We asked the question “What does it mean to be Alaskan?” to several hundred participants at the Forum of Young Alaskans this past weekend. The resulting word cloud is beautiful and illuminating.

• What does it mean to be Alaskan?

note: I removed the words “Alaska” and “Alaskans” from my data for aesthetic purposes, they were giant and felt repetitive. Thanks again to Wordle.net for this fun tool!

Anyone who went to school up in Fairbanks will remember the siege-proof Gruening building planted in the middle of campus. It was a solid, imposing brick of concrete prepared to defend campus administrators from any student uprisings.

Ty Keltner built an amazing replica out of legos and put together a comic detailing the process. All the final structure needs for atmosphere is some kid chucking watermelons off the roof and a few pale streakers being chased by bike cops.

• Ty Keltner’s Amazing Lego Gruening Project

I’m getting ready for the Forum of Young Alaskans tomorrow.. err.. later this morning. Like usual, I’m up late crunching on some last minute detail work. It’s going pretty well, not at all like that time we started screened the first half of the film festival while Aaron was still working on recording the second half.

Most of my time on this project has been sunk into various website development holes, specifically, a big map of Alaska that tracks ongoing discussion. It’s based on the twittervision concept and pulls data from a bbPress discussion area.

I’m really proud of it, I actually don’t know how I made it. I went into a frothing twitch for three days and it was just there when I woke up.  You don’t have to click anything, just let the map wander around a bit. Check it out.

• Young Alaskans - Discussion Map

The Forum of Young Alaskans takes place Saturday, October 4th.  The event is a statewide discussion for Alaskan youth ages 16-25 and will take place at UAS in the Glacier View room from 1-5pm.  The local forum will be connecting with other communities around the state through UATV and YoungAlaskans.org.

The format will involve all the localized groups working along the same agenda and timeline. We’ll have a shared introduction to the event and process through a video feed. Then we’ll do some individual reflections and small group discussions which will feed into the online discussion area. Throughout the event we’ll be broadcasting video from different locations and, in the end, all the participating communities will report back and we’ll have a chance to hear what people talked about and worked on in their areas.

The small group work and discussions will be recorded in the online discussion area and then the data will be sifted through and presented on a website using tag clouds, Google Maps and whatever else we can create to aid in visualizing this statewide discussion.

My involvement has been primarily as a steering committee member but I’ve also been doing a lot of website work for the project. The past couple of days I’ve been working with the Google Maps API to develop the discussion dashboard and I’m basing some of the functionality on Twittervision.

Incidentally, this is the first post I’ve made from my new Ubuntu install.  Three of my five internal hard drives were beginning to deteriorate and I decided it would be a good opportunity to do some house cleaning and experiment with a new OS.  I’m still locked into Windows XP because of the Adobe Suite but I’m going to try to wean myself away and learn more about Linux since I have no desire to continue traversing Microsoft’s perilous upgrade tree.

I gave up on the hobo story arc and drew Galactus, Devourer of Planets. I think Cayleigh asked me if he would eat Pluto. I guess maybe so, but it would take some coaxing… “How do you know you don’t like Pluto if you’ve never tried it?”

• Comic - Devourer of Planets

I’m not entirely sure why I abandoned the hobo comic but I think it was just too heavy. To be clear, the hobos I see day-to-day aren’t mischievous, train-hoping drifters. They’re scabbier and much less romantic. They smell like Colt 45 strained through weak livers and crusty blue jeans. I think most of them are beyond help or don’t want it. It’s depressing. I’d prefer to think about kittens… and I don’t even like kittens.