Narration X

Organicity: Issue 5

Public Presentation
You are invited to attend the CSU East Bay Multimedia Graduate Program’s Final Thesis Project Presentations on Wednesday, June 7 from 7 to 9:30 PM. The presentations will be held at the Hayward Campus in the Arts and Education (AE) building. The five graduate teams (including yours truly) will give brief presentations at 7:00 in AE 1203. For the rest of the evening, the teams will be showcasing their projects in individual rooms. The Organic City will be in Room 169, where visitors can meet Tour Guides Seamus and Sarah, explore The Organic City’s storyworld, and receive a tour packet souvenir. You can travel through our website from desktop computers, attend workshops on our mobile experience, and view video stories in a mini-theater. We will also be inviting the winners of our Oakland Storytelling Competition, held in coordination with Watchword Press. We look forward to seeing you there!

Upgraded Story Tours Section
In order to address usability concerns and highlight our new downloadable Featured Tours, we have upgraded The Organic City’s Story Tours section: http://www.theorganiccity.com/wordpress/tours_main/. Now you can explore story tours via a variety of platforms: you can download audio and video featured tours to your iPod or other mobile media player; you can explore a mobile version of The Organic City’s website on your internet-enabled Pocket PC or Smartphone, or you can explore custom author and genre tours from the comfort of your personal computer.

Announcing The Organic City Mobile
We have just released the mobile version of our website! You can check it out at http://www.TheOrganicCity.com/mobile. We encourage you to use the mobile website to find stories, tell your own stories, and take story tours while physically exploring downtown Oakland. The Organic City’s mobile website was created specifically for Pocket PC and Smartphone devices equipped with Windows Mobile 2003 or later, GSM Internet, Macromedia Flash Player 7 for Pocket PC (http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/), and a headset. In particular, the following devices will support this site: HP iPAQ hw6500 series and T-Mobile’s MDA Smartphone. If your handheld computer won’t support the mobile, you can still download our featured tours (http://www.theorganiccity.com/wordpress/tours_ipod/) to your iPod or other mobile media player.

Announcing new iPod Featured Tours
Now you can you can select one of The Organic City’s eight featured audio or video tours to experience on your iPod (or other MP3 or portable video player) with a printable map while exploring downtown Oakland. The featured tours are showcased at http://www.theorganiccity.com/wordpress/tours_ipod/. For example, you can download William Wong’s Oakland Chinatown Tour. In this video tour, Mr. Wong, a distinguished journalist and author, guides you to memorable locations in Oakland’s Chinatown, the place he was born and raised. You can also download Joyce Whitelaw’s Musical Tour to enjoy songs from her place-based musical album “A Musical Celebration of Oakland” while walking around Lake Merritt. Ms. Whitelaw, a fourteen-year resident of Oakland, composed the album for the 100th anniversary gala of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce. Her music accompanies lyrics written by local authors.

Oakland Storytelling Competition Winners!
The Oakland Storytelling Competition turned out to be a great success. Thanks to all of the local aspiring authors that entered the competition. Because it was such a tough decision to choose just one winner from all the wonderful stories, the generous editorial staff at Watchword Press decided to select three winners.

Congratulations to all three winning authors who are listed here in alphabetical order.

On a Search for Alien Sea Creatures by Christian in the “Urban Myth” genre.

10 Years Old by kmleahey in the “Other” genre.

The Tragic History of Harrison Street by mikee in the “Comedy” genre.

They will each get their story published in the Watchword Press Literary magazine and appear as featured authors at The Organic City. A big thank you to the Watchword Press crew all the folks at for all their hard work.

Competition Watch
Over the last few months The Organic City entered several different competitions. We wanted to keep you up to date with how we did. Unfortunately, there were no wins for The Organic City team. We did however secure an honorary mention at Prix Ars in Austria and have had the honor of being a Webby Awards nominee.

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

We hope that our project shows you the possibilities of creating stories about your local community and publishing them instantly online. We hope that by showing “the kind of thing” that you can do with today’s free technology that you will be inspired to create your own media too.

We intend to keep the site up and we hope that you all will continue to contribute more of your wonderful stories so we can keep the virtual community campfire burning. We will of course have no access to the fancy technology that our school provided us with so if you possess the skills or technology please get involved. We still intend to collaborate with the community and encourage you to do the same.

This is only the beginning of our community story!

Peace,

Seamus and Sarah.

The Organic City Team.