Today, we had a great session that focused on the question of how the contest interfaces with or conflicts with the spirit of collaboration in the Parkside Exhibit Workshop.  We talked about motivating factors for participation in the platform as a whole, and most agreed that they were more interested in a creative, friendly space to realize some cool exhibits than a place to win a prize and cash out in the Bahamas (well, not exactly). 

We were mixed from the beginning about the contest/prize component of this project.  We ultimately decided to implement prizes to jumpstart participation, but our real goal is to support a creative community.  Towards that end, we do have a couple additional discretionary prizes for general participation, but ultimately, $$ is not the way to go here.

We talked a bit about ways to encourage more collaboration on exhibits.  Keystone Bouchard mentioned that he really cared more about working out unsolved problems with the Wikisonic project than anything else and wanted to work with others on it.  I suggested that we create some exhibits that are explicitly group-owned, that anyone can be a part of anytime.  Per the discussion, I also installed a drop box in Parkside where you can drop free, full-perms resources to share with other builders so that we can really create a basis of support and supportive objects and scripts.

I'd love to hear more from folks about how we can best encourage, support, and reward participation without it being fundamentally linked to money.  We have some fabulous participants sharing lots of time and energy, and I am so gratified and amazed by the enthusiasm and positivity of Parkside Hall.  I hope it can continue to grow into a really active place.  Please share your suggestions for how to enable this as comments here, or drop a notecard in the mailbox in front of the museum.

Some tangible changes that were mentioned:

• open posting board in Parkside.  When you enter, you will see this board on your right.  You can upload textures onto it with questions, challenges, creative thoughts, etc. by dragging them while holding down CTRL.
• new exhibit of Reflexive Architecture by Keystone Bouchard outside.  If you haven't checked it out, please enjoy this awesome exhibit.  We will start holding sensor scripting classes soon--let me know if you want to help.
• new museums coming soon.  I'm talking to some other museums about working their exhibits into this process.  This means more challenges, more themes, more workshops.  I'll keep you posted...