When: Friday, August 8, 2008, 4:00 – 6:00 pm

Where: Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub

What It’s About: Surely, if you ever read Silicon Florist or Portland Creative/Event Review series you’ve heard of this “Portland tech community” deal going around town.

Beer and Blog is undoubtedly the best way to meet members of this growing community in an informal, relaxed environments—if by “informal” and “relaxed” you mean “meeting local Tweeters and bloggers that you followed and subscribed to 24/7, but could only see in 48×48 pixel avatars.”

This session feature Melissa Lion, noted author and Recovering Californian.

To the notes:

*** BEGIN EVENT NOTATION ***

Sure, you can blog about aprons every single day, but people want to see something more. They want to see the humanity of it. At the same thing, though you shouldn’t hit that ‘humanity’ every single time.

What is your voice?
How are you doing it?
And is there humanity behind that blog?

Rick Turoczy talked to me before I went to talk to you guys: in my blog, I’m known as this potty mouth individual who talks about sex all the time. Well, this is my character. On your blog, the way you write every post is your character.

Also, who are commenting on your blog? They are your characters, too, because they come into your life. Don’t forget to respond to every comment; and if you can blog your reactions—even better. People love a shout out, and it adds to the blog’s character.

And don’t forget to comment on other people’s blog. I have to admit that I haven’t done this regularly. It’s really important.

There is humor, and then there’s irony. It’s a touchy thing, but try irony a little bit. Irony is simply when you say one thing and mean the opposite.

There’s also setting. My blog is set in St. Johns. Need an idea for setting? Look outside your blog—literally: outside your window.

For example, Lelonopo devotes one day out of the week to take photographs and blog about signs in North Portland—and nothing else. I love it.

The other blog that I love is boos on powerlines. The blog contains nothing but this guy in his late 20’s, who fixed his motorcycle and was pissed at her girlfriend who just broke up with her—nothing else. To me it’s compelling to see the movement of his motorcycle. It’s almost as if you really want to know what’s going on with the person that day.

The other thing that is really important: shiny things. People love shiny things on their blogs.

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝
Translation: Geek talk happened before and after the presentation.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: The principles that Melissa Lion talked about apply universally.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Rick Turoczy was a literary agent.

NOTE: As usual, my partner in crime Amber Case used her anthropology observation skills to great effect, thus capturing every important word that was spoken about by the panel.

When: Tuesday, July 22, 2008, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Where: PNCA

What It’s About: The five architects and urban planners who envisioned Portland’s future on the first round of pdXPLORE sat down with civic leaders to explore the viability of the projects and ask hard questions—most of them answered very indirectly.

*** BEGIN EVENT NOTATION ***

Please note that, if the person who was speaking is unclear, her position will be designated with a bracket. Also note that, while this notation strived to be verbatim, it skipped a lot of parts that were not spoken clearly.

Moderator – Thom Walters of Corragio Group:
I have spent quite a bit of time in my career moderating. What I can tell you about leadership is the presence of unreasonable thinking. This is what we have to explore tonight. Caveat: do it with integrity, humanity, clarity and respect.

As you all know, Portland has a very compelling growth projection. More than 1 million people are moving (or going to move) to this region. This is a discussion about the design, planning and process around this vision. And this discussion will be an exploration into how design thinking could enter into the process.

I will allot one hour for the discussion. Each designers [there were 6 of them] will pose to our civic leaders.

At the end of this, we’ll open the floor to the audience.

Carol Meyer Reed (designer):
My question will be in three parts. Both residence and visitors really understood the value of the quality of life in PDX. So as we grow:

• What are your concerns and specific solutions for maintaining and enhancing these qualities?
• Are there any specific ideas that you see coming from the design perspective?
• Can growth be good? And how can growth be good for us?

(Civic Leader):
I will answer your last question first.

Absolutely—if we harness the people, and human capital. But it can also be a nightmare—if it doesn’t pay its own weight. The answer to the third question is: that depends. Yes, we have to accomodate those million people. But, by the way, they’re not a million people all coming here. Some are born here.

I think that it will depend most on what we invest in, and on how we understand—in a more sophisticated way—how public capital relate to private cpital. The influx of people moving here looked random, but it’s a predictable product of energy pricing and policies. During the 60’s, there was a real bias toward how investment was made. There were also regulatory zoning and energy pricing.

The challenge now is to figure out what else do we put in the pot? What’s the investment strategy to accomodate these people in a different way? Gas, tax, federal subsidies and public sewers system—those are ways of the past. We need new ways.

To answer your first question: first, one thing we need to do is inverse the system. Let’s state very clearly that we are enhancing urbanities. A lot of times, there’s ambivalence about this. Oregon’s system is about protecting farmlands rather than enhancing urbanities. The former strategy is passive–reactive. What I’m advocating is a more positive, aggressive strategy that asks “this is what we want to achieve as a city. Now what do we need to do to achieve it?”

One part of the solution is systemic. For example: building a structured parking lots. Putting your money into something like that creates different retail and housing areas around it. The other part is these signature pieces throughout the region that is unique the area. Because, keep in mind, this is not just about the city of Portland. There are some real challenges on a lot of areas in the suburbs.

To answer your second question – “What are some ideas that we can bring into reality?”:

• The first is development of infrastructure and finance tools. Recognize and enhance them. Finance them.
• Parks, to me, are an essential part of great urbanity. We talk about big ideas. We have the biggest environment protection measure on the country, but it was focused on nature reserves. We have yet to see this with urban areas.
• Development of trails network of ppl who commute around the region. Transportation network.

So my final answer [to the growth question] is: it depends, you have to invest in the right things.

Carol Meyer-Reed:
One thing that we talked about amongst the five designers was: who do we want to talk to? A lot of times, we preached to the choir. This is great for making ourselves feel good, but how do you deal with people who aren’t the choir?

(Civic Leader):
Two-thirds of our region lives in urban areas. A lot of the development pattern of the last 50 years were very oriented to private realm. I think that the demographic is changing. We are becoming both more urban and urbane.

Also recognize that our region is not very dense. [To facilitate more people moving in] you really don’t have to change the construct very much. You just have to focus them in the right areas to fill. I don’t think that there needs to be very radical changes.

And, certainly, standing still is not an alternative.

Studies have shown that developing new communities at the edge of the town/urban growth boundaries cost twice as much than developing one in the area that we already have.

Rick Potestio (designer):
I have a question to David and Sam. I think Portland is in its defining moment of finding its identity. Our project provides a mean to looking at that. In particular, we looked at how the city itself can not only be the most populous, but also the most dense. We propose a way of reconfiguring our neighborhoods to embody these qualities.

My question is: what changes do you propose to our current system that can maintain our leadership as a city, both nationally and in the world?

Sam Adams:
It all starts with planning for human beings and neighborhoods. And being humble in the fact that ppl are only going to live in neighborhoods that are going to feed their needs and are affordable to their means. Portland has proven that the mixed-use model, combined with density and lots of amenities with robust transit system works.

Our biggest problem is complacency. Emerging analysis says that we can fit our portion of required 20/40 [year plan] density. There are very few changes that we need to made to achieve this, but that wouldn’t necessarily produce the kind of neighborhoods that we sought after. So your projects in putting focus around neighborhoods (mixed use zoning) is a good idea. Being an entrepreneur is key part of this. We have to recognize and use land use zoning and transportation planning. But on this table, there also needs to be people in social planning.

Portland is becoming an older and younger city at the same time. And we’re not used to that. Our plan 30 years ago, for example, didn’t include a school in every district. So when we complain that our schools were closed, jurisdictions can’t do anything about it—because it wasn’t in their plans.

Rick Potestio (designer):
From our study, we learnt that the most dense neighborhood tend to also be the greenest. There are a lot of truly great benefits from having a great mix.

But when we talk to institution like PDC, we see a barrier. Because we saw that there’s no real mechanism in the financial that to enable this. Can you propose to enable this?

Sam Adams:
We don’t start out by talking to a neighborhood about densifying them, we talk to them about what they want. “If you want a Whole Foods or a New Seasons, this is what your traffic will be.” We just went through this last week, planning an upzoning. In some neighborhoods, there’s excitement at what additional customer base will bring to them (we plan to bring 10 story buildings.)

Rudy Barton (designer):
Question for Gil: Portland’s 1972 downtown plan was internationally recognized for its achievement. Vision trumped regulation. What I would like to know is how much will our planning efforts in the next 4 year going to be determined by old methods, and how much of it by new tools?

Gil Kelley (civic leader):
I’m very optimistic about future of our city, because you find an enormous willingness to shape the future in a positive way. I found this fact to be almost universal in Portland. I think that we have everything we can to grow, but we also have to acknowledge where we are.

Portland, for the first time in generations, is looking at its comprehensive plan. For example, Metro is revisiting its 20/40 plan and the state is revisiting its land use plan. There’s a sweet spot here to ask these big question:

• Where are we going? Where do we want to go? What kind of community do we want in 20–50 years? Who do we want to take with us? Schools, hospitals, partners. What is the roles of neighborhoods in this?
• How do we get there?
• How do we know if we’ve gotten there?

This plan has to posit some measurement method. I think we’re doing pretty well. So I just want to say that there’s some big picture planning going on, and part of that is revisiting our design toolbar and coalescing around our big ideas. When I observe the work in this room, a thought emerged: in many ways, you have to realize and design around the natural land forms and weather. And you also have to ask generational questions. We’ve gotten kind of fragmented when it comes to city building. We’ve got an engineering bureaucracy, and have a real struggle even remembering what the land form was. What an interesting idea to think of “what if we retrofit the cities for the next 100 years?” And then you kind of have to think about the building, because there’s a lot of creativity in that. We have to look at building as a design toolkit, and then moving to articulating “what do we care about the public realm?”

Thom Walters (moderator):
What might your thinking be conceptually?

Gil Kelley:
The power of ideas is how this will get traction. The concept of 20-minute neighborhood is one of them. But I think that it can’t just be a conversation between the planning committee. It can’t simply be “we will write our policies, then the world will conform.” We have to make real choices.

Sam Adams:
Innovation to a lot of Portlanders is giving them opportunities and provide for their basic needs. If we want to remain diverse in our income, we need to be accountable in every part of the city’s prosperity, health and happiness. As we look at global warming, we need to ask ourselves first: are we producing enough food/energy for ourselves to be self sustainable? Design has to be built around that.

(Designer):
One of the issues is this: as the cities are changing, what are our planning and design tools?

The creation of public space always happens as a byproduct of negotiation with large big companies. But as designers, we believe that public space is an outdoor living rooms for the communities.

What we’d like to see is that the creation of the design should drive zoning, rather than the other way around.

The current toolbox doesn’t allow this to happen. There’s a recognition about how this public space is crucial to the community. We find that the city, more than simply becoming a place to visit, is becoming a space to live.

Back to the question: do you have any ideas about what mechanisms are needed to do this, and how do we get this and share it to the community? One of our task is to show ppl that dense neighborhood can be be beneficial.

Sam Adams:
We have Conway, Rose Quarter, the Main Post Ofice Site, etc. Keeping those outdoor living room is important. The hard task is to figure out how to have public squares in existing neighborhoods. As a mayor, I would pursue having green space in every community/nieghborhood. We’ve been talking about how the city could acquire the right mix of property.

It’s very tricky, because one person’s green space is another person’s residence.

(Designer):
How do we work ourselves out of this box, to the point that the value of public space/realm is pushed forward?

(Civic Leader):
Economically, it could be proven. It’s just that there has been this ambivalence in Portland history. For example, when the city chose to purchase Mt. Tabor, there was criticism. Just 8 years ago, when Chinese Garden cost $12 million, there was also criticism.

And let me touch on the rest of region again. The city of Milwaukee is rediscovering the Willamette River again. Lake O just opened up street with access to the lake. Tigard wants to build community around Fennel Creek. Fact is, communities across the region are discovering this.

Michael McCulloch (Designer):
Directed to Robert, Alice and Tom: One of our collective agreements was, when we zoomed up to 30,000 feet, we saw a lot of room here. When you look at the map, again, there’s plenty of room. Our agreement is that. So, our question is:

• Whether or not you can support that?
• The constituent parts of the plan that has this outline community—can they commit to increase, say, to accomodate 75,000 more people in Gresham, and another 75,000 in Hillsboro, can they hold their urban growth boundary?

Robert Liberty (Civil Leader):
We have physical, environmental and moral obligations. Six reasons:

1. Policy making and protecting future generations.
2. Vast majority of growth is not going to the edge. In the first 7 years of the millenium, a total of 200 homes were permanent in that 20,000 acres. A strategy is to recognize what’s already happening.
3. It costs twice as much to built around the edge. This is not an interesting plan. We need a strategy—a lower cost strategy.
4. Equity issues. In the 1990’s, we’re pulverized by income. This is happening again today. I’m sure my parents would despair that I was able to buy a house between Division and Powell. We have a lot of poverty increasing in East Portland and West Gresham, we need a strategy.
5. In our region, the biggest single source of greenhouse gas is driving. What if money that will be paying for gas can be used to make denser neighborhood so people drive less?
6. We’re running low of freshwater, land to grow food and biodiversity. We have world class land right next to our door. To sacrifice that, I think, is a failure, for our region, the nation and the planet. We talked about amenities in public spaces. This common shared space. We need to spend less resource and money building private space. Any strategy that makes a virtue out of leisure is a strategy that works.

