear something back from the group about is the No Property Left Behind idea I shared a little while ago, essentially crowdfunding the purchase of properties that no one else bids on and then trying to marry them to good purposes. We’ve been working more on how to execute that idea in a manageable way — targeting smaller areas with local partners rather than citywide — and one of the questions I have for each of the coalition groups is: Do you have interest in trying this approach and assuming ownership of foreclosure properties until you can find good private owners or other solutions?

In its simplest terms, the way the scenario could work is this: Let’s say Grandmont Rosedale Development Corporation says they want in. There are 294 properties in their area at the foreclosure auction. 294 x $500 = $147,000 if all were to be purchased. We help them post a fundraiser where people can pledge money towards the purchase of as many of these properties as possible. If it raises $25,000, we would then buy up to 50 $500 properties, deed them directly to Grandmont Rosedale DC, and help advertise the inventory so people can apply to work on, use, or purchase them: mow vacant lots, clean up dumping, tear down dangerous buildings, make art, farm, take ownership or occupancy, etc.

From talking to some different groups it seems like there’s often fear of taking on properties, but you know what’s going to happen if the county keeps owning it: most likely nada except further decay, and you lose your only chance to get site control no questions asked.

Very curious to hear what the coalition groups think and if there are any volunteers to try it. If so we can work out the devils in the details together and modify things as needed.

What else?

Google Streetview + Physical & Data Decay

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:31:00 +0000

I’ve been driving around taking pictures of vacant Detroit properties coming up at the Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction to post on Why Don’t We Own This. We include an image from Google Streetview on all the property pages with a link to the google map, but check out how off they can be.

These are 3 typical auction properties in North Corktown that have changed a lot since Google last checked in circa 2009, and sadly not in a good way, all blown out and busted or not there at all. Anyone know who’s got the best DIY streetview rig?

3437 Cochrane:

Google Streetview:

Today:

3388 14th St:

Google Streetview:

Today:

3383 14th St:

Google Streetview:

Today:

An Afternoon at the Belle Isle Zoo

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 17:47:00 +0000

Yesterday my friend Peter and I went for a bike ride to Belle Isle. The fence into the old zoo was open so we took a look around. Oh my god. Of many mind-blowingly unmaintained ruins and vacancies in Detroit, this has got to be up near the top. I had no idea it was so vast, and it’s right next to the swimming beach (here’s the satellite map, the walkway you see here is the long loop between Central and Loiter/Tanglewood).

I find it odd that I don’t really hear anything about the future of the zoo, even with the escalating discussion about how to fund and maintain Belle Isle.

Any ideas for this place? Honestly, if the walkways could be secured it would make a wonderful overgrown nature walk. The whole thing is other-worldly. A few pics:

A Light, Open Letter To Bill McMachen In Macomb County

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 16:15:00 +0000

A couple days ago news came out that Macomb County, Michigan canceled it’s public tax foreclosure auction at the last minute and sold all 650 properties to private resident Bill McMachen for approximately $4.8 million — the cost of the total back taxes owed on all the properties. You can read about it here (first story on Fox 2), here (Fox 2 follow-up with video interview), and here (Curbed).

Since LOVELAND’s been working on maps and tools around neighboring Wayne County’s fall foreclosure auction — including open online fundraising to purchase properties that no one buys, and asking the public for input on what to do with them — it sounds like Bill might have an open mind and a situation on his hands where some of our work could be helpful, and vice verse as we learn about what’s happening here.

Hence…[drum roll]…an open letter!

—-

Hi Bill,

My friends and I have a little Detroit-based venture called LOVELAND that does city mapping combined with different sorts of newfangled internet bells and whistles. We just mapped out all of your new properties on a site called Why Don’t We Own This, which you can see here: http://whydontweownthis.com/dragonfly/macomb (at the moment we only have 625, not the 650 reported, and are checking the difference, but you get the idea :-)).

At the top level you can clearly see the county, it’s cities, and where your new properties are clustered:

You can zoom down to particular cities, like Warren, which touches Detroit and has most of your new properties in it:

And then down to individual properties like this one, with a parcel map and street view imagery where that exists:

And then from there people who sign in can leave comments, ask questions, and generally discuss properties.

OK, so. I guess my most direct question is would you be interested in talking about how these tools can be customized to help you advertise, communicate with the public, and manage applications for the properties as you try to re-sell them to the best, most worthy buyers? We have a bunch of ideas and can stitch things together quickly.

I’m jerry@makeloveland.com or 908-343-1981 anytime if interested.

And now just a brief backstory:

Down here in Detroit, the county tax foreclosures and auctions are on another level. Where the whole of Macomb County had 625 properties, last year in Wayne County, Detroit alone had 13,050. Each auctioned for an opening bid of $500, and more than 7,000 did not sell.

7,000 x 500 = $3,500,000… more than a million dollars less than what you spent in Macomb. Crazy, right?

Currently on the homepage of whydontweownthis.com you can see 34,300 properties in Wayne County that have been tagged for foreclosure and will likely show up at the fall auction if their owners don’t jump to pay their back taxes now. So the situation is still escalating.

We’ve been working on an idea called No Property Left Behind that would help neighborhoods collectively purchase auction properties that do not sell. It’s sort of the reverse of how things went down in Macomb: rather than taking everything off the table up front, there’s a plan in place to acquire what gets passed over at the end.

Anyway, enough typed words. Please give a shout if you want to talk about possibilities.

Thanks a lot, and good luck doing good,

Jerry Paffendorf

jerry@makeloveland.com

908-343-1981

you love graffiti

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:20:04 +0000

you love graffiti

test test

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:16:29 +0000

test test

No Property Left Behind (Update In Progress)

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 21:10:58 +0000

What to do with a property like this? No one bought this 2 acre property in Detroit when it was first auctioned for $500:

In March I first wrote about an idea for a campaign called No Property Left Behind, which would crowdfund the purchase of $500 properties that go unsold at the annual Detroit/Wayne County Foreclosure Auction, and then crowdsource what to do with them.

When I was at MIT for the Knight Foundation Technology & Engagement Summit last month I got to brainstorm it with some very smart people, and in Toronto a couple weeks ago I mentioned it in my NXNE talk which got a nice little write-up in the Toronto Standard.

Long story short, there’s been a lot of enthusiasm and interest in it, and a lot of questions about how it could work. For those just tuning in, I’m going to try and do a super succinct breakdown of what we’re thinking, why, and big open questions right now, so you can understand and feedback on it, and potentially get involved in working out the kinks and making it real.

First.

Every year Wayne County (which includes the City of Detroit) holds what I understand to be the world’s largest property auction — The Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction. Last year 13,050 properties in Detroit alone were auctioned online with an opening bid of $500, and a whopping 7,235 went unsold. I’m no math star, but that’s more than 1/2. The 5,815 that did sell sold for $20,580,806 to 1,132 unique bidders.

We know that because we wrote software to track the auction as it happened live on bid4assets.com. You can see an archive of the auction at http://whydontweownthis.com/rabbit including sortable lists of highest priced properties, biggest buyers, etc.

Living in Detroit I know full well while many of these properties did not sell. Certainly incomplete awareness that the auction was even happening or how to participate in it played a role, but the truth is that a lot of these properties have buildings that need to be torn down (or at least cost a lot to fix up), have trash or contamination issues, and are generally in difficult locations (off the beaten path, surrounded by blight, perceived as dangerous, etc). In short they are difficult investments, and your $500 purchase might be a ticket to a $50,000 liability.

Still, it doesn’t seem right to me that so much land and architecture spread all across Detroit could really be valued at $0 or worse by the market. I feel like there’s a massive failure of imagination happening and that a really hard problem like this might benefit from tilting our heads and looking at the solution space differently.

Having some experience with crowdfunding, you can’t help but add up the unsold properties and think, well, 7,235 x $500 = $3,617,500, and if someone had wanted to suddenly become the largest land owner in Detroit, that’s what it would have cost.

$3.5 million is both a big and a small number. Many of us barely have $35 to spend right now, but if you’re a wealthy investor that number might look vanishingly small. And to a “crowd” of people from around the city, the region, the country, and the world, you could make mincemeat out of that fundraising goal if the channels for collection were clear and trustworthy.

I’ll give you an interesting example. Last week a woman named Karen was harassed by kids on a school bus, the video went viral, and someone set up a fundraiser on IndieGoGo to buy her a vacation. With 24 days left on the crowdfunding campaign, more than *30,000* people have given her more than $655,000. To reach a $3.5 million goal in Detroit, those 30,000 people would have to give $116 each. Doable? Of course, especially when you consider the bigger fish who could step up with checks, and that the number of funders could be much higher (if you really tapped into the Detroit spirit).

We do not live in a world of straight-forward value, so I hate to put Karen and the City of Detroit on a scale and ask which is more worthy of massive crowdfunding. However it’s an indicator to me that people can step up at higher levels to help sort out, clean up, repopulate, and reinvest in a truly great and important American city.

Second.

OK, so let’s pick our number. Let’s say that we want to raise $2.5 million, enough for 5,000 unpurchased properties, and that we hope the additional interest the campaign generates will decrease the number of properties left behind to that level or less. We create a transparent bank account (something I think is so important not just for raising the funds, but creating trust around how it’s being spent), we invite the world to put money in it, and when the auction happens we run a script that watches all the auction pages, and if there’s a minute left on something with no bids, boom, it auto-bids $500. And it does this again and again and again until all the money is gone and as many leftover properties as possible are purchased. (And if somehow there’s no room to buy leftover properties…miracle of miracles…the excess money is returned.)

Now let’s assume we’ve all just bought 5,000 Detroit properties that include vacant lots, decrepit abandoned houses that should be torn down, hulking open dangerous factory buildings, and some really nice stuff too. What do you do with all that???

The point of this all is not for the group to continue owning it, but to immediately advertise its availability with the simplest application form in the universe so that you can immediately begin receiving proposals and turning it over to people and projects. Proposals would be reviewed under guidelines that always favor the local first, and fan out from there. Depending on the property and buyer, they can be gifted or resold for $500 - $1,000, or for higher on a case by case (the proverbial Ms Jenkins can’t compete with the proverbial Acme Corp). Land contracts would come with such terms as, if you don’t pay taxes within a year and noticeably move to improve the property you lose it.

Speaking of taxes, I think the way you’d do this is to be upfront that the purchasing group *would not pay taxes*. Here’s how the ethics work out: properties at auction were not generating tax revenues to begin with, and if no one else stepped up to buy them they would continue not generating revenues. If there’s a good faith effort to find an owner who will, then the group is not being a deadbeat. The worst that can happen is that if no one steps up in 3 years time to take a property on, it recycles back to the county to be auctioned again. Yay!

The most open questions I have about the general approach include:

Should it be done in more targeted areas?

Should it be done in something like a land trust?

How do you avoid liabilities for things like blight violations or people getting hurt on the properties?

Who sits on the board of something like this?

I’m going to come back and edit this more later, it got real long and I have to run, but wanted to get that out. Woo…

One Day In Detroit: Devils & Details Brainstorm 1: Tours, Lists, & Collections

Tue, 29 May 2012 18:28:00 +0000

The devil lives in the details, maybe doubly so in software and web design. When you’re trying to keep things simple, you’d be amazed at the tiny games of whack-a-mole that get played as you change one tiny thing that affects something else, and how one seemingly small decision to put something in or leave something out creates a legacy that takes things in a different direction, both in how people use something or don’t, and how they think about what it’s for.

As we attempt to exorcise the devil from the One Day In Detroit beta app, I’m going to try posting a tour a day for the next bit and talk through some issues and possibilities, walking right into the devil’s house. No need to knock, he knows we’re coming. Bastard always does.

The original itch to scratch with One Day is experiencing so many people coming to Detroit for just a day or two and asking over and over again, “What should we see? Where should we go?” You end up developing a standard playlist, typing, retyping, saying, re-saying, and eventually you just want to put it down and share it with everyone. For me, I’ve found myself giving the Whirlwind Sampler Plate Driving Tour a couple dozen times in the last year-ish.

But when you sit down with the app to make a tour, you’re really making a list. It’s a small step from creating curated “experience” tours where things should happen more or less in a certain order, and simply listing themed collections of things that are good to catalog, know about, and be able to choose to visit, but aren’t designed to be done in a day or in a certain order.

I’ll give a few examples.

Playing around, one of the first “tours” I made was really a list of all Detroit locations listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Well, truth be told, I paused after 49 because my typing fingers wept, but you get the idea. I think this is a *great* collection to have all in one place, and One Day makes it easy to compile and share, but it’s certainly not a tour per se.

Same thing with the statue “tour” I started piecing together. While seeing cool statues is a nice thing to do in the city, you’d have to be a pretty freaky dude to only stick to statues on your hypothetical day here (hey, man, I’m not judgin’, and maybe I’m wrong :-)).

And again same thing with the “tour” I just made of Hacker & Maker spaces in Detroit. Maybe you do want to check them all out in a day if you’re into that scene, but it feels like more of a List or Collection that grows over time as new things come online or are discovered.

These three “tours” also have something else in common. As lists/collections I’d love it if other people could add to them. It’s like you want the option to not just make a tour that you publish and control by yourself, but in addition to that, you want to start a list, and you want to be able to choose to make it locked or publicly editable.

As an example, wouldn’t it be cool to start a publicly editable collection of all public art works in Detroit? The kind where someone who finds a new piece of graffiti can easily add its location to the set? Imagine this for all sorts of interesting things. Then perhaps an aspect of proper Tour creation becomes picking and choosing locations from collections to put in a certain experiential order.

Thing is, if that’s not the firm direction, a seemingly small change forks the app into something like “Find and share things worth doing” and “Catalog and explore everything.”

I don’t know man, I just work here. :-) If anyone has thoughts, let us know at team@makeloveland.com and I’ll share them with Dandelion and Skidmore too.

More devils tomorrow, and everyday for the rest of your life… :-0

One Day In Detroit: User-Generated Tour App Beta

Tue, 29 May 2012 17:14:44 +0000

Check it out! We just softly rolled the One Day In Detroit beta app onto the open internets. Over the past 6 weeks or so we’ve been working in a fun little collaboration with our friends at Dandelion Detroit and Skidmore Studio to think and design through the possibilities.

Here’s the skinny on where it’s at right now. On the homepage, if you press the circle it pulls up nearby locations that have been featured in tours. More on that in a sec…

Scrolling down we’ve got a section for Featured Tours, which can rotate depending on what’s going on in town and what new awesomeness gets posted (you can, of course, also search for tours and locations, pull up the full list, and sort by different attributes):

Tours are ordered lists of places with descriptions, addresses, imagery, and driving directions:

Every tour also has its own map. There’s also a Places page that shows the locations of all tour stops in one “global” citywide view. This is a screenshot from when you press the circle button on the homepage. It zeros in on you and shows you things that are closest and what tour it came from, if you want to stumble into something while on the go:

Tour creation is mercifully straight forward. Right now you name your tour, describe it, and start posting locations (name, address or cross streets, short descriptions, and a photo).

You can also say how long it probably takes and whether its best to drive, walk, or bike.

We would LOVE to hear your thoughts on this. It definitely scratches an itch, especially in Detroit, a particularly mysterious city. But as always, the devil loves living in the details. One little irritation or counter-intuivity (<— new word) can spoil the whole soup, and there’s a ways to go to nail it.

Hit the LOVELAND team at team@makeloveland.com if and when the spirit moves you, and by all means please try it out, make a little tour, and let us know how it goes.

I’m going to start posting a tour of the day while talking through some design issues, ideas, observations, questions, what-if’s, etc. Good people, good times.

Fun With Texting: DetroitSoccer.us

Tue, 29 May 2012 16:38:05 +0000

Larry’s been gaining mastery over the world of group text messaging for some upcoming projects, and we just put up a simple text subscription service for people who want to follow neighborhood teams in the Detroit City Futbol League, and the minor league Detroit City Futbol Club, Le Rouge.

