PSFK SALON CHICAGO With Syfy: Speaker Len Kendall Talks About Crowdsourced Collaborative Storytelling
On the morning of August 24th, PSFK will host a special event designed to Fuel Imagination with the support of Syfy. There will be a number of inspirational talks by key creative minds and a panel discussion about trends and ideas in Chicago and beyond.
Get tickets here: PSFK SALON CHICAGO
One of our speakers will be Len Kendall, local creative and co-founder of the3six5, the crowdsourced digital storytelling project that features a different author every day for the entire year. Len will share how the idea originated as well as what he’s learned about collaborative lifestreaming. In advance of the talk, we asked him about his creative process:
Can you tell me a little about the3six5 and how you got started with it?
“the3six5″ was a result of our (co-Founder Daniel Honigman and I) desire to experiment with the up-and-coming blog platform Posterous. Much like its older and more popular counterpart, Tumblr, Posterous had developed into a large network of what many people call lifestreamers. With that in mind, we set out to take advantage of this growing trend in order to share the stream (or story) of more than one individual. At first, since we’re both Chicagoans, we thought we would try to create a platform giving one different Chicagoan the stage each week to share a bit about themself. The key was that these individuals weren’t “bloggers,” but rather people who didn’t share their lives with the world through digital means. While the idea was one we would have loved to pursue, we realized that both the audience and the subject matter would be limited if we restrained ourselves to a single city. Thus the3six5 was born. A story open to the entire world, in which 365 different spots were made available to create a daily dairy of the year 2010, told by a wide variety of our fellow citizens. Using the networks we had built up over the past few years, we put our project out there and within weeks (and 5,000 entries later) we had filled every day of the year. The stories have ranged dramatically in tone and topic, and so have the authors. Having passed the half-way mark recently, through successes and failures, we’ve learned so much about people we never would have been exposed to, as well as just how intricate managing such a crowdsourced project can be.
What has been inspiring your creativity lately?
I’m lucky to have so many avenues to pull creativity and inspiration from right now. From an educational perspective, photography and comedy writing classes are filling my spare evenings with a unique way of looking at things. From a digital angle, I’ve got incredible online publications like Brainpickings.org, GOOD.is, Kitsune Noir, TED, and of course PSFK to draw from. Companies that consistently amaze me are Threadless, Posterous, 37 Signals, and Tesla. And within the marketing industry there are so many thought leaders I have the pleasure of digitally interacting with each day (and on occasion in person) like Mel Exon, Edward Boches, Alicia Kan, Saneel Radia, Bud Caddell, Jeff Brecker, and of course all the wonderful people at my own company GolinHarris.
Thanks Len!
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