Three questions for Mark Melnykowycz

This week's user Mark Melnykowycz has just recently started the Web Portraits Zurich project at Amazee, with which he wants to create interesting portrait photographs of people in the Zurich Web scene. Of course, he is part of this scene himself. Let's see what he has to say:

Why are you at Amazee?

Amazee seems to be a place with people filled with ideas, as opposed to a group gathering around a singular set of concepts. That means we all benefit from exposure to things outside our normal thinking environments. We get inspired more and are more motivated to engage in new projects.

I’m at Amazee for the community and connection to a wide range of people and their ideas. Many times new ideas come from association between two dissimilar fields. Like taking an idea from one area like Mathematics and applying it to, say, Biology, to form a solution unique to both fields of study. I see a lot of that potential in the Amazee community, and that's the main reason why I was attracted to, and why I'm getting more involved in Amazee.

I first heard of Amazee via the 2009 Swiss Startup Camp in Basel. To be honest, I didn't think much of it at first, because I didn't see the difference to a normal message board or webpage. However, I feel that the community access is very powerful, and makes Amazee unique to the Internet. I think that it is one of the most useful sites I know of from an interaction standpoint. And by interaction, I mean connection between ideas generated on the Internet and those actually being applied in real life projects.

In what way does Amazee help you reach your goals?

My first real project on Amazee is Web Portraits Zurich. The most useless thing a photographer can do is sitting in front of a computer screen reading about cameras instead of going out and shooting. Most people just get caught up in the technical details, and some actually prefer that to making a cool image. I think that Amazee is the right platform for this portrait project because it gives direct access to people interested in having a cool image of them produced and getting others involved in the creative process.

I’m starting out with the portrait project because it’s more manageable than, say, trying to organize a smart materials project based around tissue engineering, which isn’t really the type of project to organize via Amazee. So far the project has pretty good exposure (which is due to the Amazee community), which is key to its success. I'm confident that once I do the full project roll-out with details and videos on how things will move forward, that we'll be producing some very interesting and strong visual portrait images for people to use in promoting themselves, their startups, brand, etc. Again, the main thing is being able to tap directly into a dynamic community of people who are motivated to do something, eager to be participants, not just forum readers.

What impact will the Internet have on social action in the future?

My first real "social action" was as a member of the Graduate Employees Union (GEU) when I was a Master’s student at Michigan State University (MSU). Basically as an engineering graduate student I was well paid, but graduate students in other departments were not, and sometimes also lacked healthcare. So I helped organize within the union, everything culminating in a strike to pressure the university to accept the contract conditions giving more rights and better working conditions to Teaching Assistants. It worked and we ended up with a contract we wanted. However, it takes a lot of ground work to make something like that happen, and I really only joined the movement at the end when everything was already in motion. At that time organization and long meetings were the normal thing, which lead to burn-out pretty quickly, and honestly kicked my ass. I went from being on three committees to more or less doing nothing for the GEU because it was too much work and pressure.

I see online tools like Amazee, Facebook, Twitter, etc. as having the potential to remove some of the organizational and workload from the backs of a few main individuals, and thereby making such social action organizations stronger by enabling communication on a more personal basis using the technology. A large amount of time is spent just talking to people, showing them why social action is good, and giving them a way to be involved as a person in the union, movement, whatever.

There's a lot of potential, but the technology and communication needs to be managed well. And of course, the people need to be attuned to using these tools and trusting them. If you loose that trust between people, then the sense of the social movement can be quickly lost, and I believe trust is therefore a key factor in the success of startup like Amazee and its use as a social action organizational platform.