Alice Rouyere:
I love “living on the edge.” You have great access to right rail. I’m a proponent of balance to growth:

• In-field
  Adapt use of land to growth. We have to come up with creative approaches. One of the things that I think is important is to create adaptable environment. Sure, we’re thinking about design, but we also have to think about the future. We have to create as many connections as possible. For example, this expensive shopping center near Gresham created a wall between the community. On the other hand, I was surprised when plans on some Metro-owned properties were unveiled. It showed 8 story towers built in our neighborhood, and I heard a lot of interest in moving “up high.” As gas prices increase, people are going to spend more time in the neighborhood. How can we draw interest from landmarks like the Johnson Creek?
• Green space
  As we adopt our design for future generations, we need to think what they can afford. We actually need more product that’s for sale that people can afford. On the trees and green space side of things: we’ve done a great job and made very innovative plans. The challenge now is to come up with cost saving approaches. For example, we’d like to get people to accommodate more jobs in the Springwater Area.

Tom Hughes (Civic Leader):
I work with the city of Hillsboro, so I’ll focus my remarks on what we’re doing in Downtown Hillboro. Our demographics are changing. I think there’s a growing desire for authentic urbanity. I’ve only worked with the city for 3 years, and are struck with how people are drawn to the downtown. We don’t have a limitless budget, but we have made strategic investments that are great draws. Our most recent investment: the Old Town Theater. It was just brought back to life a month ago.

The neat thing is, suburbia is monochromatic and boring, but downtown Hillsboro is interesting. So I guess the point is: make investments that make downtown more appealing. Can we create enough of a sense of place and identity that developers are going to take the risk of purchasing a condo? The other thing that I want to say is that, I think that Hillsboro community is supportive of nuanced densification. I don’t think we can get 75,000 more people to Hillsboro right now. This is a losing battle, because I don’t think the community will agree. But more and more people grasp that if you want that authentic urbanity back, you need more rooftops.

(Designer):
Does the planning process include the target of x number of additional people, and are you designing the city to accomodate this?

Tom Hughes:
The key thing is market demand. We don’t have a precise number. It’s one thing to have this paper exercise that says that we can accomodate. And it doesn’t have to be highrise, either.

Thom Walters (Moderator):
As a last question, I’ll ask our Civic Leaders to either share a specific insight or opportunity that had started to percolate in the community.

Sam Adams:
It’s great to get the designers together to explore these concepts without politics. I hope that this kind of effort continues, and your work continues. There are only so much money that flows to the region. You ask to see how to do it? Our urban growth boundary should be kept the way it is today. Hold the line. We need to make density be as positive of a force as possible.

Thom Walters:
Designers, is there anything you’d like to share?

(Designer):
A lot of times, “parks” are tightly defined as spaces occupied with soccer moms, kids, dogs—that kind of thing. This is fine, but social interaction in the future is going to occur in places of intersection: like grocery stores—places you don’t expect. It’s a challenge to design those places, and design for a community of people. These places are the stages where these conversations can take place.

Rick Potestio:
I want to point out that design, really, is not just about the numbers, but about quality. And sometimes the quality solutions ares going to be highly unconventional. For example: on the 13th St. we have a plan where we have pedestrians walk in the middle of the street. Hitting the same numbers doesn’t mean that we’re in the place we want to be. I think we need to think about the quality of the design.

We used to have a definition of home as our house and our yard. For many of us today, home may include the city, the corner coffee shop, the tiny little pocket park and the little plaza. These are the spaces that, for those to work, we need quality. Without quality, those rooms won’t get used. We have to design it. You can’t leave it to private developers to design that, because it is a public room.

Thom Walters:
Now we’re going to open the mic to the audience.

(Audience):
I work in the design realm. We, designers and artists, are asked more and more. to design on the “space between the buildings”—this kind of leftover, junk spaces that has often been overlooked. Often, we’ll be asked by stakeholders to “contribute to the vision.” But the reality? The control is on ODOT or PDOT’s hand. Do we really need transportation engineers to control the project? Is there some other method that we can go to?

Sam Adams:
NO.

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ½
Translation: Complete understanding of The Timeless Way Of Building not required.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Thanks to indirect answers (to legitimately complex questions), the panel quickly devolved into trite policy-speak. Don’t let this stop you to from appreciating the thoughts and ideas behind this exhibit, though.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
I can has just the facts?

Amber Case recorded the entire proceeding, which I helped edit.

Where:Monday, July 21, 2008, 6:00 PM – 9:00 PM

When: McMenamins Mission Theater

What It’s About: Mark Shuttleworth is both the founder of Ubuntu and the first African to go to space. If these are not enough of a reason for you to attend, I don’t know what else will.

On to the review:

*** BEGIN EVENT NOTATION ***

Tonight, I want to talk to you about two things that I’m most passionate about:

• Space: life and times of an average cosmonaut
• Ubuntu

So, who likes to fly into space? I’m going to talk to you about the life of a cosmonaut. What it’s like to actually fly? I’m delighted with the idea that we’re approaching a transition—after which, it will totally be possible for anyone to fly into space.

It’s a difference to see earth from a distance. Everybody I know who had been there had a profound experience.

So, thanks to all the profit I made from those SSLs [laughs], I found a chance to take on this challenge. Of course, this is a way to make my life potentially shorter—but also potentially more beautiful.

Traveling into space was my answer to the question “What’s the one thing you want to do before you die?”

I went to Russia and lived there for a year to train for the travel. It is an extraordinary place. Very different culturally and socioeconomically. Their language is excellent—I would call it a mixture of testoterone and ballet.

The first thing that I did there is cosmonaut medical testing—which everybody hated. I figured that, if I did this, everybody would take me seriously. Granted, after 2-3 weeks of spending my time in there, I questioned my decision [laughs.] But it was worth it.

The training consisted of many things. I remembered getting into a parabolic flight and was asking “where is the spare parachute?” when they answered “here in Russia, we don’t need any spare chute.” There were also the centrifuge training to condition your body to be able to stay alert, focused and functional during reentry. There were simulation of different processes in the flight. There were also survival training, because, you know, when you are in a vehicle that orbits the earth every 90 minutes, you do want some survival training for different situations that you might encounter. For example, when the suit is inflated, it restricts your blood supply. This was why they spent a lot of time tweaking your suit to make it as comfortable as possible.

And there was the final suit test, where they would inflate your suit, put you in a vacuum chamber, then suck the air out of it.

So there we were, 3 guys from Italy, Russia and South Africa.

There were all these activities that serve as a kind of “tunnel” that takes up you to the launch day.

The very scary day was really the night before the launch. That was when I said to myself, “Look, I have proven that I can do this. Now do I really want to do this?

In the morning of the launch, you went through all this tradition. The real irony of this is that it took 2 hours for guys in surgical suits to suit you up, so that the whole world knows that the suit is indeed sealed, then you would go into a bus, stop in the middle of the way, rip your suit off and take a piss on the bus’ wheels. Everybody did it, because the first cosmonaut did it.

This, by the way, was where all the “good stuff” got into the ISS (International Space Station) [laughs.]

The launch experience
You are in this rocket for 2 hours prior to launch. They would wake you up every now and then to check up various systems, but you actually had nothing to do (and probably a bad sleep the night before,) so most pilots slept. Then you have 2 day to live in this module before you dock in the space station.

Life in the ISS was hectic. The station itself had a very busy schedule. Previously, they had 2 guys doing full-time maintenance jobs before they reduced it. We were very lucky because the shuttle that was scheduled to take the ISS crew back to earth was delayed. So we had 3 guys from our crew and 3 from the station. The atmosphere was very collegial.

Eventually, it’s time to come back. Every cosmonaut knows that all the tragedy in the Russian space program happened at landing-time.

This is partly because the reentry was such a physically intense experience, in comparison with the launch. I remember seeing a bolt, like piece of a nut head floating just outside our window. This bolt goes at 25 times the speed of bullet and could easily blow of a part of a concrete wall. We don’t even have a rail gun that can shoot that fast.

Yet I feel like I can grasp it with my hand.

So, as you entered into the atmosphere, the blackness of space goes into orange-y splash of color. Then you see pieces of metal on your ship’s side literally vaporizing. The sight of molten metal running off the window was really terrible. Also, the Soyuz spins around and around. So you have this intense feeling of physicality as this thing lands.

You’re relieved when, after you finally entered the atmosphere, you have this “WHOOSH.”

All in all, going to space was an extraordinary experience. If I do fly again, I would like to take on more responsibilities, or to take Soyuz to new destinations:

Q&A

Watch you wore at the space station, or was given by other astronauts?
There was a long tradition of giving astronaut watches. We got an AMIGA Omega (more specifically, an Omega Speedmaster Professional, thanks to Todd Kenefsky) on earth, so its time got set to GMT, but the Russian guys gave us something else to wear in the ISS, in which the time pointed to Moscow. So you literally get time-tranitioned the moment you dock to the space station. It was, in fact, the fastest time transition ever [laughs.]

Technologies that were involved in the vehicle?
Soyuz essentially had an 8-bit computer which you have to program in Octo. You have procedure that is essentially a series of number. Now, I can say that, from my days of copying software from BASIC, this is a particularly bad way of controlling. What about checksum? What about double checksum? [Laughs.] This was why we checked each other’s calculations frequently.

But, with this system, you’re basically saying: at this time, you point in this direction, then fire this engine x amount of times.

After 10 days in space, one of the experiment that I was part of was to measure that loss of strength and dexterity. You felt like you lose both very quickly during the trip. You felt a lot weaker. It turned out that your muscle was still as strong as pre-flight. They figured this out by measuring the difference between what you can recruit in your muscle (what your brain can get out) and what your muscle can actually deliver. After 10 days, you lose about 25%. It’s amazing. To actually see recruit weakening, it’ll take longer. Because we actually have people living and working in space, they have found and researched several ways to mitigate this. Granted, dexterity loss will happen, and only one lady ever came back with zero bone loss. But it is about the only way to study human in space, so it’s an essential and important research.

Memorable sights, sounds or smell—pleasant or otherwise?
First of all, you have six guys all cooped up in one pod [laughs.] But the sounds were interesting. My distinct impression of this happened immediately after reinsertion. On that moment, there was a period of silence, then suddenly, there was a series of clock noise, *tick tock tick tock*, that kicked in and cut off. So you went from complete silence to this very domestic sounds. Then there was also the sound of the fan, because the vessel have to create its own air circulation.

What’s funny was that, you were expecting all these things to sound “tech,” yet they didn’t.

The smell. The station was new. They put a lot of work based on their experience with MIR and put them into ISS. On MIR, you have fungus going in the panel. You have to actually open a panel, scrap all the fungus to, you know, find the vodka they were hiding [laughs.]

What’s really interesting was that, during reentry—as soon as we open our mask—there’s this warmed plastic and body… Very distinctive sort of smell.

“Oh shucks, I forgot to bring this on the way up and on the way down” moments?
Soyuz is a very simple vehicle to operate, but one of the key switch is a light switch, which unfortunately looked very similar to other switches. Sure, we pass gazillion tests to locate this button. But it wasn’t very easy to locate when the lights are actually off and it’s actually dark.

On reentry, as I’ve mentioned before, you start with a series of explosive switches. Now, it’s possible to do this process manually using a switch that’s located besides that light switch [laughs.] But it was actually only one of several overrides.

Thoughts on building a space station on the moon that will serve as a waypoint launch point to reach Mars? (this was corrected by Jae Stutzman, who asked this question during the presentation.)
The moon is interesting, but I think that we should be going to Mars. There is life on Mars. And that is the single most profound piece of information we can find as a species.

Computer while in space?
The standard laptop at that time were Pentium-166’s [laughs.] So I took a risk and took two relatively modern computers (Pentium III 1 Ghz) into the station. I used them to track heat dissipation and pick up issues with cosmic rays, and they ran with no problem. About two shuttles later, there was a boxful of the same computer that I brought.

I want to go back up there and fix up their IT.

One of the most difficult thing for Crewmember was that there was no private ability to talk with family. Everything has to be monitored and mediated by the control center. In a very cunning move, one cosmonaut installed a piece of VOIP software on the computer, and didn’t tell anybody. There was suddenly a note going around the control center: people’s mood improved so much and crews were happier. Turned out that this was because they had the ability to phone home. The crews used this little ping tool that will give you green, orange and red light. If light is green, you can call.

It’s great, too, because when you call people, they always say “where are you?” [laughs.]

Ecosystem, air you breathe and food you eat. How much is recycled and how much is brought from the earth?
It depends. When we were up there, the water was produced using fuel cell that would fuse hydrogen and oxygen together. We had tons of bags of water. That’s what we were drinking mostly. There’s an air conditioning system and condensation, so you can drink that by putting it through the kettle. So that’s your hot water.

Oxygen is generated from the water. Food is carried up and, despite the general notion, was actually pretty good. There was a competition between the Russian and US crew, on which food gets eaten most often.

Let’s talk about Ubuntu.

After the space trip, I feel that anything that I diverted time to should potentially have a global impact. While I was in Russia, some guys had set themselves up the goal of figuring out how cheaply they can put up computer at schools at a sustainable basis. I read the report and became very intrigued.

The next opportunity came when I was in Cape Town. I was stunned seeing kids using Linux desktop, and using it really productively. So I thought that there was an opportunity to have a global impact by maturing the Linux desktop.

So I ask myself the question: What would move Linux forward in a significant way?

This was 2003. At that time, Linux was really steady. There were two very steady, commercially sustainable companies.

So it struck me as strange that we were only scratching the surface when it comes to free software. We need to find a new way to deliver a free software. And that meant trying to figure out a business model that’s entirely service-based.

I’ve been a Debian developer since 1996. It does a good job. So how could we add to that, and deliver services that Debian didn’t?

So, I thought, we should have a metronome-like, Predictable release schedule.

So we conceived Ubuntu by focusing relentlessly on this piece called delivering. There’ s a real art to the process of delivery.

