I didn’t have high hopes for GISH – I didn’t know what to expect. But I had hoped for some sort of collaborative creating and remixing with some like minded people. So I paid my $25.01 (why the .01, I wondered) and waited to see what the challenges would be like.
GISH is a week long event, and this year it ran from 30th July to 6th August. So on Sat 30th I logged in from my PC. First I tried to update my profile, but the web pages kept crashing, so I gave up on that. Next I headed to the Teams tab, expecting to find a chat room or a forum, but there was just a list of names with links to email them individually. Meh, I assumed the captain would be in touch.
And that was pretty much it. I scanned through the challenges and picked up a couple I could do alone from my desk (many of them either specified a specific location in the US or required interaction in busy places, neither of which were possible for me), and wandered off to do other things.
During my busier than usual work week I occasionally wondered why nobody was getting in touch – was I missing something? I checked the Teams tab again, but there was still nothing there. But apparently I was missing everything, as I found out after the event had ended. It turns out that there was a ios/android app, and that’s where my team were chatting. Somehow I’d missed mention of it on the web pages. I know this is all my own fault, and I could have got in touch with the captain (who I did not know), or other team members, but there it is.
And I can’t help feeling a little sad that nobody thought to ask me where I was.