Check it out at detroitsoccer.us.

The way it works is you text “Follow <team #>” to 313-499-0940 and on game days you get a text early in the day with who, where, and when they’re playing, along with where the after party is, then afterwards you get the score. That’s it. Just a fun, easy way to stay in the loop.

The texts look something like this (this is for the minor league team, all other games are free):

We also posted a little city map showing neighborhoods with teams:

If you’re a player or a fan (or a possible fan), we hope you like.

Techno Viking Says Sorry For The Radio Silence

Tue, 29 May 2012 16:22:57 +0000

Been working hard in the lab on new releases. Reminded of this internet classic from across the ages while attending the Movement festival over Memorial Day weekend:

Microhoods: Small, Cheap, & Under Control?

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 03:39:00 +0000

Too long, didn’t read: LOVELAND’s working on a system that divides Detroit into many small sections that people with local knowledge can easily explore and update information about. Put the many small sections (AKA Microhoods) together, hold your face a foot away, stare into the distance, and a city comes into focus.

Surprise surprise. LOVELAND Technologies has cleared off some desk space in the lab to start piecing together a new crowdsourced map app called Microhoods. It’s another theme-and-variation on our mapping work like Living In The Map, Why Don’t We Own This?, the Call To Action service map, Site Control, etc.

The basic need is this: Detroit is massive (140 square miles) and has massively widespread disinvestment, vacancy, and the attendant problems that come with that. Really, this is all so massive (massively massive) that many people write the city’s problems off as intractable, and who can blame them? As the city has shrunk from 2 million people to 700,000, at least 1/3 of the city is empty and untended, there are more than 45,000 unintentionally government-owned properties, and 70,000 empty structures.

On top of that there is no good way to keep live record of the situation on the ground (data doesn’t exist or gets old fast), share problems and opportunities (what’s broken, blighted, empty, and/or ready for change?), and invite support for existing projects as well as investment (who’s working on what or wants what where?).

If we wanted to start attacking those problems in order it would go something like:

• Create a system whereby areas of the city are more manageably sized

• Share as much information as is already known about these places

• Invite people to contribute their on-the-ground knowledge of what’s going on (or not going on) where

• Encourage people to advertise opportunities to help and invest (including plugging in and pointing to people fundraising, volunteering, selling property, etc on various other services)

OK. If you squint your mind’s eye at the problem with us, you can see the outline of a possible solution.

Larry’s whipped up an interactive grid of the city based on 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile areas (AKA microhoods). They run A - Z from north to south (how convenient) and 1 - 30-something west to east.

When you drill down to a microhood you get all the parcels that comprise it, a way to toggle layers of information on and off (want to see property ownership? all local block clubs and service organizations? local projects and fundraisers? user-generated content?), update-able survey questions, and a way to say what’s really happening on any parcel.

Over the Easter weekend I’ve been poking around the alpha site making notes. From across the years a mantra came back to mind: “fast, cheap, and out of control.” MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks coined the phrase in an essay back in 1989, proposing a new way to explore other planets using swarms of cheap decentralized robots. What we’re thinking about with Microhoods might be surprisingly similar in some ways, but instead of swarms of robots exploring distant planets, it’s crowds of people exploring Detroit.

Some fun with remixes, here’s the short introduction to the 1989 essay with inerspliced with microhood updates in bold:

Fast, Cheap And Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of The Universe

Small, Cheap, & Under Control: A People’s Inventory of Detroit

Complex systems and complex missions take years of planning and force launches to become incredibly expensive.

Complex top-down urban planning projects take years and become incredibly expensive both financially and politically.

The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the more catastrophic if it fails.

The longer the planning and the more expensive the mission, the less responsive to changes on the ground, the more detached from residents, and the more disheartening if it fails.

The solution has always been to plan better, add redundancy, test thoroughly and use high quality components.

The solution has always been add multiple review boards, triple-check the data, test thoroughly against precedents in other places, and use high quality contractors.

Based on our experience in building ground based mobile robots (legged and wheeled) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of mass produced simple autonomous robots that are small by today’s standards (1 to 2 Kg).

Based on our experience in building city mapping and crowdsourcing software (desktop and mobile) we argue here for cheap, fast missions using large numbers of ordinary people equipped with local knowledge, laptops, smartphones, and pen-and-paper.

We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that launch mass can be slashed, that totally autonomous robots can be more reliable than ground controlled robots, and that large numbers of robots can change the tradeoff between reliability of individual components and overall mission success.

We argue that the time between mission conception and implementation can be radically reduced, that budgets can be slashed, that passionate residents and volunteers can be more reliable and informed than paid professionals, and that large numbers of contributors can change the tradeoff between reliability of any individual contributions and overall mission success.

Lastly, we suggest that within a few years it will be possible at modest cost to invade a planet with millions of tiny robots.

Lastly, we suggest that within a couple years it will be possible at modest cost for millions of people to meaningfully invest in a renewed Detroit that makes sense on a sustainable local level.

—-

Like everything, to be continued…

PS I also recommend checking out the Errol Morris film “Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control” that features Rodney Brooks and 3 other…obsessively curious and dedicated people:

One Day In Detroit Progress

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:50:18 +0000

The One Day In Detroit user-generated tour guide app is starting to look pretty slick. Still a ways to go, but it’s functional and simple. We’ve grown our little group of alpha testers and udate-getters to around 30 and have a narrow stream of sweet tours trickling in. If you want to join the group, hit me at jerry@makeloveland.com. Here’s a screenshot of the current look on an iPad:

Weequinox

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:41:00 +0000

This week marks the end of the WDET Call to Action 30-day drive for volunteer hours. We hope to segue this energy into another collaboration supported by the Knight News Challenge: you can help by voting for it!

We’re wrapping up proposals & contracts on a few new projects this week and starting to design them in earnest beyond vague outlines. First there’s a flurry of emails and shared design documents, giving way soon to code and mockups and live test sites. For now it feels like the calm before the storm.

During this breathing room between client work we’re building One Day In Detroit and blogging about it. Beyond a fun, hopefully useful app it’s also an exercise for us in openness, writing, and inviting a loose network of collaborators to design, hack and test.

Jerry has been attending hockey games, hobnobbing with the mayor, picking up rubble, running between meetings, sending mockups and brainstorms, and blogging prolifically.

Mary, as far as I can tell from across the continent, is keeping up communications with our clients and partners new and old, organizing our timelines and business dealings, juggling contracts, and raising puppies.

Happy equinox all! Many new launches, articles and partnerships coming this spring. And as always we’re on the lookout for talented Rails or front-end developers who dig our brand of crazy - drop me a line at larry@makeloveland.

❦

Remember to forget

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 21:31:00 +0000

Ok, so we all know caching is a good idea if not an absolute necessity for your production web servers. Why did it take me until last week to install memcached? Every smart architecture employs it or similar. I had this idea it was a painful setup process - not true. Getting your Rails app speaking the memcache is frighteningly easy.

Requests to certain apps (geographic searches, say… where the data changes infrequently) have been taking longer as the content size grows. The built-in file-based caching works for the basics but doesn’t cut it here because we need the data to expire & refresh every few hours.

It only took a few minutes to install the memcached server on OSX (brew install memcached) and Debian (apt-get install memcached). Once that’s running, the dalli gem gives you seamless action caching & session storage in Rails. (NB: The only issue was having to use 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost in the configuration.) Requests for Call to Action map data dropped from 500ms to 2ms. I’ve been strategically hitting the slow requests on our various sites, applying Rails action & fragment caching with excellent results. Don’t I feel silly having not tried this sooner?

❦

Hello folks! Today we have the beginnings of maps on One Day....

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:10:00 +0000

Hello folks! Today we have the beginnings of maps on One Day. This is one of Jerry’s test tours showing on a Google Map. Did you know they offer driving/walking/biking directions through the API? Yes indeed, just feed the Google server a list of locations and it’ll tell you the best route, complete with Polyline coords and turn-by-turn directions. I’ll also recommend their geocoder (which we’re using to turn addresses into lat-longs).

Next there needs to be a sense of order in these marker locations: how will we do it? Numbering? Animation? Only time will tell.

Identity

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:07:00 +0000

Today I stirred FB & Twitter sign-in into One Day In Detroit so that new folks can make an email/pass account or just press the one button and be done. It’s technically simple these days (I use devise & omniauth and it takes an hour to set up), though I grapple with the approach & justification for each new project. Do we require an account to play with the site? Which features? Will people need to choose Yet Another Password? Creating accounts is a drag, and with all the small experimental sites we craft at Loveland, we’d like everyone to feel free to experiment with a minimum of “drag.”

Last year I researched ways to share accounts across our sites so there’s just one “you” to remember. We called it your “LOVELAND ID” and I was really inspired by 37signals’ movement towards unifying their account system. I’ll tell you, no small task. Here are some approaches:

Shared database tables - in Rails normally each app has its own database. Well, you can tell your User model to connect to a different one… so if you point every User model to the same table you’ll be able to log in with the same credentials to each site, right? Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend this anyone. It’s a mess. It also requires every app to use exactly the same authentication library and user schema, making upgrades very sticky. I did this with the Inchernet and LoveTax originally (using authlogic, they are Rails 2 projects) and felt very clever. Okay, so I wanted to plug WDWOT in later, but it runs on Rails 3, and devise is the preferred way there. Shoot. You can massage your authlogic table and encrypt passwords using :authlogic_sha512. But this is a smelly approach.

CAS - RubyCAS is an industrial-strength single-sign-on solution. Pretty cool. I actually got this working with our Loveland database, roughly following this guide. It has a big, inscrutable, non-rails server component, and I shelved it because I didn’t find an easy way for users to sign up from the app.

OAuth - Very popular. I settled on this as the cleanest, most standard and futureproof way. We have one app that’s an OAuth provider and it holds onto all the user data and gives you the signup/login flow. Each of the other apps is an omniauth client; when you want to log into one, it sends you to the provider. This excellent guide will explain everything (and provide source code!).

Today, this foray doesn’t have much practical significance because we’ve decommissioned Living in the Map and LoveTax, so essentially it’s the Inchernet and WDWOT left. For clarity I’ve split them up and put the accounts back on their separate servers. In retrospect, instead of simplifying life confused the backend architecture and user interaction — people had to leave WDWOT and login on makeloveland.com, etc. Going forward, my choice now would be to rewrite the OAuth strategy with more foresight and factor it into a library reusable across each app’s code.

❦

Map Considerations

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:26:00 +0000

For the WDET Call to Action project I had the chance to reevaluate our map toolkits and check the latest offerings. Our requirements included solid mobile interactivity, flexible shape drawing (I dig GeoJSON), choose-your-own-stylishness, and - for the wide audience we expect - the most complete browser compatibility available - including IE. So I sat down with a mocha and compiled this chart. I used to love polymaps (it powers the inchernet and WDWOT), but it’s so bleeding-edge it doesn’t support IE (at all) or smartphones (very well).

Leaflet came out the clear winner, wrapped in Wax. I’ve been digging Wax and TileMill to present big datasets fast, especially to mobile viewers. See the difference between whydontweownthis.com, where Polymaps loads tons of client-side markers, and wdwot.com with its slick pre-rendered tiles. Each parcel is still clickable either way.

Astute readers may have noticed I didn’t mention the Google Maps API. It gets simple jobs done, isn’t very customizable, and I’d rather plug into the OSM ecosystem.

❦

Day One of One Day

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 01:28:00 +0000

Hi! I’m Larry and I write the code for LOVELAND Technologies. Lately I’ve been inspired by Jerry’s blog-a-day oath as well as my favorite design & development process blogs, including 37signals’ SvN, Etsy’s Code as Craft and BERG’s weeknotes.

So here we go! Yesterday we kicked off a new project, One Day In Detroit, and since Jerry’s going to be walking everyone through the process I will too. In later posts I’ll travel back through time to show you fun techniques from our other sites. Here’s what’s involved in spinning up a new app!

Create a new Rails project on my laptop and point my web server to it. I’ve always happily used Passenger and Preferences Pane, but today I’m trying out Pow (which is rad). Either way, a few seconds and you have a site running your app at http://oneday.dev.
You’ll want a database to go with that. Make an empty MySQL db on the dev machine (and on the testing server for good measure). Call them oneday_local and oneday_stage.
I sketch out the data models for the app, basically the high-level Things we’ll be manipulating. In this case, I’ll say Tours, Places, and Users. A Tour is a list of Places. Write down their attributes (name, description, location, etc) and run a “rails generate model Tour…” and “rake db:migrate” and you’re in business.
Caveats: you need to tweak the place.rb model file and Place migration for RGeo (see below) so that it makes your table spatial. And also use the Devise generator for your user.rb & migration… the docs cover this.

I’ll gather the building blocks (gems) for big chunks of functionality thanks to the lovely Ruby ecosystem. For starters let’s plunk these in the Gemfile:

haml for page templates. It’s just so much more pleasant than ERB.
devise handles user authentication & registration & so on. Full-featured, bulletproof, customizable, the industry standard for handling users in Rails 3.
omniauth works with Devise to not only add authentication to Facebook and Twitter, but several dozen other services. Awesome.
rgeo to work with geography features (it provides geometric data types and projection goodies. Works with MySQL spatial and PostGIS. The rgeo_json gem will translate geometry to GeoJSON for your javascript mapping pleasure. I like this path a lot, very intuitive and accomplishes a lot with notsomuch code.
exception_notification is a life saver when you administer over a dozen sites on your own. It emails you whenever there’s an exception in your Rails program. Simple!
kaminari for slicing your content into pages
nokogiri for parsing XML documents
andand offers you a fun shorthand for checking object properties; I use it all the time.
paperclip is photo uploading made super easy.

For the front-end libraries I’ll kick off with

jQuery in every project. Do I need to say anything about this?
Twitter Bootstrap gets you good-looking, snappy UI components and base styling.
960.gs for the 12-column grid layout (Bootstrap does this too now but I’m accustomed to 960!)
Wax & Leaflet for lightweight web maps. Leaflet rocks as an alternative to Google Maps - not only can you choose your tile-styles from CloudMade’s library, design your own, render your own with TileMill, but it plays nice with GeoJSON and works on your smartphone.

That’s the toolbox so far.

❦

Support Something

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 05:47:42 +0000

Lately we’ve been getting into all sorts of trouble.

Maybe you’ve heard, maybe you haven’t of the Imagination Station’s recent efforts to build a statue of RoboCop in Detroit. So, yep, that’s us.

We recognized early on that this was a project with more energy than anything we had really ever seen. And to reach our fundraising goal in just 5 short days, that was nothing short of exhilarating. The largest sum we had previously raised for one cause was $5’000, RoboCop was 10x that.

As it stands we have raised over $64’000 and have upwards of 2’500 individual backers.

It hasn’t been all sunshine and unicorns though. Detroit is a rather binary city. And not everyone likes RoboCop.

There has been a lot of very productive discussion around RoboCop, even if it doesn’t have much to to with the statue itself. There has also been a lot of unproductive discussion. I will take a moment to describe unproductive discussion: 1) any question that has been answered by members of the Imagination Station team a number of times but is asked repeatedly only because the questioner does not agree with the answer given. 2) Good-Old-Fashioned name-calling, which has come in the form of Facebook posts and the occasional aggressive text message. Which, hey guys, p.s. I *do* get a warm, fuzzy, safe feeling when I see the police and if *that* continues I just want you to know that I am ALL ABOUT restraining orders. :)

I’m not going to spend much more time on that other than to say if you have something to say, please, please call me 734-552-2438.

What I feel has been terribly valuable about RoboCop is the learning experience that we have had on how to handle something with such a meteoric energy behind it.

