IntroductionWriting in Digital Environments (ENC 4416H), taught by Dr. Stacey Pigg, explores online phenomena with an emphasis on networks, authorship, and collaboration. For the third major assignment, students were asked to respond to an exigence in their community using the theory of collective intelligence. Each student pitched an idea to the class and then voted for the top four ideas to work with in small groups. I decided to join the group who wanted to provide the Knights Helping Knights Pantry a Pinterest account to collect, organize, and share recipes. These recipes would use food items that were donated on a regular basis, thus giving students a variety of ways to use, say, a can of green beans. Our project looks simple from the outside, but the amount of work our group put into every decision becomes more apparent through a discussion of the background, rhetorical choices, limitations, and what was learned. I would like to focus on these aspects through the course objective, Collaborate with peers and organizations to solve problems related to distributed symbolic action.BackgroundThe Knights Helping Knights (KHK) Pantrys mission states they are committed to serving the UCF students by providing basic needs including food, clothing, and personal hygiene items to foster continued academic success thus increasing retention. Andrea, the class member who pitched the Pinterest account idea, volunteers at the KHK Pantry a few times a week. Working under this mission, Andrea understood how important it is that Knights dont let knights go hungry. Unfortunately, she also realized that students who use the KHK Pantry do not take as much food as they could. Because certain food items are donated more often than others, a resulting lack of diversity in the use of these foods caused KHK Pantry users to not participate as fully. This prompted Andrea to suggest a Pinterest account be created for the KHK Pantry users as a way to advocate a tasty variety of meals utilizing the most popular foods. Pinterest claims it is a tool for collecting and organizing things you love. The basic functions of Pinterest allow users to pin images from websites onto boards that are generally based around certain themes. Recipe boards are among the most popular, mainly because the Food & Drink category has the most pins on Pinterest. Grounded in these affordances, along with the ease of pinning pictures attached to websites with recipes, makes a Pinterest account the best technological platform for categorizing and archiving recipes. Groups invested in the KHK Pantry Pinterest account include UCF students (specifically those who already visit the KHK Pantry and freshmen living on campus), people and organizations that donate to the KHK Pantry, volunteers and administrators who run the KHK Pantry, and Pinterest users (those in the UCF/Orlando community and foodies). Most decisions involving the Pinterest details and attempts at garnering participation are made through this analysis of the audience.Rhetorical AnalysisOur group also felt the use of a Pinterest account was most beneficial to our exigence because of the collective intelligence theory we read for class. In Infotopia, Sunstein asserts that language and culture itself are produced not by a single mind but by widely dispersed people with their own bits of information, producing goods from which all of us can benefit. And each of these evolves rapidly over time, incorporating and discarding material as human communities organize themselves In this sense, curious people can obtain remarkable aggregations of information without leaving their screens (121; 97). Breaking this quote down reinforces the choice to solve the KHK Pantry problem with a Pinterest account: Widely dispersed people online platforms span physical spaces All of us can benefit a common goal is achieved through individual incentives Evolves ability to continually add and categorize Human communities descriptions and comments on boards and pins Aggregations of information diverse recipes archived from across the Web Screens 5.7 Internet-enabled devices per U.S. household makes Pinterest widely availableA look at Information Ecologies by Nardi and ODay shows how understanding the technological platforms affordances can help the intended users (audience) utilize the tool more efficiently and with better results. Affordances are those properties of an object that neatly support the actions people intend to take with the object (Nardi and ODay 28). In this case, Pinterest allows its users to very easily collect and organize relevant pieces from the Web. Nardi and ODay taught our group that thinking about technology as a tool helps designers remember that there is someone on the other endpeople who are using the tool (30). Using an audience focused lens (and based on the inventory), we were able to choose categories for our boards which include: Beans and Legumes, Veggies, Tuna, Pasta, Soups, Holiday Recipes, Cooking Basics and Help, and Simple and Quick Recipes. The last two boards were made specifically with our audience of freshmen living on campus in mind; these people mostly likely do not have experience cooking or the tools to cook more involved meals. We also utilized Pinterests group board feature, which made a space for Pinterest users to share their favorite recipes. This technique allows for more user interaction and can lead to less work being done by the KHK Pantry to maintain the Pinterest account.We also took ideas from Howard Rheingold in his book Net Smart. For our circulation strategyhow we planned to gather participation for our projectwe looked to his tips on What Cooperation Theory Teaches Us about Life Online Today (Rheingold 155). These include: Contribute publicly to let our community know what the KHK Pantry was up to, I wrote a press release that was sent to an editor of the Central Florida Future. In this way our project could be both publicized and transparent. Reciprocate using Pinterests repin feature, our group was able to not only post original content from other websites, but also circulate existing content. Doing so connected our account to other Pinterest users, thus increasing our popularity. Look for ways to seek a sense of shared group identity we accomplished this tip through the use of group boards, as discussed above. In terms of a circulation strategy, the group board allows for a social space, encouraging user participation and engagement; users opinions are able to be heard as well. Introduce people and networks to each other the follow tool in Pinterest allows our account to connect with other users and vice versa. We are also able to link together users through the group board. For the circulation strategy, our group made a flyer encouraging Pinterest and KHK Pantry users to check out the KHK Pantry Pinterest account. This was sent out to on-campus housing residents. Create institutions for collective action this is the whole basis of our projectgenerating a virtual place that hinges on mass intelligence and rhetorical decisions.LimitationsThe first limitation we were met with involved the issue between categorization versus connection. While Pinterests unique affordances allow for smooth categorizationthe ability to search, save, and sort information from across the Webthis platform has to borrow techniques from other social media sites that are better at connectionthe ability to comment and like, follow and be followed, and share outside information. The connection half of Pinterest is mostly dependent upon the user linking existing social media sites with their Pinterest account. Otherwise, finding followers and having other users find you is detrimentally hindered. And, because the KHK Pantry Facebook site is a page, not a person, we could not link these two accounts together, even if we were allowed.Which is my next point: even though KHK Pantry has existing social media infrastructure, we were not allowed to post about the Pinterest account on these platforms. The coordinator of the KHK Pantry did not want our work interfering with the work of their intern, who was actually crafting a Tumblr presence for the organization. Urging Facebook and Twitter followers to also follow the Pinterest account was a key component in our proposed circulation strategy. Luckily, Andrea was our mediator between the group and the KHK Pantry organization. She helped us communicate with the administrators, take notes on the inventory, and illicit interview questions. Having a mediator that was immersed in the organizations rules, rituals, and values proved crucial in the success of our project.Time was the biggest limit to our collective intelligence project. While the account will continue after the fall 2013 semester, actually showing the results of our circulation strategy is tough when we only had a few weeks to work. The press release proved the most difficult in the time department: Interview questions were sent November 19th I received a reply to the questions on November 20th The press release was sent to the Central Florida Future on November 25th I received a reply from an editor on November 29th The process of researching, writing, and sending the press release took ten days, only to have the editor tell me the newspaper had a full budget for the last two issues of the semester. Of course, this would not necessarily be a problem if our project spanned longer than a month. Garnering participation takes time, especially when relying on unpaid advertising in traditional mediums. And even though Pinterest is an online platform (a space set up for instant gratifications), participation is not guaranteed to be immediate.ConclusionWorking with a technological platform that uses collective intelligence to benefit an outside organization taught me four important lessons about writing in digital environments:1. The affordances of any tool can help and hinder the solution to an exigence.2. Carefully tailoring the solution to the audience is key to success.3. Getting the word out before the project is complete can actually help engage participants to complete the project themselves.4. Partnering with an outside organization is difficult and makes complete control impossible.