I had discussion with people from other Linux distros about this. We feel that the process of delivery is a real responsibility.

• For the user: you have the right to expect something robust, secure, stable and tested—regularly.
• For the upstreams (the guy at Apache, GNOME, KDE and Linux kernel): we have to try our very best to deliver their intents to the users.

In free software space, in the very first time, we were able to separate R&D with production cycle. We effectively have allowed people to pick pieces of the ecosystem that are more important to them.

But what’s really missing is the execution piece… The delivery model.

So far, the result is very encouraging. So encouraging that I believe that it will be comercially sustainable without changing our business model.

And the real volume is happening emerging markets like India, China. A lot of them buy computer, but what’s surprising is that, up to 20% of them actually leave Linux on their computer. People are beginning to see Linux as “This thing that I can use,” rather than taking the risk of installing pirated windows on their PCs.

And, by the way, people says that installing Linux is hard? Try installing Windows [laughs.]

So, you see, there’s a real room for Linux and Canonical to thrive.

We aim to broaden the mission by having two spaces:

• Service. This space is a very natural extension for developer to deploy friction-free, rather than having them develop on on CentOS or Fedora. I am very encouraged by increasing interests from serious hard/soft vendors.
• Mobile. I have no doubt that Linux is a platform for future consumer electronic devices. Sure, we all know that iPhone set the benchmark. But we’re not just talking about that. We’re talking about remote controls, refrigerators, and other devices that you can use at home.

  What’s a little less clear is what the stack gets to be. We believe in X86 for consumer electronic. It’s an open enough church, and Intel had strong enough commitment to deliver that. It’s also very closely aligned with GNOME, our primary desktop environment. The very first version of this platform is going to be released sometime this year. It’s fascinating, interesting, though not yet very crystal clear.

The bottom line: we would have an economic model of delivering high quality, free software without taxing it. And that, to me, is a very compelling vision that makes not going to space again worthwhile.

Q & A

OLPC—what’s your interaction to that?
It was an extraordinary success. It has completely change the way how the industry sees low-cost computing. Before OLPC, it was always a question of “How much you can cram in?”

What Negroponte did was turn it upside down.

The classmate PC that Intel produced wouldn’t happen without the OLPC. The entire category of the sub-notebook wouldn’t happen without the OLPC. And regardless of it becoming a de facto platform, I think it’s a profound success.

How do you determine that Linux usage in China was as high as 20%
We looked at analysis of return, in particular at return after one year of ownership. By this time, you would think that people who switched to Windows will do already.

And yet, they don’t.

These number, in China, was close to 20%. It was a surprising data point. This means that a significant people were very happy with Linux. This is the benchmark that we measure ourselves against. It was a surprising number.

Ubuntu Foundation? Canonical registered in the Isle Of Man?
Canonical Limited was registered in the Isle Of Man, a very tax-lenient region—but we’re a global company.

With regard to the first question: we set aside $10 million into the Ubuntu Foundation. We know how much would it cost just to maintain a regular LTS releases. This is a way that I know that, no matter what happens to me and Canonical, we will be able to release and provide support for 5 years. This was the purpose.

Customer characteristics/market segments?
70% of our business is server oriented. Very surprising.
60% of workers based in the US.

What matter most for us is getting other companies to get successful with Ubuntu. There’s no requirement to interface with Ubuntu through Canonical, but doing it through us is a reasonable way to do it.

Gaming possible on Ubuntu? Game developers? Linux as gaming environment?
There are, I think, two critical ingredients for a gaming platform:

• Networking, where Linux is very strong at.
• Graphics, where we’re not as strong.

For gaming on Linux to be successful, we need to focus on casual gamer. I don’t think Linux can compete for a platform for the next Crysis, but we can certainly deliver elements that you need. I wouldn’t be surprised to see handheld gaming with Linux as a platform. Use it as a tool to leveling the playing field. From my perspective, I wold focus on casual gamers. Reach people who are well-paid, smart, and online all the time.

Backstory behind alliteration (Gutsy Gibbon, Hardy Heron, etc.)?
I downloaded all kinds of mailing lists from a bunch of communities, Debian and others. Spent weeks getting seasick in the ocean reading all the messages to try to find people to hire. I finished of in Australia. One guy that I was about to hire talked about calling the release “Worthy Warthog.” I will defend this tradition to the very end, though some people want us to drop the animals [laughs.]

No longer in South Africa?
I want to work globally. Investment in South Africa is very difficult. London is convenient, and it has been quite good to me. I expect to go back to South Africa, but for the moment I’m enjoying seeing the rest of the world from various angles—and attitudes.

Ubuntu sold as boxed products?
Absolutely fine. That’s the nature of the free software ecosystem. You cannot resent somebody else who uses your software in ways that you don’t directly benefit from. I want to see company benefits around the platform. The vision is not to have Canonical “own” it, but to have people deliver it in a lot of different ways and formats. We have some trademark policies, but in a sense, we’re only the custodian of it. We have an amazing community, because everybody feels that he/she has some parts in it. If the shrinkwrapped product gives people—who otherwise hadn’t had the confidence to try free software—to try free software, then that’s great.

Difference between education in South Africa and the US? (Editor’s note: I’m not positive on whether this question was asked verbatim.)
I grew up in a country which was a living nightmare, with institutionalized injustice. So American history was the best way for our teachers to teach us about a system that’s so prone to abuse.

Deal with Microsoft?
I have great respect for Microsoft. I know. This horrifies a lot of people. But we forget that Microsoft made software cheap, accessible and standardized—and in the 80’s, this was the best way to move software forward.

But today, creating free software is the best way. But we still have to win people over, so it’s frustrating to me when Microsoft did something like this: they just signed a deal with South Africa to give out free copies of Windows to use at school.

At one level, it’s frustrating, because it’s a game that’s being played by them. On the other hand, it’s good that kids had access to more technology.

But remember:
Microsoft gives out software because they earn it.
We give out software because we own it.

The amazing thing about free software is that you’re free to explore every one of your interest on; and that, behind every tools, there is a mailing list full of people who are as passionate about the software as you are.

Business Model/Venture Funding?
From past history, I have a VC team in South Africa. People continually express interest in Ubuntu. We haven’t and won’t take VC until we have taken the risk out of the [business] model. Before we take outside money, we need our management team to do the right thing at the right time. It seems like a dangerous thing. This is a reasonable criticism.

But we’ll first establish ourselves as cash-positive. In a very real sense, we will have to choose. Some parts of our operation are already profitable. Some are not. We just choose to have all those parts to have all the grounds covered.

In the next 5 years, we can pick and choose which pieces to turn up and which to turn down to make ours a sustainable business model. We will choose when we become fiscally self-sustaining.

Last question:
When you started off the evening, you said “within our lifetime, space travel will be possible.” A lot of things have changed, things are up and down. What role do you see free software playing in the next 20 years?

In a very real sense, some people thought that software doesn’t matter anymore. To me, this is amazing, because more and more of our lives are actually defined by software. It used to be that software is this thing that you interact in the office. Now, for example, if you look at the iPhone—it’s a pure software experience. Fundamentally, the whole thing is a software experience. The hardware dissolves in the background. Interaction with companies and government becomes possible today, thanks to softwares.

I think that, first, software is profoundly important, and second, it will define how we work.

If so, I think that we need to define how it will shape. And the only way that we could make this happen is with freedom.

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Half and half. Sure, not everyone knows about Ubuntu and the Linux kernel; but don’t you want to, like, fly into the orbit like Mark Shuttleworth did?

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Legion of Tech have outdone themselves again by getting an inspiring character to Portland to share their wisdom for free.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
More inspirations than you can handle.

When: Wednesday, July 16th, 2008, 6:00 – 8:00 pm, although wolfing down our second meal of the day, touring the venue, making secret plans for a possible bike-and-soak Tweetup, and finally biking back to Downtown took about 2 hours more.

So you know, (Amber Case and I) went to three event that day: starting with Lunch 2.0 @ souk, SEMpdx networking, and finally this.

Where: McMenamins Kennedy School.

What It’s About: Writing for the Web for Profit is a place to learn web copywriting in a friendly, sit-down environment. Participants ask questions, share tips and help each other—moderated by the group’s founder, Marilyn Schwader. Audience’s technical level varies wildly across the board, so this event felt more like an offline writing group that just happens to be focused around the web medium, rather than a networking or tech event.

This, in my opinion, is a welcome change of setting. As you may know, most meetups that I attended around the area are networking or tech-focused, free-flowing and non-topical.

Technicality: ☝
Translation: This group is tightly focused on copywriting. This means that topics like, say, exploring new features in WordPress 2.6 are de-emphasized in lieu of guidelines like, say, how to write shorter paragraphs and longer posts.

Most attendees, like Marilyn said, just wanted to write something and get it published on the web—if possible, without ever having to worry about technical matters.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Granted, we only managed to catch the last third or so of the meetup, but if your WordPress skills are far stronger than your writing skills (*raises hand*), this workshop is for you.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Doug Coleman has amazing podcast recorder.
(courtesy of Amber Case.)

When: Wednesday, July 16th, 2008, 5:30–7:30 pm, although Amber Case and I had to leave the event an hour early to attend Writing for the Web for Profit.

Where: Paddy’s Bar and Grill.

What It’s About: SEMpdx, to my knowledge, is the only Search Engine Marketing networking event in Portland. For those of you who seek comparison, it is much closer in spirit and pace to Lunch 2.0 meetups that were held at eROI and vidoop (standing-room only, rapid conversations, lively environment.) I also got to meet and chat with COLABORATORY members.

Technicality: ☝
Translation: SEMpdx meetup is as close to a “Networking Happy Hour” as you can get. In spirit, it achieves the right balance between a restive ad/design meetup and a loose Beer and Blog.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: We were late for biking to our third event of the day (Lunch 2.0 at souk being the first and this the second) by an hour, thanks to great conversations that we had here. Granted, Amber deals in all things Search Engine and Web Analytics, but I enjoyed talking with diverse group of people which includes old friends and new colleagues alike.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Two venues down, one to go.

UPDATE: Thanks to Ascentium for linking up to this review.

When: Wednesday, June 25, 2008, 1:30 – 5:00 pm.

Where: Aura Restaurant and Lounge, which thanks to its atmosphere was an interesting venue for this daytime event.

What It’s About: A primer to social media marketing strategy, viewed through numerous case studies from the eyes of four influential speakers from four equally influential companies.

I have to admit: I came with a bit of skepticism—wondering whether the speakers will view the social web as yet another venue to command and conquer, rather than to participate in and learn from. I was proven wrong—and couldn’t be happier. One speaker even bravely admitted a failed attempt that he ultimately remedied.

I find these: their desire to genuinely engage people and admit mistakes, to be an indicator that Light Up Your Brand as an advertising and marketing conference, really did “get it.”

(On that note, I am strongly compelled to attend more local events from these industries, and wish that they are made more public/advertised better ie. through Upcoming.org)

But on to the note.

*** BEGIN EVENT NOTATION ***

As agency, we, Ascentium, were asked a lot about social media, so we decided to bring together leaders from industry and hear what they think. Light Up Your Brand is a peer group with great people.

Chaz Edwards from Federated Media

Web 2.0 for Marketing: Rise of conversational media.

• The first phase is a C:\_ (command prompt) interface
• The second phase is a place where brands like Microsoft play—where, instead of learning an arcane language, you can “poke” and figure your way around a graphical interface.
• The third phase is a place where the search bar is the interface—as technology is made more accessible.

Web search affects how we think about brands. Today, your Google result page is your corporate homepage.

So not only is search the new interface, search result pages are really a proxy of how your brand is doing.

But if you think of things this way, it’s unsettling just how much the web real estate is not controlled by you. Google is favoring conversational sites rather than informational ones—and your site is largely informational. Wikipedia, fan sites and blogs can and do show up higher than your company site.

This is the rise of conversational media.

Need proof?

• Conversational sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Blogger, Facebook, flickr and WordPress is growing at a much faster rate (double-digit) than, say, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, About.com, Ask.com, Disney, iVillage, etc.
• ComScore now gives “Conversational Media” its own category.

There are two points that I want to make regarding that last statement:

1. First of all, the fact that 600 million people uses Conversational Media means that it’s not a niche category anymore. We have to think of this is a business opportunity.
2. The vast majority of these users, however, are people who participated in a very low impact way. Only 1 to 10 percent of the total visitors are curating contents.

If what I told you is true, we as marketers need to figure out a way to develop conversational marketing further.

Historical analogy:
Apple. 1984. Super bowl. It was one great TV commercial. It was advertising content that was as good as the television program. The quality of this marketing was amplified into the press. The ad reportedly was worth $5 million dollar that night—and this didn’t include word of mouth (ie. watercooler conversation the day after.) Collectively, all these conversations and press started to build Apple’s brand equity and caused us to pay premium for their products.

Case studies:

• Intel builds morning newspaper for Enterprise IT
  popurl is a smart technology that takes all the RSS of the world and puts it in one place. We contacted Intel. It would be great to build the morning newspaper for Enterprise IT with the technology that powers popurl.

  Intel said: we’ll fund this, but we want our logo at the top and Intel’s relevant content displayed in the sidebar.

  On the first week, the site got 40,000 visitor—50% of them returned.

  With this, amplification followed through conversation that happened in Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, StumbleUpon. Free marketing.

  But something else happened. 6 weeks into this program, I typed ‘Enterprise IT.’ Google found 36 million pages.

  The 8th one on the list was Intel’s popurls page. Here’s a marketing that started as advertising (popurls,) had PR amplification, and ultimately inserted Intel into the audience’s conversations.

• AMEX OPEN Forum

  AMEX wasn’t getting good clickthrough with a web banner campaign. People came to the OPEN website, apply, then leave when they’re done.

