A Safe Place

Talk To The Station: It’s 2011… Have You Called Michigan Central Station Lately?

Just sent this out to some friends and inchvestors, have a look-see and get your idea for Michigan Central Station up on the site for the owners and others to see:

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LOVELAND’s excited to announce a brand new web project at http://talktothestation.com .

Built in 1913 and vacant since 1988, Michigan Central Station is Detroit’s most iconic historical landmark, and a second city skyline unto itself. LOVELAND has been commissioned to create a website that makes it super simple for people to submit ideas for the preservation, reactivation, and redevelopment of the space.

On the site you can learn about and see the building, and type, text, or call in with your ideas. Yes, you can now call Michigan Central Station on the phone. Who’dathunk?

The building’s owners are part of the commissioning team and will be actively watching what comes in through the site. They’re currently cleaning out the building, installing new windows and a new roof, and seeking your input on what should come next.

Again, the site is at http://talktothestation.com .

Please have a look and have your say on what you think should or could happen to this out-of-this-world 500,000 square foot landmark that’s just as important to Detroit’s future as it was to Detroit’s past.

Happy Sunday!

-Team LOVELAND

New Map For Detroit Auction: Why Don’t We Own This?

At LOVELAND Technologies, our Detroit-focused internet startup, we’ve been working hard to develop powerful new kinds of interactive city maps (the working name of our mapping platform is Living In The Map). Last year we released a parcel-based map of Detroit with a swiss-army-knife-like set of features, experimenting with different ways to display data, and different features for commenting, posting photos and videos, creating location-based fundraisers, highlighting projects, and more.

Today we’re releasing a single-focus map built around the thousands of properties up for auction at the Wayne County Tax Foreclosure Auction happening in September. The map is called Why Don’t We Own This? and lives at whydontweownthis.com (you can also get there via wdwot.com for a shorter link, and will be building out a mobile phone version).  

When you arrive on the site you’ll see a map of Detroit broken down by zip codes:

When you click a zip you’ll zoom in and see all the properties up for auction along with some basic information:

When you click a property you’ll zoom in all the way to a parcel-based map focused on the property, along with a Google Street View window, and as much data as we can find about the property:

Importantly, if you log into the map with a LOVELAND account or Facebook Connect, you can comment on or follow updates and conversations on specific properties or entire zip codes. At the same time as we’re visualizing the properties so people can easily see what’s happening in the city and in their neighborhoods, we’re also opening up communication channels, which we think is important and powerful for reasons we discuss on the WDWOT About page.

While no one can control auction outcomes, we believe that adding dialog and increasing transparency can help create healthier auction outcomes and help maximize local benefit. After all, if properties become more than price tags, if they can carry local histories and stories and desires, there’s a better chance for intelligent and welcomed reactivation.

Please have a look at whydontweownthis.com and let us know what you think. Please also spread word so people are aware of what’s up in the city and their neighborhoods, and can share what they know and what they want for these properties, if they want to.

Depending on what people think and how they use it, it’s also possible for us to update the map or specific properties with additional features (for one example, we can turn on “crowdfunding” tools if a property is clearly identified as something a neighborhood wants to make into a public space like a park or community center, and wants to raise funds to bid on and develop it with).

A couple of notes: We’ve independently built this map using publicly available information from Wayne County and the Detroit Residential Parcel Survey. Things change, and we can’t guarantee the accuracy of any information. If you see something wrong, please let us know and we’ll update it. 

We’d like to thank our friends at Data Driven Detroit for their advice and assistance in helping keep things fresh, and the many people who’ve given feedback and supported our work along the way. As we move forward we want to continue creating innovative maps that not only empower people through information, but also through interaction that can accomplish real things in the real world and make the city a better place.

Thanks for reading, we hope you find this service useful, and we hope you’ll share your ideas for how we can get better and better at doing the most good. It’s all a work in progress.

Linkin’ Ain’t Easy: New Internet Things for The Imagination Station

We just pulled the switch on a brand new Imagination Station website at facethestation.com. Check it out and see what you think. We moved from WordPress to Posterous because it’s a faster and dare I say more joyous way to update a site than many alternatives. While I’m not a programmer, I’m definitely a power user and maker of internet things (it’s sort of like tumblr, but you can create pages and things). It always surprises me how difficult it still is in 2011 to bend visual layout to your will, put it up at the dotcom of your choice, and turn it live for people to see and interact with. 

I sense a mini rant brewing so I’ll stop. :-)

One of the big new additions to the site is a custom fundraising interface by LOVELAND, programmed by Larry Sheradon. A few months back we started brainstorming some ways to visualize fundraising for Imagination Station, and latched on to this idea of money as energy. Watts are a commonly known unit of energy so we went with the concept of every dollar donated turning into a Watt in the system. The idea being that later in the year we’ll come up with some things you can spend your Watts on. Maybe we’ll get some partners where 10 Watts can get you a drink at a bar or 50 Watts gets you a pizza or 1,000 Watts gets you a night at a hotel, or things like that.