One of our *prime directives* at LOVELAND is creating easy ways for people to post and fund projects that they care about. We’ve started a geographically based payment platform as one of the features of Living In The Map.

And we are continuing to build on those ideas and features. One of the most important things that we know about crowd-source fundraising that has only been driven home by the RoboCop project is that in order to succeed, a project has to be interesting.

Part of creating that interest is building a straight forward model that persuades people to care about a project. Finding that spot between super-fun and super-serious is difficult, but we’re working on it.

What we ultimately want to see out of RoboCop is the harnessing of all of that (go ahead admit it) international attention and have it focused on to Detroit in a way that highlights all the positive that is going on.

I mean you can think of RoboCop as a joke, if you want to. But the way I see it is even if you see all of this as a joke. EMBRACE it! Make it your own. Mayor Bing, sit down with Peter Weller and invite him into your city, or hell, put him on the “no fly” list.

But nothing is gained by fighting your neighbors.

I’m going to sign off with something Robo-Positive and light-hearted. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Peter Weller:

RoboCop Speaks to Detroit from Peter Weller

Logging Into Detroit (A Teaser)

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 01:45:10 +0000

greatamericanpixel:

LOVELAND is very close to releasing version 1.0 of our map of Detroit, dubbed Living in the Map. Larry’s been hacking on it hard like a drunkard with a broadsword and stitching it up sweetly like a hummingbird after heart surgery (sorry, been drinking coffee). If you’d like to take an early look and let us know what you think, email me at jerry@makeloveland.com and I’ll hit you in the next couple days.

Here’s a real quick taste of what we’ve got running. When you pull up the map you see the entire city broken down either by zip code:

…or cluster (the same clusters being used for the Detroit Works Project):

When you click an area you drill down to see every single land parcel that composes it, along with ownership information which appears instantly on mouse-over. Every zip and cluster has its own profile, basic data, and “wall” ala Facebook. If you comment or like or follow a place, you’ll get updates on it, etc:

The parcels are the backbone of the map on which we’re building more features and visualizations. We want to take it slow and test for different use-cases knowing this badboy can expand in many directions and, proficient though we may be at it, we don’t want to make things messy or overextend ourselves.

The way we’re currently strategizing this (we love strategery) is to roll out very basic city-wide features and data by the end of the week, and then focus on one neighborhood, Corktown, as the place to prototype and test things that will roll out widely once people like them and they work well.

This ties in with Imagination Station’s proposal to develop a community engagement program for Corktown that uses the map as an organizing framework. Planned features include things like reporting problems directly to the city with one click (street lights out, dumping, etc), creating fundraisers (ex: we need to raise $500 to make this lot a garden), and additional layers like neighborhood stories, local projects, businesses, volunteer opportunities, etc.

If you want to read the current About page we’re working on, head below the proverbial fold. We could not be more excited about oh the places this map will go, and I’ve left a bunch of things out here, but whatever, as they say in France: Le under-promise and le over-deliver.

Just one last pic of the parcels crashing on the shores of 8 Mile, how pretty they are:

Read More

Something Good out of Something Scary

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 07:41:44 +0000

First, I want to thank everyone who sent good thoughts, vibes, words, and prayers my way.

I heard back from my doctor at the University of Michigan yesterday and I received the best news possible. No signs of ongoing renal inflammation. This means I will be operating at full capacity. AWESOME.

Here’s a photo Jerry snapped of me in recovery:

I’m also going to share a small portion of the last email my doctor sent me.

“I read about Loveland in the NYT, but didn’t connect you to the Mary Lorene Carter ….You are doing great work, I am impressed by your guts and creativity.”

Pretty cool? I think so.

In other news, the Knight Foundation grant that the Imagination Station applied for recently has been chosen to move on in the second round of the application process (read the initial proposal)! Keep your fingers crossed for us! We’re all working hard to bring crazy fantastic new things to Corktown, Detroit, and well, really, everywhere.

Thank you, again for all of the support! I am one healthy and ferocious Detroit Ice Squirrel, and I’m so happy that I get to work on and make amazing things with my teammates, family, and friends.

I Do Something Scary.

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 12:38:57 +0000

I generally keep my posts centered around the projects that I work on. And though I recognize that there may be a few incriminating photos of me on Facebook I try to use social media to promote interesting things and not personal ones, this is a rather personal post. So continue reading at your own risk. It may or may not be graphic in content and inappropriate for children, and the squeamish.

About five years ago I was diagnosed with Lupus. Which was, in the simplest of terms, not awesome. For someone who was petrified of needles, the blood work and biopsy were terrifying. Not to mention the following months of chemotherapy and steroid treatment.
[sample kidney biopsy cells]

After being the “worst case scenario” over and over for months I was finally told I was “in remission”.
Probably the biggest kick in the teeth was a year later discovering that my left femur had died as a result of corti-steroid treatment that I had undergone. So while I’m pretty bitter about not being able to go out for my morning runs anymore I was fairly happy with being “in remission”, and I’ll gladly take the handicapped parking that comes with the *zombie* bones.

[sample zombie femur]

This fall I was alerted by one of my doctors that there was evidence of ongoing kidney inflammation from my lab work. This Wednesday I go in for my next biopsy. Best case scenario: I pay $15’000 for a biopsy that shows I have residual kidney damage from my last flare-up. Worst case scenario: more chemical therapy and anti-body infusions.
I have to admit that between doctors appointments, scheduling “procedures”, getting my medical records in order, and telling my mother ” it’s fine, we’ve done this before.”, I’ve been a little pre-occupied.
However, I have the best support system evar! <3 I have Jerry Giraffendork, who has promised his Wednesday to sit next to a sedated me (and take advantage of the amazing wi-fi University of Michigan’s hospital offers), my parents and five siblings will be circling, and I have amazing friends and teammates.

I feel this post may be a little selfish.But, I also feel that it is necessary to document what my brain has been marinating in. For me there are no real lines; work, romance, education, recreation, family they are all the same thing. And for whatever it’s worth, I’ve taken the red pill, just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Ketchup.

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 22:20:02 +0000

Jerry’s jumped back on the blogwagon. And inspired me to follow suit.

Lately Jerry’s brain has been consumed by possible vectors of LOVELAND evolution. I’m gonna go ahead and say that I’m partially to blame. We’ve been talking about these things a lot but never really getting traction. Until I (of all things) made him watch the Social Network.

In his former life Jerry had what I will call a “traditional” VC experience. Couple of guys in their 20s with a cool idea get a couple million dollars from some venture capitalists to make their idea happen. Everybody moves from Brooklyn (Silicon Ghetto) to San Fransisco (Silicon Valley), the VCs start staffing the team with their own people, midnight board meeting is held, and BOOM our hero arrives to work in the morning to find his stuff packed up and his office locked.

Not exactly how it worked out for Mark Zuckerburg, but enough of the story lined up for Jerry.

Anyway the point of that long digression was that revisiting the problems that the Wello team encountered in the startup world started a line of thinking that is now informing the future of LOVELAND.

So we’ve been reading and re-reading and watching and re-watching interviews with some of these interwebz wiz-kidz and looking at what they’ve built and how they organized their company.

With the Imagination Station we’re taking advantage of the cold weather to get moving on the organizational end. And the design team is beginning to really kick some butt. If all goes well we should be able to hit the ground running this spring and get moving with some hardcore rehab. We’ve also applied for a grant through the Knight foundation which would allow us to focus on building out the community engagement aspects of LOVELAND’s Living In The Map tool. You can read our application here. (and vote for it too, we’re currently ranked #1!!! <3)

So what else? A couple of great partnerships!

We’re still working with LEMONADE: Detroit, and there’s just one day left to have your frames matched by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan…. so you put in $1, they put in $1, same goes for donations of any other amount! Which means this is a really cool way to help fund a really cool movie. And you get credited as a producer! Cool? Very. So buy a frame or two!

We’re also working with SUPERFRONT, a gallery out of Brooklyn and Los Angeles. They’re hosting a show called Detroit: a Brooklyn Case Study. This show opens in LA in January, will stay there for a few months and then make its way across the country to Detroit (where LOVELAND will host the exhibition!) and New York!! There’s even still a few days to support the exhibition through Kickstarter.

And we’re working with a number of groups that range from historical conservation, artists, entrepreneurs, to civic development to further populate Living In The Map in addition to the community engagement work we’re doing with the Imagination Station. So stay tuned for more updates. Larry is making mapping magic!

LOVELAND is growing! I’m always astounded by how big an inch actually is! <3

vanessamiller: Detroit loves Mary and Jerry from the Loveland...

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 01:33:13 +0000

Detroit Loves

Phillip Lauri- Founder, Detroit Lives!

vanessamiller:

Detroit loves

Mary and Jerry from the Loveland project! http://makeloveland.com/

a take from todays catalogue shoot for Detroit Lives!

http://detroitlives.org/2010/09/13/weekend-wrap-up/

Something Awesome at the Imagination Station!

Sun, 12 Sep 2010 05:51:42 +0000

Today we had a fantastic day at The Imagination Station!

We’ve been trying to get 2236 (Lefty) torn down for quite sometime… not quite there yet (more on that soon). But today we had a workday that we left feeling completely exhausted, damp, filthy, and oh, so good!

We were one of a couple sites for a large network of volunteers and ended up with about 50 people at the Imagination Station and Roosevelt Park. The people that came into our site were fun, interesting, passionate, and ridiculously productive!

Our volunteers cleaned up the entirety of Roosevelt Park, weeded the gardens in front of the Train Station, tore out *all* of the drywall in Righty (2230 14th Street), AND got to watch our friends Ben and Andy pull down the back half of Lefty with a truck!

So a huge thanks to everyone who came out and worked at Roosevelt Park and The Imagination Station! A very special thank you to Ben and Andy, all of the media crew who came out to document…. Dan Land, Nick Farrell, Donna Terek, and Alan Languirand! Mad love to Catie Newell and her father for all of their work! Enormous thanks to Christ The King from Southgate, particularly Becky Buettner and Mitchell! And we don’t even know how to thank Phillip Cooley for the direction, resources, and ridiculous hard work!

Our Volunteers.

Mary and the Media Makers!

Phillip-Chimney-Sweep-Cooley.

Catie, our very rained on, yet still very cheerful, artist.

Thanks for making awesome things happen guys!

We’ll be back there tomorrow! So if you’re in the area (Dad, I’m calling you out!), we have plenty of work! 10am-5pm 2230 14th Street Detroit, Mi 48216…. See you there!

Something Exciting!

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:50:16 +0000

Here’s something.

A few weeks ago Jerry spoke on a panel at a PSFK event. At a pre-event meet-up we were introduced to another speaker for the event named Catie Newell.

Jerry and I were really impressed and excited by her work, so much so that we asked her if she would create the second art work for the Imagination Station (the first being Marianne Audrey Burrows painting). What’s cooler is that she taken us up on our invite!

So here’s a few examples of the kind of work she’s done, right here, in Detroit!

Exciting? Absolutely.

Lush, Moving Video about Recovering Detroit from Blight

Unlisted — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 12:39:00 +0000

Volunteer Portraits, Jeff from Imagination Station on Vimeo.

A video portrait of Detroit social activist Jeff DeBruyn by Stephen McGee.

Detroit photographer and cinematographer, Stephen McGee has just released a new series of videos produced for the The Imagination Station in Detroit. The videos lushly capture the emotion and effort going into trying to remove the blight from Detroit and replace it with art and creative redevelopment.

Here's an excerpt of the Imagination Station's vision:

Imagination Station of Roosevelt Park is a nonprofit whose first job is to clean up 2236 and 2230 14th street, two blighted structures on the park facing the epic ruins of Michigan Central Station in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. The house on the right will be renovated using sustainable green practices. The burned out shell of the house on the left will be disposed of and its boundaries used as a public art space. Through this process, the Imagination Station aims to create a replicable model of redevelopment fueled by traditional partnerships and grant practices, as well as new social media techniques for fundraising, storytelling, and volunteerism

.
There's also an excellent portrait of Jerry Paffendorf, who's Loveland project has launched the idea for The Imagination Station.

Wack Dem Weeds from Imagination Station on Vimeo.

[The Imagination Station]

[Detroit: Shrink a City with Wild Imagination]

Loveland "Makes" The New York Times

Unlisted — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 19:41:00 +0000

Jerry Paffendorf, Mary Lorene Carter and Alan Languirand of the Loveland Team at the site of Plymouth. (Image credit: The New York Times)

The New York Times reporter Melena Ryzik went to Detroit this week to cover Maker Faire and ended up doing a profile about how artists are surviving and thriving in the shrinking city of Detroit. Rita J. King wrote her own take on the transformation of Detroit in her essay last week, "Detroit: Shrinking City with Wild Imagination."

Wringing Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit profiles a number of artists including our own Jerry Paffendorf's Loveland Project:

Jerry Paffendorf, a newly arrived resident who quickly built himself a niche. Mr. Paffendorf, 28, moved to Detroit from San Francisco by way of Brooklyn last spring, with an expertise in software design and a side of techno-savvy wit. He is behind a project called Loveland, a “micro real estate” enterprise that sells parcels of Detroit that he owns by the square inch for $1 a piece. Mr. Paffendorf bought 3,150 square feet of land for $500 when he arrived; “inchvestors” get a plot in a part of town that might not be well trod otherwise. Proceeds go to organizations that address Detroit’s many problems.

Congratulations Jerry!

[NYT: Wringing Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit]

Making Parties, Making Progress, Making Faire, Making Soup!

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 21:57:27 +0000

I feel like I’ve been neglecting my blog… even though it’s quite likely my only readers are Kyle, my Grandma Pat, and my Aunt Ruth. Still I don’t want to keep them in the dark….

About 2 weeks ago (July 17th) was the Big Inch Block Party, and it was an outrageous success! THANK YOU to EVERYONE who came out! Thank you so much to our sponsors: BetaWorks, McClure’s Pickles, Valentine Vodka, and idetroit! Thank you to Cafe D’Mongo’s and the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue for hosting! Thank you to the fantastic volunteering skillz of Jennifer Ruud, Nikki Barr, and our Inchtern Nicole Itkin! And thank you so much to our collaborators Rita J. King, Joshua S. Fouts, and Larry Sheradon for traveling so far to be here, having the whole team together for the first time was in itself a fantastic event!

We’ve also had huge progress at the Imagination Station. Last Thursday a team of about 40 young volunteers come out and totally rocked it!

They got the Roosevelt Hotel boarded up and completely gutted the second floor of the house we’re going to rehab at the Imagination Station. Such a volunteer effort is ridiculous exciting to be part of!

The Maker Faire was this weekend too! Jerry, Alan, and I had so much fun. There were a ton of super awesome projects there.

p.s. Yes, this car actually shot Twinkies.

Alan took a mobile version of Lemon Battery out into the faire and was able to document it, which is awesome, and probably the most comprehensive documentation of the event.

The excitement of Maker Faire was exhausting enough, but on top of that Jerry and I had to move Saturday night, and make 2 birthday parties too!

Back to Maker Faire Sunday and then a very, very exhausted Mary and Jerry made their way to Detroit SOUP. Which is a really fantastic event put on monthly by our friend Kate Daughdrill and Jessica Hernandez. SOUP has a $5 admission which pays for your, well, soup. This admission reimburses the cooks and then the rest of the admission gets put towards a micro-grant. A handful of people present different projects that they work on that would benefit from a small grant, all of the SOUP attendees vote for which project they think would get the most out of the grant …. and you know, the most popular project gets the money.

Last night a project to clean up Avery Park in Woodbridge got $300 for materials and supplies. Good luck to them! Detroit has a lot of very committed volunteers and I’m sure the park will look beautiful.

