Festival2012/Submit/Visualizing Viral Impact

• Title of session: Visualizing the Viral Impact of Creative Commons Content
• Your name and affiliation: Visualizing Palestine
• Session format: Design Challenge

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

Explore ways of tracking and visualizing the viral impact of Creative Commons content on the web.

Whilst established content providers seek to protect their content and prevent unauthorised republication, increasing numbers of people now seek the opposite, and use Creative Commons and other copyleft licenses to positively encourage the unrestricted sharing and reproduction of their work.

As a non-profit initiative aiming to disseminate our work through Creative Commons licensing, like many others, Visualizing Palestine also needs to be able to demonstrate the viral impact of its work. Whilst individual platforms, such as Facebook and Youtube offer statistics on the viewing and sharing of content at its original point of publication, and various organisations offer specialist analysis of social media trends, there seems to be no single tool yet able to gather, analyse and display data on the wider sharing and republication of work across the web.

This session aims to explore the possibility of leveraging existing services such as Google image search, along with various social media reporting tools and visualization engines to create a bigger, visual, picture of how content is being viewed, shared and re-posted over time.

How do you see that working?

We propose:

1. A short presentation on our work and the challenges of reliably tracking and measuring its online impact.
2. A brainstorm on the modes through which content is shared and republished, and what tools are available to track this (whether the content is visual, textual or in another format entirely).
3. To share a pre-prepared brief/specification for a viral tracking/visualization tool.
4. To work in groups to develop technical ideas for tracking content and gathering data, and visual ideas for representing virality.
5. Sharing design proposals and critical feedback.
6. Group building to bring project forward.

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

We propose to have 3 facilitators for the session, allowing the possibility to respond to various group sizes. We also have a good network of contacts in London, so can easily expand our team at short notice if there is a high demand for the session.

• 5 participants: To work in a single round-table format, proposing a single specification for the project

• 15 participants: To work in 2-3 groups, followed by presentation and critical feedback on ideas.

• 50 participants: To work in up to ten groups, and to expand the brief and work on other possible related tools and applications of the ideas.

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

As a design session, we hope to be learning as much as the participants. We hope that people will be able to clearly communicate both the challenge and the initial design responses immediately following the session.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

To find a team of people interested in developing the brief into a fully functioning open-source platform for content-tracking, at least in the form of a minimum-viable prototype. Either working together with us, or taking on and developing the idea independently on an open-source basis.