Thursday, February 02, 2006
The Next Indy ...the Janus-faced sibling of IndyBuzz
The Next Indy was conceived as the flip-side, the Janus-faced sibling of IndyBuzz. IndyBuzz began as an effort to tell people in Indianapolis about the cool policy-wonky and intellectual events that are coming up. That alone turned out to be a big job. A lot of cool stuff is happening, more than be comfortably consumed by one person ... and no one is doing a good job of aggregating this kind of info. (For a taste of what's involved, try visiting a university's webpage to find out upcoming events, then remember that many of the best events are organized by departments or schools that forget to tell the university's webmaster, which necessitates poking around further ... now multiply that by 50).
IndyBuzz evolved into something more ambitious. More than just offering announcements about events worth making the time to attend, more even than making recommendations, IndyBuzz tries to make events deeper and more meaningful ... for those who attend and for the community itself. So it tries to prepare people for an event by explaining why it's important, by suggesting a couple of useful articles about the event's topic, by pointing out some websites with more information or a couple of books that are especially good ... and maybe most importantly, by identifying local groups that are trying to solve the problems being addressed by the event. Time-consuming, that's what this process is ... if done well, an IndyBuzz blurb takes longer to prepare than the event itself.
But the site has been popular, and I learn a lot. The Next Indy could be seen as looking backward at events past, where IndyBuzz looks ahead to events that are on the horizon, thus the picture of Janus, the two-faced Roman gentlemen who styled himself as the patron-saint of beginnings and gates. But the reality is that The Next Indy isn't only looking back, thumbing up or thumbing down a talk that happened last night or a play from last week. It ought to be looking to the present ... what does this event tell us about our community? And it ought to look forward too ... after this event, where do we go from here? ¶ 1:32 PM
The Next Indy was conceived as the flip-side, the Janus-faced sibling of IndyBuzz. IndyBuzz began as an effort to tell people in Indianapolis about the cool policy-wonky and intellectual events that are coming up. That alone turned out to be a big job. A lot of cool stuff is happening, more than be comfortably consumed by one person ... and no one is doing a good job of aggregating this kind of info. (For a taste of what's involved, try visiting a university's webpage to find out upcoming events, then remember that many of the best events are organized by departments or schools that forget to tell the university's webmaster, which necessitates poking around further ... now multiply that by 50).
IndyBuzz evolved into something more ambitious. More than just offering announcements about events worth making the time to attend, more even than making recommendations, IndyBuzz tries to make events deeper and more meaningful ... for those who attend and for the community itself. So it tries to prepare people for an event by explaining why it's important, by suggesting a couple of useful articles about the event's topic, by pointing out some websites with more information or a couple of books that are especially good ... and maybe most importantly, by identifying local groups that are trying to solve the problems being addressed by the event. Time-consuming, that's what this process is ... if done well, an IndyBuzz blurb takes longer to prepare than the event itself.
But the site has been popular, and I learn a lot. The Next Indy could be seen as looking backward at events past, where IndyBuzz looks ahead to events that are on the horizon, thus the picture of Janus, the two-faced Roman gentlemen who styled himself as the patron-saint of beginnings and gates. But the reality is that The Next Indy isn't only looking back, thumbing up or thumbing down a talk that happened last night or a play from last week. It ought to be looking to the present ... what does this event tell us about our community? And it ought to look forward too ... after this event, where do we go from here? ¶ 1:32 PM