  But we found people that came to the site on a regular basis, and they spent more money.

  The question is: how can we engage and get them to be more loyal to the brand?

  Solution: AMEX OPEN became a publisher. We partnered with independent blog authors and business people whose audience intersects with OPEN. The idea is to get those people to create valid information about small businesses that would be useful for the forum visitors.

  Engagement
  Thousands of visitors validated content by voting “this post useful”

  Amplification
  69% of traffics were referred by independent, non-affiliated media sites.

• Dell: Tapping into the “Green” conversation

  Dell is a latecomer to the “Green” bandwagon. How could they establish credibility? We created a drawing app of Facebook. Dell then invited user to draw what “Green” means to the user. 12,000 submission were entered for this contest.

  Dell engaged a core group of people very deeply:

  1. Over 60MM impressions
  2. Over 12,300 graffiti
  3. Thousands of fans of the contest
  4. Millions voted for their favorite Graffitis
  5. Hundreds of thousands visit Dell’s Regeneration.org and joined the conversation

Takeaways

1. Build your competence as a publisher—either in-house or through partnership with existing content leaders.
2. Think of your site (and ads) as brand assets: emissaries you set free for your fans to help tell your story. It is destined to be free. Share your brand assets freely.
3. Join your customers in the conversations they’re having, in places where they’re naturally aggregating. Don’t try to force them into your environment (ie. Go to Facebook, not Dell’s own website.)
4. Think of search result as your ultimate report card—a proxy as to how well your brand is doing.

David Veneski from Intel

Three phases of internet:

1. The Portal Era – Content is king
2. The Search Era – Context is king
3. The Social Media Era – Contacts are king

We consume media in 3 ways:

• As recipients: film, TV, radio, press and outdoor advertising, etc.
• As interpreters: internet, interactive TV, ambient, guerrilla and mobile advertising
• As participants: MySpace, podcass, YouTube, flickr, Facebook, Digg, etc.

As marketers, we’re facing uphill battle with this new reality:

• Decreased attention
• Increased consumer control
• Proactive advertising avoidance
• Multi-tasking is the norm
• New habits, new expectations
• Democratization of content—user generated

At Intel, we’ve done a ton of TV advertising in the past. Today, we hardly spent anything. Those TV campaigns were great, but today, people are consuming ad on significantly different media. By advertising online, we spent one-tenth of the cost and got the same result.

Syndicated content and contextual linking on relevant website. We have the opportunity to take our :30 TV ad, embed it on the web and serve it up as contextual ads.

Intel + digg
We sat down with Kevin Rose and said, “we want to work with you. What would it take to build something that excites your audience?” He replied, “our users are dying for a new visualization model.” So we built digg’s arc.

We also sponsored Facebook’s Grafitti app. We don’t just built it for philanthropic purpose, mind you. We want to market to you, but not do it disruptively.

The result: we generated 60,000 additional impressions to our brand that we didn’t expect. Yesterday [Tuesday], we launched a Robot Contest. Got 475 active graffitis in the first 15 hours. Users are embedding Intel’s branding in their graffiti. It’s the perpetuation of our brand in a way that we don’t really anticipate.

Then we went to slashdot and built Intel opinion center. We basically put our brand in a very skeptical environment. I have to admit that it wasn’t successful. But the key thing that we learn: never shut it down. You have to see the conversation through, even though it may be painful to read. It’s okay if they say bad things about your brand. You’re going to get feedback—and it’s not always going to be good—but you have to listen and address every single one.

How we solve this problem: we got the really smart people at Intel (chip engineers, developers and such) to have candid conversations with slashdot users (who are interested but very skeptical.) Then we tell them to forget the marketing speak, and talk to them just as if they would if they talk to their cubicle mates.

My takeaways

• The online arena is changing
• Intersect the customer where they naturally go—don’t assume that ‘if you build it, they will come.’
• Collaboration is key: work with good vendors. We enjoyed, for instance, in working with SourceForge, Slashdot’s parent company.
• Participation breeds loyalty.
• Give first—take second—the audience will know if you are disingenuous. [Editor’s Note: frankly, the fact that the speakers addressed and acknowledged the importance of being genuine made this event worth the afternoon.]
• Keep pushing innovation

Patrick Crane from LinkedIn

There’s a positive change created through social media.

Why do people find the need to express themselves?

• No longer defined by their employer
• Career mobility up
• Average job tenure down
• A professional brand is key to winning jobs, employees and customers

The six degrees of separation? It’s becoming a truism today.

You may ask, then: is the forecast realistic? Can the social networks earn this much advertising value?

Yes, and no. Yes, it’s going to earn advertising value. But no, it’s going to be measured in conversations instead of revenues.

These facts breed opportunities for a company to market themselves differently.

Passive discovery and active search
Google will not always be the first place to search for information. Today, there are numerous search engines and ways to discover news (ie. DIGG, StumbleUpon, etc.)

This is my personal experience. I got an iPod and wanted a really cool headphone for it. I went to Google and searched for “premium headphone,” but it didn’t give anything that I really wanted. Then I though, “What if I run the same search term through my del.icio.us contacts?” I found what I’m looking for.

Viral pass along
Company should use Web 2.0 to harness the power of a good relationship they’ve earned. For example, on Facebook, the fact that somebody just joined an influencer group for a particular brand is distributed/pushed to everyone of his/her contacts. Everyone knows. It generates interests. And so on.

For example: the LinkedIn Blackberry fanatics group registered 300,000 members. Funny thing is, they don’t go to Blackberry’s website to interact and troubleshoot stuff. They do it amongst themselves, unmediated by the company, in Linkedin.

Deep dialogue

Southwest CEO, Gary kelly, asked on LinkedIn:

“How can an airline make you more productive?”

The question got 137 answers in essay length, which got distributed to the respondent’s contacts by way of push notifications (ie. “So and so just answered this question”.) This was, essentially, a dialogue with the brand. Southwest, then, came back to all the respondents with a message that said “we listened to you. Here’s what we did based on your suggestions. And here’s a business class ticket for you.”

Brilliant.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates asked on LinkedIn:

“How can we do more to encourage young people to pursue careers in science and technology?”

The fact that he joined LinkedIn (he’s the most searched person, by the way) at about the same time that Microsoft launched the Windows 2008 brought the latter into the spotlight.

We’re launching a new subscription and discussion environment for groups. Today, about 1,000 companies are already doing it in a beta kind of environment. This feature will be rolled out to all groups on late July.

Companies and brands: here’s a way for you to create your group, do it in private or public mode, and have a dialogue with your audience there. The thing with dialog is that you really have to do it even if it’s a little bit scary. I applaud David Veneski for having the guts to say that Intel got slammed on Slashdot.

Why do I think it could work for marketers?
Because it’s already working for publishers.
For example: on BusinessWeek and most major publication websites, there’s a sidebar that contains story tools (Digg this, Stumble this, share this, etc.) Brands should do this, too. There’s no harm in encouraging people to share.

There’s even a potential new ROI model here. The idea is that all division within the companies, not just their “web team,” should interact with communities around the brand.

10 practical steps for marketers

1. Sign up and connect. Don’t leave it to your agency.
2. Consciously built out your networks. Connect to influencers you know.
3. Join groups and engage with people.
4. Understand opportunities for ‘virality.’ See how it works
5. Focus of the authenticity of the dialog. The Slashdot example is brilliant. Talk to the customers like you talk to the guy besides your cubicle. Remember: the internet is a place where the smallest instance of marketing-speak can be smelled from a mile away.
6. Ask yourselves: is my company ready for this?
7. Expand beyond a test budget for advertising.
8. Go beyond the banner ad.
9. Develop new measurements for ROI. Sure, you can measure most traditional media results by the amount of money you get from it; but what’s the value of getting 1,000 answers from customers—all with deep insights?
10. Create a group of cross-functional evangelists within the company.

James Rice from Ascentium, who have been kind enough to share his presentation with us. It is embedded below for your reading pleasure, preceding my quick takes (and often verbatim notes.)

RODEO Branding:

• Relevant
• Open
• Distributed
• Experiential
• Original

There’s all this fuss about social media.

But email has been social for day one.

And humans are pretty social, right?

Social media is a coffee house.

So, no offense, but shut up, brands.

You should start by listening. Figure out the purpose and value that you can bring to your audience before you say anything.

Does badge branding works digitally?

Subscriber marketing: the next evolution of direct marketing. Stop thinking about your customers as “target” or “segment.”

If you have things people can get fanatical about, do let them know. Let your subscribers and most loyal customers in on the secret first before you start to “go viral.”

Experience marketing. Like what Seth Godin said, there is more value in reaching the right 5000 people than the 5 million people who don’t care.

“Runs, not hits, win games.” ROI should be based on depth of engagement.

In fact, in this participation economy, ROI should mean Return on Interaction.

Dell does IdeaStorm. Starbucks does myStarbucks Idea. This is great and all, but don’t do this if your brand isn’t ready to listen with intent.

Even if you’re not ready to do this, however, you can at least foster a community and add value to what’s already occuring.

Discover, Activate, Maximize. Convert prospects into users, users into fans.

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ½
Translation: Complete understanding of the art and subtleties of xterm not needed.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝½
Translation: If you work in social media, many of the things that were talked about in this event should come as no surprise. I find the speakers’ frankness and desire to learn as signs that point to changes in how the industry play in the social media spaces.

And that, if you ask me, was Light Up Your Brand’s biggest allure.

What I learned From This Event In Six Words:
They get it. Now, do you?

(A note/recap from the organizer is available in PDF.)

When: Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Fourth Tuesday of every month

Where: AboutUs office, which I reached in an hour and fifteen minutes by biking really, really fast through the Springwater Corridor from Gresham.

What it’s about: Portland Net Tuesday is a venue where folks from nonprofit organizations can learn about ways to integrate technology into their activities. A note that focuses on the stories behind rather than the subtle technicalities of the two sites, Connectipedia and Squarepeg, is presented below.

*** BEGIN EVENT NOTATION ***

Connectipedia

Connectipedia is Wiki + database that’s focused towards nonprofits.

Objective: to serve as a go to place for both Foundation members and Nonprofit organizer to get information, connect with each other, and ultimately get funded, or fund the right organization.

How we’re different:

• In Wikipedia, a page about dog looks literally like a collective book report on dog.
• In Connectipedia, thanks to its database functionality, if somebody wrote “The best dog park is in Laurelhurst,” that same bit of information will show up in the dog page, Laurelhurst page and Portland page.

But Connectipedia isn’t built to be a wiki where user can find all the information, but one where he/she can find where all the information lives. Rather than having write-ups or contents, Connectipedia has links to write-ups and contents. If it’s available on other sites, Connectipedia will link to it.

If Wikipedia is a full-length book, Connectipedia is the reading list.

The easiest way to use Connectipedia: sign up, enter your organization name, and start filling it out.

DataPlace.org pulls in all kinds of public demographic data for various neighborhoods, counties and cities in Oregon. Connectipedia embeds statistics from DataPlace, so nonprofits can easily browse all these data, wiki-style, and compare them side by side.

Squarepeg

Story
Squarepeg started out when a group of student activists had difficulties maintaining contacts and creating momentum around their causes, while going to school at the same time.

The founders noticed a gap: when they build websites, nobody goes to it. But when they go to MySpace/Facebook, there’s too much information for anybody to pay any attention.

They also noticed that, on social media channels, they get a pretty solid response to any cause—until they sent out an email and invite the audience to meet. Then suddenly, half of them dropped out.

They finally learnt that people use social media to talk about their lives, the movies they watch, etc.—not about social causes.

What they found, however, was that if they meet with people offline before they organize things online, this greatly changes the dynamics and dialogue around the community. More people commit. Less people drop out. Etc.

In other words: in order to create real change, you need to have face to face, real life conversation. Internet is great as a databank of informational resource. But inspiring and organizing social activism events are an entirely different subject. It doesn’t work.

So they aimed to create a space where people can connect with other user, events and actual actions. Hyperlocal. In other words: they built a social network centered around social activism.

In this process, one of the first thing they realized was that they need a large number of user to make the network valuable. You know, the critical mass. So we tried to work with some nonprofit organizations in Portland who are willing to invest both members and times. They would literally help these organizations plan annual meetings and then say, “wouldn’t it be nice if we can use an internet tool to do this?”

That changed about two weeks ago.

TechSoup has a conference called NetSquared. For the last 3 years, this conference aims to bridge the gap between the developer and social activist communities by having the former vote on projects to be worked on during the next year. Social activist groups, then, will benefit from the developer’s expertise and resource.

Squarepeg was one among the twenty-one organizations that were selected; and they immediately got overwhelming amount of feedbacks from the people at NetSquared.

Almost all of them suggested one thing:
Don’t create your own social network.

That’s where we are today. And that’s why we don’t have a demo to show you tonight. We are scrapping the development of the social networking part of Squarepeg.

But they decided to do something better.

Squarepeg is now collecting organizations, users and actions around Oregon, from local blogs and event places, aggregating all these information in one big source, filtering them through a recommender engine, then disseminating the result through Facebook, OpenSocial and widgets.

In other words:

You put in your data, and the system spits out what thing you’ll be most interested in.

This way, nonprofit organizations don’t have to have a MySpace and Facebook account to reach MySpace and Facebook users. They can simply submit their listing to Squarepeg, and the system will push the information on all of those sites, through widgets and applications.

Put simply, it reduces barrier of entry for nonprofits who aren’t necessarily social media savvy to organize events and gain members from social media venues.

What’s unique about Squarepeg, however, is that they are planning to partner with media venues and for-profit companies, not just nonprofit organizations—but only ones that aim to cause social change. That, to put it simply, is how they’re going to make money.

