“Smile” flickr photo by kkimpel shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

We’ve tackled Resolutions, Love and Music with the first three months of our CLMOOC Data Postcard Project, and now we move on to a cheerful theme to herald in the warmer days (at least in the northern hemisphere).

When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you – or so we are told. So what makes you smile? What tickles your fancy so much you can’t help breaking out into a cheesy grin? What (or who) is so dear to you that the very thought of them makes the corners of your mouth turn up?

For this month’s data postcards, inspired by Dear Data, we invite you to share some happy moments with us and maybe create some interesting (or even amusing?) data points. There are all sorts of ways that you could go about this, and what you create is absolutely up to you, but you might:

• Keep a note of everything that makes you smile during the course of an hour, a day or a week,
• Take pictures, or make some drawings, of all the smiles that you see around you,
• Smile a lot, and record the results to share with your recipients,
• Keep track of when you see others smile (and possibly record the context) over a time period;
• Design something that will make the receiver smile – like a poem, a song, or a story.

To join us, go here to sign up (and add more topics if you wish!). (Make sure you’ve signed up for our other CLMOOC postcard list first so you have addresses.) The way this all works is somewhat at your discretion — you can mail just one data postcard to one person on the list, or make a few for a few people. We don’t expect you to send a postcard to everyone on the list — you can, but that might be a lot of work.

We will be engaging in this from now until the end of April, but with hopes of getting something in the mail by April 15th (more or less — again, no hard and fast boundaries). Feel free to post what you make or what you receive in all the usual spaces. We look forward to hearing from you!