Detroit: Shrink a City with Wild Imagination

Rita J. King — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:42:00 +0000

Co-owner of the Imagination Station Jerry Paffendorf leads a tour of the space and explains the future of the Detroit project.

I just returned from Detroit, where the Loveland crew continues to blow my mind while working on creative reconstruction of a shrinking city, Detroit.

The Imagination Station, depicted in the video above, is an empty building next to a burnt-out house destroyed by arson, as many places in Detroit are, and an old defunct hotel. Jerry co-owns it with Jeff DeBruyn. Across the street from the Imagination Station, beyond a grassy field, is the desolate, majestic Michigan Central Station, which stopped operating in the 1980’s and now looms tall and gray in a grassy field, full of broken windows and occasional hidden interlopers exploring the emptiness.

The cumulative effect of so much neglect makes it seem from an outside perspective that Detroit was abandoned all at once, as if a nuclear core had melted down and the entire city had to be evacuated. Vacant skyscrapers look almost normal by day, but at night, the city masterminded by Henry Ford, once the richest person in the world, is a ghost town of darkened windows and squatters.

When we meet Jeff for the tour of Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, starting at the Imagination Station, he’s chatting with squatters, Mike and Kevin, who have taken up residence in the future Imagination Station. They have big news--the three buildings were boarded up and the city is planning to come through and tear them down the next day.

Of all of the countless structures that could have been scheduled for demolition the very next day by the city, it seems absurdly odd that these buildings, two of which are now being tended by mindful new owners, would be first up. Next to the houses is the Roosevelt Hotel, a brick building with broken glass, graffiti tags and squatters. Through busted shades on the third floor, the outline of a man appears briefly in the window.

Next to the Roosevelt Hotel is the first of Jeff and Jerry's two houses, which is burned out by arson and brought back to life for a fleeting moment by the artist Marianne Audrey Burrows. A few months ago, Marianne was in a group of artists and friends from the Loveland crew who came from Detroit to visit the Imagination Age Salon in New York City. I run the Imagination Age Salon, after a lifetime of dreaming about it. Marianne had never been to New York before, and she was wild and wide-eyed with energy.

She said she needed to paint and I commissioned her to paint a mural on the double doors of the garage at the bottom of the garden. It was late spring, with hot pink rhododendrons in full bloom. Over the course of the hot day, she painted a full cityscape in the background and the blooming rhododendrons in their full rebirth in the foreground.

Since then she has painted six other murals in or on buildings around the city including inside and outside this burned-out shell of a house, which has become in its last days a canvas for her great work “Reclamation.” The hot pink rhododendrons are reborn again on the charred walls along with the blue silhouette of the black-windowed city skyline.

Paint A Burnt House from Imagination Station on Vimeo.

Now the ruined house is boarded up, and no more visitors can see the art inside. Yesterday, the day I toured with the artist herself, was the last day of the life of the house. We stepped over black bricks and burnt sticks on the shelled stairway to the second floor, where we tiptoed across damaged floorboards to the explosion of sky blue paint spreading from the corners of the rooms to the broken windows and beyond, out into the world.

After this structure is removed, The Imagination Station will be left standing across from Michigan Central Station, which was designed by the same firm that created Grand Central Terminal. While it’s hard to imagine Grand Central not existing in Manhattan, it almost happened. The structure was under siege by would-be developers in 1968.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis intervened:

"Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future? Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters. Maybe… this is the time to take a stand, to reverse the tide, so that we won't all end up in a uniform world of steel and glass boxes."

Before we get in the car to explore Corktown, Jeff points across the street to a barbecue restaurant next to pawn shops and a half-painted Banksy on the last brick building, near the roof. Apparently one of the world’s greatest living artists was chased off like a common thief before he had a chance to finish, leaving only the dark faded silhouette that somehow suits the location perfectly, making me wonder if maybe that’s what Banksy intended. Across the empty grassy field, in the silent darkness of the Michigan Central Station, the shadowed perimeter of bobbing heads popping up over the edge of the roof looks like the painting came to life in the form of mysterious explorers.

There’s danger and romance in the creative anarchy of abandonment and empty space for people who have a roof over their heads but want to explore, and then there’s stark necessity for people like Mike and Kevin who have run out of other options. What they’re doing could be considered giving in or fighting back, depending on where you sit.

“In 2002 I graduated from law school,” Jeff says as he pulls away from the curb. “Six years ago, a priest brought me to Detroit. Father Tom. I moved into the shelter to run the soup kitchen and live a monastic existence, living simply, serving the poor.”

“You’ve been living there ever since?”

“Ever since. But now I’m ready to expand, that’s how I got involved with Loveland and the Imagination Station.”

He explains the nature of the divisions that tore the community apart, starting with freeway construction in the 1960’s and then riots in 1967, commencing after a police raid during a party for two returning Vietnam vets in the very place we now sit in an idling car.

“This is ground zero for the riots,” he says. The dusky night has cast the quiet street into a jagged ring of shadows on the horizon. My eyes haven’t yet adjusted. He rolls slowly past vacant lots, some bound by hurricane fences, some gone to seed, others covered in remnants and junk. “Some of the houses burned down. Crime drove people out. The city is shrinking. Detroit is 143 square miles but the population is down from over two million to under 800,000. I believe that this city can and should be used as a model for how to shrink a city.”

Some of the blocks we pass are blown out completely, empty of people and hope, with sagging roofs and rusted gates swinging open on overgrown fields of Queen Anne’s Lace. These areas, he suggests, can be turned into community parks, farmland and incubators for social entrepreneurialism.

“Wait and see what’s going to happen in the next few years. The Imagination Station will be the center of a major shift. We’re going to make it real. Community organizing through social media. I’m excited to learn these new skills and see how they can have an impact on fundraising. We don’t want to kiss ass or beg. We just want to raise the funds to make this real.”

A Couple of Somethings.

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:58:45 +0000

Shwoo! We’ve been so busy that by the time I get anything drafted to post something else has happened and what I just wrote seems obsolete! :p

So real quick I gots a rundown for you of some of the stuffs going on….

Tomorrow Jerry and I are gonna jump into the Funzone and make the drive out to Akron to give a talk at the Arkon Art Museum. Cool? Very.

Then we race back to the D! Friday Josh, Rita, and Larry all get into town! Soooo excited to see them!

Josh, Rita, Larry I’m calling you out! You ready to have your minds blown!

The occasion for their visit is The Big Inch Block Party that we’re hosting and holding at the Downtown Synagogue and Cafe D’Mongo’s! And now, I’m calling the rest of you out! Get you’re butts to the synagogue Saturday night for the best par-tay of all time evar, srsly. Everyone who attends is a Land owner! Video confessions of your visions for Detroit and LOVELAND will be taken! Lemon Battery will be happening! Marianne will be painting! The Detroit Party Marching Band will mayhaps make an appearance! The Reelers are gonna play! And those sweet kids from Lightning Love are gonna headline! Check the site for details and the Facebook event!

There’s one more day in the Monumental Kitty Kickstarter round! Get in on that! This is your last chance to get inches that build a sphinx in Corktown!

We’re gonna be launching our next grant too! Stay tuned to find out who it is! (hint: it’s Spaulding Court) :)

AND! We’ve started a brand spankin’ new project! We’ve partnered with Jeff DeBruyn and purchased two houses facing Michigan Central Station (the greatest american ruin eva!). It’s blight and we’re gonna get rid of it! And we’re gonna make cool stuff.

We’ve titled it the Imagination Station, check out the site see what we’re doing and get involved! This is us taking the concepts of storytelling, community engagenent, crowd funding, and creative collaboration and applying it outside of LOVELAND.

It’s gonna be BIG!

Loveland: The Scene of the Crime

Unlisted — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 09:21:00 +0000

A sawed off pole in Loveland missing its solar panel lies across Plymouth.

By @RitaJKing

Shortly after midnight I received a call from Jerry Paffendorf to let me know that a crime took place today in Loveland.

Loveland is a city of inches in Detroit. 600 people from all around the world are “inchvestors” who share space in Loveland’s first fully developed colony, Plymouth. Each parcel in Plymouth is one square inch. Each inch costs one dollar. I own 1000 inches in Plymouth. This neighborhood of 1000 inches is called The Imagination Age Network.

As “inchvestors” in Loveland, we live scattered among states, countries and even continents. But we share a neighborhood, and in our neighborhood tonight, a crime took place. How we react to this challenge is the first real test of our shared values.

Tonight, before I spoke with Jerry, I had dinner with Jesse Dylan, the Curator of Mysteries of the Imagination Age Network. The most incredible thing about Loveland, he said, is that it’s “real.” Immediately, we learned just how real our shared space is. The same way a seed contains the blueprint for a vine that can grow a half-ton pumpkin with seeds of its own, each inch in Loveland is tiny but full of future.

Jerry’s pictures of the crime scene depict what happened to the pole that he, Mary Lorene Carter and Alan Languirand erected to support a solar-powered camera at the top. It was sawed down, and the solar panel, which the Imagination Age Network funded, was removed and stolen. The next step would have been to attach a Lemon Battery camera.

Had the camera been installed, images of the vandals would have been captured and uploaded before they had a chance to get close enough to touch the pole. In this way the Lemon Battery camera will curb future vandalism on the site, unless would-be criminals don’t mind their pictures instantly being shared with law enforcement and the rest of the world. A sign will be placed on the property warning future visitors that if they can see the Lemon Battery, the Lemon Battery can also see them.

This is not the first time recently that I’ve dealt with an invasion. A few months ago, I heard a sound at my back door at home. I caught a gloved hand holding my garden shears reaching for the doorknob through a broken glass panel. As I met with various security professionals and weighed the options for protection, I was forced to deal with serious questions:

Which measures are only psychologically comforting, and which actually result in increased safety?

What is the proper attitude to take in the face of such a crime?

Where’s the line between security and paranoia, protection and cynicism?

Some might argue that leaving a valuable object like a solar panel unattended in an abandoned urban environment during an economic and cultural crisis is asking for trouble, but I disagree. Neglecting such areas when they need attention the most leads to even more squalor, and that’s a failure of imagination.

At the heart of Loveland is love.

Something Monumental.

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:34:54 +0000

LOVELAND had it’s Season 2 launch a few months ago, and we’ve been busy updating things and making a few changes. Today we did some big site updates and launched a new round in KICKSTARTER that is dedicated to funding our first grant!

Monumental Kitty is a sculpture designed by Jerome Ferretti, and the first of 7 grants that LOVELAND is giving out in Season 2. When completed it will sit at the north footprint of the Corktown Pedestrian Overpass. It’s a really amazing work, you can check out more, including a not only informational but super-fun video about it on the Kickstarter Round here.

Every dollar you inchvest in Monumental Kitty gets you inches in the Hello World microhood of LOVELAND… So what’s stopping you? Buy Land, Have Fun, and Make Art Happen In Detroit!

I moved! But not far

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:28:43 +0000

I’m only a click away. 7billionfriends.com is retired for now. I needed a new sheet of paper and found one at The Great American Pixel. See you there!

CAW!

Construction at Loveland

Unlisted — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 12:32:00 +0000

Plymouth, LOVELAND Construction, June 2010 from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

By Rita J. King

I couldn't be more excited to see cement being poured.

The time capsule shown 44 seconds into the video was packaged by me in the middle of the night before Jerry Paffendorf and Mary Lorene Carter drove back to Detroit from New York City last Monday. Jerry texted me when I was already in bed to tell me if I wanted to bury a time capsule in the cement, they'd be by at 9 am to pick it up.

I am the founder of the Imagination Age Network, a neighborhood of 1000 inches in the first colony of Loveland, Plymouth. Plymouth consists of 10,000 inches, outlined by the cement.

I got out of bed and in the silent darkness, gathered my thoughts to figure out what I should include. Time capsules in cornerstones customarily include that day's newspapers so the date can be remembered. I printed out a copy of my friend Cory Doctorow's latest post on Boing Boing. I included a string of Mardi Gras beads from New Orleans. I found them on the floor in a little girl's room. She had meticulously stenciled a sign for her door, "Don't come in without knocking first," but looters had kicked the door in and torn her abandoned possessions to shreds, leaving only a pile of tangled beads on the cheap, burnt carpet. The beads symbolize rebirth, reconstruction, the hope that Detroit will once again be a city of the future and that the individual lives of the human beings affected by disaster are remembered. I included a picture of the Detroit girls, Celeste and Ricki, who live on the same street as Loveland. They are the only ones left on their block, but they're thrilled that the micro real-estate experiment has given them neighbors.

The jar includes a map of Plymouth and two versions of the Imagination Age Network, the first as conceived on a cocktail party, on a napkin, with Jerry, and the second (shown below in the rainbow image) after the actual plot of land was redistricted. Originally, I had intended the Imagination Age to be subdivided, but we ended up with a single block of 25 by 40 inches. I like it better the way it turned out, but both maps went in the jar.

Old map.

New map.

I included an LED light connected to a small battery that I once used to write the word love in the air.

The jar contains other secret items as well, but more on that later.

The most important thing about the jar is that it contains an augmented reality marker and on July 17, in Detroit, the jar will begin to communicate from inside the cement. The contents of the jar will be updated as the community develops.

Also see:
Welcome to Loveland!
Rita J. King speaks at O'Reilly's Gov2.0 Summit about Loveland
Loveland.

I Do New York. part 2: The Imagination Age.

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:54:04 +0000

****This post is waaay overdue. I’m actually now *back* in New York. So, expect more on that later. Even if it is almost a month late, it’s important to chronicle my first visit.****

Friday morning, Alan left us to attend a family wedding in Rhode Island. So, Marianne, Jerry, and I wandered into Manhattan to see what kind of trouble we could get into.

We avoided Time Square as someone had left a rather threatening cooler in the area. We did however head over to Central Park, which was beautiful. In case you’re wondering, Central Park looks a lot like what Detroit’s Belle Isle would look like… if people were actually visiting it.

After visiting Central Park, Marianne, also left us to meet up with a New York painter she is acquainted with. So Jerry and I popped into Grand Central Station and grabbed a train to the Bronx, to visit our friends and collaborators Rita J. King and Joshua S. Fouts at the Imagination Age Salon.

I really can’t even begin to say enough nice things about Josh and Rita. They are both ridiculously brilliant and phenomenal hosts. I mean just check out the strawberry-rhubarb pie (my favorite :)) that Josh made!

After dinner, Marianne rejoined us. During our conversation she showed Rita some of her work, by which Rita was so excited that she asked Marianne to paint a mural at the Imagination Age!

So Saturday morning Marianne, started the mural… less than 8 hours later, look what she had!

And Rita also put together a beautiful video about it.

Jerry and I ran off to Brooklyn to play with some of our friends on Saturday, but were back to the Imagination Age Salon on Sunday… By this time Alan had returned from the wedding and was able to join us for dinner and some evening brainstorming and collaboration.

Our stay at the Imagination Age was outstandingly productive, as well as fun. We were able to come up with a lot of new applications for LOVELAND and the tools associated with it. And even though we head back in June, I miss Josh and Rita already.

Map of the Imagination Age Network in Loveland

Rita J. King — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:35:00 +0000

Loveland continues to grow, inch by inch, and the Imagination Age Network in Loveland has now been mapped!

The Eight Zones are named for the aspects of the Eightfold Path. Each member of the network receives an address within one of the zones.

In the map above, the thin purple rectangle represents 40 inches of shared space. This shared space will include all elements that can be found in any community--with a twist. Eventually the network will create multiple shared assets including a Theater of the Future, The Imagination Age School, and a store. The image directly above is the banner for the store, which will soon be open for business.

I Do New York. part 1: The Arrival.

Sat, 15 May 2010 21:16:45 +0000

I’ve never been to New York. People say “You’ve never been to New York?!”, and I say “I’ve been to New York state, but I’ve never been to New York city,”. To which they respond: “You’ve never been to New York.”