We literally stopped the car and decided on a direction two weeks ago. When our direction was to create a social network, the development time was so long. In light of that, we decided that, this time around, development has to be really quick.

What our timeline today looks like:

1. Recommender system will be online within a week.
2. In 3 weeks, the system should be pulling data in real time from Social Actions (and all the other places) and framework for events listing should be done and tied in with the aforementioned recommender system. At this point, Squarepeg should be ready for private beta.
3. One month to test it out.
4. Official launch within 2 months.

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Some of the bits that go into the underlying technology and practices of Connectipedia were technical, but they’re easy enough to understand—provided that you have a laptop at hand.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: It isn’t just about social activism and technology. It’s about stories—ones where the social web can make even the most low-key causes possible by putting them in the spotlights of active participants. If you’re in a nonprofit, Portland Net Tuesday is a must go.

UPDATE: But don’t take my word for it. Bob Uva can attest to this fact since he had been attending the event since February.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Social media cause meaningful social changes.

When: Wednesday, June 18, 2008, 7:00 – 9:45 pm, although the ticket holders line formed as early as 4:30 and the conversations extended through the afterparty until close to past midnight.

Where: Bagdad Theater

What It’s About: 14 interesting Portlanders presenting unique ideas, stories and experiences over the course of 20 PowerPoint slides, each 15-second in length.

But to tell you the truth, I’m having a hard time deciding between what got me more excited about Ignite Portland: the wonderful presentation lineup, or the fact that I get to meet and connect with so many Twitter friends in real life? I can’t tell you how many times I used the introductory line “hey, you’re [Twitter username]!” or have a kind soul tap my shoulder and say, “you’re Bram, right?”

For example, I learned from Varun Thota that Akshay Dodeja was going to be interviewed by Robert Scoble the next day about their startup, Mugasha, that Cami Kaos just printed a new sticker for her and Mike’s Strange Love podcast, that Bill Lynch from Jive Software had a voracious apetite for good typography, and that the said software company had one of the highest DJ concentration among its staff in the country.

Allison and I even got a chance to hitch a ride with the elusive Gary Walter and learn more about the wonderful things that he did (as well as the reason why he stayed up all night.)

That, dear reader, is the power of social media, and nowhere is this fact more true than in events like Ignite Portland.

Technicality: ☝
Translation: Ignite 3’s most technical presentation was about Boiling Water In 5 Easy Steps.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation:About the only thing that should be keeping you from attending this event is Bagdad Theater’s limited seating capacity.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Portland Is Awesome. Proof: Ignite 3.

When: June 11, 2008, 7:00 – 9:00 pm

Where: World Trade Center Auditorium

What It’s About: How to optimize your physical and cultural ecosystems to optimize and maximize the uses of your specific design skills and practice.

*** BEGIN EVENT NOTATION ***

The Design Eco-System, by Bill Buxton

We’re surrounded with technologies. However, there are several issues with these ecosystems:

• One where we undertake design (agency, studio, shop.)
• One where we live and interact with technology.

There’s an area called Design Thinking that’s a very hot topic today. The challenge, though, is not simply figuring out how designer’s think, but also what they know. What is the knowledge that lies behind the thinking?

I literally bought every book in the bibliography of my book.

The reality is really painful:

When people thinks about ‘thinking,’ there’s a thought that thinking only goes in the head. And the whole theory about design thinking is based on this premise. But what I know from cognitive science is that thinking doesn’t only happen in the head, but also in the ecosystem surrounding the head.

Edwin Hitchins wrote in his book that, tools, maps, organizational structure of the ship (crew, equipment, etc.) and a whole host of other factors that’s beside the ship’s steering wheel, all plays a part in shaping its navigational system. Discount these factors, and the navigational system falters.

In the same sense, the tools, objects and notations that surrounds a knowledge (be they physical, conceptual or notational), are all inseparable ecosystems that surrounds a knowledge system.

In the same sense, design must continually consider and take its ecosystem into account, or be doomed to failure.

For us in the design industry: if we’re good at whatever we do, it takes a full-time job to get it. You pay the price to get where you are, not just in money, but in time, relationship, family, etc.

Today, everybody thinks and say they’re designer. Designer makes stuff, right? Wrong. Just as we’re not lawyers because we know a little bit of law, and we’re not doctors because we know a little bit about our body, we’re not designers just because we know a little bit about color, typography, layout, etc.

Well, there is a huge gap hidden behind the facade of people who are great at doing a specific thing. This gap is the idea that people who are good at what they do don’t have to sacrifice anything to get where they are. Believe it or not, even we as designers still get this idea when we think of other people.

In other words, it’s not in the result, but in the process that goes to get to the result.

That’s why I’m interested in investigating processes and thoughts that we can teach, learn and reproduce. I’m interested in one hit wonders. It’s the repeat offenders that I care about.

But first, why do we bother engaging in this conversation?

• We are collectively failing miserably.
• The issue at stake is getting more and more serious.

Somehow, we have to change everything at systemic level, or otherwise, we’re just going to get worse and worse.

The reason I got concerned about this is the revolution of ubiquitous computing. Today, microchip is embedded in everything we use. Again, the more they’re there, the worse we’re going to get.

Why? When technology started off, it serves to solve a technological problem. Somewhere along the lines, however, it became mainstream. For example: the architecture of a Von Neumann engine are essentially unchanged from way back when it was the size of a refrigerator. Yes, it got smaller, faster, cheaper. But the structure doesn’t change.

But the things that changed are these:

• Who uses them?
• And how they use them?

What happens is:

1. These technologies affected our lives.
2. Our lives are changed.
3. But the technology itself remains the same
4. This screws up our lives.

For example:
Imagine an office without any organization tool. Now introduce a paperclip in that office. You will change its culture.

In the same sense, everytime we put out a technology and place it on a society, we also change it. We are, inadvertently, redesigning the culture.

Now we have to take responsibility for those things.

So, somebody in the company decides to make this widget, design it, then sell it. This widget changes society. But where’s the thought behind it? Where’s the ‘design’?

Even when design is present in a product lifecycle, it’s not integrated closely.

Let’s clear things up a bit. Planning is not the same as design. Planning is not design in the same sense that conceptual art isn’t blueprint.

Yet my experience says that most people confuse the first sketch with the blueprint that’s made to construction.

OMA – Seattle Public Library

• Call for proposals for architectural submission: November 1998
• Awarded to winner: May 1999
• Construction: March 2002
• Building opens: July 2004

A scale model of the building [picture shown on slide] was built on Dec 1999. It shows up way before the construction.

But here’s the kicker. Interestingly enough, the design of that building still went on when it was constructed. But isn’t the design supposed to be “done” when construction starts? No. The primary, “high order bits” of the design may be set beforehand. But as the building shapes and takes form, you can see opportunity that you can add at a lower design level. Even when the building opens, you can still make refinements. This is why you always have leave to leave things open at a lower design level, and continually fill them out as the construction goes on.

There’s an interesting thing about ratio here [the timeline shows that the design phase went on for a longer period of time than the actual construction]: Design usually represents 17% of the total cost (25% if you’re Frank Gehry.) But they actually hire an architect to make the specification, which will inform the brief, which will inform the designer. But it doesn’t stop there, because a construction project doesn’t just involve architects and interior designer. Everyone from structural engineer, finance, and all other disciplines are interwoven, and must be present at every phase of the project in order for it to succeed.

You see, there’s an incredible amount of work going here.

Architecture mirrors software and hardware development in that, in a sense, they have the same level of complexity and same level of relationship between disciplines that work with each other. In software development, for instance, your software architect is also your structural engineer.

You must know:

• What makes you distinct.
  Let’s all admit that, as a community, we are pathetic at articulating what we do! But if designers don’t know what’s important to them, who will?
• Your value lies in your distinctiveness.
  The last person I would hire to work with me is another copy of me. Why? Because if I’m good at what I do, I must be bad at what I don’t do, so I need someone to cover my ass—so to speak.
  Designer takes warning: In the technology sector, a designer who assimilate into the workplace and try to be more and more like an engineer give up their distinctiveness. It’s like selling yourself short. Never lose what makes you unique in the first place.

The most cliched example about design and business in the last 5 years is Apple. But I’m going to tell you 3 things that you haven’t heard in any article about Apple’s design success:

1. Jonathan Ive, as we all know, designed iMac, iPod and iPhone. But did you know that Jonathan joined Apple at 1993, when share prices were still way up there, and Steve wasn’t there?
2. Did you know that In the first 24 hours (!) of returning to Apple, Steve brought a principal analyst in, who told him two words: Industrial Design?
3. Did you know that virtually all of the designers who did the product designs for iPod and iMac worked for Apple before Steve came back?

There’s a gap here. If the same talents worked at Apple before Steve came back, why didn’t they came out with iPod in 1995? The design team already knew what they do, but nothing was changed in the mid ’90s.

Why? It turned out that they don’t have a Chief Innovation/Design Officer. Who takes care of design? No one.

Today, the success of iPod is such that if you had the silhouette of Bill Gates recognizably holding an Xbox 360 in that orange background [iPod print ad shown on screen] I would bet you that the ad would sell iPods! Other companies tried to copy their ads. Apple loved it.

Who made the iPods successful? Obviously, not only the design team or the iTunes developer, but also the guys at legal, who made record companies sell songs for 99¢ at an online environment that nobody at that time understood!

The point is, I don’t care who you are as a designer/engineer/financial guy/lawyer. You could all be the best in the world, but if you’re not playing from the same songbook, you’re toast.

By the way, while you congratulate Steve and Jonathan, may I recommend looking at the sales of the G4 cube? It’s a genius product. No fan, no noise, belongs in the MoMA, etc. But it sales faltered. Ditto with the iMac’s “hockey puck” mouse.

My point is this: if Steve and Jonathan had not failed and failed regularly in the past, they would not have succeeded in building the one killer product. Nothing ever comes for free. You have to learn from your mistakes.

People at IDEO have figured something out. If you’re a designer, in order for your design to matter:

• You need to be high profile.
• You need to build a company that hire and has T-shaped person as staff (Note: this concept is similar to what I wrote about Mashups and Alchemists.)

[Picture of a slick-looking gallery shot of Trek bicycles]
Trek doesn’t sell bicycles.

[Picture of someone riding Trek while crossing knee-length water]
Trek sells the ability to scare yourself shitless.

Trek buyers may give their money for a bike. But, really, they pay for the experience they will get by using the bike.

The lesson is this: you design experience, not product. So start realizing that things we design isn’t material, but experience. Yes, it will be a physical manifestation of something, but to the user, that “something” will always be a mean to an end. The physical product is what you give your money for. The experience is what you buy.

This principle changes the way we approach design.

[Picture of an HTC Dash phone]
In a traditional design mindset, you are asked to:

• Draw this phone.
• Draw my phone’s interface.

Easy enough.

But in this new principle, you are asked to draw the experience of using this phone.

I don’t know anyone who can design anything without some sort of a drawing or sketching involved. So if you agree with the premise that I elaborated above: that design should be generating experience, not product—there must also be a sketching for experience.

For example:
In the mid to late 90’s, Palm kicked Microsoft Pocket PC’s butt and got the market monopoly, while at exactly the same time Microsoft lost got a lawsuit about monopoly (how ironic is that?)

Jeff Hawkins designed Palm, and he was able to get funding. If you recall, the Newton was getting savaged in the press around that time. Ditto with Mimeo, Eo, Go, Pen for Windows, Dolphin, and the PDA that Sony had. There were millions of pen-based devised.

Yet Palm was the only one who nailed it. How did Jeff do it?

He didn’t start with the user interface, or materials—or even drawings.

Instead, he got a piece of wood, cut it to fit into a man’s pocket, then went about his everyday business for 2 weeks, where he would walk to meeting and pull out a pen and this wooden pad, then started taking notes.

Everyone thought that he was a lunatic. But what he was really doing was going into the wild and asking himself, “How would it feel to have everything on my pocket, that’s always on, that I can take meeting notes on? Will it feel stupid or not?”

That’s experience sketching.

In this respect, other’s companies’ failures aren’t really failures. They’re expensive education that somebody else paid for, that you should learn from.

Design, by my definition, is choice.
There are two places where you can exercise your creativity in a design process under this definition.

1. How do you get a set of different option from which to choose from? If you work with me, you do not come to an ideation meeting with less than 5 equally viable solutions to the problem. Come with 5 that you don’t know all the answer to, so you can ask questions and explore possibilities. Each of those solutions must be meaningfully distinct, and you have to be able to articulate why they’re meaningfully distinct. If you do your job correctly, you’re going to end up with another 5 equally viable solutions.
2. Determine a criteria that will throw all of your solutions out out, so you’re forced to think outside your 5 options.

Enumeration/Elaboration → Reduction/Selection.
Design is the most negative job in the world. Hardly anything you come up with will manifest into product. Only one out of a million concept, in the end, will come up. You start with a lot of things, you finish with one.

But how do you optimize this process? You combine two methods of ideation:

1. Refining. Let’s imagine that going from first idea to final product is like walking through a road that converges on the horizon. Now, imagine that designing is like walking through this path, in a circular/zig-zag manner, but in increasingly smaller circles.
2. Exploring. Imagine a tree, where many tree branches grow and stem out of the bigger branch. To achieve growth, you need both branching and pruning.

Either method is sufficient. Both is essential to the process.

Since sketching is an activity that’s central to both methods, we’re going to discuss that.

