The ITP spring show actually proved to be a very good forum to preview and discuss the mobile posting website free4md.com created by myself, Megan MacMurray, Nanna Halinen and Jadie Oh. Although we found it somewhat difficult to persuade people to register for the site amid the crowds, confusion and strange objects/noises in the immediate environment, we received a considerable amount of interest. Our site even got written up by rhizome.org. All in all it was a relatively nice review, althought they did point out FreeFormed's ultimate shortfall, the user interface design, which needs to be fixed immediately. Unfortunately, none of us are web designers and if it wasn't for Jadie's hard work on the css and Nanna's design ideas we probably wouldn't have had ANY kind of design. My plan is to ultimately convert the site from perl to php, which is proving to be somewhat of a challenge because my excitement to create new functionality seems to be far exceeding my desire to implement a new language. In either case, we are hoping by the end of the summer to have something more pleasing to look at, a design that functions more intuitively and a considerable amount of new features.

Tomorrow Nanna and I are meeting with Bryan Nunez from Witness.org, a non-rofit organization that seems somewhat interested in FreeFormed as well as possibly hiring us to help them with their mobile posting platform currently in the works. Given their interest in assisting and teaching activist groups how to use video to document human rights violations, among other interests, we feel that working with them, even in an internship capacity, may prove to be an excellent fit. We'll see.