I would like to see a RI version of WGBH Forum Network, a digital library of free public lectures, in our case, around Rhode Island. Starting off (version 0.1) I would think/act simple.  Create a YouTube or Blip.tv Channel, get some volunteers with their cameras, record and post. Although with a little more effort I would add in event calander gathering, cross-organizational networking and creating lasting partnership with cultural and education organizations and their lecture series, volunteer videography coordination, post-recording production including adding in lecture slides (if any), and simple catagorization of lectures (version 1.0).

The goal being to expand those circles of conversations within the state, building synergy and ideas to help build ideas, stimulate local economy, etc. This is being done in various niches around the state but I would like to see it statewide. For example, how many attended or were aware of last Saturday's Lecture given by Former Providence Journal Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Joel Rawson on newpapers decline and the impact on democratic process? The Newport Museum, host of the lecture does not have the resource to produce such a recording. Having a RI lecture network and digital library could help build those conversations and cross-pollinate those ideas which help us build our state.

Hi Ed, Matt. 

Here's another example, perchance? The RI astronomy group, The Skyscrapers, with web url http://theskyscrapers.org, has guest lecturers at regular monthly meetings, first fridays of every month. We have a fall gathering with lots of lectures and vendors as well, called Astro Assembly.

These lectures are mostly reports of research by working astronomers, some historical astronomy related research, and a few reports by gifted amateurs on some stunning projects. Mostly hard science.

Some of the membership have also worked up some video records, on disks in our library and on YouTube, of some of these lectures. Go to http://www.youtube.com and search for "astronomy skyscrapers" for a list.

What you are visualizing is like a calendar of such events? Also a group of people with skills and inclination to "cover" or record the events?

Really nice ideas,

Peace, dan.

Dan,

I don't see one calendar with all these events listed but find them on each individual organizations website (for another example the calendar for the New London Maritime Society). These calendars could be gathered and used (either internal to the digital lecture library or externally to the RI public or both) to form a master calendar.  I mentioned this because first of all it is nessecary to know when the lectures will be for scheduling purposes but also as it could showcase a great tool FuseCal (developed by a local RI company).

As for recording these events I see this as a "fly on the wall" type recording (i.e. no post one-on-one interviewing but one could record post-lecture QA at the event) so no expert knowledge needed.  Although I am not a videographer I have listened to enough new media people talk about various techniques to know some skill is nessecary for recording, especially post-production. I was thinking community  volunteers with some sort of video/production expertice.  Such an operation could be run through a non-profit or business.

Ed

Hi Ed and Dan,

Thanks for your ideas. I'd definitely get behind better event aggregation and recording. And I'm really glad to see that Ed beat me to the punch on suggesting FuseCal for the event aggregation, as I used to work on FuseCal and I think that tool would make this kind of project much easier.

I'm about to head over to the Providence Geek Dinner, and would be happy to brainstorm on these kinds of ideas there with whoever's in attendance.

cheers,
Matt

I wanted to add that one immediate thing that local geeks can do to help out the local community is volunteer to lead a session at NewBCamp. It's not too late! More info at http://NewBCamp.com

I also wanted to link up a recent call-to-action for volunteers in the Providence Daily Dose (http://providencedailydose.com... via http://freegeekpvd.org/fgpvd/?...)

Lastly, I wanted to send a shout-out to my friends who ran the Geeks4Good food drive at last month's Providence Geek Dinner. Just one example of folks from our geeky community making real positive change... I'm looking forward to seeing much more like that!

What a great idea, but OK, now you've opened the flood gates. I have many wishes!

The Council for the Humanities has almost 40 years worth of grantee projects - from curricula to oral histories, documentary films, radio shows - the list goes on.

WISH: to find some folks who were interested in digitizing some of this stuff to make it more widely accessible. Here's what the Connecticut Humanities Council does: http://www.ctheritage.org/onli...

WISH: an online encyclopedia project. Other states have these. Here are just two examples:

• Georgia: http://www.georgiaencyclopedia...
• South Carolina: http://www.scencyclopedia.org/

WISH: Lunch Poems, like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... but with local writers and more interesting camera work. 

We have so much amazing humanities content - would love to make it more useful, accessible, dynamic, engaging - and dare I say it, FUN!

Thanks for reading!

Here's something that one of my colleagues just participated in; an overnight coding challenge to build websites for non-profits in Minneapolis. http://www.f1webchallenge.com/

"ten teams of volunteer web pros to create free websites for ten nonprofits." 

An update on calendar aggregation:

I've started collecting calendar URLs for events around Providence, to be included in a local branch of Jon Udell's elmcity project. Our calendar just went live at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/se... ...just in time to list tomorrow morning's Open Coffee :-)

If you have any online calendars which you'd like to see included, please tell us in the Mashable City forum at http://groups.google.com/group... or simply shoot me a message through my RI Nexus contact form.

Sweet... Matt - are you able to make it easier for people to post URLs - looks like you have to join and be approved to the mashablecity user group before posting...  Ideally - we could add a form to the same site the calendar is on.  Also - biggie - organization - tags, categories? each event could technically be in a different category - not just each calendar (also posted on the http://seedprovidence.uservoice.com Thread)

cool.  that will be our next call to action on the http://seedprovidence.uservoic... thread.  

i'm sure some smart person can come up with stripping keywords from event posts to create auto tags.  anyone up to the challenge?   

We now have the beginnings of the calendar on our website:

http://www.seedprovidence.com/...

Anyone can add the following code to their website to display the calendar events for the day:

<p style="font-size:smaller">
<script src="http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/services/mashablecity/jswidget"></script>

</p>
<p>
Questions? <a href="mailto:matt@mattgillooly.com?subject=elmcity+calendars">Ask</a> and we'll answer.
</p>

Thanks, Wayne. Additionally, for anyone who wants direct access to the data, there are XML and JSON feeds available at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/se... and http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/se..., respectively.

Also, Jon Udell added an iCalendar feed to the aggregation software today. You can grab that at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/se... for importing this monster feed of events into any of a variety of calendar tools.

The point of aggregating this data is for people to use it, so please feel free to use these feeds whereever you see fit. And if you like, let me know where you use it, and eventually I'll put a page on http://mashablecity.org linking out to your sites.

awesome... the ical feed is a huge bonus..