Mïark - 2020-03-28 17:35:05 UTC #

Jay Gilligan is proposing creating a new on-line centralised juggling focussed hub, he posted his ideas on facebook and agreed they could be shared here (he also compliments the Juggling Edge events listings):



due to some different chattering on various parts of the internet, i’ve finally been inspired enough to write this all down for public consumption. erik aberg has been my partner in crime on this, helping in all the ways possible (even though he warned me against writing this here). we also need to thank emil dahl and cal courtney for helping with some first steps towards making any of this happen!



ever since erik started his work surrounding the definition of juggling, that got me started on some thoughts surrounding the culture of juggling. even as i write this, i already know i have no place to share these ideas. and as such this stops me from writing and sharing many many things that i would like to. i could post this as a facebook status… but then only my friends on facebook (who the algorithm chooses) will see it. i can also cross post it to jugglingrock, juggling home, etc. etc. but as well anything posted there will be buried by tomorrow and if not then, it will certainly be long gone in a few weeks. facebook is also unsearchable in any practical sense of the term. so putting this up on facebook (which i already know i will do, and it feels slightly hopeless) is almost the same as throwing all these thoughts away in the long run. i might do better to have a few personal phone calls with friends. but the juggling community is larger than that!



from looking around i see all these great new things happening in juggling. the juggling world is growing in scope and spreading out into many new locations. lots of new things are happening- new ideas, new structures, new groups. instagram is a good platform to witness some of this growth. i wish to have a central place to discuss juggling with everyone from around the world. i want to have a place where i can share my ideas and hear the ideas of other. i’d like this place to be accessible to as many jugglers as possible, and i’d also like this place to be around for a long, long time. this place should be a resource for juggling information and knowledge for us interested in juggling now, and for future generations who would like to continue that journey. that place does not exist right now and i hope it could be possible to make it.



i thought back to the last time there was a “central hub” for the discussion of juggling in the world. i know it was not perfect for any number of reasons, but for me i think that was rec.juggling as accessed through the internet juggling database (IJDb). rec.juggling still exists, but since the IJDb closed in 2012, rec.juggling stopped having any sort of relevance to the juggling scene at large. there have been several attempts since 2012 to fill in that gap, but there is nothing that even comes close to what we need today. and like i said, rec.juggling as accessed through the portal on IJDb wasn’t all that great, or even close to being ubiquitous so there’s not much of a point in mentioning it anymore, except as a historical foot note in this story.



facebook has a couple of really strong things going for it. in fact, one of those things is the most important factor in any of this: it has the most people there right now! it is without a doubt a community. in fact in regards to juggling it is many hundreds of communities with various degrees of localization and agendas. another nice feature facebook currently provides is the ability to have built in language translation services. i have had several valuable discussions with jugglers from all around the world in japanese, russian, spanish, french, and english… all at the same time! that is pretty incredible to me. after those two points though, facebook is a terrible terrible place to try and archive knowledge. most of the conversations we have on facebook (good or bad) are lost all too quickly, only to surface again in a few months and be repeated all over again. there’s no real continuity, nothing is being built other than a growth in numbers and perhaps enthusiasm? those are not trivial nor bad things, but maybe its time to do something with a vision for all those jugglers who love juggling?



i keep coming back to this in my personal life but i feel like there’s all these people all over the world who are working on lots of the same things with juggling. but everyone is alone with their struggles. or that its very cyclical- one conversation may be sparked which leads somewhere but that conversation never gets shared or saved so that it can be referred to and so the next juggler who comes along has to start from zero. i know there has been some work to counteract this- for example some great guides on reddit by Mike Moore which can be pointed to whenever those topics surface from a new arrival. and for sure there has been other great work by many people here and there. but that’s just the point… its still piecemeal. you can pick apart any of these thoughts here and give counterexamples to the problems or issues. but that’s not the goal. it doesn’t work if all the solutions are just working fragments of other, larger systems which are not ideal. mike is making reddit a better place for juggling. but reddit (as it is now) is not the solution we are looking for. i don’t generally participate on reddit because i don’t feel the payback in the long term is enough in relation to the investment of my time. that goes the same for any of the other number of alternatives, including facebook.



