Seattle.
The first keynote at AoIR 2011 is by Mike Monello (who was also the producer of the Blair Witch Project). He begins by noting the importance of team collaboration, and says that Blair Witch emerged as a completely organic process involving its principal creators. The filmmakers wanted the dialogue to be completely improvised, and so created a deep mythology for the Blair Witch story; some of the (very realistic) clips recorded for the film were then broadcast on TV, and audiences were encouraged to go to the online community Split Screen to discuss whether what they’d seen was …

Vienna.
The final speaker in this session at Challenge Social Innovation is Ricard Ruiz de Querol, who begins by noting the major social challenges we currently face; in addition, we also have some very major social media platforms – his interest is in the overlap and connection between them. A third element is the realm of social innovation, which intersects both areas.

Social media is an umbrella term for a wide range of possible tools, platforms, and practices; even individual platforms like Twitter sustain a universe of applications and practices. Where do we start? How can and do developments – …

Vienna.
The next speakers at Challenge Social Innovation are Christoph Kaletka, Ricard Ruiz de Querol, and Bastian Pelka, who are presenting nothing short of a manifesto for social media and social innovation. Social media, Bastian starts, are not a technology, but a specific form of using existing technology: a social innovation. Social media is an umbrella term for a rapidly growing set of practices and platforms, which are based around the core innovation of user-generated content as a new social routine.

Social media, then, describe a new communication pattern (a paradigm shift in communication), which replaces finished communicative processes …

Vienna.
The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation is Heidemarie Hanekop, whose focus is on user collaboration with companies. First, of course, such collaborations are importantly enabled by the Web, which makes a broad base of new knowledge publicly available and thereby enables new forms of information sharing and collaboration. This can happen with and without the help of commercial interests – from Wikipedia and open source to Facebook and YouTube.

Such new collaborative spaces are clearly attractive to users, which has also led to the involvement of companies in this space. But user collaboration stands in sharp contrast …

Vienna.
The next speaker at Challenge Social Innovation is Birgit Blättel-Mink, who focusses on the case of German games developer Crytek (which developed Far Cry, Crysis, and other games), based in Frankfurt, which engages with its users as innovators. The company has some 600 employees distributed across five international studios and two distribution centres; its core product is the Cry games engine.

Crytek’s user community includes casual gamers (on social networks), hardcore gamers (in the Crytek Mycrisis community and other online communities), and modders who generate modified games modules and take part in various specialist communities. Casual gamers …