Step 1: Finding a name.

This part didn’t involve me. My co-worker Levana had already canvassed the multitudinous youth groups that we work with at various trainings, gatherings, and presentations. The name RYSE, possibly but not necessarily an acronym for RAN Youth Sustaining the Earth, rose to the top (no pun intended). Kids liked it, despite—or perhaps due to—its deliberate misspelling.

Step 2: Crafting a brand.

The next step was to gather adjectives that would describe the kind of identity that we wished to create for RYSE. Since it’s a youth network (as in high school age), a lot of the RAN staff excused themselves from this step, leaving the younger members to generate the list. The list of adjectives for the logo ended up being a good mix of useful (doodleable, authentic, upward movement) and generic (hip, cool, smooth).

Step 3: Casting a wide net.

The design process now on my plate, it seemed right to start with a brainstorm. Based on the list of adjectives I received, I put together these twelve designs. Having just read “The Wisdom of Crowds” on my holiday train ride, I was very wary of the process turning into a consensus-based design by committee, turning the logo to poop.

Step 4: Raising the bar.

Instead of circling up and talking through our opinions, the team was asked to vote on their three favorites without mutual consultation. The idea was that the least inspired logos would quietly drop out of the race. That’s indeed what happened, and we ended up with these. There were still too many to send to our youth groups, so next was a quick “embarrassment vote” to remove the ones we didn’t even want the youth to consider.

Step 5: Getting feedback.

Now we were down to five designs, which we felt were good enough to send back to our youth allies for consideration. We asked for both word associations (so we could match them to our list) and Favorite/Least Favorite votes from them. Though the voting for Favorite showed a dead tie across all the logos, the word associations we got back were priceless. “Skyward” and “empowering” were used to describe one, while another just received “weak”. The silver bullet was the feedback that one of our activists would, “totally wear a t-shirt with that one on it.”

Step 6: Closing in.

This next step involved tweaking the design chosen from the feedback through multiple variations to see if there were other treatments that we preferred. Some people had asked beforehand if we could see this one like this or that one like that, but I kept punting the tweaking until after we had gotten a little closer to a decision—no sense in making multiple versions of a bad logo, especially when we’re crunched for time.

Step 7: The devil’s in the details.

Everyone was pretty sure that we had found our logo at this point and all that remained was the tweaking, fitting, squishing, and squeezing of what I considering a rough “scribble”, albeit digital, into the “final” version. Sending these details around for a final vote, most of the comments were in the family of, “they all look great” or “those are very small differences, any are fine”. Only a few people actually kept voting this far into the process.

Step 8: The new RYSE logo.

I took the final logo and did all the technical things in Illustrator to make it feel more “final”, like stroking borders, expanding appearances, and simplifying paths. The vectors went from about 1300 points of complex paths to about 300 points of much simpler paths—stripped for export if you will. Then I had a little fun exploring what it might look like in a two-color piece and made the birth announcement to the team. We had a new logo.

The whole process took just about two weeks, not including the casual conversations and market research that led to the name in the first place. I’m quite pleased with the logo, especially that we managed to include so many voices—like the youth we’ve been working with (it’s their logo, after all)—while keeping the process from slipping into groupthink and lowest-common-denominatorism. Bravo, my inner Creative Director.

I’m not lying or even embellishing. Feel free to check out Time Magazine’s official site and see for yourself.

They cite many of my achievements over the last year. As Americans grew weary of the overproduced drivel on television they increasingly turned to sites like YouTube for entertainment and I was there with my videos from Japan. As Americans sought connection they looked for long lost friends and family on sites like MySpace and I was there, smiling back at them. As Americans rejected corporate news they turned to alternative sources, like blogs, and I was there with the Stanifesto. I haven’t even mentioned the events I’ve added to Upcoming or the links I’ve added to Del.icio.us, but I think you get the idea.

I know what you’re thinking. I wasn’t even aware that Stan was a candidate! I know, right? Honestly, I was a little surprised myself… mostly because, if I qualify for these sorts of contests, why haven’t I won any before?

This year, George Clooney was named People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for a second time. That’s right, he was chosen back in 1997 as well. Granted, People does have a blog where you can nominate men you know personally (how very 2.0 of them), but are our celebrity stocks so depleted we have to double-dip in the man candy already? That’s like nominating someone with the last name of “Bush” or “Clinton” for president ever again—kind of a big “F-U” to the other 300 million or so Americans who haven’t been tapped yet. Like me.

It’s the same thing with that other big contest, the Nobel Peace Prize. They really need to take Time’s lead and honor me with a golden dove or stick of dynamite or whatever you get when you win. I’m especially qualified as well. Take a look at the list of past winners. I’ve ordered substantially fewer people killed than either Henry Kissinger or Yasser Arafat.

I’ll be submitting my demo reel for Oscar consideration as soon as I have some time to burn a DVD.

My particular project was inspired by James Surowiecki’s amazing work on the wisdom of crowds. It seems that, given the right circumstances, crowds can be remarkably intelligent—quite contrary to popular opinion that, while a person is smart “people” are stupid. I’ve seen other people replicate the “jellybean jar” phenomenon and thought I would give it a try at my office.

Out comes a really big jar and lots of malted milkballs. One hundred seventy-six (176) of them in fact, though I was tempted throughout the process to, uhm, abbreviate the total. The general idea is that, despite the wide range of guesses from the staff on how many milkballs are in the jar, the average of our guesses should be very, very close. Hopefully (since that’s the point of the project) closer than any one guess.

Next I go office to office, stopping people in hallways as need be, and give them the pitch: “Fill out the piece of paper with your name and your guess, using any method you wish for guessing—other than removing the top and counting them one-by-one, however it is of the utmost importance that you discuss neither your guess nor your strategy with any other staff member.” Yes, it was a run-on sentence, but by the end of the morning, I had it down pretty well.