Since I met Jerry he’s been trying to drag me out there with him, but I always had other obligations. And last week we were finally able to schedule a trip. Now I can officially say:

I’ve been to New York.

Last Thursday morning Alan, our friend Marianne, Jerry, and I piled into a car and started driving east. I have to say I couldn’t have chosen better travel buddies.

Quick rundown of the BFA clown car.

Alan Languirand: Graphic Designer, Photographer, Programmer, LOVELAND Partner spear-heading Project Lemon Battery, Cool Dude, Friend, and Roommate.

Marianne Audrey Burrows: Painter, Performance Artist, Curator of the Motor City Movie House, Friend, and all around Detroit Visionary.

Jerry Paffendorf: Mixed Media Artist, New Media Artist, Tri-Coastal Bearded Giraffendork, LOVELAND Creator, Collaborative Partner, Swell Guy, Friend, and Roommate.

Mary Lorene Carter: Mixed Media Installation Artist, Painter, Art Historian, LOVELAND Librarian, Detroit Ice Squirrel, and Motor City Bad Ass.

The drive was about 10 hours, but a rather enjoyable one. One of the things I really enjoy about driving is the opportunity to see the areas you’re moving through. And not to get overly sentimental, but srsly, we have a beautiful country.

And, mad props to Marianne, she dominated the state of Pennsylvania. And throughout the whole drive we only encountered traffic once.

And Disco Fries, once.

We got into the city around 10pm-ish… and dropped off our things. We started at 3rd Ward, a fantastic creative collaborative space that some of Jerry’s friends run. They have extended their facilities and taken over an apartment building, so it was super awesome of them to offer us their guest suite. So, Rock On, 3rd Ward! And public be warned, we’ve got plans to collaborate with these dudes in the future!

After stashing our bags, the four of us popped out for a few drinks with Jerry’s old boarding school friend Colin. And afterward, had a couple of beers on the roof of 3rd Ward.

Here’s the view.

Overall it was such a fantastic day and night. Everyone I came into the city with and met was full of great energy.

And the rest of the trip only got better.

The Nosebriidge Neighborhood, SF Events This Week

Sat, 15 May 2010 20:20:00 +0000

Mary, Larry, Krista and I are all connected up in San Francisco getting ready for this week’s meetups and presentations. Tonight we’re at Noisebridge at 7 for an open meetup (Facebook event page with deets). Tuesday Mary and I are speaking at Institute for the Future. And Tuesday night Larry, Mary, and I are demoing at SF Beta.

For the Noisebridge event tonight we’re trying something new that we’ve been thinking about for a while. We laid out a design for a neighborhood called Nosebriidge (spelling intended :)) and Larry drew it out on paper. Anyone who buys land tonight will go in the Nosebridge microhood and can draw on their land. We’ll upload the drawing onto the map on Hello World so the handmade marks will show up on the map.

If you’re in San Francisco, hopefully see you at one of these events!

"I want you to be there." Micro Meetups in Detroit and San Francisco this week!

Mon, 10 May 2010 22:24:00 +0000

OK first off, the new blog I tried to make is being a jerk, so long live this one for now! It’s good to be back in the neon green. :)

This week there are 2 informal micro meetup micro parties for LOVELAND micro real estate, one in Detroit THIS WEDNESDAY and one in San Francisco THIS SATURDAY. Mary and I have the honor of being flown out to west side for a talk about the project at a conference by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and want to make the most of our trip there.

Here are the details on both:

* The Detroit event is this Wednesday, May 12th at 7 PM at our studio at the Russell Industrial Center, 2nd floor, building 2, suite 211 at 1600 Clay St. Here’s the Facebook event page with RSVP and here’s the google map.

* The San Francisco event is this Saturday, May 15th at 7 PM at the Noisebridge hacker space in the Mission at 2169 Mission St. Here’s the Facebook event page with RSVP and here’s the google map.

My cell is 908-343-1981 if you get lost, want to talk, or anything else.

Here’s generally what to expect: We’ll have some refreshments and things like that, and we want to share a short interactive presentation on the adventure-in-progress that is LOVELAND, brainstorm cool ideas, hang out and help connect some cool peops. It’ll be nice and casual.

LOVELAND rolls pretty punk rock and mysterious as far as startups go because we’re trying to create a culture and a brand that can constantly transform itself, and I can’t wait to share the more comprehensive and complete story of where this came from, where it’s at, what we’ve tried and learned so far, and where we see it going as we continue leveling up and adding definition.

It’s gonna be fun and interesting. We hope to see you there! : )

You Wanna Start Something?

Mon, 03 May 2010 15:43:18 +0000

I’ve been threatening to do this for a while… and now I have. I started a new blog: Mary Carter Motor City Bad Ass.

Several months ago, Jerry snapped a photo of me with my arms crossed and looking generally, bad ass… or at least as bad ass as a young skinny white chick wearing a cardigan can look.

So here’s a gif of the series of Mary Carter Motor City Bad Ass that started it all.

Follow. Enjoy. And look for me in Detroit, on the interwebs, and everywhere (even trapped in freight elevators, see below), being a Motor City Bad Ass.

Jason Silva in The Imagination Age "Intentions: 128"

Rita J. King — Sun, 02 May 2010 23:30:00 +0000

When Jason Silva sent me the concept teaser for "Turning Into Gods" (see below for video) I was struck by the scope of the thought and his enthusiasm for a subject that has kept me staring at the ceiling many nights since before I even started grade school:

Is immortality possible? Can science put an end to death?

Jason Silva seems certain that the answer is yes. Looking ahead for a moment...let's say we get there. Envision a place where consciousness is re-engineered without the turmoil of the mortal coil...

But will we ever truly be immune to hazard, even if the singularity is reached?

One line grabbed me particularly:

"Imagination," Silva says, "allows us to think beyond our limitations to conceive of what might be and go further than we ever thought possible."

I invited him to become a member of the Imagination Age Network in Loveland, an experiment in Detroit created by Jerry Paffendorf. Loveland explores new concepts about community and the micro-ownership of shared real estate. Loveland is 1,000,000 square inches in all, made up of individual colonies. The first colony, Plymouth, is 10,000 square inches and has 588 "inchvestors." The Imagination Age Network is a 1000-inch neighborhood in Plymouth. Our goal is to see how big we can make an inch.

The yellow rectangle is the Imagination Age Network in Plymouth, shown amid the parcels of 588 other inchvestors. For more information about Loveland, click here.

Jason Silva's inch is called "Turning Into Gods." He chose the address "Intentions: 128" for his project. The Imagination Age network is divided into eight shared zones of 122 inches each. Intentions, the second zone, includes inches 123-245.

The first step in growing Jason's project is to watch the video below and leave comments on this blog post with your thoughts on possibility, science and technology, a grand unfolding instigated by humans, and, oh yeah, "making ourselves permanent."

TURNING INTO GODS - 'Concept Teaser' from jason silva on Vimeo.

Something Nice

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 07:13:34 +0000

We (Jerry, Alan, and I) had the chance to spend some time with Phillip Cooley. He’s a friend, Inchvestor, and general man about town doing awesome things in the city of Detroit. The rest of his family is also very active in the city. I’ve seen his parents at Corktown Residents’ Council meetings, and recently the New York Times wrote a very nice article about them.

ANYWAY! We had a really nice meeting with Phillip, in which we caught him up with our progress and where we want to take things. Jerry talked about the project as a whole, the mapping tools Larry is working on, and which properties we are trying to acquire. I convinced Phillip to share some deep-fried pickles with us, and drink at least 3 beers more than he had intended to. And, Alan filled him in on Project Lemon Battery and how really, purchasing the battery was the biggest hurdle we had to installing PLB on PLYMOUTH.

So, it may be that he knows a good thing when he sees it, it might be that the 3 of us are ridiculously charming, or it may have been all the Guiness I persuaded him to have, but when we ended our meeting Phillip told us that he would buy the battery for LOVELAND and Project Lemon Battery!

So! Battery is on its way! Phillip Cooley, you rule! You are a good person, and people say nice things about you!

Here’s a very bad picture of Phillip getting ready to do very nice things.

And one of Phillip with PJ Ryder… I call this one “Two Detroit Restaurant Owners Face-Off!”!

So, if you find yourself in Detroit, and hungry, or thirsty, spread the love and visit the Cooley’s restaurant, Slow’s (Best mac and cheese evar)!

Begging For Batteries: What We Need To Make The Solar Streaming Property Camera Work

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 23:27:00 +0000

Update: Wow, great news! Phillip Cooley has stepped in and purchased the battery we need to stream the property. You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar, and very worthy of Mary Lorene Carter’s newest trademark compliment: “You are a good person, and people say nice things about you.” We will do you proud, and you have made us and many inchvestors happy. Now everyone go eat at Slow’s Bar-B-Q. :)

Battery down. Everything else still applies:

—-

Alan has been nailing it on our Project Lemon Battery solar powered web cam ++. We have the solar panel, we have the first camera (an old iPhone that streams over 3G), we have the working software that automagically posts pictures to Flickr every 10 seconds, we have the 21 foot tall poll cemented in the ground with wires running through it, and we have the birdhouse in which the camera will sit.

What we don’t yet have is the battery we need to install at the base of the pole to make sure that the camera will be recharged by the solar panel and ensure the camera stays on even when the sun is hiding. The price of this badboy is $342 plus $98 shipping, for a grand total of $440. Look at this beast:

Check out the videos we’ve made using Lemon Battery so far. Both of these show us terraforming Plymouth, the first LOVELAND property of 10,000 inches for 588 people.

Here’s digging out the shape of Plymouth and digging the hole for the pole:

Here’s planting the pole in the ground, tying it in place, and filling the hole with concrete:

Further, Mike R has been working to layer graphical magic on top of the Lemon Battery stream like this:

So we have an awesome AWESOME package in place but we need help affording the battery. If you want to see this system happen sooner than later please buy some land in the new property, Hello World, or get in touch about becoming a sponsor of the battery.

You can buy micro real estate in Detroit here at $1 an inch, and you can call me at 908-343-1981 to talk. Remember, LOVELAND has been entirely bootstrapped from tiny inchvestments (inch sales) rather than large investments, and we’re doing our first grant program where we’re splitting money from inch sales with other projects in the city.

If you’re a Plymouth inchvestor, chipping in will get your land online faster and help get this unique system up and running. We’ve been getting interest from other projects in Detroit that want to use the system, and we’re down for that. So let’s get this battery and spread the love, sunshine, streams, and lemons.

Thank you and awesome.

Neighborhoods, Services, and Sponsors, Oh My!

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:09:00 +0000

These past couple of rounds we’ve offered a new inchvestor reward and feature. If you own a square foot or more of LOVELAND (144 inches) you’ll get your own Neighborhood that you’ll be able to control with the similar tools to what we use behind the scenes, allowing you to give away or sell your land to friends or anyone and lay out their property lines. We’ll feature Neighborhoods alongside the full property map, encouraging people to explore them in particular. It’s your own little Sim City.

As we build the Neighborhood tools we’re paying attention to how the tools could be applied to human-scale macro real estate. We’ve had some meetings with groups interested in using the mapping tool in their neighborhoods. So cool. Larry has been rocking it, and the first map like that we put together is of the second floor of building 2 of the Russell Industrial Center. This map represents all the studios and I’m just sending invites out to all the occupants so they can log in and fill out what they do there. See the interactive version here.

We’re also working on bringing back an older idea and implementing an Inch Services section. What’s an inch service? Well, hopefully it will be an immediate answer to the question, “What do I do with my land?” LOVELAND itself will offer a few basic services like, for example, if you’d like to pay for a seed to be planted on your land, we’ll go do that for you. And if people want to offer their own services to inchvestors, they can do that. For example, miniature model maker John Bell has been thinking about a new micro car factory called Packard II. Want a miniature car for your micro real estate? ~~There’s~~ There will be an ~~app~~ inch service for that. Want to offer a service of your own and make money if people want to buy it for their land? Get in touch.

We could also use more monetary support to keep going strong. Funds are always super tight, and it makes sense to offer a way for people and businesses to support the project without having to buy land. We’re working on a new map interface that will feature Neighborhoods, inch services, and property sponsors. Here’s a sketch Alan made as we work out the design:

If you’re interested in supporting the project and becoming a sponsor we can work that out. We’re not totally sure what to charge or how to handle it yet so I can’t be specific on what we’re asking for yet, but that’s all the more reason to get on the phone and talk about what’s fair.

As always you can call me at 908-343-1981 or email jerry[at]makeloveland[dot]com. And as always you are encouraged to buy land and have fun. :)

Jerry

"@makeloveland Chicken!" My Short Talk On Augmented Twitter at The 140 Characters Conference

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 01:43:00 +0000

Mary gives the fuller story, but the panel I was on at the 140 Character Conference was rocked by volcanic eruptions that stranded Josh and Rita in London while Tish Shute and I carried on in condensed form. Here’s my supershort superfasttalk that touches on inspiration for bringing elements from virtual worlds out onto the realtime web and the really real world:

@makeloveland Chicken! Augmented Twitter supershorttalk at 140 Characters Conference from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Here’s the link to the @thekotel project I mention (Tweet Your Prayers — apparently my tweeted prayer for peace and pizza is on its way to the wall in Jerusalem, how crazy is that??) and the 3D Mailbox website (alchemically turning words into graphics = best concept ev-ar). Aaand here are some Augmented Reality pics Mike Rugnetta put together on inchvestor land in Detroit as we work on getting Project Lemon Battery humming with LOVELAND.

Augmented mARy:

Augmented Volcano:

Augmented Robot:

It’s been an inspiring trip to New York. Now headed back to Detroit all pumped up on passionate internet movers and shakers, with a few new ideas up the ole sleeve. <3 Got more to say about this stuff, but once again need more time. :)

/cue get-off-the-stage music

Buy land, have fun,

Jerry

908-343-1981

jerry[at]makeloveland[dot]com

Something ser·en·dip·i·tous

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:49:02 +0000

Keeping Jerry in Detroit for more than 2 weeks lately has been a lot like trying to nail a shadow to the floor. Monday morning he was on his way back to NYC to attend and speak at the 140 Characters Conference. The conference is meant to be one of the largest gatherings of people using real-time internet for business, media, art, and personal life. Jerry was supposed to speak on a panel of futurists that included Tish Shute, Rita J. King, and Joshua Fouts. The panel was to discuss the future of augmented reality and its place in real-time internet. Both Jerry and Tish’s talks were great, but…

Unfortunately, nature had other plans for Josh and Rita, who are currently stranded in London by volcanic ash. They were, however, able to make lemonade of the sour situation, and participated in the quickly assembled TEDxVolcano talk.

So, while Jerry is in New York and Rita and Josh in London, I’m still here, in Detroit, manning the battle-station.

The primary reason for me not accompanying Jerry to New York is due to a presentation of my own. I have, over the last 10 years, attended 3 different universities and switched majors 3 times…. So, in case any of you are wondering, this unofficially qualifies me as an expert in the fields of: fine arts, library science, and the history of art, particularly the pagan empires of the Mediterranean (700bce-400ad). Today I had to present my senior thesis to a panel of faculty, which means I get to graduate….and I’m not entirely sure if I’m doing it accidentally, or on purpose.

So, for anyone who cares, here’s a few examples of my work I do apart from LOVELAND. I assure you, they are very impressive and important works of pure genius.

Shadow Pattern- 22x30” 2003 watercolor

Pink and Green- 3x5’ 2004 oil, string, and cut paper on canvas

Cobalt- 3x5’ 2005 oil and cut paper on canvas

Snowflake- 9x12” 2005 cut paper on canvas

The Snowflake Room- (approx.) 13x13x13’ 2005 cut paper installation Collaborators include: Adrian Hatfield, Julia DeClerck, Julie Dummermuth, Kevin Ewing, Matthew Sisco, Kelly Grogan, Lorraine Wiley-Desmond… and a few more.

