On September 11 and 12, both halves of the Brown Institute came together for the first “All Hands” meeting of its 2015-16 granting period. The event started with a wrap up of projects that were funded in beginning in 2014. These included a novel meta-tagging tool for images called VisualGenome, a 3d immersive video on Iranian artists titled Reframe Iran, and a tool called SearchLight to help journalists spot differences in the behavior of online services like search engines and ad servers. It was gratifying to see how far these projects had come in a year, producing prototype platforms, academic papers and rich pieces of journalism.
In the second half of the day, the incoming grantees and fellows worked through a project mapping exercise designed in partnership with the Magnum Foundation. Emma Raynes and Kate Fowler did an excellent job walking us through a methodical process to create a “map” of what the groups need to do over the year. Each project map included the team’s goals, their collaborators, their “assets,” and some notion of what success would look like. The teams were assisted by a group of facilitators, professionals with experience in their project area. The facilitators came from MoMA, The Met, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Microsoft Research, The Marshall Project, NYU and Betaworks. Quite a group!
We are grateful to everyone who helped make our meeting a success! Check back with us periodicallly to see how the projects are going! You can find a complete list of the new grantees and fellows here.
