The Convergent Media Collective came to be because there was a group of students,professionals and makers who were regularly meeting up as friends working on projects for fun. We collaborated on each other’s projects and helped each other learn new skills.
One of the first projects we undertook as a collective was the Bexar County Bibliotech project. This project came to fruition when we the Convergent Media student organization was presenting at the annual UIW tech fair.
Across from us was the Bexar County technology group and they were very impressed with our work. They interacted with Joel Peña and Charlie Young, who showed them some projection mapping and augmented reality.
They then contacted us to have a private meeting where we showed them some demos of our work.
Out of those meetings we were then asked to do a full demo to the CTO of Bexar county and other technologists at the county.
They were quickly impressed with the work we showed them and the ideas and theory we shared with them about social media, both in terms of campaigns and analystics. We presented on visual demonstrations as well as augmented reality.
They then asked us if we could specifically consult with them about Bibliotech, one of the first ever public digital libraries, located in the heart of San Antonio.
As a group at this point we hadn’t officially formed, we just had a chat on Facebook called “the bexar county library chat”. But one day as we discussed somebody change the title of the chat to “Convergent Media Collective”. And we were off!
We met regularly with the Bexar bibliotech project manager Laura Cole, who guided us through mutliple demos for various groups. The highlight of our consultations with the Bibliotech project was consulting directly with Judge Neslon Wolff at the actual project site. We showed them the technologies and media production ideas that would end up being incorporated into the final opening of the Bibliotech space.
The interactions and meetings gave students and community members first hand experience working with government entities as well as non-profits. Pitching and demo-ing projects ideas and concept quicky became second nature for collective members. Our meetings became more frequent, both online and in person.
We prototyped out some augmented reality ideas for them that ended up being directly incorporated, here is a video of one of our initial tests.
What was amazing was the interactions and the reception of The Collective’s ideas by the Bexar County officials, they were so open and encoraging when it came to us exploring ideas and presenting them.
We would like to thank Bexar county for giving us an opportunity to interact with them and give the collective a real world experience in the world of developing new convergent media ideas.
