FreeCulture NYC photo-mob to produce enormous repository of free pix of Manhattan
Fred sez,
Link (Thanks, Fred)On Friday, March 28th (April 4th rain date), join Free Culture @ NYU and Free Culture @ Columbia on a quest to get the best shots of NYC. Bring your camera and a way to get around town for the biggest scavenger hunt in Free Culture's history.
All photos will be uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons for inclusion into Wikipedia articles about NYC that need photos. We've got hundreds of locations, sites, and things to document for Wikipedia and it should be a really fun day.
Each member of the winning team will receive an iPod shuffle loaded with Creative Commons music! Second and third place teams will win copies of "Wikipedia, The Missing Manual" donated by O'Reilly.
Update: Looks like rain on Friday the 28th, we're rescheduling Wikipedia Takes Manhattan until April 4th, same places and time.
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That is so cool. Wikipedia needs more pictures - hopefully this will be the beginning of a trend!
Being an amateur photographer and only 4 hours from NY, I am crushed that it's on a Friday when I have to work. Damn.
Awesome!
I've been really keen on the idea of wiki-tourism - going to strange and exotic places primarily to take photos of stuff for Wikipedia.
Anybody else misread that as "erroneous", instead of "enormous"?
how about throwing them all at photosynth? how cool would a fully explorable model of manhattan be?
That is a nice idea, I wonder how many volunteers are going to get stopped by over-zealous security guards?
Cool. How do we get something like this to happen in Chicago?
ZOMG! What about the terrorists!?!
Hasn't photography already done enough damage?!
The iPod Shuffle with Creative Commons music sounds great, until the winner plugs it into their iTunes and it makes them wipe it so it can be attached to their library.
Careful -- a friend of mine got detained and interrogated shortly after 9/11 for filming a post office in NYC.
Nothing came of it, but still... leave your suspicious beards at home!
Too bad the grand prize is a product that doesn't really live up to the ideals that Wikipedia and Creative Commons are built on. The iPod doesn't support open, patent-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Flac, and it's tied to iTunes in a way that requires third party engineers reverse-engineer their way into it.
I'm not trying to hate on the iPod. It's an okay product, but it seems like an inappropriate prize for a competition that's all about openness.
Dude, this is Manhattan, try springing this stuff on us with more warning!
Sounds like a brilliant project. Too bad they planed it for a time and day when most people (like me) are working. Saturday would have been much better.
Boo fridays.
Everyone should wesr dark blue jackets with large 'WC PS' (Wikimedia Commons Photo Shoot) on the back, crew cuts, and a black earbud in one. Women should have short no-nonsense hair, men should emulate DiNozo on the American television show NCSI.
Seriously, though - the photosynth idea is good. It would also be good to put these photos into an open-source or University graphics lab project to build 3-D models from 2-D photos. I once saw software from Paul Debevec that took a set of 3-D photos and build a realistic 3-D model from them. He is now at http://www.debevec.org/ but I am not sure he's still working in that particular area of graphics (and it got famous so he may not need the help, I'm just posting him as an example).
Think of the possibilities for open-source game development if there's a large open source of 3D models for major cities.