Rich Bowers, who introduced me to the notion of scenario planning by loaning me his copy of Peter Schwartz’s The Art of the Long View back when we both worked for CompuServe (more years ago than either of us would care to remember) sent me an email the other day with a link to this videoclip about Dorkbots. There’s also this map of dorkbot groups around the world. And now, thanks to Chris Yewell and Cleveland’s Ingenuity Festival, you can add one more Dorkbot group to the worldwide assembly.

What exactly us a dorkbot? Well, it’s a person who does “strange things with electricity,” most of which involve mixing computers and art together in weird and wonderful ways. Check out the video yourself for a great brief intro to the concept, then click around a couple of the city groups on the map to see what’s happening in different parts of the world.

The most amazing part of this for me is that the exchange with Rich, who heads up the Ohio IT Clearinghouse (which just launched Ohio Computing Unlimited), began on Thursday of last week; by yesterday afternoon, a mere 5 days later (and a time period that included the Easter holiday for many folks), Chris Yewell had already begun forming a Cleveland chapter.

With any luck, we may even see the fruits of this emerging effort at this year’s Ingenuity Festival in July.

This is not just fun and games for fun and games sake; dorkbots can be a great way to introduce young kids and those fearful of computers to basic computer literacy skills (one of the IT Clearinghouse’s major goals), and also as a testbed for experimental interfaces and ways of using computing as a communications tool. Not that there is anything wrong with art just for art’s sake…