To continue with that analogy, here’s what we have on so far:

To ensure compatibility with multiple browsers, almost all websites are created with purposeful whitespace (typically on the sides) to ensure that all content is visible. The decision to not follow this convention on My City Lives was in part symbolic of our relationship with space, while simply also possible given that our sizing and content is always dynamic due to the nature of the application. The result: a living, growing and good looking map.

The slider was one of those things that when the gents from Jet Cooper first explained their vision for, we didn’t fully understand. This wasn’t surprising since our experience was with a more horizontal form of navigation where you select a link and get taken to a new page. As you’ll notice from the image below, the slider performs vertical navigation by ‘sliding’ down to take you to a new page or video. The advantage to doing this is that the user never has to leave the map (indeed, you can see it still in the bottom portion) and thus remains always connected to the reason why they’re there. The slider, therefore, validates one of the reasons why we chose to work with Jet Cooper as it leverages the concept that great design can concurrently have great purpose.

Now zoom out, all the way out. Toronto is our starting point, but boy do I get excited about the possibilities when I see this image (i.e. imagine if our default view was the most popular video at the time from each continent?)

It’s taken me two days to write this piece which, given its brevity and rather simplicity, should leave you scratching your head as to what took me so long. Since we’ve launched live, we’ve been identifying and swatting bugs while slowly rolling out the content, so I’ve been working perhaps inefficiently in a dozen tabs at once (the platform itself, the admin section, email, twitter, docs, fantasy basketball, etc). The majority of our content to begin is in-house, primarily created by our StoryCatchers who you’re going to be hearing a lot about soon but scroll below to see one of their videos (this particular one was created by doc maker Aliyyah Fazil).

In the meantime, please bear with us as we get things working properly and know that as happy as we are for reaching our launch milestone, it’s not without deep appreciation for the help you provided*.

A & A

*Don’t think you’ve helped yet? That’s cool, you probably already have without knowing it.  But if you’re really eager, just share MCL in about a week and then tell us to receive our “refer a friend” kickback: a virtual fist pump.

Clearly both approaches work, but there are also parallels between how these communities grew and what the communities themselves are like. Facebook by nature is closed compared to Twitter. In Facebook you generally have to except people/friends before they can see your profile but you certainly need to be a Facebook member; whereas most of Twitter is open to anyone with a web connection, member or not. One’s content is restrictive by nature while the other is open by nature and this is similar to their community building philosophies as well as developers’ ability to create applications for the platform.

So what kind of platform is My City Lives going to be, exclusive or open?  Well we hope it will be as open as Twitter and that the community will create all the game changing apps that Twitters community has spawned.  So how do we ensure this? We keep it as simple as possible while allowing our users to find useful information. But how will it grow?

Once you’ve decided on the inclusive or exclusive community part, then there comes the actual building and growing of the community. Do you send out press releases? Do you connect with bloggers in your area? Do you buy adds on Facebook (god no)? Do you speak at events/hang out where early adopters hang out? Do you SEO the %*@# out of your site? Do you focus on word of mouth? Do you take the age old inventors angle and just make something that you would use and hope that you’re solving a problem that many people have? Or maybe you just sit back and let Twitter do what it does best.

Well I can comfortably tell you that we are “focused” on most of these options.  But what we really want to do, is build this sucker from the inside out. My City Lives is about recommendations and exploration, so we’re hoping our community will recommend it to friends and recommend through exploration. This is exactly why we are adding 10 StoryCatchers to our team.  In no particular order, Ambreen, Emily, Bill, Gabby, Lu Anne, My Ahn, Simon, Mahmoud, Aliyyah and Grace will be joining our team officially this Saturday.  These StoryCatchers will be responsible for helping to seed the early stage content on My City Lives and will help define what the site is all about by infusing the site with their talent and creativity.  We have also been in contact with quite a few bloggers who write about Toronto as well as conventional media in order to reach the non-techies. There are many things we have on the go and hopefully some will even surprise you.  But for now, please welcome our new StoryCatchers.

With the end of 2009 here, the team at My City Lives wanted to take this opportunity to update you on our achievements to date and what to expect in the coming year.

It was only January of this year when we founded Creativity Killed the Recession, a grassroots organization that provided a forum for dynamic city builders to incubate ideas at a time when they were greatly needed. Charged with the task of how to ‘kill the recession’, the group collaboratively worked over the subsequent months to help one another and help our city with a bold project. Not too long after, the tangible manifestation of our creativity and collaboration was born in My City Lives.

The goal of My City Lives is to be at the forefront of today’s movement to reinvent our relationships with spaces, communities and each other. Our method to accomplishing this is by providing an online platform for anyone to share their experiences in their city using the most compelling and growing medium – online video.  Our unique technology associates their story with the location where it was recorded on an interactive map so others can visually explore communities through the stories of others.

Concurrent to our platform development, we’ve engaged with a broad spectrum of stakeholders (which may have included you) to properly determine how My City Lives would be of value to them whether it was a small business, an artist or even our local government. The product of this process was a forward thinking business model which would ensure that we could be a self-sustaining enterprise that was focused on ‘purpose’ in addition to profits.

As our friends and early followers, you will have the exclusive first peak at how we intend to do exactly this in the latter part of January. At that time, we will be launching in beta form for you to explore and experience. In the meantime, if you wish to read in greater detail about our people, philosophy and product, we have updated our blog with a comprehensive company update.

