Evolve
Posted to http://makeloveland.com/evolve a lil bit ago. Trying to get better at blogging/writing/sharing again. Been so busy, been feeling like there’s no time to live my life twice. But, with everything we do, how excited we are about it, and how excited we want you to be about it, there’s really sort of not enough time not to. If you know what I mean.
Since we started working on LOVELAND in the spring and summer of 2009, I’ve joked to friends and interested people that part of our mission is to be as confusing as possible. That’s not intentional on our part, just an honest recognition that things can get ornate and gnarly and tangled as we experiment, throw quirky curveballs, pick things up, put things down, and grow the project organically. For those who’ve been following along, I think the process is more amusing and interesting than confusing, but there’s definitely an understanding gap in something so open-ended and left-field. “OK, I get that part, I think. But what is this really?” is something we hear often.
Honestly, I’ve never minded “hurting” our monetary bottom line (AKA inch sales, with some patronage from supportive fans) by being abstract as long as the work was creatively satisfying, people were interested, our inchvestors were saying nice things, we could pay rent month to month, and our volunteer teammates were happy. Lord knows we could have been making more money either through increased clarity to customers, sponsors, partners, more direct asks or investors (who we’ve yet to seek). To my mind, as a creative person and entrepreneur whose been through this process before, I’m confident that the rewards come eventually if you put your time and passion into something, and it’s really really important to let yourself truly search for new ideas and opportunities if that’s what you want to find.
To that end, something’s been brewing for the last six months that’s reaching a fever pitch. See, we’re at a point in our experimentation where we’ve discovered things I think it would be irresponsible for us not to focus on improving and scaling to make people’s lives better. It’s funny, there’s this startup incubator called Y Combinator whose founder, Paul Graham, has a simple mantra for entrepreneurs: “Make something people want.” I’ve always spun that around in my head to “Make something people won’t,” as in, make something no one else will make, and that will be a great and liberated place from which to start making things people want, in a way they didn’t know they wanted, because they didn’t think it was possible. “Crazy enough to work,” we like to say about that, and LOVELAND has it in spades.
As I look around at what LOVELAND’s built and what’s happening in Detroit, it’s impossible not to think outside of the inch and the microhood. It’s impossible for us as intelligent, creative, ambitious people who want to build things that haven’t been seen before while doing good, and who are pouring beakers of powerful new internet technology back and forth into beakers of powerful new social connectivity on a daily basis, to not want to have the biggest impact possible and genuinely change people’s lives and create new possibilities. This city is absolutely overflowing with huge, scary problems and equally huge, inviting opportunities to be helpful and create change. And it’s basically dictating where the project is going next.
Over the summer we co-founded the Imagination Station nonprofit creative campus in Corktown, Detroit, on Roosevelt Park facing the epic ruins of Michigan Central Station. The roof of the abandoned four-story hotel next to our two little abandoned houses has become one of my favorite places in the city. I love to walk past the squatters on the first floor, climb to the top and look out at so many things that are inspiring for so many reasons: the quaint and eclectic neighborhoods, the empty fields and buildings, the skyscrapers downtown, the casinos, the train station and the bridge to Canada. And I imagine a LOVELAND framework that doesn’t just apply to the micro, but to the entire city, like an interactive layer of love over Detroit. I see a way for the world to take great joy in finding, funding, creating, and sustaining a transformation here. Even that giant train station starts looking like an inch to me. Lovable, fundable, changeable.
You can read a grant proposal that Imagination Station just submitted to the Knight Foundation here. Building on top of LOVELAND’s mapping and fundraising platform, we’re moving things to city-scale, starting with Corktown, with payment-integrated social maps, real life local data and resident updates. We’ve had the most basic platform up on inchernet.com since we spoke at the TEDxDetroit conference a few months back, and now we’re getting ready to bring it to life. LOVELAND’s not going to lose its inchy origins or its sense of playful exploration, but it is going to grow up a bit. Or maybe it’s just Detroit that’s shrinking. Depends on your point of view. As always with us, expect surprises, but this time on a macro as well as a micro scale.
— Jerry Paffendorf
RSS
Archive
Mobile