Sketching
[Picture of the Taccola’s Notebook from 16th century]

In my research, the first time in history that sketching was used as a mean of thinking was present in Taccola’s Notebook [in the page shown on screen, he elaborated on different ways to construct a catapult.] Prior to the Renaissance, sketching was essential, but only as a way to remember, catalogue, or draw from memory, but it wasn’t a tool for ideation.

The anatomy of sketching
So what makes a sketch a sketch? I went to look to traditional sketching as practiced by architects and industrial designers. From those, a pattern emerged. I then analyze these at a meta level:

• Quick, timely, inexpensive and disposable. A sketch has to look like it’s done in an instant and leaves room for the imagination. Instead of doing one beautifully, do a dozen.
  When I teach, I will even take marks off for good sketching works. You have to. A sketch has to look like you didn’t invest any time in it because you’re so full of idea.
  The idea is that, the more you sketch, the more the brilliant ones will show up among the crappy ones.
• Plentiful.
• Clear vocabulary. You know a sketch when you see one, because it’s characterized by things like lines that extend through endpoints, etc.
• Resolution-dependent. A sketch should have no higher resolution than one that is required to communicate the intended purpose or concept. It shouldn’t contain more detail than it needs to.
  I’ll say it again: the resolution of the rendering should not suggest a degree of refinement of the concept that exceeds its actual state.
• Suggest and explore, rather than confirm. If you want to get the most out of a sketch, you need to leave big enough holes for the imagination to fit in. Leave some room.
• Ambiguous. A sketch should contain notions of loosenes and openness.

I should also note that there is no such thing as ‘low-fidelity’ or ‘high-fidelity’ renderings. There’s only the right or wrong rendering fidelity that’s appropriate for the price, phase of the project and client.

So what is the right representation model and material to use? That highly depends on the project; but your team must be fluent in many ways of representing, so that you can choose the most effective and appropriate one. You may prefer sketching to sculpting a model, and that’s okay, but your design team must have someone who is fluent in every visual representation method.

During the ideation phase, ideas are dime a dozen. The style of management should reflect this. So, at first, you have an “easy in, easy out” type of situation, and later, you have less options and ways out.

A way to think of a sketch versus a prototype is to think of them as occupying different sides of a smooth continuum, rather than as activities that are exclusive to each other.

How many of you:

• Had your high school yearbook said “most likely to be the best artist in the class”?
  [few people raised their hands]
• In a class of 30 people, how many of you did not know where you stood between “sucking at drawing” and “good at drawing”?
  [a lot of people raised their hands]

My question is: how did you know?

You knew because everytime you draw something, you are reminded of how good or bad you were by other people. “Mine looks like chicken scratch,” for example. Other people don’t just look at it. They comment and compared it against other drawings.

Our relationship with our sketches is the same thing. A sketch should not be something that we only look at. It should be a catalyst for conversation. A two way street. A sketch has to speak back to you.

One more thing: you have to put your sketch in a sociopolitical context. Until you can do that, it’s just “a big, crappy, red, really expensive painting that my mom has, but nobody else in the world can understand the significance of.”

Let’s imagine you sketching in your studio. Then this person who dresses swanky comes in, and they shred it. “The marketing people don’t understand me. Only other designers can,” you said.

Well, then why they hell did you give them the sketches, knowing that they can’t read it? Never show a sketch unless the person can read it. If they can’t read, it’s your job to teach them to read.

Remember: there is just as much variation in our ability to read a sketch as it is about our ability to draw it.

If the person with 10 year of experience can get way more from seeing the same sketch that a design student sees, that means that reading sketches can be learned and perfected with experience.

[Editor’s note: the notion of reading a sketch is a concept that I find very intriguing, and not many people have delved into.]

Designers are collectors or crap. Crap that they might use and pin in the wall for a moodboard or inspiration. Crap that you can pick up anywhere. Well, all these craps are “Awareness Servers.” If you have a shop, you better have this in your wall, or you’re dead. These “Servers” can serve the agency as:

• Persistent communal displays (that anyone can add.)
• Shared reference points (so anyone can say “this product will have a button that look that the one laptop we have in the Crap Piles” and everyone else will get it.
• Conversation Provocateur. Collect things that references to something that will generate question and illustrate.

For example: I have a picture of a guy who speaks in public with a pajama [Editor’s note: it’s a very long story; one that provides context to the quote, but that I also failed to note in full.]

This picture spurs conversation over and over again, and clients would ask “What is that guy doing in an inappropriate dress code?” Then I can say “Well, if I dress differently at home and work, why does my technology remain the same in both places? If I take the technology that I use at work back home, it would be the equivalent of dressing in a full-on suit when you go to bed, no?”

So why do I go to Pixar and see these moodboards and “Awareness Servers” everywhere, but go to an agency or marketing department, and only see their client portfolio?

Mark My Words: Annotation is important to ideation.
An agency or shop should encourage non-destructive commentary and idea exploration. This is why you have to have tissue paper besides your table, so when your friend presents a mockup, and you suddenly have sparks of idea (“what if we put this element right here?”), you can contribute and add to it.

This concept of annotation should apply to any materials: 3D, film, 2D, anything. You have to be able to comment and explore things non-destructively. Pixar even go as far to invest their money in building all these internal tools that can mark up and criticize animation like crazy without destroying it. That’s why their stuff looks so good.

But you know what’s sad? Most shops don’t have those tools, and their work isn’t even as complicated as an animation feature film.

The Critique:

• It’s about the work, not the person. If we’re friend, and I don’t critique you even though your work sucks, I disrespect you, because I wasn’t being honest, and therefore allow you to get ripped by client, or people outside of the safe agency/design environment.
• Importance of multiples. Never present one solution.

I think that the practice of critique at least as important as sketching.

But I couldn’t find a single book that talks about critique anymore. Why is this? Well, I also couldn’t find a single book that said “Designers need to breathe oxygen to stay alive.” That’s why nobody talks about Critique anymore. It’s so important, critical, and fundamental to the process of design, that we often forget it.

If you are a designer, and you can’t articulate everything about critique, then before you go and complain to anybody about why design is not taken seriously in your environment, you should help everyone understand cross-disciplinary critiques, and you will change your environment’s culture.

“It takes almost as much creativity to understand a good idea as to have it in the first place.”
– Alan Kay

This quote pisses me off, because he hadn’t told me this 23 years before he said it.
Not understanding this quote was the biggest mistake I have made in my career as a design director. I can write good article. That’s not enough. I should be able to get enough ideas 20% the of the time, and spend rest of the time cultivating creativity across all discipline inside the company, so that they can internalize this quote and I can get ideas anywhere.

If you get this right, the product will take care of itself.

Summary

• Every concept from traditional design still applies to this new paradigm of Designing for Experiences. The tools may change. The behavior doesn’t.
• What changes: the representation. The new thinking requires:
  • New tools
  • New practices, and
  • New teaching
• Creativity: use it or lose it. Generate. Generate. Generate. Eventually a great concept will stick. Just keep adding. Never stop. That is the most important message.

Final thing
What we need to do is this: redesign the culture of organization and doing it effectively.

Things like drinking and driving and picking up after you smoke are really design exercises, because the originator of those concepts know how to engineer the change in society by “pushing the right button.” Kind of like Designing for Experience, isn’t it?

I will close with this: somebody once asked my professor friend, “what single characteristics is common across all of your best students?”

This was his answer:

“They all have the ability to deal with models at the conceptual/meta level, yet at the same time deal with materials. They sew, make pots, play with LEGO, etc. While they work at a high levels, they were equally as conversant with the pragmatic tools and never lost that touch.”

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝
Translation: The same principles that guide Designing for Experiences apply to everything from software development, architecture to marketing.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Design Thinking was flat-out the best talk I’ve had all year, and one that made me regret not knowing and hanging out with more Information Architects and User Experience Researcher/Designer in the past. Immediately after arriving at the venue, I got a vibe that connoted hard work, brilliant thinking and high intensity. It’s almost as if these people simultaneously put three times as much thought not only into what they do at work, but also what they talk about at social events.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
I’ll tell you after I reread.

When: Friday, June 6, 2008, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Where: Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub

What It’s About: Jason Grigsby from CloudFour talks about optimizing website, then shows you how to do it. Unfortunately, I am not technical enough to fully comprehend the latter part of the presentation, but any web developer and geek worth her salt should know these. Anyway, on to the notes.

*** BEGIN PARTIALLY COMPLETE EVENT NOTATION ***

2003, John and I worked at another company. Our datacenter reached max capacity, and the power company wouldn’t give us more electricity. We end up spending a lot of times optimizing 60 customers site to make them run faster. This is the kind of stuff that a lot of web dev don’t pay a lot of attention to today, or even back in 2003.

Recently, I realized how important this is for the environment. In California, datacenters can’t get more electricity. How people deal with thes: companies that have big network are load balancing to another country.

What about the regular web developer? We can do things to make site use less CPU time and bandwidth. It’s like recycling a can: not big, but if everybody is doing it, then it will make a difference.

In a Google survey, only 5% of the page is HTML document. The other 95% is CSS, JS, images and other stuff. So, really, the vast majorities of what the user will feel to be different is the parts that loaded after HTML. Another research showed that the size of typical pages have tripled since 2003, and the objects contained within it have doubled.

Clearly, then, there is a lot that developers can do to optimize the way they currently do things—if not for performance’s sake (which can be a non-factor with high-speed internet connection), then for the environment’s.

Yahoo! has guidelines on improving web pages performance. Jason discussed 13 of them. Some notable ones:

1. Install YSlow for Firebug, which will give you metrics and score to judge and improve your site against.
2. Make fewer HTTP Requests. This is the one of the most important thing that you can do to optimize your site. Firefox 2 and below only make 2 HTML requests per website at a time.
3. Sites that has a lot of CSS and JS files should combine them in a single file. Images, on the other hand, can be hosted on several domains to balance the load.
4. Use content delivery network: things that will allow you to geographically put content closer to the user. For instance, Google launched the AJAX Libraries API last week.
5. The simplest thing to do—but one that not enough people does—is Gzip your files.
6. Every time a site is loaded, a browser will check its header for update. This is important, but only if it’s updated. But elements like header graphics, and things that don’t change for a while don’t need to be updated and ‘checked’ by browsers all the time. Therefore, setting your header to expire in the future is a big deal.
7. This one is common practice: but put stylesheets on the top and script on the bottom.
8. Minify Javascript, particularly if you’re doing mobile web development.

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: The fact that I only had enough aptitude to take note of the first part of the presentation—and not the second—should tell you. However, don’t let this deter you from learning and attending more presentations by this local mobile web dev maven.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: All suggestion is simple and practical—indeed, much like recycling a can to help the environment. In fact, I’m doing it on my professional website as we speak.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Change the world. Optimize your HTML.

When: Wednesday, June 4, 2008, 7:00 – 9:00 PM

Where: NemoDesign, which again proved my inability to navigate around Portland by arriving early and then spending the next 20 minutes looking for the correct entrance. Lesson: company/agency/studio logo on the door should be big enough to notice from the street.

What It’s About: The elusive Andy Baio talks about three lessons that he learned from building, in order of appearance, Meaty.org, Waxy.org and Upcoming.org.

Let’s get to it.

*** BEGIN EVENT NOTATION ***

It all started with a script that takes dictionary words and buys the .org .net and .com domain for each word. In the pool, there were three sites: Meaty.org, Upcoming.org and Waxy.org

I want to make software that allows virtual community to meet offline—that is so crucial.

Andy learnt #1 from Meaty.org after its competitor, Meetup.org launched with much fanfare and better feature: Finish it.

Around that time, he started his own blog. His first entry was posted on April 14, 2002, wherein he established the ground rules in subsequent writing:

No journaling. No tired memes. Be original.

Waxy.org proved to bring immeasurable impact for Andy. It raised his visibility—even in mainstream media, where 5 different journalists from The New York Times covered 5 different articles on Waxy.org 5 different times. Waxy.org also ended up being a platform for his future projects (including Upcoming.org.) It connected him to likeminded people.

Through my blog, I’ve pretty much been able to meet everybody that I care about and admire.

Lesson #2 was learnt from Waxy.org: Blog because you love it, not because you want to “develop an audience.”

Upcoming.org was started in January 2003. He did not stop until it was done 9 months later.

There were two reasons why Andy was compelled to build Upcoming.org

First:

I always loved live music, but always had terrible memory. For example: I would read LA Weekly and see a concert from a band I loved, then forget about it—until a week later, when my friend told me about how awesome the concert was.

Second: Friendster.

I thought it would be cool to do something with social network beyond connecting online.

Upcoming.org was a side project. He did it in spare time, by himself.

Andy then puts up different mockups of the first iteration of Upcoming.org, wherein he said:

I love to do high-resolution mockup on every version of Upcoming. Other people “envision” something out of a wireframe. I can’t do that, that’s why I must have pixel-perfect mockups.

On the concept of “Watching” (as opposed to “Attending”): Watching is where you want your friends to know about the event, but also that you won’t be attending it. “It,” Andy said, “seemed to be a natural way of approaching it.”

Andy continued his work on Upcoming.org until his son was born, and he had to stop all work on for 8 months.

You have a job, a side project and a son. Pick two.

Fortunately, the site continued to grow and doesn’t ‘explode’ without his continual attention.

Note: The Web 2.0 movement is starting to come about around this time.

On March 2005, Johnny Dell, a reporter from InfoWorld wrote about how awesome Upcoming is. He thought of improving it via the uses of API and Tags, two things that didn’t really “exist” at that time. Andy decided to put a gun in his head and promised to deliver the improvements in one week. To this end, he wrangled User #2 and a friend to help him do it. The new Upcoming is launched a week later.

At that time, Tim O’Reilly wrote the famed article that compares Web 1.0 and 2.0 side by side, where he mentioned that evite is 1.0, and Upcoming.org is 2.0. That brought a lot of coverage, but more importantly, people were building applications on top of the API.