As always, we welcome your feedback and are humbled by the levels of support and interest we have already received from you. For a company which has yet to actually launch its product, it’s been a warming response and great validation that we are creating something that people can believe in.

So again, we thank you for your continuing support and wish you the very best holiday season.

Adil & Adam

We recently completed our first round of testing which validated a successful creation of the application, in the most rudimentary form. We are now working on the many fixes and adjustments that we found need to be made, while working with some new individuals to build out a proper user experience and concentration on design.

When we began this project, we believed that we would be able to launch in September but in the interest of doing it right, we are pushing back and now hope to leave our Private Beta in October. As always, we’ll keep you informed on our status and encourage you to reach out to us if you have any thoughts, ideas or good words. We love good words.

Adil & Adam
adil@mycitylives.com/adam@mycitylives.com

Business Plan

To achieve our vision for My City Lives, we need resources and unless you know someone who is quite careless with their money (who you should probably stay from anyway), you need to develop a plan to show how you’re going to do that. The key is to know what your focus should be on. Ideas are plentiful so beyond elucidating your vision, this is rarely the focus of a plan. The focus should primarily be on the execution since this demonstrates that you’ve gone through the challenging task of logically considering how to make your idea work.

My City Lives is an easy idea for people to understand. The planning behind it, however, is far more challenging but it’s certainly a worthwhile activity. You get to dream. You get to strategize. At the end of the day, you have a manifestation of your labor and love. That’s pretty much exactly where we are now in regards to our Plan. We decided to do something different and present our Plan as a website with videos and images complimenting the points we made.  If nothing else, it’s an appropriate approach given its creativity and close relation to the medium which My City Lives will exist upon.

Next stop: investors.  Interested?

Site Development

Paul has been working like a man possessed lately to try and meet our target of having a beta version ready by August 9^th. Our goal for the August date was to be able to show the first iteration of our idea and to get a real feel for how our technology will work.  Think of it as making brownies for the first time. They’re just as delicious as you envisioned but they don’t look like what they looked like on the box and you probably have a good idea how to do it better the next time.

When ready we’ll be sharing our beta with you and hope that you’ll share our excitement in reaching the milestone of deploying a functioning product. But like the brownie analogy, we’ll also ask that you be patient with how it looks and feels. Come September, our plan is to launch the second version of MCL and by all means, by that point (aka ‘the second batch’) we’ll have figured out all the things that make you go “huh” the first time around. Clearly, this perfectly exemplifies the advantages and disadvantages to conceiving and creating a new company within a few months.

Collaboration

Finally, maintaining our philosophy that this is by nature an open idea and that you’re all stakeholders, we’ve been living a life that can be characterized by constant collaboration. Our thinking always dramatically improves by sharing ideas with people and here’s a sample of who we’ve met in the last two weeks:

• Victoria Foley and Angel Matich from Belladona Communications. They’ve launched the Canadian Greatness® program, which celebrates the greatest our country has to offer and leverages their examples into giving campaigns. What a great talk about the potential for our country.
• @Jason Wagar from the Toronto Community Foundation, which supports hundreds of different community based organizations in the city. For over half an hour, Jason just spit out great ideas on how we can get community groups on board with MCL.
• @Tonya Surman, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Social Innovation. Check out their site, CSI is positively one of the best things going on in this city by being a forward thinking incubator for social change.
• We had a ‘tweet up’ with @jenmyhuynh who is verging on becoming a master networker and @skanwar who recently left Microsoft to co-found an ahead-of-the-trend development business that’s all about the user experience.
• And of course, we met a ton of great people when we did a quick pitch about My City Lives at Refresh Events.

As you can see, we’re operating on a number of fronts right now and it’s equally exhausting as it is exhilarating. But the key takeaway is that My City Lives is happening (!) and when we do the September launch, there will be a number of people we have to thank and share our big milestone with.

The origins of Creativity Killed the Recession are humble in that we had no plan beyond bringing creative people together. There was no grand desired output, no concept of a movement; it was a solution that made sense to explore. The exploration evolved into an adventure and we found ourselves submerged in creative culture – at times overwhelmed at the sheer amount of ideas and activities that people were involved with. It has been inspirational to be introduced to the greater creative community and intimately engage with a small subsection within it. The summation of your inspiration challenged us to dream big when considering how we could take the concepts of creativity, community and collaboration and turn it into tangible change.

The manifestation of your collective ideas – My City Lives – is now being created.

The idea stemmed from us putting together what problems we all shared at Creativity Killed the Recession such as the need for economic stimulus, supporting arts and culture, connecting communities and having pride in our city and its institutions. Addressing these things, we determined, would elevate us not only from the recession but towards a level of prosperity that we all believe is possible for our city, our country and perhaps even the global community. My City Lives, therefore, will have its roots in Toronto but its success here can lead to an even greater impact beyond our immediate boundaries.

What determines if it’s successful? By our definition, so long as people are participating in the creation of content, then we can go home happy. The idea is to achieve an unprecedented level of exploration, but it’s only possible with the participation of others who believe that by being involved they are contributing towards ending the recession. We might not achieve exactly this, but the very fact that people are trying and believing is all we can ask. After all, as the late Margaret Mead famously said, “a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Of course, the most important question is: what exactly is My City Lives? I’m going to wait until next week to unveil the answer to that question – not necessarily to build up suspense but rather so we have some time to produce an early demo to compliment our words.