Berklee Blogs: Big Questions, Big Ideas—Being a Fellow for the Open Music Initiative
Berklee student Summer Whittaker (left) works on a project with fellows from the Open Music Initiative's summer lab.
Image credit: Tiffany Knight, IDEO
To help kick off the Open Music Initiative (OMI), BerkleeICE and IDEO convened a three-week summer lab to dig deeper into the equity and copyright issues that brought the initiative into existence. With an aim at engaging young adults, 18 fellows were selected through a competitive application process, and represented skills such as graphic design, music performance, and web development. One of those fellows was Berklee student Summer Whittaker, who reflects on her experience for Berklee Blogs.
Through BerkleeICE and IDEO, the OMI summer lab was devoted to exploring ways in the advancing of the open source standards through a series of two five-day sprints. The sprints were focused on finding ways for incentivizing artists to capture critical data and ways to help enable the fan experience.
For the past three weeks I have had the honor of participating as one of the fellows in the lab. The experience was very different from anything I could’ve imagined so far in my journey at Berklee. There were moments of inspiration, moments of stress and some of us, including me, even teared up under the pressure of long hours and intense discussions.