Project for Awesome

In 2007, two adult brothers named John and Hank Green started a project on YouTube called Brotherhood 2.0. They decided that for the entirety of 2007, they would no longer communicate through text for the entire year. Living across the country from each other (John is a Young Adult author who lived in New York at the start of the year, and Hank is the editor of EcoGeek.com and lives in Montana), e-mail was a major method of communication for them. Instead of the impersonal format of text, for the whole year they agreed to make videos to each other, alternating days and posting a video on their YouTube channel every weekday for the whole year.

As two extremely intelligent and entertaining people, they soon developed a following. Over time, they turned this following into a real community. I'd love to go more into detail about how two guys created a viable, solid and strong community in their spare time, as internet community theory happens to be my nerd-flavor of choice, but instead I'd rather talk about the things they have used their community for.

In 2007, they created the Project for Awesome. It was a secret project, everyone was welcome to participate, and you had to sign up for a mailing list to get all of the details. Hundreds of people signed up, not just community members but also major players on YouTube as well. On the day the project was revealed, almost every single video on the "Most Viewed" page had the same thumbnail shot : The logo of the Project for Awesome. The Project for Awesome had no real rules except for 1, the logo must be your middle shot, 2, the words "Project for Awesome" must be in your video tags and 3, you talk about a charity or cause that is important to you in the video. And that was it. And on that day, Project for Awesome was ALL over YouTube. The level of participation was high - people who had never made a video before signed up for YouTube to participate. People who make their living from their YouTube videos took time out of their normal shows to join in. Everywhere you went on YouTube was the Project for Awesome. It wasn't a heavily organized, strict or structured event - just a bunch of people talking about what was important to them.

This date for this year's Project for Awesome is December 17th. Individuals, groups and nonprofits themselves are encouraged to participate. This blog post is short notice to be sure, but take a couple of minutes to shoot a 2 or 3 minute video, talk about your cause, and get it out there. And on December 17th, sit back and be impressed as the huge site YouTube is nearly completely taken over by people doing the exact same thing.

More details can be found here.

Posted by Kelly Lang on December 15, 2008 at 08:07 am EST

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