i realized one of the things i want most is a sustainable online place to discuss juggling with other jugglers. there are several other features that an online juggling hub could provide, which i’ll get to later. but having a healthy discussion forum is #1 on my list. that’s why i did a small test with the object episodes forum a couple of years ago. i’m part of an online music community called lines (llllllll.co) which is built on a really nice forum software called discourse. discourse has lots of great features which make it instantly more useful to have a conversation there rather than facebook. of course the problem is that we are all digitally destroyed for time- no one wants more screen time in their lives. so we all go to facebook and no one really wants to have yet another place to visit, yet another place to have to go spend more time online.



my thought with the object episodes forum was that it would be one small part of a larger picture. obviously i put it out without the rest of the picture and while there were definitely some worthwhile discussions there, i realized pretty quickly that its days were numbered in the grand scheme of things. i don’t think the success of a discussion forum relies upon sheer numbers. i think it can sustain on a small but passionate amount of people who regularly contribute. i stopped participating because i knew that investing more time, money, and energy into that forum was a dead end since it was not the complete plan i wished it to eventually be. that’s why i took it offline and chose to try and focus the resources i have for things like this on the real idea. object episodes was a good test, but it was not going to spur the growth of the rest of the infrastructure needed to keep it going.



my idea with erik is to have an online centralized location for juggling which provides enough value that its worth people’s time to visit it outside of facebook (and whatever other online necessities people have). one small example of this could be daily content which isn’t found anywhere else- a picture of the day (culled from erik’s exhaustive historical juggling picture archive), and/or a historical juggling fact of the day. would a bunch of these things be compelling enough to make you think a couple of times a week “huh, i wonder what cool juggling photo is up on the site today, i think i’ll go check it out”? then the front page of the website could have the top 3 most recent subject lines posted on the forum, and maybe the top 3 most discussed subject lines from the forum. if you check out the photo of the day, or check the upcoming festival calendar, maybe one of those subjects from the forum catches your eye. maybe you go to the forum and start to participate in the discussion. does this sound like it might be realistic?



obviously everyone will have different ideas about the details of such a website. i’ll write down the ones we thought of here. to be clear, i’m not proposing that we have a discussion which turns into a contest about what features such a website could have. this is our carefully curated list of ideas which we refined over many too many hours of conversation about what we think might be the most useful to both us and the community at large:



- working title: Juggling Portal (or “the” Juggling Portal), could be JP for short



- the main page easily features all main activities without the need to click through links to reach the start of any of the main areas. i know if i go to a website and sometimes even have to click more than once to find the start of something i’m done and just leave. again, i’m online too much, i have too many other distractions online. i don’t have time to menu dive.



- the front page has: a photo of the day. this photo is sourced from a folder which erik fills once a year with enough photos to last the entire year. this is a sustainable practice. he’s not going online every day to post a photo. i mean he has terabytes of photos. he could fill the folder with 10 years worth of photos tonight. the folder should be accessible to the admin with a simple online interface to drag and drop photos after a login and with some simple dialogue boxes to enter in a caption or other meta information about the photos.



- the front page has: an event calendar link, but it also displays on the front page the title link to next upcoming event (or multiple events if they are on the same nearest day) and a countdown clock to that event. right now juggling edge has the most useful event calendar i know of, is this just a link to them?



- the front page has: a historical juggling fact of the day, again pulled from a database of facts that erik has entered previously. and to sustain that, the juggling portal should also have a publicly searchable database of juggling information. i believe Olivier Caignart mentioned he is working on something like this? as well the interface for making this happen could be an admin login page with a dialogue box which connects to the database both for the fact of the day feed but also for the larger searchable database



- the front page has: a link to the forum with the top 3 most recent subject lines, and the top 3 most discussed posts



- the front page has: a link to the records part of the website. but not just the link, also some curation for the top numbers records. like maybe solo balls, rings, and clubs records for example are listed right there. i mean even a silly thing like this i could use monthly!!! i’m at a show and someone afterwards comes up to me and asks if i can juggle chainsaws and then asks how many balls i can juggle. i could just point them to the JP right away and see that someone from the UK just flashed 17 balls. i’m not personally so into the records thing in terms of posting or logging personal records but 99% of the people i have talked to so far are into it, including erik, so it seems to be something that people are really passionate about and is important to them. then it might be really beneficial to the community if that was a feature of this website.