Paper Cuts 1- 9x12” 2007 cut paper and cast shadow installation Collaboration with Laura Goins

Before LOVELAND, my work was definitely more conventional *fine art* focused but I was using the idea of the grid and the individual. I was and am very interested in how the individual collaborates and participates in a larger society. What their value is… “We are many, but we are alone” was a reoccurring theme… a major concern of mine was how to connect individuals (snowflakes) and put them into a larger network in which they communicated and collaborated in a way that made them into a more massive community than they could be on their own.

So, in a way it is rather serendipitous that Jerry and I met and began to collaborate on the creation of the Creative Army that we want LOVELAND to evolve into.

Congratulations Mary Lorene!

Unlisted — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 03:07:00 +0000

Congratulations to Mary Lorene Carter! Confidante and collaborator with Jerry Paffendorf on the Loveland project has an inspiring blog post about completing her art degree.

The primary reason for me not accompanying Jerry to New York is due to a presentation of my own. I have, over the last 10 years, attended 3 different universities and switched majors 3 times…. So, in case any of you are wondering, this unofficially qualifies me as an expert in the fields of: fine arts, library science, and the history of art, particularly the pagan empires of the Mediterranean (700bce-400ad). Today I had to present my senior thesis to a panel of faculty, which means I get to graduate….

[I Do Something.]

Something Hot

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 03:17:00 +0000

So I’ve been saying it for awhile and finally someone agrees with me.

Sarah Kornfield took a moment to write a little about a couple of futurists she thinks are *hot*. Guess which Giraffendork is on the list? She also writes about our friend Stuart Candy. You can read her blog here.

And just to drive my point home here’s my favorite futurist posing for his TigerBeat centerfold photo shoot..

I do Something Ground-Breaking.

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:13:00 +0000

As most of you know, 5 months ago Jerry bought a property for LOVELAND at auction. The property, located at 8887 E Vernor, gave PLYMOUTH a home and turned what we had been calling *Future Inches* into *Actual Inches* for You Guys, our Inchvestors!

Friday, before heading to Battle Creek for our friends’ Lorraine and Floyd’s wedding, that I mentioned in my last post, we went to get the pole that will provide a perch for Project Lemon Battery’s solar panel and camera.

Then we flew to the Russel Industrial Center (where I was trapped in the freight elevator) to meet with some very nice people who want to make a documentary about LOVELAND.

This is how I feel about being trapped in a freight elevator.

And this is how Bad Ass I am during interviews.

Yesterday, we brought out our shovels, measuring tape, solar panel, wits, and muscle, and broke ground! We dug the hole that we will sink the pole for the Project Lemon Battery into. We plotted out and cleared the space that your inches are on. And we documented the whole process using Lemon Battery… who’s solar panel also kept Jerry and Alan’s iphones full of juice.

You can check out the time-lapse video of the whole process here:

And individual stills on LemonBattery’s Flickr.

And here are a few of the day’s highlights snapped with Jerry’s camera, where I am, primarily being a Motor City Bad Ass, and *supervising*

Alan, setting up Lemon Battery.

James, Loveland resident architect, going over plans whilst being intensely supervised by a Motor City Bad Ass.

Me supervising some more.

Jerry being a Motor City Bad Ass.

Me, being supervised.

And…. riding wild shovels!

Love in LOVELAND.

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:48:34 +0000

Not LOVELAND, but Really *Something* …..

I am wildly happy to tell all of you that last Friday, April 9th, 2010, Jerry and I made the long drive to Battle Creek, MI to witness the marriage of my best friend Lorraine and her Floyd (p.s. one of the very best guys evar)! It was a very intimate ceremony, and obviously, Jerry and I were ridiculously honored to be invited.

So, Interwebs, may I introduce you to the brand spankin’ new…. Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Wiley!

Here I am with my favorite new married couple and my friend Michael Peacock!

Also, In case you wanted to know what getting married really looks like… It looks a lot like filling out paperwork:

And here’s my favorite Giraffendork, bringing tall to a tall fight and beating out the best man, Chuck Kolenda, by less than an inch! He says it was his closest fight of all time, ever. Vitamin P, I am exceedingly proud of you!

It was a fantastic time and I wish we could have stuck around Battle Creek longer, but the next morning we had to shoot back to Detroit and then over to Grosse Ile for my Grandfather’s 80th Birthday!

We had to stop quickly at my parents to help cook and take over some food…

To Jerry’s horror and disgust everything we had to transport was seafood (not his fave). This is how Jerry felt about being strapped into the car and then burdened with the task of holding everything:

And then me, Motor City Bad Ass, telling him to suck it up and enjoy the party:

Sunday, was in itself so exciting and fun that it warrants its own post! So, stay tuned and keep rockin’!

First Day of Plymouth Construction and Lemon Battery Time-lapse

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:25:00 +0000

Yesterday Alan, Mary, James, and I (joined by two students shooting documentaries in Detroit) broke ground on the site of Plymouth, the first 10,000 square inch LOVELAND property. We dug out the shape of the grid so we can pour a concrete border and path into the middle and run the property lines for 10,000 square inches, and a 3 foot deep hole to plant the pole for our Lemon Battery solar panel and camera.

Alan brought the solar panel and the camera to record the work. Over the course of 2 and a 1/2 hours Lemon Battery snapped 636 photos and automagically posted them to its Flickr account. The photos were then pulled into a time-lapse video on Youtube:

Blows. My. Mind. We’ve got quite a powerful live and archival documentation tool to play with now, and we’ll be able to overlay the physical property installation we’re constructing at 8887 E Vernor Highway:

with the online property map:

Here’s the 21 foot tall pole the camera will go on:

And here’s the birdhouse that it’ll go in as a mount:

Thanks Tim! If you ever need a birdhouse in the greater Detroit/Hamtramck area, this is your shop.

Tell ‘im LOVELAND sentcha.

"The project is too weird for me not to do it."

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 14:43:00 +0000

If you want to see one of the cooler, weirder, more surprising transformations on the popular internet, this is what Flickr the photo sharing site looked like when it started out as an open-ended virtual world called Game Neverending (2002 - 2004):

link via Waxy

Now co-founder Stewart Butterfield and friends are working on a new game called Glitch coming out later this year, which, if history is any guide, will somehow morph into something that saves the publishing industry (or something like that :)). Here’s the trailer:

And! He also has himself 12 shiny new inches in Detroit, saying the project is too weird for him not to. This bodes well for LOVELAND in a not so weird way. I wonder what we’ll hatch into in the future, too, having created sufficiently weird conditions that hatching can happen. :)

I put Stewart on an open space of the map figuring there are some people who’d want to self-select to be his neighbors. So, who’s in? He probably doesn’t mind if you play your music loud at night or check the mail in your underwear. Become Stewart’s neighbor right here.

Welcome aboard, Stewart. Keep ~~Austin~~ LOVELAND weird!

What's Goin' On?! A Quick LOVELAND Update

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 22:07:00 +0000

Holy crudler, time flies. Here’s the quick scoop.

☛ We’re beginning to fill in the new 50,000 square inch Hello World property. Please inchvest here at $1 a square inch. We have a goal to hit over the next few days. 1/2 of the inchvestment money goes to 7 other grant projects in Detroit. The rest goes to us building rad stuff for you. Not that we’ve been prying into your affairs, but we have heard through the grapevine that you like RAD STUFF!

Here’s Hello World in progress, let’s fillerup!

☛ People are logging into the new site Larry made and saying Hey! Definitely try it if you haven’t yet and see who your neighbors are. You definitely see some interesting activity. :) Here are some clips I captured:

☛ The transformation of the Plymouth property begins this week! Here’s the property, pre-mowing, as modeled by Mary.

☛ Here’s what we’re constructing to define the 10,000 square inch property: a 9 x 9 foot grid with foot wide border and path into the middle. The pole is for the solar powered camera that will stream it online:

☛ We got our solar panel in the mail. Look at that badboy! (I’m talking about the panel, not Alan):

☛ Mike R is working on an Augmented Reality overlay for the camera feed so you can toggle the property lines on and off (by the way, he just did A Ticket for Rush ;)):

☛ And even overlay imagery of your choosing:

☛ We had a meeting with The Villages Community Development Corporation last week (Plymouth is in the East Village area of Detroit) which was very encouraging as regards scaling LOVELAND up in the future. Imagine that the property map you log into on the website wasn’t only for inches, but whole neighborhoods or whole cities. We’re going to meet again to see if maybe we can share some tools and data.

☛ Maybe we’ll try one out with the Russell Industrial Center first. They kindly sent over their floor plan and occupant map to us today. The RIC suffers from the same problem that a lot of communities do: How the heck do I know who’s here that I might like to meet or collaborate with, and how can we talk about what’s going on around us? Almost like a social network for space. Maybe we can use this as a real life test case, starting with the floor that LOVELAND’s studio is on.

☛ We’re also starting to look seriously at grants and alternative forms of funding for the project. It’s become hard enough paying for everything we need to, let alone want to. To support LOVELAND you can inchvest in land here, but also if you want to support at a higher or different level, or sponsor or assist with gaining additional resources so we can keep things going at the speed and scope that they should be, please call Jerry at 908-343-1981 and we can talk it out.

Much appreciated. Spread the word, spread the love, spread the inches. Back to it… <3

7 Billion Friends: Upcoming LOVELAND Parties & Presentations

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 01:12:06 +0000

7 Billion Friends: Upcoming LOVELAND Parties & Presentations:

Oh man, we got event LOVELAND stuffs coming up in San Francisco, New York, and Detroit (The Third Coast!). On the presentation end:

☛ On April 20-21 I’ll be speaking on a panel at the 140 Characters Conference in New York. As they say, “This event is shaping up to being the largest…

Upcoming LOVELAND Parties & Presentations

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:29:00 +0000

Oh man, we got event LOVELAND stuffs coming up in San Francisco, New York, and Detroit (The Third Coast!). On the presentation end:

☛ On April 20-21 I’ll be speaking on a panel at the 140 Characters Conference in New York. As they say, “This event is shaping up to being the largest worldwide gathering of people interested in the effects of the real-time Internet on both business and “we” the people.” Tickets are, appropriately, $140 for the two days.

☛ On May 17-18, Mary and I will be in Palo Alto, CA at a conference by the Institute for the Future where we’ve been invited to give a keynote talk about LOVELAND with the title “Persuading People To Care”. This one is a private conference for invited members of the IFTF network.

☛ On the 19th or 20th (to be determined) we’ll be in Mountain View, CA to give a talk at one of the Acceleration Studies Foundation’s Future Salon meetups. This one’s totally free and open.

And of course, more importantly, on the PARTY end we’re planning 3 events. Tellem, Andrew:

♥ LOVELAND Party West: San Francisco, CA
When: Saturday, May 15th
Where: Noisebridge hacker space
What: Drinks, hangage, a short talk or two over the course of a few hours

♥ LOVELAND Party East: New York, NY
When: sometime in June, date to be determined
Where: Rita King and Josh Fouts’ Imagination Age Salon in the Bronx
What: BBQ, hangage, and general awesomeness over the course of a weekend

♥ LOVELAND Party North (The Third Coast!): Detroit, MI — THE MAIN EVENT
When: Saturday, July 17th
Where: The Downtown Synagogue with Cafe D’Mongo’s Speakeasy wide open nextdoor and peops boppin’ on the street
What: Bands, video projections, a short talk or two, a video booth where people can record creative ideas for vacant land use in Detroit, all sorts of free-flowing awesomeness

If you want to travel for any of these events and need a place to crash, let me know and we’ll try and hook it up!

Breaking Ground On A Ground Breaking Work of Staggering Inches

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:59:00 +0000

Hear ye, hear ye. This coming Sunday we’ll be at 8887 E Vernor Highway, the site of Plymouth, the first 10,000 square inch LOVELAND property, to break ground on the construction of the grid, and the property lines for LOVELAND’s initial 588 inchvestors will be set in place.

Here’s the location again (google map) on Detroit’s east side, in The Villages.

Here’s Mary doing her trademark Motor City Badass pose. The other day Mary, Alan, James, Mary’s dad, and met there to finalize the construction plans

One of Courtney’s friends should be out there this week to mow the grass and then on Sunday we’ll be out there with some shovels, some bags of cement, a pole (gosh willing) for the solar camera, and some stakes, tiles, and wood.

Here are some great images that Alan made in Sketchup (flickr set) of what Plymouth will look like.

We made an executive decision (love those) when we were on the property to ditch the metal grid in favor of a wire grid strung between eyelets all around the interior frame. That will make the grid itself more fluid and inchvestors won’t have to deal with bars of metal on their land. If anyone wants to help volunteer in digging up some ground, setting some cement, or any other handiwork, please let us know!

If you’re an inchvestor in Plymouth, get your mind fired up for what you want to have happen on your inches. You can mail things that fit on your property (flag poles, models, pictures, seeds, etc, anything PG and safe) to:

LOVELAND
at The Russell Industrial Center
c/o Jerry Paffendorf
1600 Clay St
Detroit, MI 48211

You can see the online property map of inches along with inchvestor’s who’ve logged into their land right here.

See the original time-lapse of Plymouth being designed in tape form on the floor of the Russell Industrial Center:

Crazy Company Presents A LOVELAND Premonition from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Which was scraped up and displayed as an art piece:

And then reincarnated in the form of Russell tiles (which will ring the installation on Vernor) in the new studio at the Russell:

So the on-site installation will be maybe the fourth incarnation of Plymouth. Wow. Thank you for your patience, all Plymouth inchvestors, as we’ve worked through this process. And don’t forget we’ve got a new grid to fill in on a new property (the exact location of which is still a secret, even from us :)). You can get inches there via the big green Get Inches! button on makeloveland.com.

Here we go…

Leveling Up!

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:48:54 +0000

Man, what a week. We’ve grown a bit, and you can take a look at LOVELAND’s people page to see the crew behind the curtain. Krista and Nicole are the newest entrants and over the last week we’ve been getting everyone up to speed and setting up our collaboration tools and responsibilities.

We invited Krista onboard to lead outreach for inch sales in Season 2, with our ambitious new goal of a 50,000 square inch property, and an ambitious new grant program where we’re splitting inchvestment money 50/50 with 7 other great projects in Detroit. Half of your inchvestment goes to help them level up, and the other 1/2 goes to helping LOVELAND level up, giving us the fuel we need to become awesomer and awesomer.

So far I think we’ve done a really great job being super interesting and laying the foundation of the project and the community, and proving concepts. Now we’ve got to level up on our resources and outreach to people and organizations who want to help build LOVELAND, because there’s more work to be done than we can currently do, and more to pay for than we can currently afford.

It’s super exciting to be at this point, and I want to thank everyone again for believing in and supporting the project as we progressively continue to evolve and realize this vision. As they say in France: le y’all rock!

Plymouth: The Imagination Age

Rita J. King — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:31:00 +0000

The dimensions of The Imagination Age, our 1000-inch neighborhood in Plymouth, the first colony in Loveland, is shown above at 25x40 inches.

New LOVELAND Site for Season 2!

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:07:00 +0000

OK! We’ve got a new site at makeloveland.com for the start of Season 2. Check it out!

We’re still getting some things into place and stacking and re-stacking words, but Larry rocked it, and we got it up just in time to see the end of the first full day of spring like we’d hoped.

Some very notable notes on the site and season 2:

First, if you’re an inchvestor, you can now log into the site, fill out a profile, see your neighbors, make yourself available for contact, comment on things, etc. Let me know if you have any issues, this is all new.

