His classmate and project partner Sarah Mattern is more soft-spoken but no less enthusiastic.

The thing that's got the pair so revved up is TheOrganicCity.com, a multi-faceted community storytelling concept they're bringing to life for the multimedia graduate program at California State University East Bay. Multimedia is a field of study in which students weave together new technologies, from the Internet to telecommunications, in fresh and creative ways.

TheOrganicCity.com, for example, is a lot of things — a Web site, a storytelling center, a virtual community and a future source for downloadable digital tour guides. They chose the project's name, Byrne says, because they want it to grow on its own in a natural, organic way.

"We want people to take it over and make it their own," Byrne says.

Standing under the Grand Lake Theatre marquee on a recent breezy morning, Byrne and Mattern offer a flood of information about their multimedia brainchild as they set out on a stroll around the eastern edge of Lake Merritt.

"What we're doing is facilitating the community to do what they want," says Byrne, who lives in Hayward. "We're exploring documentary stuff, personal journals — and tourism is another dimension.

"We're testing ground to see what (is possible)," he says. "The community can do what they jolly well like with it."

Click onto TheOrganicCity.com Web site and find a map of the Lake Merritt area dotted all over with red circles, blue squares and an occasional yellow triangle. Each colorful shape stands for a text story, video clip or audio snippet that an area resident has contributed about a spot near the lake. So far, residents have posted about 100 stories, but Byrne and Mattern want more.

Got a tale in you about all seven houses you've lived in around the neighborhood?

Jot it down and submit a blog to the Web site, as one contributor did.

Byrne and Mattern, a Castro Valley resident, also are happy to post historic film footage and sound bytes sent their way by the public.

One area resident sent in a black-and-white 1950s newsreel about a local women's rowing team.

Sketches, poems and personal reflections also find a home on the Web site, as do journalistic accounts of happenings in Oakland. One community member recently wrote a controversial piece about serving on the jury of a murder trial.

Ultimately, TheOrganicCity.com's creators hope Bay Area residents will get out from behind their computers and enjoy the site's stories outdoors on handheld digital devices.

Byrne observes that so much new technology — laptop computers, MP3 players and cell phones — isolates people from one another. He and Mattern are hoping that TheOrganicCity.com will inspire the opposite effect once users start downloading story tours onto video iPods and pocket PCs.

Like tourists wandering around a museum holding an audio wand to their ears to learn more about a Grecian urn or African bangles, story tours played on handheld devices will shed new light on Oakland landmarks and little-known points of interest. Tours offered through TheOrganicCity.com also come with visual storytelling features.

"We have this vision of people walking around with devices (asking each other), "Hey, what are you looking at? What are you looking at?" Byrne says.

Walking tour subjects in the works highlight neighborhood public art, historic buildings and architecture and the Grand Lake Farmers Market. A mini-documentary will detail renovation of the Cleveland Cascades, a 1920s era urban waterfall, that once faced the lake.

Pausing at the foot of a long, steep concrete staircase, Mattern pulls out a handheld portable PC that gets Internet access through GPRS, a mobile data service available on cell phones.

In the U.S., GPRS technology isn't as quick and reliable as it is in countries such as Japan. But we're expected to catch up within a few years, which means the technology will be more readily available to consumers.

But for now, Mattern and Byrne are pushing the possibilities of the technologies at their disposal.

"This is where we are," says Mattern, pressing a small plastic stick to the map displayed on her handheld computer's touch screen. "You can touch the points on the screen and be able to see what the story is (in your location)."

"We have one text story in the area about this woman who is leading the landscaping at the Cleveland Cascades. She's in her 80s. She's amazing and comes out here and works and puts in the plants."

As TheOrganicCity.com tours evolve, a global positioning system may also allow users' handheld devices to pinpoint where they're standing, making it easier to find a story tailored to a particular street or landmark.

"What we're hoping is that when people watch this they have a new appreciation for the place," says Mattern, whose professional background is in environmental planning.

When she completes her multimedia degree, she hopes to merge the two fields in a way that lets her perform public outreach and community building tasks in more innovative ways. Byrne fantasizes about working for Google's European headquarters in Dublin, where he'd like to start an Irish version of TheOrganicCity.com.

Students in the CSU East Bay multimedia graduate program come from backgrounds as varied as Web design, computer programming, theater and journalism. One former student was a marine biologist, another an astronomer.

"What we really look for are people with an interesting mind, some kind of way of seeing the world (with) creativity, curiosity, a vision of some sort — that and high motivation," says program founder and director James Petrillo, a professor of art.

"What our real goal is is to take this interactive technology and make it meaningful and exciting to other human beings," says Petrillo, who helped start up the program 11 years ago.

It's one of only a few in the world. There's an undergraduate program, too.

"'When I wanted to do my (graduate) program in multimedia, internationally I could count on one hand the number of programs," Byrne says. "And some of those were in Australia."

From 35 to 40 students annually enroll in the two-year program. About 20 percent of graduates want to teach multimedia skills at a university, another 40 percent go on to seek jobs at corporations such as Electronic Arts or Pixar. The remainder are looking for entrepreneurial opportunities, Petrillo says.

For their thesis one team of students, for instance, is working on an online 3-D modeling program that allows the user to study the feng shui inside and outside of their own room or building. If the structure is built on an inauspicious spot, the impertinent program will even suggest: "Don't build here."

Another pair of students has designed an ambitious tabletop-style multimedia game using a technology called augmented reality. Unlike virtual reality, which typically requires a player to wear a mask of some kind. This game calls for players to hold up a window-type screen over the game's surface. As players peer into the window, they see real-life objects in front of them as well as elaborate 3-D images, such as a Greek chariot in flames, visible only through the viewing screen.

Sound complicated?

It is. But for those enmeshed in the wildly creative process of brainstorming the possibilities of new media, every project presents fresh, bold potential.

"I want to be one of the pioneers to figure out what kind of stories work as new technologies come along," Byrne says.

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