[LRUG] [JOBS] 100 Hours of Solitude

[Tom Stuart]

Hi LRUG,

(This isn't really a job, but why take the risk?)

A friend of mine, David Varela, is an excellent writer who works on fancy modern things like the Perplex City ARG and the Zombies, Run! iPhone app, as well as many other projects for the stone-dead media of print, stage and screen.

David's latest wheeze is to lock himself in an isolated Yorkshire farmhouse for a week in December and, under the watchful gaze of a 24-hour webcam, write whatever he's told to by online viewers, with all resulting material being released into the public domain. There is a chance he will go peculiar.

He's doing this to raise money for Arvon (http://arvonfoundation.org/), a charity who run residential creative writing courses for children and communities. Everything he writes during the week will be done in exchange for donations to Arvon.

Anyway, it's a fun and worthwhile project, and David's looking for someone to help with the technical side. He's hoping to build a simple web site which will show the live webcam feed as well as a real-time view of the words he's writing. Without expert assistance this is likely to degenerate into an unholy mashup of Ustream and Google Docs, but I reckon there's probably something cleverer that can be done with Ajax or WebSockets or callback hell or whatever.

If that's the sort of thing you enjoy fiddling with, and you'd like to support a charity by building something clever and creative, David could really use your help. It's a good opportunity to get involved with a project that's a bit different to the usual run-of-the-mill Rails app, and you'd get to show off what's possible with the real-time web while helping to improve the literacy of people who need it the most.

If you're interested, information on the project is at http://www.indiegogo.com/100hours, and David's email address is david at davidvarela.com. Since it's for charity I don't know how much (if any) money is involved, but David can fill you in on the details.

Cheers,
-Tom