Second, we’ve set a new goal of 50,000 inches on a new property called Hello World. The name of season 2 is Building The Bridge To Everywhere, and the side story to that is LOVELAND is building a bridge across the Detroit River, which just happens to be 50,000 inches across in parts. Look out for more illustrations and cartoons and fun stuff about that.

Important and awesome to know, we’re trying out the first LOVELAND grant system. We selected 7 projects in Detroit that run along the spectrum of practical to creative land use: farming, community gardens, architectural rehabilitation, and art. The plan is to split the season’s inchvestment with these projects and follow along with what they’re doing and how they use it.

Our site is now about 3 trillion times cleaner than before and I’m eyeing that wide image spot at the top of each page as a place to frequently update wild images from the season 2 story. Keep your eyes peeled.

Working on a new video for the homepage now. Send us feedback on the site and have fun!

"I've Never Heard Of Logging Into Property Before"

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 16:00:01 +0000

Yesterday was the first day that some inchvestors started logging in and poking around the new site. If you’re an inchvestor and want to test it out and give feedback before we replace the old site, let me know. I’m sitting here right now with a piece of paper and a pen trying to condense the simplest bestest feedback directions for Larry.

Here’s the homepage after you log in right now, with some peops starting to fill things out. Full-size image. Almost there for season 2! :D Mary and Alan and I were at an Open City meeting last night and met a nonprofit working on vacant land development in the area of the first property. It was awesome to connect and see eyes light up at the idea of PEOPLE LOGGING INTO LAND. To be continued…

What's Up? To Do List Number 7,846.538

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:23:00 +0000

LOVELAND next to do’s for me, Jerry P:

The new website is alllmost ready! We need some inchvestors who want to login early to come test it out and refine things over the next few days. Get in touch if you want the access info. Basically, Larry has been kicking butt at it and it looks great. What we need are peops who want to poke around and send us feedback for the things they want added or clarified before it goes live. I’m jerryp[at]gmail[dot]com or 908-343-1981.

We’ve got a great list but we’re still finalizing all the grantees we’re sharing inchvestment money with during season 2. If you have or know of a project in Detroit that is somewhere on the spectrum of practical or creative land use (farming, gardening, parks, building restoration, or pure art work) please let us know ASAP.

Since I’ve been traveling for the project the last couple weeks I haven’t been able to do much on the physical installation of the Plymouth grid (besides make a breakthrough on materials via my dad), but now that I’m back and I hear the birds chirping and the bees buzzing, well let’s finalize the budget and get that badboy in the ground.

I need to buy art supplies for the 9- and 11-year old neighbors of the first property.

I need to coordinate with Jen about getting flowers and other things planted on the property.

I also need to get back into the database and move some people around to finalize the layout of Plymouth and stamp it with my seal of might (or something like that :)).

The illustration for The Bridge To Everywhere needs to be completed. (This is a virtual bridge that will progress inch by inch across the 50,000 inches of the Detroit River, measuring out progress through season 2.)

Mary and I need to go back to the city office to confirm the address of the season 2 property so we can buy it (you wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — how difficult it can be to isolate exactly what property address is where: it would be embarrassing, but completely plausible, to think you’re getting something but actually get something else).

Mary’s rocking it on mailings and other creative and organizational work. She’s got her new (and first!) blog going at I Do Something. Likewise, Alan is rocking the camera at Project Lemon Battery.

Next week we welcome to Detroit from San Francisco to train for her job as Global Director of Inch Sales (or some title like that :)) for LOVELAND season 2. As a Canadian, she will be able to gaze fondly across the river at her Mother Land, and then we will lash her and say get back to work! (keeeding, Krista!)

And other stuff. But who’s got time for other stuff when there’s this stuff?! Well, I’d better, because I’m sure I forgot to list some things I need to do right quick.

/deep breaths

/cannnnoooonnnn baaallllllll!!!!

LoveMachine Collaboration: Can 10,000 Inches Become A Person?

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:46:00 +0000

OK, so I don’t know if 10,000 inches can become a person, but I’m modifying that from LoveMachine Inc’s provocative self-description:

Right now we have three projects, in different areas and stages of development:

Work. Software for companies to work better and faster.
Money. A digital replacement for world currencies.
The Brain. Can 10,000 computers become a person?

LoveMachine is a new project run by friends Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, and Ryan Downe, creator at Second Life. I got a call from them last night asking if I was at SXSW to come hang out. (Nope, though I hear the Detroit Ice Potato may be making an appearance during the music portion, looking for an album deal…) We did catch up though about doing something together. I love LoveMachine’s live workroom and list of instant jobs that are constantly available for anyone to do on their site.

Those are both things we need on LOVELAND’s new site. It’s just a better way for us to keep things transparent and invite collaboration and build a creative army like we want to but can’t using traditional methods. I’m writing this post to make sure we hook that up together, and whatever else the machine has cooking that the land could use (virtual currency etc). Plus they need to come to come visit us in Detroit!

Isn’t this great? Again from their site:

We are also a different kind of company. Instead of interviewing to work here, you just get to work. If you’d like to join our team, first sign up at the worklist, where you can see and bid on the jobs we need done, then enter our live workroom and talk to other team members!

The Continuation of The Ghost Inches and Project Lemon Battery Test

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:04:00 +0000

Yesterday was the big St. Patrick’s Day parade in Corktown, Detroit. Thousands and thousands of people don their greens and go marching down Michigan Avenue right outside our house. It’s a pretty crazy all-day party.

In the morning I posted a new Kickstarter round and the next episode of the Ghost Inches:

The Legend of The Ghost Inches Part 2: Ghost Inches Unleash Ravishing Forces from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Not to give anything away (EPIC SPOILER ALERT :P) but the little lemon dude who pops out at the end is the mascot for Alan’s Project Lemon Battery, which is the solar powered web streaming camera that we want to use to help record the properties.

Where Alan has it now, it’s a web service attached to an iPhone camera app that automagically takes and posts pictures a viewing page and to Lemon Battery’s Flickr every 10 seconds (note this will be very random and very down very often as it’s worked on). He attached the camera to his jacket and went walking around the parade while it captured and posted pics all by itself. Here’s a great time-lapse movie Alan made of all the pics:

Testing Testing Lemon Battery from Alan Languirand on Vimeo.

And a few stills:

Huh? You’re not posting this to the internet are you? Too late! :D

I had maaaybe a little bit too much fun drinking pineapple Faygo and vodka (it’s good, I swear :)) with peops that came over, crashed out pretty early, got up at 3 AM and watched more of the Jim Henson Storytellers series from the ’80s that Mary’s been introducing me to. Good times!

And now, back on the grind!

Inchvestor Profile: Ken Hudson -- "100 Squirrels in Loveland"

Unlisted — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:57:00 +0000

The Black Squirrel, part of a collection of urban art that Ken Hudson may be including in his Loveland inches.(Image and art credit: Ken Hudson)

Inchvestor Profile
Name: Ken Hudson
Number of Inches: 100

Ken Hudson is a Canadian visual and theatrical artist, performer, digital media consultant, and Managing Director of the Virtual World Design Centre at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, near Toronto.

He is perhaps better known for his ground-breaking work using the virtual world of Second Life to train Canadian Border Guards, which led to significantly improved grades on students’ critical skills tests, taking scores from a 56% success in 2007, to 95% at the end of 2008 after the simulation was instituted.

Ken will be documenting his involvement in Loveland on his new blog "100 Squirrels in Loveland."

What inspired you to buy inches in Loveland?

Obviously, there's the character of Jerry [Paffendorf] and his bon vivance. People want to be involved in ideas he's pushing forward.

It connected really strongly with my creative past. I used to create theater in alternative venues. In Canada my claim to fame is I adapted Shakespeare's Henry V to an Ice Hockey arena -- with heavy metal music and fighting with sticks. Before that I did a show in an store window on Queen Street in Toronto in 1999. [Here's a video clip.]

This idea that Jerry was going to retrieve some of these ideas -- using alternative venues, using venue as a space for expression. In other words the venue itself becomes part of the entire narrative. Those concepts are really appealing to me. Then the idea that he would be blurring the boundary between virtual worlds, augmented reality, site-specific art.

How do you perceive Loveland and what has it inspired you to do with your inches?

I see it specifically as a creative space. There's no promotional or corporate angle.

Last fall I started doing a bit of stencil graffitti art. Where I live, we have black squirrels that hop across the road all the time. So I cut a stencil of a hopping black squirrel as a way to capture that image. Then I put it in some strategic locations in our town. (See above) [Ken says he may incorporate the Black Squirrel into the expression of his inches.]

What's your current vision for how you're going to use your inches?

I see it completely as self-expression, finding images or populating the space -- physical, virtual or both with primary artistic intent. Part of my work doing performance in alternative venues, everything around it becomes part of the performance.

It's less a group show and more a collaborative art piece. I want to keep my points fluid so that I can adapt to what's around me and respond to it. I don't want to create a monolith here.

Whatever I do there, I expect to grow from the collective experience.

Kenny Hubble, Hudson's Second Life persona.

Do you imagine using your inches across platforms?

I see it as something I want to have maximum flexibility with. The squirrel may be virtual or augmented reality. The similarity between the public performance work I've done all the way to Second Life is that it all builds on the environment. It's not art that's happening in a glass box that doesn't have any relationship to anything around -- just the opposite. Everything around it changes it. If you're doing a show on the street and a bus comes by, it's part of the show.

Is it a physical project for virtual art or a virtual project with a physical location? Those are all salient questions for contemporary art as we move forward into the century. I think it is experimental in the best way. I don't think there is an over-arching artistic intention. I think there is a really neat idea. One idea that isn't even explicitly mentioned is that you could even buy real estate in Detroit for $500. I mean, that's a huge social issue that is entrenched in this concept.

What does that say for people in economically depressed areas. Or to people that don't have access to fine art or virtual worlds? What does it say to those people? To start to envision what land could be used for, what contemporary art is.

Whether it answers all these questions or not, it certainly raises all of them. To me, that's incredibly exciting.

----
You can follow Ken's involvement in Loveland at his project blog 100 Squirrels in Loveland.

LOGINLAND! New Site In Progress

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:12:00 +0000

Larry just sent me the framework for the clean new LOVELAND site, where I was able to log in for the first time. Awesome! So pretty soon inchvestors will all have accounts where you can create a profile, link to things from your property, meet the neighbors, and so on.

I’m currently going through the site updating content and making notes for Larry. ¡Viva la inchvolucion!

Oh and look. The properties will still adjust placement a little more before they’re locked down (for example I need to give away some of the 288 inches I kept for myself to other people who came in at the end), but right now one of my neighbors is listed as my grandma.

There goes the neighborhood. Grandma, stop fixing my hair! You’re embarrassing me in front of all the inchvestors!! And yes I brought a sweater!!! :D

Animated Gifs + LOVELAND Fashion = <3

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:38:29 +0000

50 inch inchvestor Nicki Manchisi models her new LOVELAND shirt in San Francisco:

We were just catching up about the project and Nicki was reminiscing about its origins and all the inch grids I was leaving around the house back in the day, which are still hanging up on the walls. <3

w00t! Just Commissioned A Functional 8-Bit Map of Detroit Via Kickstarter

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:27:00 +0000

Awesome! I saw this pop up on my radar and went for it. It’s too perfect.

Brett Camper is making fully accurate 8-bit maps of real cities. His Kickstarter project advertises that for $200 he’ll make any city you want (there are also cheaper rewards, check it out). 8-bit New York City is live right here (also pictured above), and he’s got a list of the usual suspect cities he’s planning:

- San Francisco
- Los Angeles
- Boston
- Chicago
- Washington D.C.
- Seattle
- London
- Paris

Obviously Detroit needs to be on there! Whoever commissions a map can be credited as its “mayor”. This one is dedicated to LOVELAND’s inchvestors. Hopefully we can really functionally use the map in the project too, linking to LOVELAND properties etc.

Too awesome. Thanks Brett! <3

Loveland on NPR's All Things Considered

Unlisted — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:55:00 +0000

[cross-posted from The Imagination Age -- written by Rita J. King]

Plymouth is the first full colony of inches in the Loveland project in Detroit. The yellow block of 1000 inches is my neighborhood, The Imagination Age. Loveland is being featured today on NPR's "All Things Considered." (Click here to listen to the archive)

What is Loveland?

It's an experiment in the micro-ownership of real estate, economic revitalization and cultural development.

It's an art project.

It's a statement about creating something new and unexpected.

Yes, it's about a guy selling a million square inches for a dollar each. With so many people out of work and seeking new ways to make money, create connections, excitement, fun and new ideas about the way communities work--that's a visionary way to get something going in an economy that promises to steamroll people who fail to freshen their skills, update perspectives and figure out new ways to pay bills.

Me, Jerry and our friend Tish Shute.

Sarah Hulett, the insightful journalist who interviewed me and Loveland founder Jerry Paffendorf, started off by saying that she wanted to understand the thinking behind the project.

I'm frequently asked why Jerry, who splits his time between the coasts, chose Detroit for this project. Why not? Why shouldn't a young, provocative artist move to Detroit and get something going? Is there some unwritten rule of etiquette that says we must avoid American cities in crisis? Detroit was once a city of the future, and that blueprint from the past is greatly appreciated by Jerry, who slept over at the Imagination Age Salon last night before catching a top-of-the-morning flight back to Detroit. We were up all night discussing plans for the future of Loveland and Detroit, ways we can explore Square, for example, to raise much-needed funds for local initiatives.

Sarah Hulett thoughtfully went back to interview the two little girls who live in the house next to Loveland, Celeste Moore (left, 11) and Ricki Collins, 9. In fact, their house is the only house left on the block. Ricki said she hopes the inchvestors will come and visit her. I am planning a visit soon.

Sarah Hulett asked me how Loveland might benefit the local population in Detroit. I don't know yet, but in order to find out I've opened up a block of 100 inches within the 1000 inch Imagination Age neighborhood in the Plymouth colony, a network that includes many notable residents already, including IBM Senior Research Fellow Grady Booch, WIRED writer Alexis Madrigal, filmmaker Josh Asen and educator Liz Dorland, to name a few. If you have an idea, even a tiny one, and imagination enough to envision how big you might make an inch, ping me on Twitter or leave a comment on this blog post.

I'm working hard to turn my inches into opportunities to connect people in Detroit with a larger community of innovators around the world, and I need your help, your ideas, your support and most of all, your imagination. Inches are tiny, but I hope you'll think big. Technology is a prism held up to the bright beam of the imagination.

[NPR: Inchvesting in Detroit: A Virtual Realty]

Want an Inch?

Rita J. King — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:15:00 +0000

The Imagination Age in the Plymouth colony in Loveland, shown above in yellow, and the rest of the colony, in all its inchy splendor-in-the-grass, is shown around it.

Want an inch?

Yes, Loveland's first colony, Plymouth, is full--but you can still get in on the experiment. I have 1000 inches in Plymouth, a neighborhood currently called the Imagination Age. Maybe, like the newly minted Google, Kansas, the name will change once we all get set up, but for now, we're going with the Imagination Age.

Neighbors in the Imagination Age include the brilliant writer Alexis Madrigal, IBM Research Fellow and all-around creative genius Grady Booch, filmmaker Josh Asen (who directed the video above), educator Liz Dorland, Tiffany heir and designer Stephen Burlingham, Tony Award winning production designer Richard Hoover & actor John Ventimiglia, to name a few. The purpose of this experiment in micro-ownership of real estate is to see how big you can make your inch, or inches. In the meantime, the neighbors are starting to get together. If you want to be part of the neighborhood, ping me on Twitter or leave a comment on this post and tell us why.

Follow @RitaJKing and LOVELAND founder Jerry Paffendorf, @makeloveland, on Twitter.