It turns out we had guesses as low as 86 and as high as 275. That’s quite a range. Still, when I averaged all the guesses together, I got 178—only two away from the correct number! That beats both the closest guess (at 168) and the “panel of experts”, meaning the average of the five closest guesses, (at 164). Yes, including the outlier “noise” actually made the guess more accurate.

When people are asked to make a decision, they do so with a certain amount of bias. If they discuss their decision with others, this bias spreads to others. However, in a diverse crowd operating as individuals, these biases cancel one another out, making the group more intelligent. I;’m sure that a memetic analysis would involve memes and anti-memes colliding and exploding.

The staff was overall very appreciative of the experiment/celebration and immediately saw its implications with how we both interact in group decision-making and how we receive feedback from our activist network. They were also quite happy that the lesson ended with the average being closer than any one guess, because that meant we got to split the malted milkballs.

From the very beginning, the movie has stood on title alone. Screenwriter Josh Friendman, who reviewed early drafts of the script describes it:

I will not give away any of the plot details of SNAKES ON A PLANE. But know this. As the great Sam Jackson would say: There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane. What else do you need to know?

Indeed. Mr. Jackson famously took the part based on the title and just as famously fought to keep it when movie executives sought to change it. A lot of times movies will have “working titles” that are later changed to something perceived as more box office friendly by the marketing plan. For instance, “Kicking & Screaming” was originally titled “Will Ferrell Soccer Movie”. Currently tops at the box office is “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby“. I’m absolutely positive that if you ask 10 people “Hey, what’s that about?”, 9 of them will respond: “Will Ferrell Nascar Movie”. Why not just call it that? Why not call it what it is instead of running it through the PR machine on spin cycle until it comes out shiny? When “Snakes on a Plane” was about to become Pacific Air 121, people spoke up.

The fact that the democratic blogosphere (and, let’s be honest, all of us) so values authenticity provoked it to rally behind this uncharacteristic showing of sincerity from those typically slimy Hollywood types. Fans began making their own posters, t-shirts, and complete trailers for the movie. The demanders started to assume the role of suppliers, to make the products that they wanted themselves (in fact no “official” posters, t-shirts, or trailers were released until fairly recently). It was somewhere around this point when the executives “got it” and not only kept the title, but went back to film a scene containing the line “motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane”. If ever there were a movie that embraced the basic tenet of the Cluetrain Manifesto, it’s this one. I am given hope by the idea that there is fast becoming an economic model that rewards candor over craftiness.

Early in the 1976 film Network, anchorman Howard Beale explains his inability to continue newscasting with, “I really don’t know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit.” He must have been speaking only for himself because, 30 years later, there’s still plenty of bullshit to go around. I don’t think that anyone is saying that “Snakes on a Plane” will be a good movie. It might be shit, but it won’t be bullshit. The core of all the enthusiasm is that it is what it is, unapologetically. Mr. Jackson has said of the brilliant title, “You either want to see that, or you don’t.”

And I do, so I’m going tonight.

1. Hands Off the Internet, a “grassroots” website against network neutrality.
2. Tom Giovanetti’s OpEd in the Mercury News, “Network neutrality? Welcome to the stupid Internet.”
3. Sen. Ted Stevens’ already infamous “The Internet is a series of tubes” speech.

Let’s deal with these in order of hilarity.

First, there’s nothing “dirty” about poor Senator Stevens. He just clearly has no idea what he’s talking about. I don’t even know the dude’s party affiliation, and frankly it doesn’t matter. But it does show that the lobbyists are pulling out all the stops and not letting this one merely play out in the “Court of Public Opinion” (probably because they know they’d be found guilty) by rounding up all the Luddite, out-of-touch Senators they can in order to stop net neutrality in its tracks. Perhaps I’m being unfair to this elected official. Obviously, we can’t expect our duly-appointed representatives to be experts on every subject, like “what the internet is”.

Second, I’m unsure how to approach Tom Giovanetti’s piece, because I not only fundamentally disagree with him, but I also happen to know that he’s a hired gun PR guy that gets paid to polish turds. He’s the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a conservative think-tank that muddies the waters around debates that should be open-and-shut if a sincere discussion were to take place. Consider his previous work for privatizing social security and against municipal wireless and open source software. So, he’s a dick.

But even beyond that, consider his argument against network neutrality: access to mainstream media, like television and telephones and even police radio, will plunge into chaos because of “extremely high demand” for something stupid. Where are the heroic telecoms flying to the rescue to prioritize content!? Their hands are tied by draconic legislation! Argh! Except, isn’t “extremely high demand” already prioritizing content? Who benefits from a system that prioritizes anything other than what people want? Perhaps whomever is paying Mr. Giovanetti?

Finally, the “grassroots” website. The most astute of you will notice the quotation marks I insist on putting around the word “grassroots”. This is perhaps because the “grassroots” website is produced in connection with PR group Public Strategies, Inc. and funded by hundreds of thousands of dollars from telecoms and conservative lobby groups. So, if you consider AT&T, BellSouth, and Cingular to be the ABCs of concerned regular folks like you and me, feel free to remove the quotation marks when you talk about it.

I don’t completely blame them. Just like record companies, oil companies, and certain government agencies, everyone’s trying to pay the rent and send their kids to college and so they work the system with whatever tools they have in their chest. The telecoms may have a lot of money and power but they should know that—after seeing the revolutionary promise of the printing press, radio, and television turned into celebrity spreads, pre-programmed rotations, and reality shows—we’re not going to let the internet go without a fight. It has finally pulled itself out of its pages-of-links-to-pages-of-links phase and started to make good on its promise to connect and empower people. We should let it.