On July 2005, Andy got an email from Caterina Fake (founder of flickr.) They were tasked to “bring the cool back to Yahoo.” They looked around on the startup that they should bring to the table. They contacted Andy, and forwarded him to Yahoo!Local. Three meetings later, we were acquired on October 2005.

Upcoming grows by connections that I made through Waxy. For instance, I met Caterina through Metafilter and my blog. So it’s all about connections as much as the friendships that you made, and knowing people who do cool things that you wanted to do.

The Good Parts (of being acquired by Yahoo)

• Surrounded by brilliant people. Upcoming was literally 3 cubicles away from flickr designers and engineers. Then there are Delicious and MyBlogLog (the same guys who started Yahoo!Pipes.)
• This is obvious, but going from a “side project” to a “full-time job,” working on what I considered to be my baby, is awesome.
• Platform technology that Yahoo! offered is powerful, and sometime complex, but enabled us to do things that we previously weren’t able to do (ie. geolocation open API.)

The Not So Great Parts

• Bureaucracy is a lot to deal with when you only have 3 people. it’s inconceivable that a 5-person startup can go into Yahoo, a 14,000-strong company with legacy technology that you need to adapt to.
• Integration was very hard to do and may drew away from things that you really cared about. For example: when the newly acquired Upcoming were working on integration with various Yahoo! services, it drives traffic to the site, but it’s not Upcoming’s organic traffic.
• With new technologies, came a level of complexity that slowed down Upcoming’s site. When you’re acquired, you will come in with your own way of doing things, and you have to adapt.

But in the end, everyone benefits

• The Upcoming community got a much better, stable and powerful site than it would have ever been, had I work on it alone.
• Even Yahoo! benefits. For instance, you can click on Yahoo → Local or search for events in Portland, and it will show you inline results that direct to Upcoming.org.
• As a startup, we did quite well and learnt a lot of information in a short period of time.

BUT I would caution any of you to not plan any acquisition exit. Talking to everybody at the Valley was like talking to a musician at Sunset Strip in the 80’s. Everyone talks about “getting million dollars in funding and entering into a hot market.”

Plus, Upcoming was never intended to really be a business. It wasn’t even a company. Just a website that was acquired. That’s it.

(We had the easiest due diligence in the world, because it was just 3 guys running service on a hosted server.)

Lesson #3 from Upcoming.org: Build for yourself. Bootstrap. Don’t grow too fast, acquire funding, etc. If you do it well, at the very least, people like you will flock. And if you built it with no certain constraint in mind, it can go anywhere.

I was trying to built something that I think was fun. I didn’t even drop my day job to do it.

Q&A

Q: Is there a concern about intellectual porperties in the M&A process when Upcoming was acquired by Yahoo?
A: If you work at a tech company, like Yahoo, and you work on your own startup, that’s certainly going to be trouble. Don’t even complete with your employer. At Pixar, you have to pitch anything you came up with to your bosses first. The concept will almost always be rejected, but then you’re free to work on that.

Q: How much traffic were you guys having when you were acquired?
A: When Upcoming.org were acquired, we doubled our server infrastructure to TWO servers.

Upcoming was a microstartup in every sense. It has a reputation that’s disproportionate for its size. Part of that is because it is used heavily in the Bay Area. Another part is because the userbase it were very active, social, “2.0” people.

You can’t expect an event site like Upcoming.org to grow flickr-big, because the interaction model is different.

Upcoming’s biggest contribution to Yahoo: providing an event-base for everything. Some of those integration [with other services] are awesome because they just used our API and we didn’t have to do anything, besides maybe building some private methods.

Q: When did you realize that Upcoming was “a bigger deal”?
A: It happened over and over from the moment I launched it. A group of Americans in China adopted it. In a small college town outside of Michigan, 10–15 students who love music adopted it, which caused rapid local adoption. I saw “spikes” like these all the time.

Right now, if you go to the Portland website, this event is listed as #1 today. Is it really #1 [in the litera sensel of the word]? Probably not.

If you have an active core, that’s the community that”s going to decide what’s most popular.

Q: Did you guys do any marketing activity?
A: I did some talks and opened myself to press. That’s it. There was no budget for marketing Upcoming. Our advertising paid for the server but and was making a little bit of money. But for us, word of mouth is the most logical form of marketing because we wanted it to grow organically.

Q: Did Yahoo! hoped that everybody would use Upcoming? Or just the geek audience?
A: I always hoped that everybody would use it. It would’ve been great, but part of the challenge is that you have a very large audience that just wants to lurk. 95–98% percent of people who has a Yahoo!ID are just watching what’s out there. Back when we were there, Yahoo! were trying very hard to change that (read: trying to be more Yelp-like.) It’s tough, and they’re still working on making changes to get mainstream audience to dig into it, but not much had been happening ever since.

Q: Feedback from the community after Yahoo! acquisition?
A: We were very conscious of this aspect. Before we were acquired, I saw this 2 case studies:

1. flickr: sent out announcement months in advance, saying that user will have to do it eventually (adopt a Yahoo!ID) but provide no other benefit whatsoever, only inconvenience (while it might’ve been relatively minor.)
2. Blogger: blogger 2.0, big redesign, tons of new feature, also, you’re going to use your new Google account to login into it.

I’m a Yahoo! user and I was afraid of switching! Even if I do, what did I get out of it besides inconvenience?

So we bundled all these redesigns and feature updates all at once, then gave out free T-Shirts to old users. There was very little outcry.

Q: What community feature that was introduced after launch brought a lot of traffic?
A: One of the bigger things was that we started integrating event feed from Yahoo!Local, so every event can be populated from there and not always be added by someone.

Also, Switching from the old “Metro” system to Yahoo!’s location system (using zipcode, proper geocoding.)

Q: Tell me more about the logo?
A: The type was designed by Letterhead Font. I always had people questioning the logo: “It looked like a sports/baseball team.” But I always liked the idea of it having a “summery/outdoorsy” and organic feel. Plus: it also made for great shirts. I’m glad that Yahoo! kept the logo up there.

Q: Did you have to alter your platform/codebase after the site scaled/bought by Yahoo?
A: Yes, we had to move over to Yahoo’s platform. We had an easier time, though (ie. compared to del.icio.us.) Yahoo’s standard were PHP, but upcoming was written in PHP. Several things had to be tweaked, but the code changes—yes. Every lick of code that I wrote got rewritten, and we ended up using Yahoo! search engine to power ours.

Q: How did you left Yahoo?
A: I left not long after my contract expired (last November.) There are a couple of things going on at Yahoo that was interesting (couldn’t talk about it,) but ultimately what happened was, when you’re working for something you built for somebody else, it changes the dynamic of your work. I’ve been working on upcoming for the past 5 years, but it all came down to wanting to work for myself.

*** PAY ATTENTION, PORTLANDERS ***

Portland is awesome, it has tremendous DIY culture that’s very different from Valley culture. Down there, if you ask somebody about the reason why they’re building something, the goal would almost always be be commercial. I’m interested in building products that are profitable, but at the same time, also makes a lot of people happy.

Ultimately, I just want to do something new and have absolute control over it, and make money doing it.

*** WE NOW RETURN TO OUR REGULAR NOTATION ***

Q: How does Upcoming monitor inappropriate events?
A: Through flagging, community manager. There were two classes of frustrating behaviors that were happening not long after we were acquired:

1. We had Nigerian spammers discover Upcoming as a backdoor, using its Private Messaging feature to get to user.
2. People would post event just to put spammy information in it.

Then we started to built heuristics into the system.

One of the test that we did was we pass everything to Spam Assassin. I highly recommend this.

Q: Coudal’s Deck?
A: The Deck fits with my philosophy. It targets sites with little but influential traffic (like the kind of blogging that I do at Waxy.) No CPM model. Very focused. It’s a great model that I haven’t seen picked up by any other places.

Q: Tell me more about the “week you brought your friends in?”
A: So I commited publicly to Johnny Dell’s InfoWorld column that I will do what the article requested in a week, so I asked Gordon and Leonard for help. After that, it became a natural collaboration.

Q: Where do your attention lies these days?
A: I spent a lot of time writing, something that I wasn’t able to do during my Upcoming–Yahoo! days. But there are two areas that I’m interested in:

1. Web-based collaborative gaming. I went to GDC and saw indie game movement. Mind expanding stuff that paralleles with what has been going on with Web 2.0.
2. Providing ways for indie creator to make money doing what they love. Can’t really talk too much about this, though.

I have also been working with Rael Dornfest with his Bottlecap Labs project.

Q: How do you value Upcoming in the negotiation with Yahoo?
A: We asked ourselves: “If we worked on it ourselves, in 2 years, what would we be making?” We had a rough number going in, though. Second thing: it’s totally risk-free for us to get acquired. There were no contractual obligation to stay for a period of time.

Q: Have you considered going to another investor before Upcoming was acquired? Or just kept it a side project?
A: Our plan was that we either:

1. Are going to be acquired by Yahoo!, or
3. Gordon and Leonard will be working on it full-time.

There are compromises and risks that we don’t want to take, so we didn’t consider angel investing.

Q: Would you do it differently if you had to do it all over again?
A: While we were at Yahoo? Yeah, we would. But no, I’m really happy with the way everything came off for everyone.

Q: Are there other offers from companies other than Yahoo?
A: Nope. The whole process was very fast, in fact.

Our official contract was signed and announced at the same day, in fact. I went to Web 2.0 conference, but the night before, we tried to hammer the contract out because they want to get the news out at the conference.

Q: Can you tell me about Upcoming.org’s general timeline?
A:
January 2003: start
September 2003: launch
January/February 2005: Gordon & Leonard comes in.

Q: Any patent/legal stuff you had to worry about while at Yahoo?
A: We hadn’t patented anything before we were acquired. With every new release at Yahoo, though, they were asking me for a new patent filing. I think it’s not a good concept. Hate the patent system.

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ½
Translation:I talked to Andy whilst enjoying a veggie pizza and humming along extremely loud Middle Eastern music at It’s A Beautiful Pizza, and he said that he was planning on making the talk as accessible to everyone as possible.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: More than anything, this Portland Web Innovator session is about a regular guy who rose to prominence by deciding to follow his passion. Andy was straight out one of the humblest high profile presenters I’ve ever met.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Do it because you love it.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-15/ Sat, 31 May 2008 09:55:24 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-15/ LiSA (Lessons in Social Advertising)

When: Wednesday, May 28, 2008, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM, the same day that Portland Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop was taking place, though I attended the networking an hour prior and then left for Strands Beta meetup 45 minutes after the panel started.

Where: Hotel Deluxe.

What It’s About: Panel discussion about viral/nontraditional advertising through social media (does it work? To what extent?) which, while may seem a bit late (hello, this is what social media consultant has been doing for the last two years,) is also a subject that’s ripe for the picking now that it has moved into the ‘Best Practice’ area (But I want a Facebook, Hi5, Friendster and Orkut account for our Research and Trend department, too.)

Speaking of which, I suspect that the reason why a particular social network succeeds in one region but not the other (Facebook, for example, doesn’t find heavy adoption in Asia, while MySpace doesn’t with Europe) not only has to do with adoption rate, but ultimately with feature that’s suited to that region’s culture. The question is, what features in specific?

Anyway, as with any panel discussions, this one features a moderator and four panelists:

• Hashem Bajwa from Goodby Silverstein and HP.
• John Furrier from furrier.org, who LiveTweeted the whole thing and even bounced some questions to his followers.
• Michael Berkley from SplashCast, a social network video sharing service that Hillary Clinton apparent uses in her campaign.
• Dave Allen (yes, the ex-bassist of Gang of Four) from nemo design and Pampelmoose, one of the better record labels out there.

This is where it gets interesting, because two of them are agency folks, and the other two comes from the tech industry. This backgrounds reflected on their answers.

Note: I was only able to attend the first 45 minutes of LiSA, and thus am only able to post this passing note. Please feel free to contribute to this (Gaia Brown, I’m looking at you)

*** BEGIN VERY INCOMPLETE EVENT NOTATION, WITH MUCH APOLOGIES TO HASHEM FOR NOT BEING ATTENTIVE ENOUGH TO TRANSCRIBE HIS RESPONSES ***

Ken Lewis, Moderator (M): What is social media?

Dave Allen (DA): Social media fulfills a basic human need for connectedness and validation that manifest in the form of staying in touch with family and friends. In the social media space, brands needs reach out to certain groups of people. But who are those people and how can brands reach them?

Michael Berkley (MB): Social media can benefit brands if it can be inserted into the conversation. It has the ability to ambassadors among consumers. Advertising on social media means leveraging your consumer base to tell your story and be evangelists. The risk: it can backfire, because it’s about brands being invited in by consumer (not pushing in onto the consumer,) or, at least, accepted into the conversation.

John Furrier (JF): There’s one thing that’s different about Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is about website and personalized, self-serve advertising (‘self-serve’ means that audience can click if they like to or not click if they don’t. Clicks generate leads.) On Web 2.0, it’s still personal, but also about relationship with your peers and group—in other words: not self-service. Very random and disaggregated.

M: Give examples where client uses social media beyond traditional content.

JF: I’m live tweeting this question and gets answer back. THAT is social media.

MB: Can banner ads on Facebook be considered ‘social’ or ‘spam’?

