Soft City Culture and Technology ― The Betaville Project

Soft City Culture and Technology: The Betaville Project discusses the complete cycle of conception, development, and deployment of the Betaville platform.

Betaville is a massively participatory online environment for distributed 3D design and development of proposals for changes to the built environment– an experimental integration of art, design, and software development for the public realm. Through a detailed account of Betaville from a Big Crazy Idea to a working "deep social medium", the author examines the current conditions of performance and accessibility of hardware, software, networks, and skills that can be brought together into a new form of open public design and deliberation space, for and spanning and integrating the disparate spheres of art, architecture, social media, and engineering.

Betaville is an ambitious enterprise, of building compelling and constructive working relationships in situations where roles and disciplinary boundaries must be as agile as the development process of the software itself. Through a considered account and analysis of the interdependencies between Betaville's project design, development methods, and deployment, the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose "public works" must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure.

Carl Skelton directs the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse in New York City, and leads the development of the Betaville web applications in collaboration with the M2C Institute for Applied Media Technology of the University of Applied Sciences, Bremen. The Betaville project builds on his work as an artist, organizer, and founding director of the Integrated Digital Media programs and the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University from 2004 to 2012.