The Mystery of the Ghost Inches

Unlisted — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:52:00 +0000

LOVELAND Season 2 Pre-Game: The Legend of The Ghost Inches from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

Jerry Paffendorf, who recently announced the completion of Plymouth, the first 10,000 inches in Loveland, produced this video mystery in response to requests from people who still want inches.

"Small parcels of land would occasionally disembody and float the streets..."

Plymouth Grid Construction

Rita J. King — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:36:00 +0000

The Plymouth grid construction is underway and the design brings the past into the future. Check it out.

Congratulations Plymouth Inchvestor Colonists

Unlisted — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 13:17:00 +0000

Yesterday Jerry Paffendorff announced that the Plymouth Colony of Loveland, the first 10,000 inches of Loveland, has sold. The community is now sealed.

Starting next week we will be profiling members of Loveland's Plymouth colony on the 1000 Inches in Loveland blog.

Congratulations, Jerry!

"Inching toward a virtual new Detroit at $1 a square"

Unlisted — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 13:15:00 +0000

The Detroit Free Press has a new article about Jerry Paffendorf's Loveland project. As readers may know, Rita J. King is the largest "inchvestor" in Loveland. Her story of the project can be found at 1000InchesinLoveland.com.

Rita J. King has confirmed that the 1,000 inch holder who "plans to install an actual mailbox on the site" is indeed her. From the article:

"I would like to get to a point where it is globally interesting," said Paffendorf, 28, who moved to Detroit's Corktown neighborhood in January. "I want to bring these inches to life."

Inch by inch
Paffendorf has taken the popular concept of virtual worlds -- where you can be anything or anyone you want to be on the Internet -- and given it real roots in Detroit.

"If you can stretch your imagination ... this small space can be as big as you want," said Paffendorf.

The project allows property buyers to virtually and physically alter their land.

With 1,000 inches, one buyer plans to install an actual mailbox on the site, giving the plot, which Paffendorf calls "Plymouth," a place to receive mail.

Trevor Smith, a Web developer in Seattle, plans to use some of his 333 square inches to install solar panels that will charge up a battery to distribute power to other inchvestors. Smith plans to give it away at first and potentially charge his neighbors in the future, "assuming we could negotiate right of way through the inches in between," he said.

Starting next week we'll be profiling members of Loveland's first community of inch holders to ask them about their experience, vision and take on Loveland.

Rebuilding Detroit through the Internet One Inch at a Time

Rita J. King — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:08:00 +0000

The new global culture and economy is taking shape an inch at a time.

As the biggest "inchvestor" in Loveland, I'm thrilled to see GG Paff getting his inch on and out.

The 10,000 inch Plymouth colony, where I own 1000 inches, is almost filled up. Get your space now.

I also just funded the development of Project Lemon Battery, and I love the plans so far.

Keep an eye on Jack Dorsey's new company, Square. It's going to change our capacity to create micro-ownership of shared assets.

Inching Toward a New Year

Rita J. King — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 22:24:00 +0000

I've got 1000 Inches in Loveland, in a colony called Plymouth--in Detroit.

Loveland is an experiment in micro-ownership of land. Want some?

Welcome, Lovelanders!

Rita J. King — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 14:55:00 +0000

At last count, 75 inch-holders have inchvested in Loveland! Read all about it in this thoughtful post (including the Fermi paradox, coded communication with extraterrestrial life forms, humans in cages and shooting stars) by Loveland impresario Jerry Paffendorf.

1000 Inches in Loveland is a neighborhood in Loveland made up of eight zones named for the Eightfold Path. Read this to learn more about it and check out the map of the inches.

So far we've got Grady Booch, Stephen Burlingham (scroll to the bottom of the Tiffany family archives page to see him), the brilliant and hard-working Alexis Madrigal, nanotechno artist and IBMer Jack Mason and on Inch 502, Zone V: Livelihood, we have the mysterious proprietor of the Mystery Hole.

If you're incherested, get in touch.

Follow @ritajking, @makeloveland and @1000inches on Twitter.

The Eightfold Path as a model for 1000 Inches in Loveland

Rita J. King — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 01:14:00 +0000

The eight main zones of 1000 Inches in Loveland are shown around the perimeter of LOVELAND in pink. Each zone is named for one of the aspects of the Eightfold Path: Zone I: View, Zone II: Intentions, Zone III: Speech, Zone IV: Actions, Zone V: Livelihood, Zone VI: Effort, Zone VII: Concentration, Zone VIII: Mindfulness.

Alexis Madrigal, shown left with Josh Fouts, is an inch-holder in Zone VI: Effort. Alexis Madrigal is one of the most illustrious journalists working today, and on top of that, he's spectacularly fun. I can't wait to see what he does with his inch!

Why the Eightfold Path was chosen as a model for the eight zones of 1000 Inches in Loveland: The Imagination Age:

I've been taken with the Eightfold Path for years, and the fact that there's a mundane and a transcendental way to approach the framework of its aspects. In other words, there's theory and then there's action. It's time for action.

In "The Noble Eightfold Path," Bahikkhu Bodhi says that following the path is more a matter of practice than intellectual knowledge, but to apply the path correctly it has to be properly understood. This is a process that people can undertake together, no matter what circumstances into which each individual person is born in the physical world, if we commit to a creative approach to imagination and technology.

The current economic and cultural crisis has created an opportunity for new understanding, just as the Eightfold Path is borne from suffering yet is a framework for a genuine spiritual search. Collaborative creativity can defeat the fear of transformation.

1000 Inches in Loveland: The Imagination Age is a cultural and economic development project, a neighborhood in the larger Loveland project.

1000 Inches in Loveland will be one of the world's most diverse creative communities.

How big can you make an inch with your imagination?

I've been working on Zone I: View: Inch 1: Transformation. The project will launch this week. I've been meeting with various inch-holders to discuss their massive plans for their tiny parcels. If you're interested in becoming an inch-holder, follow the project on Twitter at @1000Inches or email us here.

Inch 502 on Zone V: Livelihood: The Mystery Hole

Rita J. King — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:56:00 +0000

Welcome the newest resident of 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND: The Imagination Age! The mysterious proprietor of the Mystery Hole (shown above around the time when she created me) is taking command of Inch 502 on Zone V: Livelihood. Right now, her art and curiosities shop is headquartered in a small town. She's ready to be connected to the rest of the world and she's starting from scratch--her high-speed internet access won't be connected until next week.

"This is going to be fun," she says, "Aggravating, but I think it will be worth the effort."

What will become of the Mystery Hole as it goes from a small town--to an inch?

Want to become an Inchvestor?

Rita J. King — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:34:00 +0000

LOVELAND is kickstarted! Get your inches!

LOVELAND is a million square inches in Detroit, and each of the one-square-inch parcels costs $1. There are tiers of membership, and already someone has inchvested in 1000 Inches in Loveland:

That someone is me.

I am creating a neighborhood out of the 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND. The neighborhood will be divided into eight zones, and open for mixed-media, mixed-reality development. I am documenting the development of 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND as it unfolds.

The first developed inch in 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND (the neighborhood is called The Imagination Age) will be launched next week, along with more information about how you can get your own inch and make it as big as your imagination. The development of the 1000 inches within The Imagination Age will also be a game. Inch-holders can opt in or out of the game, which will not start until all players have been assigned inches.

Click here to follow me or the project on Twitter.

Welcome to 1000 Inches in Loveland!

Rita J. King — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:26:00 +0000

How big can you make an inch?

Several months ago, I was commissioned by PROBOSCIS to create an installation on 27 cubes: "Transformation: How We Become Who We Are." While working on the cubes (some of which are shown above) I first heard about the LOVELAND project in Detroit.

Perhaps because I was working daily with cubes and my imagination, the idea of a city of a million square inches that fits in a warehouse in Detroit and yet relies on technology and creativity to amplify the size of each inch made perfect sense.

The installation was immediately influenced by the LOVELAND project. "Transformation" (which will launch soon) expanded first into virtual and augmented realities and then evolved into the first developed parcel in a project called 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND.

What is 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND?

Stories have a tendency to get lost if they aren't shared right away, so here's how the 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND deal went down:

CHELSEA (on a rainy night during the height of NYC's new monsoon season)---

My collaborator, Joshua Fouts, wears round black glasses. We’d been invited to the event by David Green and Liz Dreyer with a pink lotus and two shining orange fish inked on her calf. We’d met at White Oak Plantation near Jacksonville, Florida, where we drove past rhinos and zebras on the way to the lodge to meet in groups and discuss the consequences of the economic downturn on the arts and how this might be overcome through meaningful participation in the digital culture. We promised we’d meet again in New York. I invited GG, who now stands in front of me, having run late from Brooklyn but committed to keeping his word.

There he is, all six-feet-six-and change of him, wearing a shirt that says, “I’ve got twelve inches in Detroit,” in neat capital letters that could only have been ironed in place by the man himself. He goes by Jerry because he’s not crazy about George Gerald Paffendorf III, but he doesn't seem like a Jerry to me, so I call him GG.

“What’s going on in Detroit?” I ask. GG lifts his eyebrows because the answer to that question is going to take some time, but he's excited for the chance to tell, and I can't wait to hear.

The room has been set up as a bar for the night, so people come and go. Josh, GG and I sequester ourselves in a corner overlooking the amber rectangles of light spangling the wet slate street-scape. Josh had met GG in Singapore in 2007. I met them both on the same day in San Jose a few months later.

GG won Josh's undying affection when, less than 24 hours after they met in Singapore, this GG-magic image with (GG, left and Josh right) appeared among Josh's copious electronic correspondence.

GG is 27 years old and he’s already an admired futurist, which may explain why he has an air of time travel about him, as if you could set the dial to any time or place in which humans have interacted and he would find a way to improve life through his imagination and capacity for catalyzing collaboration. For over two years I’ve been waiting for his Big Idea, but I had no idea it would end up being so tiny.

“Detroit,” he says. “Okay. Loveland, is what the project is called--a million square inches that I’m going to sell for $1 each. Anyone from around the world can buy one, or more than one, and be a part of the community. The inches are just a jumping point for people, and they can be as big as the minds of the community. Loveland is a platform to connect people. People will come together to build this new land. Every inch will exist in the physical world and in the digital realm at the same time. What’s going to happen? There’s no way to know in advance, and that’s the fun of it. But you know something will happen. Reality will...be...augmented!”

He stopped to eat a cheese cracker and a few grapes and then went on to explain why he’d chosen to tie a virtual project with the physical world by placing it in Detroit, a story I know all too well from my work in the Gulf Coast: economic decline, mass exodus of the jobless population, widespread systemic change and the absence of a clear path for transformation.

“Detroit was the most futuristic city that existed for a time,” he says, “an engineer’s dream of tinkering coming together with a possible vision of reality, like the automobile moving at sixty miles in an hour move a person to another place. The universe is like a seed. So it’s just how big can you make your inches? What can you do with an inch if the only thing stopping you from making it as big as you can imagine is your ability to imagine it? Think about all the things people can do with it.”

To GG, confusion isn’t an obstacle. If some people don’t get it, that won’t stop him from reaching those who do. Around us, people listen and gather, and someone asks for more information on the Loveland project. What can people do with an inch, really? Is this a real inch, or an imaginary inch that some guy from New Jersey will sell you for $1 because he has a million of them?

“The inch markers are just something that give a human feeling,” GG said. “They act as a connector for the sense of ownership. An inch sounds stupid until suddenly you have something that can be connected to other people, and then you see how big and important that is. I know it’s funny. I know it makes people smile. It’s game-like, but it’s a city that will fit into a warehouse.”

The population of Loveland, if all million inches are sold, might end up being higher than the current population of Detroit: 800,000.

“Dancing Ink Productions will take 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND,” I say. “For economic and cultural development. Loveland is a new city and I'm going to create a neighborhood and document its development. The neighborhood will be known as the Imagination Age.”

“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” said GG. “Right on.”

I grab a stack of paper and start to sketch out the grid.

“You already know where you want your inches to be?” he asks. “Look at that! It’s real!”

It *is* real. Starting next week, space within 1000 INCHES IN LOVELAND: The Imagination Age," will be available.

Follow on Twitter: @1000Inches.

Loveland - The Works

WDWOT Member Update 1

The Dead Dishwasher Dilemma & Other Analogies: Notes From A Recent Talk

"Excuse me, human! Which Way To The Detroit Dog Park?"

All WDWOT and Auction All The Time

Techonomy Detroit Presents "I See Tech People" Directed By M. Night Shyamalan

No Property Left Behind Invitation: Who, What, Where To Crowdfund At The Detroit Tax Foreclosure Auction?

Why Don't We Own This? Updates!

Detroit Vacant Property Coalition -- Area Boundaries, Foreclosure Stats, & Questions

Google Streetview + Physical & Data Decay

An Afternoon at the Belle Isle Zoo

A Light, Open Letter To Bill McMachen In Macomb County

you love graffiti

test test

No Property Left Behind (Update In Progress)

One Day In Detroit: Devils & Details Brainstorm 1: Tours, Lists, & Collections

One Day In Detroit: User-Generated Tour App Beta

Fun With Texting: DetroitSoccer.us

Techno Viking Says Sorry For The Radio Silence

Microhoods: Small, Cheap, & Under Control?

One Day In Detroit Progress

Weequinox

Remember to forget

Hello folks! Today we have the beginnings of maps on One Day....

Identity

Map Considerations

Day One of One Day

Support Something

Logging Into Detroit (A Teaser)

Something Good out of Something Scary

I Do Something Scary.

Ketchup.

vanessamiller: Detroit loves Mary and Jerry from the Loveland...

Something Awesome at the Imagination Station!

Something Exciting!

Lush, Moving Video about Recovering Detroit from Blight

Loveland "Makes" The New York Times

Making Parties, Making Progress, Making Faire, Making Soup!

Detroit: Shrink a City with Wild Imagination

A Couple of Somethings.

Loveland: The Scene of the Crime

Something Monumental.

I moved! But not far

Construction at Loveland

I Do New York. part 2: The Imagination Age.

Map of the Imagination Age Network in Loveland

I Do New York. part 1: The Arrival.

The Nosebriidge Neighborhood, SF Events This Week

"I want you to be there." Micro Meetups in Detroit and San Francisco this week!

You Wanna Start *Something*?

Jason Silva in The Imagination Age "Intentions: 128"

Something Nice

Begging For Batteries: What We Need To Make The Solar Streaming Property Camera Work

Neighborhoods, Services, and Sponsors, Oh My!

"@makeloveland Chicken!" My Short Talk On Augmented Twitter at The 140 Characters Conference

Something *ser·en·dip·i·tous*

Congratulations Mary Lorene!

Something *Hot*

I do Something *Ground-Breaking*.

*Love* in LOVELAND.

First Day of Plymouth Construction and Lemon Battery Time-lapse

"The project is too weird for me not to do it."

What's Goin' On?! A Quick LOVELAND Update

7 Billion Friends: Upcoming LOVELAND Parties & Presentations

Upcoming LOVELAND Parties & Presentations

Breaking Ground On A Ground Breaking Work of Staggering Inches

Leveling Up!

Plymouth: The Imagination Age

New LOVELAND Site for Season 2!

"I've Never Heard Of Logging Into Property Before"

What's Up? To Do List Number 7,846.538

LoveMachine Collaboration: Can 10,000 Inches Become A Person?

The Continuation of The Ghost Inches and Project Lemon Battery Test

Inchvestor Profile: Ken Hudson -- "100 Squirrels in Loveland"

LOGINLAND! New Site In Progress

Animated Gifs + LOVELAND Fashion = <3

w00t! Just Commissioned A Functional 8-Bit Map of Detroit Via Kickstarter

Loveland on NPR's All Things Considered

Want an Inch?

The Mystery of the Ghost Inches

You Wanna Start Something?

Something ser·en·dip·i·tous

Something Hot

I do Something Ground-Breaking.

Love in LOVELAND.