March 11, 2009 Jill

Here I am in beautiful Niagara on the Lake staying at the uber fabulous Oban Inn participating in CFC’s NBC Universal Multimedia Matchmaking Program.

So far, it’s an amazing experience. Here’s the concept: lock a bunch of creative people from different media backgrounds up in some wonderful locale, give them a raft of brainstorming tools and techniques and devote an entire week to coming up with something new, wonderful and multiplatform.

We are working with two amazing leaders, Frank Boyd and Mark Atkins of Crossover labs, UK and two wise and funny mentors, Richard Adams and Suzanne Stein. Frank and Mark have been traveling the world running this workshop for many groups. They are jetlagged but inspired and inspiring.

The first two days, which seem like the better part of a lifetime, were devoted to blue sky brainstorming” anything is possible. We used many techniques and were constantly working with new people. (We looked at some websites which I bookmarked to Delicious, tagged mmp.) We’ve worked intensely and very long hours.

One of our assignments — given out the first night — to realize a little project. Teams of 2-3 selected a platform and a genre. My partners were Jacqueline Nuwame and Liz Marshall. We chose Twitter and mystery. Others had Facebook and science, YouTube and horror and Flickr and sci fi. Last night, we presented.

Our group had come up with a teeny-tiny mystery involving my “disappearance”. The group was challenged to turn to my Twitter tribe to find answers: what was the story behind my disappearance and what had I hidden and where. We used #twystery as a tag to help keep track of the thread. We planted little pieces of the story with a bunch of my Twitter pals and they were wonderful in bringing the story to life. A very cool experiment and totally web 2.0, not only because of the platform, but also in the way a virtual community came together to make it happen.

Today however, things have made the turn. The blue sky finally showed itself over Niagara on the Lake, just as we were forced to start limiting our options. After lunch, we chose projects to work on for the durations and partners to work with. That was amazingly difficult. We had generated between 30 and 40 ideas and many of them are incredibly interesting with a lot of potential. Plus there is an amazing gang of people here with incredible talents, know how and creativity. How do you decide?

From here on, we’re developing, pitching, refining, repitching, developing, designing and pitching some more. By Friday, we hope to have something really solid to pitch to the catchers who are coming to hear us.

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