A day of seeds

So, today was not a day of big actions. Today was a day of small actions on things that could become big.

Meetings, mostly.

A meeting with a young woman with Americorps who is working at Westinghouse H.S. over the summer and who wanted help in thinking about setting up a WHS Facebook page. That was fun because she's smart and energetic and cute and has a kind of huggable openness (no, I didn't hug her).

From what she said, I think WHS admins are way off in their approach to using Facebook: they want to not allow kids to comment, and to be able to update it about once a week. I think that such a page will lose kids' interest almost instantly. And I said so.

Then I met with James Brown and Phillip Thompson of the Lighthouse Project, the afterschool program at Westinghouse, and we laid out a basic framework for students to work over the summer on producing a series of "I Am Homewood" videos. That's pretty exciting.

Then I had a phone meeting with Andrew Hughes, president of Designing Digitally, about creating an MMORPG based on Homewood. That was pretty exciting too, for a couple of reasons: first, because online games have the potential for generating revenue at least three ways - upon initial purchase, via subscriptions, and through the sale of in-game accessories. Second, because it still sounds like something Mani Saint-Victor said earlier is still true - namely, that a prototype could be produced in time for at least a soft launch at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, a little over a month from now (Aug 3-7). Third, because online games commonly have multiple iterations and fourth, relatedly, because the Homewood game could grow through iterations to become progressively richer and deeper. Fifth, because if it takes off, it could make me enough money to live on (say, $3,000/month), or even enough money to buy investments that produce enough money to live on (say, $250,000). Finally, it could help a bunch of people learn to think differently - holy cow, this could be the path to my fantasy of coaching a community toward success - build in insights from Tony Robbins, Paul Zane Pilzer, Scripture, and everything else I'm convinced of.

(How do I learn how to run a computer game company?)

Anyway, that was fun...and this evening Janet and I met with Gene and Dee, for a relaxing and uplifting conversation in Highland Park while the girls played in a playground. That was nice.

There's much more happening. I must prepare to have my life simply explode.