Eight weeks ago the Open Publishing Lab still consisted of just a few student researchers, and some really dedicated professors with a dream: establish a unified research vision and agenda within RIT’s school of print media, which would cross disciplinary boundaries, and ultimately result in the creation of innovative publishing solutions that would help to connect and extend existing publishing solutions.

Today we are only 21 days away from launching our first projects, The Social Networking Game and Innovation News at the Imagine RIT Festival on RIT’s campus May 3rd, and boy have we been busy in that time!

In March a few of us set up what is now the meeting and research space for the OPL in a room that formerly housed our beloved Kodak Approval Printer (we banished it to the basement).

On March 11th, we held our first general meeting in the lab, with new team members from the graphic design, print, publishing, and computer science programs. We talked about our projects, got familiar, and looked toward our looming May 3rd deadline. Sure it would be a crunch, but we were all so excited to be there, together, working on something new and exiting. Nobody even flinched at the thought (maybe Abdul winced just once, but with a smile). So, we set off running, acquiring new resources and team members, working together to solve problems, playing on each other’s strengths and helping each other out as much as possible. We believe that this campus is a place of immeasurable resources, and we have acted on this notion, collaborating with groups such as The Lab for Social Computing, The School of Photographic Arts and Sciences, and of course, the folks over at the Collaboritorium, to name a few. In doing so, we have learned that the potential to create great things through collaboration across disciplines here at RIT is even greater than we had imagined.

We have also had the chance to meet with some really cool people, such as Julian Dibbell, who came and chewed the fat that is desktop publishing and the social net with us! As all this had been going on, what we’re discovering is that we all have a really unique chemistry. We’re teaching each other by working together to solve problems. We’re thinking creatively, pushing our conceptions of what we can and can’t do, and ultimately, defeating our expectations to create some really cool stuff! We could not be more thrilled. The past weeks have been an amazing sprint, and we’re a strange combination of excited and nervous right now. Our deadline has hardly afforded us the opportunity to sit back and reflect on it all, and with just three short (so very short) weeks until the Festival, the pressure is on! However, our resolve remains just as it was that first meeting.

We’re up, and we’re running, and running, with no signs of stopping. Kind of like a perpetual motion machine of innovation, or a whole bunch of rabbits with drums- only instead of batteries on our backs we have canisters of creativity, or something... See you on the 3rd!