Shannon Rodriguez
Executive Director, Skidmore College Career Development Center
Saratoga AI’s collaboration with the Saratoga Torch Club, Academy for Lifelong Learning, and Saratoga Dispatch has reached the point where we must staff up. Thanks in large part to Dominic Giordano, Skidmore Class of 2025, we have become an industry leader in spatial storytelling with AI and GPS. That gives us a strategic opportunity we hope Skidmore will join us in developing because one of our main goals is to introduce Skidmore students to a promising new career path while providing productive employment (at $20 per hour) in the here and now.
Simply put, we’re training young people in the four AI tools that enable us to generate content with superhuman speed, efficiency, and accuracy in the Smartacus Story Accelerator.
In collaboration with STQRY, we’re demonstrating how easy AI makes it to produce GPS-triggered self-guided audio tours that feature the voices of a community’s most notable or notorious historic figures. Our team’s main assignment will be to develop a package of ten Saratoga-focused self-guided tours, including these three to start:
In hosting this Civic Conversation, we’ll demonstrate why mastery of these tools will be such a valuable addition Skidmore students can make to their LinkedIn profiles.
Maire Masterson
Executive Director, Business for Good Foundation
What mightSaratoga AI look like if we were to organize as a public benefit corporation? Does our model align with Business for Good’s philosophy and approach? The BFG team made a splash down at SXSW with their vision of “mission-driven” enterprises and “venture philanthropy”? What can we learn from BFG’s model? What voices with the BFG umbrella of enterprises should we amplify inCivic Conversationsproduced in collaboration with experts by our Civic Media Fellows?
Field Horne knows we’re developing Voices of Saratoga and already has provided much helpful input. Now we propose to reconnect for an in-depth conversation in Zoom with him both for his voluminous perspective on Saratoga history and to brainstorm an audio tour we especially would like to produce with him: John Pitney’s Farm, taking visitors all the way back to 1862 when Pitney acquired the 136 acres that we now know as Pitney Meadows Community Farm to feed guests staying at his hotel on Grand Avenue. This tour seems especially appropriate to offer in PMCF’s tenth anniversary year.
Jamie Parillo, Executive Director
Saratoga Springs History Museum
First we enlist our team of Skidmore Spatial Storytellers (or Civic Media Fellows, whichever Shannon Rodriguez prefers). Then we sit down in Zoom for 90 minutes to “mine” with our AI tools everything he can contribute to our plan for developing 10 self-guided audio tours voiced by AI-generated characters. He already has created a kiosk where visitors to the museum can have a chat with John Morrissey and other intriguing characters in Saratoga’s history. With Voices of Saratoga in STQRY, we’ll take these characters into the wild, triggering them with GPS markers all over the city. So we must ask the following: How can we best support the museum as we develop these tours? In what ways especially might we collaborate in telling the story the fierce attack against organized crime the courageous Peter Finley, President of the Saratoga Taxpayers Association, launched on July 23, 1926.
Jennifer Allen, Executive Director
Friends of the Saratoga Springs Public Library
In her FSSPL role, Jennifer Allen sits at the center of Saratoga’s civic and cultural life and spearheads the Saratoga Book Festival, which is set for October 2-4. The self-guided audio tours we aim to offer in Voices of Saratoga function are a lot like books with GPS triggers and so we wonder if there might be a good SBF session in Spatial Storytelling or Writing with AI. At any rate, we’d like to hear about all the ways FSSPL serves the Saratoga community and ways we might support their work with the Smartacus Story Accelerator.
Field Horne, Historian
Editor in Chief, Saratoga Springs: A Centennial History
For Further Discussion
