Taming the Butterfly

Taming the Butterfly was a community-wide game that took place from May 5-12, 2011. It's purpose was threefold: to connect Bloomingtonians with people they have not previously met; to connect them around the common purpose of imagining a better future for Bloomington; and to empower participants (through daily digital media workshops) and encourage them (by providing the teams with challenges that require groups to collaborate at least partly via social media) to carry out this purpose by using a combination of face-to-face and digital means.

Background

The Game was the created by the founders of SociaLens, a Bloomington-based company working with organizations to help them to thrive in the Digital Age. Their idea for the game arose out of research that predicts communities like Bloomington will be far better off in the future if they get good at using digital technologies to (a) connect and coordinate effectively and (b) plan for the future.

Digital Media Workshops

(Note: the links below are video recordings of the digital media workshops.) There were free, open-to-the-public trainings on Twitter, Bloomingpedia, Facebook, Foursquare, Basecamp, Flickr, Google Docs, YouTube, WordPress, and Dropbox.

Ignite Talks

On Thursday, May 12, each team presented their ideas of how to improve the future in a 5-minute "Ignite" style talk (20 PowerPoint slides, each slide autoadvances after 15 seconds).

See: User:Dortheanie, TTB2036 1, TTB2036 2, TTB2036 3, TTB2036 4, TTB2036 5, TTB2036 6