7 Billion Friends

Don't Fake The Funk On A Nasty Inch + Setting Up The Store +++

In the next few hours round 4 of LOVELAND inchvestment on Kickstarter will come to a close. I set a goal of 576 inches (4 square feet) which takes us to over 5,000 inches, more than half of Plymouth, the first LOVELAND colony. At the end of a round it’s always fun to see who’ll come in with the last inchvestment to put things over the top. I’ve started to call this “breaking the backboard” ala vintage Shaq:

The inchvestor that broke the backboard this time was 3rd Ward, an awesome creative space in Brooklyn where my friends and I used to have an office, and which the Russell Industrial Center in Detroit reminds me a lot of. In backboard breaking history, Eric broke the backboard on round 1, Sven got round 2, and Mike Hedge took round 3. But they did it on the shoulders of other giant inchvestors. Welcome everybody!

So now… I’ve got a lot of work to do that I’m piecing through with the big fluffy spiritual goal of making things clearer and funner and better and bigger and more incheractive. First I want to get a proper online store up ASAP. I’m going to use Shopify for this which lets me list multiple products and inch packages and allows people to pay using PayPal or Google Checkout. Here’s a little screenshot of the work in progress:

To avoid inchvestment downtown I’ll probably put up another quick Kickstarter with a fun little goal since they may take a few days. If anyone wants to help beta test the draft store lemme know! I could use some real feedback. The harder to please you are, the better.

I’m looking for an outdoor wireless web streaming camera that can show the property live but I don’t have a great solution for that yet. Any ideas? Do we need to set up some solar power for this?

The deeds and shirts are in progress. The first deed printing should start over the weekend but the magnifying glasses will still be a week to arrive (coming from a small company). Pierce is almost done with the shirt which I’ve decided to try printing through Spreadshirt after considering the pros and cons.

I’ve storyboarded the bones of the next LOVELAND video that recaps the project so far, shows footage from the auction where I bought our property, announces and asks for a few things, and has a scene that turns the whole city of Detroit into a giant casino slot machine thinger signifying the high levels of chance and uncertainty in pretty much every single step along the way here. Ha. Too true. :)

I also *still* need to clean up the inchvestor database so I can make that public, and I’ve been stuck on trying to do it in a clear fun way that shows progress, quantity of space and people, and some unlockable goals. That might just be way too much for me to try and do. I’ve got a lot of notes and sketches, but I can’t really program anything so I’ll have to put out a request for help.

Developer friends, please save me from crazy looking static sketches like these and lets make some interactive graphics that change and progress as people inchvest.

Doing all this stuff, I’m stumbling upon a bunch of neat ideas, potentially very powerful, for animating contributions to projects that I can see being applied to different sorts of fundraising and collective goals.

More soon. Thanks everybody! Here we goes again…