- the front page has: juggling vendors list link. does it also have a small advertisement there that could rotate through participating sponsoring vendors? maybe. i mean i don’t mind seeing advertisements from juggling manufacturers because i want to know what’s the new stuff i can buy!! and maybe the money helps with the site. i have no idea. how will the website be paid for, i don’t know. so far i was able to pay for all my random projects out of my pocket. probably not the most sustainable if we’re talking about longevity as a goal here.



- the front page has: an online juggling resource list link. this could click through to show juggling club listings (i loved the style of this from the IJDb where juggling clubs were listed with red, yellow, or green traffic lights. a red light meant something like no one from the club had logged in and updated the information in 5 years, a yellow light meant 2 years, and a green light meant that entry was updated that year. or something like that. but i have to tell you, i have many times used “red light” juggling club listings to eventually track down certain jugglers to lots of benefits in the past!), a collection of links to juggling blogs (and here, like everything else on the site- juggling clubs, juggling vendors, etc. this can all be user generated. you get a login when you register for JP. then you can make an entry on this if you have a juggling blog. we have to deal with how to monitor spam and all of that. but its 2020, that’s a thing website people know how to do?), a list of jugglers’ websites both personal and professional (again i used this all the time on IJDb), a list of juggling related resources (for example could have links to external lists like circus schools with FEDEC or whatever, unicycling hub, kendama party, i don’t know what’s out there but we could have a resource of links with descriptions so again its both a place of discovery and a place for reference. and its all searchable. so if i type in “yo-yo” to the JP, then one of the things which pops up is the yo-yo group party link under the online juggling resource link section)



- the front page has: yearly community reading list. i need to explain this- look, here’s the thing. one of the biggest things in the juggling community these days is luke burrage’s top 40 jugglers of the year. its practically an institution at this point. he has been so generous to run it for all these years and it seems to be something that lots of people in the community find to be both valuable and inspiring. though also the criteria of the top 40 voting is generally very open ended, and i can totally respect luke for that. as far as i understand his whole point is that you should just vote for whoever you think is most deserving for whatever reason in that year. but in reality lots of times it turns into a contest of who posted the best youtube video that year. or maybe even from the year before? so maybe it could be fun and drive traffic to the JP to just have a yearly top 3 video contest. that could be part of the community reading list. so on the JP you have the top 3 juggling videos of 2020, and you also have the top 3 juggling videos of all time. each year the top 3 juggling videos of all time is up for grabs, and same for juggling videos made in the current year. as with all of the community reading list content, perhaps the selection is done by nomination along with a jury of peers, and maybe partial popular voting or something. but in addition to the top videos of the year and of all time, there could be a selection of links, books, forum posts, other online content, podcasts, or just anything that would give some valuable content and insight into what juggling is right now. almost like a statement that represents the current state of juggling in the world if at all possible. basically i want something i can refer back to in my own work and also direct others to all the time, be it producers, normal people, or students when i’m teaching. i mean i always thought a great idea would be that in circus school, the graduating jugglers would get to refresh or add to a public website. because back when i used to work at DOCH, the administration did ask me to provide a reading list for every year. as far as i could tell that impetus came from administrative technicalities rather than an actual functioning need for such a list (since it was never put into actual real world use on a day to day level). but having a reading list for juggling resources is a very real and possible thing. so every year that the jugglers would graduate, they could choose which videos they thought were most important to them in their lives, and they could share the links to content which helped them the most. then this website could be a living and breathing documentation of what is happening in the DOCH circus school each year with the jugglers. everyone would ask me what’s going on over at DOCH these days… well, check out this website! you can totally see what the jugglers were thinking about from last year at least. i think that would have been a really cool and useful idea to do. so let’s have it here on the JP. it could be useful to so many jugglers around the world who are trying to interact with other genres in various capacities. i know the IJA sometimes tries to get funding for various things or invites certain celebrities to participate in events. and if they don’t know what juggling is, or what juggling is about today… well, easy- send them a link to the community reading list over on the JP, they can immediately see 6 completely insane juggling videos and there is the surrounding context should that be useful.



