We had our first planning session at #rdcHQ, and the WordPress Team hit the ground running. Once Anita and Jenn had the opportunity to meetup for the first time via Skype, we quickly drafted a production schedule and site map for the New Artists Productions website. Everyone had a lot of great ideas and energy for the project, as well as fundraising ideas for the program this summer. The goal is to have WordPress up and running by the first Hacker Wednesday so we can get right to work.

Great planning progress was also made on the other two project tracks for the summer: the MathML and SVG tracks. Levi Thompson will be the project leader for the SVG track, and he has already expertly organized the collection by levels of difficulty. Christopher Garcia will be joining us from California for the SVG Track, while Oceana and Jasper Shumaker-Pruitt join us at #rdcHQ. We are quite happy that Jasper discovered us, as his expertise will be highly valued on our MathML project!

The first Hacker Wednesday is June 15th, and if the pre-festivities are any indication — we are going to learn and accomplish A LOT this summer! GO #rdcHQ GO!

The Rural Design Collective Mentees have been selected – we are thrilled to announce that Oceana Fields and Christopher Garcia will be joining us for their second year! Jenn Covington will be joining us from South Carolina and Anita Almich of New Artists Productions will be a director for one of our key project tracks.

Projects will be announced on June 8 after our first planning session. It’s going to be a great summer!

The 2011 Rural Design Collective Summer Mentoring Program is about to begin and we are planning our season and building project teams.

This summer, we have the opportunity to work with MathML (a new W3C standard markup language), hone our illustration skills creating vector graphics for a national open-source project, and learn WordPress to create a website for an inspiring area youth group! It promises to be an exciting program!

If you would like to apply, you can download materials here:

RDC 2011 Recruitment Flyer – 3.9MB PDF

Brochure / Application Form – 8.4MB PDF

Deadline for application submissions is May 20, 2011. Follow the instructions on the application form to the right, or email a completed application as a PDF file to webchick_AT_invisible.net.

Let the games begin! See you online or at #rdcHQ!

#rdcHQ kicked off 2011 with a little Extra Credit – we shipped a custom-designed version of “How To Paint Your Shoes” to author Howard Rheingold. The book was highlighted at Point.B Studio as work in progress last fall in “Songlines,” the second exhibit in “Art In The Information Age”.

The final book turned out extraordinarily well, featuring photography from the author’s personal collection and the design and artwork of the Rural Design Collective. A digital edition of the book was also produced and distributed on DVD with the physical copies. Another job well done at #rdcHQ!