#7DaysLater was an international award winning interactive comedy that aired in 2013 on ABC. Described as a “digital crowd-sourced comedy series”, the premise was to allow the audience to input their suggestions for how the show would progress, including the characters, settings and plot, and 7 days later the writers and cast would create a 5-minute episode based on these suggestions. Every Monday the producers would start a Google Hangout, inviting anyone to participate and contribute plot ideas. Once the episode premise has been created, they would expand it through people’s call-ins on the breakfast segment on Triple J, and posts would be made via social media throughout the week with episode-relevant questions to completely flesh out the script.

A project such as #7DaysLater is a great example of how modularity and interconnectivity is able to shape media into a truly interactive and collaborative experience. Jonathon Hutchinson of the University of Sydney demonstrated this connectiveness and modularity through a quantitative analysis via Twitter data, indicating the links between both the most influential users and the most discussed topics that ended up shaping the show (link here). The collaborative effort behind #7DaysLater influenced our own Judging by the Cover project, using a similar concept of crowdsourcing suggestions for content to be created by us. Through Hutchinson’s research, it emerged that users; particularly creators or cast of the show, had higher levels of interaction from social media users than the topics themselves. This likely suggests that social media users interested in collaboration have an easier time connecting with fellow users rather than responding to direct subject matter. As Judging by the Cover currently runs through a centralised Facebook page, it is important that each post made uses a highly personalised tone with plenty of interaction to contributors, allowing them to connect with us as creators rather than the topic itself.