I love the evolution of working on these things and helping design them. Using the same basic magic of turning a payment into a grid of inches or frames in a film, I drew up and photoshopped a basic sketch of how it might work to turn payments of various sizes into star-like Watts clusters of various sizes:

I sent it over to Larry who use his great design eye and programming skills to come up with a fully functioning Watts donation interface, and then the Imagination Station teamed whittled down the copy. A few days of revisions and tweaks, and wa-la! Watts version 1.0 is currently up at watts.facethestation.com:

Check it out, see what you think, and let me know how it can be better. There are lots of little tweaks and touches we want to add to make it funner, faster, and give more feedback (seeing your Watts grow as you move the slider bar or type in an amount, animations floating around the screen, the scene progressively lighting up as the number of Watts grow, etc). 

We just started sending out an update about what’s new at the Imagination Station and encouraging people to become members via the Watts page and support the project as it gains its legs. Copying that here:

Dear Supporter of the Imagination Station:

The Officers and the Board of Directors of The Imagination Station are enormously grateful for your support in 2010. We have truly had an amazing year and are supremely confident that in 2011 you will see a monumental transformation on The Imagination Station’s campus and the beginnings of historical changes in Detroit.

In 2010, with hundreds of hours of volunteer support, we have retaken a blighted block and have begun to turn it into a safe destination place. Our work has made our neighborhood safer and our Michigan Avenue business district more prosperous! Thank you for your past support. Now, we need your support to maintain our momentum. Please visit watts.facethestation.com to contribute, or read on for more.

We sometimes get asked, “What exactly is The Imagination Station?” To this question, we answer that it is an idea, a vision and a concrete plan to transform our neighborhood, the surrounding park area and the City of Detroit. Our Mission Statement is:

The Imagination Station of Roosevelt Park will be a catalyst for change in Detroit. With community engagement and new, creative uses of the internet as our cornerstone, the Imagination Station of Roosevelt Park will seek and implement innovative solutions to Detroit’s economic, community and cultural challenges.

In concrete terms the completed Imagination Station will contain the following elements:

• Media Center – to provide computer training to our community and artists and entrepreneurs.

• Living Quarters for 2 Technologists in Residence

• Art Gallery: Public Art Exhibition Space

• Public Space: An Outdoor Green Space to be used for cultural activities supporting music, culinary, visual, and social events, and

• Three vacant lots that will be re-purposed in a manner that is consistent with our mission and vision while functioning as a reliable future revenue stream

For an example as to how our internet platform will serve the community, please follow this link that describes our plan. This description was provided to the Knight Foundation as part of a recent grant application. 

We believe, with your help, we can transform this once blighted block into a place that will provide the tools to improve the quality of life in Detroit’s neighborhoods while creating a destination place for artists, entrepreneurs and other visitors to Detroit.

We invite you to become a member for any amount you choose to donate, and a sponsor at $1,000 or more. Members get free access to all Imagination Station events plus other goodies, and sponsors get get the same plus prominent listing on the website and print materials.

Click the button below or head to watts.facethestation.com.

A DIP In The Hot Tub

Play on, ice potato, play on.

Crazy Company Presents A LOVELAND Premonition

Here’s a video premonition moving from LOVELAND Stage 1: Plymouth (that’s the first grid you see being made in the video) to Stage 2: Zug (the demon you see at the end). If all goes well it’s going to be a new kind of game — a fight against the forces of darkness, really — that transforms real property in Detroit inch by inch. And the people of Plymouth are going to be the privileged players and combatants. Join the adventure and claim inches in Plymouth for $1 a square inch here.

Crazy Company Presents A LOVELAND Premonition from Jerry Paffendorf on Vimeo.

MAKE LOVELAND!

w00t! You can now read more about the LOVELAND million inches project, get involved and sign-up for the mailing list at makeloveland.com. And if you’re the twittering type I created a @makeLOVELAND account to follow. 

On personal updates, I just got back to San Francisco from 2 weeks in New York where I brainstormed with friends and had some interesting meetings (including asking a venture capital firm to invest a whopping $6 in the project — we’ll see how that goes ;)) followed by 2 weeks in Detroit where I went looking for LOVELAND indoors:

and outdoors:

and slept on the floor in a taped-out 50,000-square-inch grid:

and got a lot of great help and feedback from my friends there, including some people doubling down to get more involved. You guys rule. I’ll be back before the end of the month after some thinking and meetings out westerly. Pics on Flickr.

More soon. Lord knows I got a lot to update………….

What’s on the 16th floor of 580 California?

If you go to the 16th floor of 580 California Street in San Francisco and tell the man at the desk you are there to see something interesting, you will be given a key to see something interesting indeed. No joke. I went the other day. If you do it too let me know. You won’t be let down.

580 California credit

statues on the roof credit