- the front page has: the trick database link. the trick database allows users to upload video with hashtags. each user would be linked to this by their own JP account like on instagram for example. you make a new trick, you upload the video and then can categorize it, hashtag it, and it becomes a searchable resource. this part of the portal would be especially important on mobile devices. in fact the trick database part of JP should probably just have its own app. the interface could be very much like instagram but with a bit more editing features in terms of collections of videos. i get it that i’m here writing about making instagram with different features. i know its not very realistic. but maybe some of these ideas would spark something in somebody, and since i’m getting all the ideas out here, i’m not going to stop now while talking about the trick database. on the TDb app from JP, you can shoot video straight on your phone, do basic trimming like on instagram, and upload it straight to the app. it would change the way i juggle in both my personal and professional life. for example, if i make a new 3 ball box trick, i could go to the TDb and search “3 balls, box” and instantly get all the 3 ball box videos (and perhaps with even more search criteria for a narrower selection, like maybe also add “cross-arm” and “box with lid”). i could see that the variation i just made up was actually done in 2019 by ameron. and i could also see 30 other variations from everyone all over the world. and that could inspire me to make a variation from one of the ones i saw and upload it to the TDb. which starts the whole process over again. if someone didn’t want their tricks public, i guess you could also have a private TDb account. like for example let’s say you’re making a new show with 2 friends and you want to have a database of video content which you can organize and search during the creation process. you could share that private content with your 2 friends only if you like. personally, if this existed, i’d keep all my content public all the time. having this resource of technique to search and reference would literally change my entire life. so i’d also want to contribute to the process as much as i personally can.



- eventually daily content could be generated by corespondents from around the world. photo of the day takeovers could be from different countries each week or month. there just needs to be the interface to upload the content in a reliable and manageable way.



- throughout the JP site there could be some “talking heads.” erik had this idea as a fun feature, again as a way to drive traffic to the site. the talking heads could be the picture of a juggler’s head with a dialogue box. that juggler could have an exclusive login to that box to write whatever they want which would then be seen publicly until they changed it. would you go to JP if emil dahl had a talking head there? or lewis kennedy? what if you knew that over on the JP anthony gatto actually had a talking head that he was actively updating… wouldn’t you visit the website then?



- the JP would also have other forms of social media to promote its content. but it would not share that exact content on other platforms! what i mean is, JP should have a twitter, facebook, and instagram account. but the instagram account isn’t going to just show the photo of the day from JP every day! then you have no reason to go to JP. but maybe its 1 post a week on the JP instagram account which sums up an interesting forum post from that week. or gives a shout out to an upcoming festival. or shares a link that was uploaded that week. just as a taste of what is offered over on the site. but again, not as just another copy of the same information. hopefully as a way to drive traffic to the site and keep it alive among all the other digital platforms begging for your attention.



- the website should be in english, spanish, french, german, italian, and japanese at least. sounds like crazy work. but worth mentioning that one of the reasons forums or other websites fail today is because not everyone uses the same language.



- a dream feature of the forum would be to have embedded translation service options like from facebook. i don’t know of any forum software which offers this as an option. but for sure it would really unite all the jugglers of the world if they could all talk to each other in some way without language being a barrier!



- another nice feature for the forum would be to have a siteswap highlighter and embedded animator.



- another nice feature for the forum would be to have a scheduling option for when to post a discussion comment. that way i if i find myself having 5 hours in one day, i can write a bunch of forum posts, and set them to be released at intervals over the next weeks. this can help rhythm of keeping discussion going over on the forum. first of all i won’t flood the forum all at once and overwhelm with too many posts, and make people skip content. obviously this feature isn’t just for my account but everyone’s as well. if i know of something coming up i can prepare content ahead of time and release it when its most relevant. this was actually erik’s #1 request.



the whole point of the juggling portal would be to unite everyone together, not fragment them more. for sure the portal would not need everything i listed above to work or survive. and as i have been talking about this privately for a few years now, i know there are people around the world doing parts of these things as i speak. still, the point is that i think the strength of these things is that they would be integrated all together. a central place where we can all meet, discuss, learn, share, archive, and discover juggling.