*** END EVENT NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Think of it as a primer and best practices in social media advertising. A lot of the discussion are comprised of common (yet rarely practiced) senses. Assuming that you join one or several social networking website (and if not then pray, tell, what’s wrong with you?), technicality shouldn’t pose a problem.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: If you’re an ad guy or creative, go for the information. If you’re a geek, go for the networking. This experience may be an eye opening one for creative professionals, but not so much for the nerds among us—because we practically live and breathe it. Again, not that one approach or format is necessarily better than the other. Had you go to a more nerd-like social media panel, the discussion will get way more technical and subject specific, thus deterring creatives to contribute.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
It’s about facilitating conversations, not advertising.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-14/ Sat, 31 May 2008 09:38:40 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/31/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-14/ Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop

When: Wednesday May 28, 2008, 12:00 – 2:00 PM

Where: Vidoop, where last week’s Portland Startup Weekend was held.

What It’s About: Like what I suspected of AIGA and SEMpdx monthly socials (‘suspected’ because I have not attended either one, although I would very much love to if you could offer an invitation) Lunch 2.0 is one of the best way to meet people in Portland’s thriving tech scene—the other being BarCamp Portland and Startupalooza.

My friend, Aaron Hockley from Another Blogger, had noted how the first Lunch 2.0 composed of “pretty much geeks,” the second was less so, and the third, at Vidoop, has a really good mix of nerdy and cubicle (pardon the pigeonholing) types.

As a creative who dabbles in technology, I originally came to these events in hope of bridging the gap that the two industries currently have. What I found out is that more people also recognizes this problem (or think that hanging out with anyone who Tweets more than 500 times a day will double their social media chops.)

I am happy to report that you’ll recognize faces that you previously only interact with via a 40×40 pixel avatars at Lunch 2.0. I also think that “hey, you’re so-and-so on Twitter! Nice to finally meet you in meatspace,” sounds like a great introductory sentence.

Technicality: ☝
Translation: I wanted to put zero, because you don’t have to work in any industry and have any sort of expertise to enjoy interaction that happens in Lunch 2.0—but then you also need to have some sort of an online presence to be able to connect with your new friends after the Lunch.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: if anyone see me with a plate that afternoon, they’ll see that I hardly ate what’s in it (save for the bacon-wrapped date, of course), this is because connecting with people and learning all sorts of new things—which includes two yet-to-be-launched web startups, a strategy to not get lynched at Werewolf games, a podcast’s audio problem, The Oregonian, a shirt design involving a physical element and an elephant silhouette, and the power of social media to cause change in society—is really, really fun—all while you’re enjoying a relatively uneventful lunch with your Interactive Media Designer at Old Town Pizza.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Have you upgraded your lunch today?

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-13-at-startup-weekend-in-pictures-livetweets/ Mon, 26 May 2008 20:04:06 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/26/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-13-at-startup-weekend-in-pictures-livetweets/ Portland Startup Weekend

See the play-by-play LiveTweet from this event.

When: Friday, May 23, 6:00pm – Sunday, May 25, 2008, 6:00pm, wherein I got the chance of participating in the entirety of the first day, the last third of the second day (including an impromptu Wii party that ensued due to the thunderstorm outside, culminating in two fierce games of Boxing, won by me and my opponent, respectively) and the second half of the third day.

Where: Vidoop, who shares a building with eROI and what I call the “Golden Triangle of Geekdom”: Backspace, Just Be Toys and Ground Kontrol.

What It’s About: Portland Startup Weekend was, to my knowledge, the 17th Startup Weekend event held during its first year. The concept is not revolutionary (build a web startup over a 24-hour working hour), but the dynamic is. Each audience:

1. Comes in with his/her idea
2. Pitches it to the crowd
3. Gets together with likeminded individuals to refine
   
4. Re-pitches it to the crowd
5. Gets it voted up or down, which in our case yielded 5–6 ideas
   
6. Converges in groups based on these ideas
7. Promises to burn the midnight oil for the next day or two

Ideas that the Portland Startup Weekend participants (there are about 30 of them) ended up with, followed by the name of their products:

• A wants stuff that B has. B wants what C has. C wants what A has a.k.a the Junk Trader project. Discuss: TreasuReCycle.
  
• I have a dream of going to a conservatory, but alas, both my parents died when I was 6 months old and I am now living with the proverbial ‘Cinderella’s stepmother’ on a wellfare—a.k.a the Dream Funder project: LifeGrant.
  
• I want to listen an individual song within a huge, seamless DJ set a.k.a the DJ Set Archiver project: Mugasha.
  
• I want to plan a meeting sometime next week, but my officemates happens to have the attention span of a 5 year olds with a to-do list so full they might as well adopt Polyphasic Sleep a.k.a the Schedule Syncer project: Get Gathered.
  
• I have an idea for a web startup → ??? → Profit!
  Elaborate “???”: Startup River.
  

Most participants do it as a challenge to push themselves and see how much they can get done in a weekend. Some take it as a complete business. This reflects on their working style. Those who want to push fast (i.e. Mugasha) focuses on rolling out a working prototype as soon as possible. Those who want to build a business (i.e. TreasuReCycle) starts with an implementation/project plan. No approach is right or wrong, but they have to achieve something by Sunday at 6. So this was Friday.

On Saturday, the teams work on their respective projects, with three check-up/progress report meeting along the day. The day was originally rather uneventful.

That is, until the thunderstorm that happened at around 9:30 deterred everyone from walking to their car or biking home, much less getting out of the building (one individual decided to brave the element with an extremely tiny umbrella, and one other, John Watson, biked up St. Johns. Bless their hearts.)

But what about those of us on bikes or on foot, who may not have an umbrella, or a heart as big as Mr. Watson, you ask?

Those people decided to go back up the Vidoop Headquarter and play Wii Sports while simultaneously consume copious amount of PBR and Bud—which inadvertently lead to much trash talk and four very intense Wii Boxing matches.

Anyway, A play-by-play LiveTweet from this event is available courtesy of Summize, wherein you will find the reports from Startup Weekend’s eleventh hour and final presentation. Reading suggestion: starting from last page, in reverse order.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Obviously, you have to lend a hand at one particular area to participate, but this can range from back/front end coding, web development, graphic/interactive design, user experience to business, marketing and advertising planning. This makes anyone with any kind of startup-company skill valuable.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: This is akin to saying “I bet I can climb Mt. Kilimanjaro if I set aside a weekend to do it.” You may succeed at actually creating a prototype or a venture; you might probably fail thanks to the sheer level of complexity that your project entails, but that’s beside the point. You’ve pushed your limit, and that’s what matters most.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Lacked buzz. But rats, should’ve participated.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-12/ Fri, 23 May 2008 08:55:15 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-12/ PDX Critique

When: Monday, May 19, 2008 at 7:00 – 9:00 pm, followed by the obligatory after-meetup at The Side Door.

NOTE: After-meetup is a social gathering that happens after an event is formally over, usually at a casual, sit-down bar nearby, populated by the event attendees. It is distinguished from after-party by its tendency to encourage good flow of ideas and unusually inspiring conversation, instead of bad decisions and copious amount of alcohol. After-meetup happens because event attendees actually enjoy each other’s company so much that they prefer to huddle in a non-event, social setting. For this reason, the very idea of after-meetup is uniquely suited to Portland.

Where: CubeSpace, a venue so commonly used for creative/tech events around Portland, I practically ran out of clever quips to describe it about a month ago.

What It’s About: I originally assumed that PDX Critique is nothing more than a 20-minute presentation slot where one gets to present his or her work or idea to a panel full of highfalutin designers, wherein they will reply with how “Saul Bass won’t like your improper use of Helvetica, sucker” and “your three-column layout is unrefined. Yes, you should really move it an eighth of an inch to the left” and “my colleague at AIGA thinks that Modernist design is so 1950.”

I’m glad that I was wrong.

Because PDX Critique was filled with the most brilliant and kind designers and information architects around (my memory registered @notbenh, @staceyanderson, @reidab, @tingey, Erik Mork, Monica Mork, and one designer whom I sadly forgot the name of.) And, most importantly, wasn’t just about critique. It’s also about open discussion and lively banter. And instead of the structure that I elaborated above, that night looked more like this.

1. You can has project?
2. Discuss.

I learnt about Soak Your Head, a web game adapted from a recently released white paper that could drastically increase one’s quotient after nineteen days of twenty-minute training. Erik and Monica Mork, the couple who designed the game, wanted feedback on the user interface, wherein the panel brainstormed solutions that decreased clutter and enhanced usability. Believe me, the game was so deceivingly complex, I felt more intelligent just by watching it get Demo’d.

I learnt about Calagator’s new redesign, its slick underbelly, and its great use of color to emphasize, and subtle grid to organize information—albeit for only 10 minutes for lack of time.

I also had the opportunity to pitch my idea about holding a BarCamp-like event for creative professionals sometime this year (which you should contact me at bram@brampitoyo.com because I need somebody who’s better than me at running this.) Not only did the panel asked critical questions, they also gave me directions to possibly take this event to, and agreed to help out and be partners-in-crime.

All this over the course of just two hours—not including the inspiring conversation that ensued afterwards at the Side Door. What a night.

Technicality: ⅛
Translation: No legal design cred needed to enter. Just bring your best mind.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: As one who work in the ad/creative industry and hang with people from the tech scene, I got the perfect balance from PDX Critique. This means that if you’re a creative, you’ll love it—and not for the usual reason.

This is because going to PDX Critique is the equivalent of bidding traditional ad/creative industry “networking mixers”—where all you care about is giving out business cards or landing the next job through strategically meeting the right creative director—bye-bye. At PDX critique, things are done more organically. Like, way more. Through conversations, you’ll get to know each individual as a person, not an interactive designer from so-and-so agency. And that, if you ask me, is a better way to know people.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Good folks. Great ideas. Better IQ’s.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-11/ Fri, 09 May 2008 07:36:11 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-11/ Portland Web Innovators – Ward Cunningham Revisualizes The Wiki

When: Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 6:00 – 8:00 pm, with a little dinner at The Side Door afterwards discussing, among many things, the merits and pitfalls of newspaper journalists relying on reader’s tips on Twitter as a starting point to conduct full-blown reportings—which proved to be somewhat apocryphal, since Business Week decided to try a concept like this the morning after.

Where: AboutUs, which yet again proved my general inability to navigate to any event in Portland (I circled the block several times before being noticed by one of the staffs standing outside, who then motioned my to “go up to the fifth floor and then go all the way to the left.”

What It’s About: Critical discussion on the present and future of the Wiki as a medium to dissipate information across cultural and language barrier. I’m going to let the event notes that I took continue this.

*** BEGIN NOTATION. ***

(Please note that bolded words indicate overarching topics that the forum discussed, with thoughts and subtopics below them.)

“We’re going from the user to the technology, because if we go the other way, we’ll never reach the user.”
–Ward Cunningham

Revise entrenched processes
New Users
We want to make a space where the aggregated knowledge (even those of strangers) can increase infinitely, even when a particular user is not there.

Would your mom be comfortable attending this meeting?

Wikis have never been a process list to start out with.

When I started the Wiki, I:

1. First made several pages that are just designed to demonstrate the Wiki contributing process.
2. Then encourage new users to start out by editing their own profile page.

This is done so new users can learn not just by seeing but also going along. This is analogous to the fact that a video game has to teach you how to play the game while you’re playing the game.

As a new user, how the contributing process is structured will shape what he or she brings to the Wiki.

Can Wiki have a “factual” and “revisions” modes? This way:

1. If a user want to get straight to the facts, the system would direct you to a more factual version of the page.
2. Whereas If he or she wants to see all changes and go a little deeper on this part, it would direct him or her to a revision-friendly version of the page.

There’s a big barrier of entry for new users. Late comers can come and just say “what the heck is going on here”?
For example: figuring out a Wiki formatting syntax, which might not be a familiar to everyone (for example: me!) but those with programming background. And some people might not be able to get past that (like, ever.) What will happen is that, after he or she publishes with the wrong syntaxes, every other users suddenly hate him/her for ‘ruining’ their properly-syntaxed works.

Can we have something that gives experienced users a ‘nudge’ to welcome new users and continually remind them that Wiki is continually going to grow and they must learn to accommodate these users?

The ideal is to have Wikis wherein you can see not only the result on the page, but also how it’s being made. Being able to watch it being created, or to replay its creation, or to watch the dynamics between the contributors—that’s about the dynamics itself rather than the text—so new users can learn by watching, and they’re watching stuff that they really need to know to get up to speed.

How to properly use Wiki in a meeting situation: instead of taking meeting notes and publishing it straight up to a Wiki, why not take 2 or 3 main topics you got from that meeting, and then create a Wiki page for each? Pages need to create vocabularies that are going to be extended to other pages.

Facilitating “liveness”
Content delivery problem. I can subscribe to recent changes in Wikis through RSS, but I can’t search within that RSS feed certain parts or subjects within those changes that apply to my interest.

Can better description of changes on the user’s part encourage better changes in general? Currently, the system restricts how the natural, human language describe these changes and instead display them in a very restricted, unnatural way.

The ability to do things, and then reflect on what you did, is both very human and important to a Wiki’s success.

The problem with Wiki is that it’s all about the content and information (no matter how dynamic they may be.) Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, are about people.

So, can we make Wiki better by integrating more human element? For example: can we get contributors acknowledged for their contributions and be more visible?

Why not have different Wiki pages depending on the kind of people that user likes to see? For example, I might only see A’s contribution on a page because I consider him to be accurate. You, on the other hand, might choose to only see B’s contribution page because you consider that user to be accurate and that A is not.

Expanding the Wiki Model
Today, a Wiki assumes that you are going to write a certain way, much like a blog would assume that you are going to write a certain way. The problem is, both models are new, but they bracketed the respective spaces that they occupy instead of freeing it from constraints.

On the writing front, there is a yet undiscovered but better manner and convention to write Wikis than the current way of doing things.

On the presentation front, the Wiki can really benefit by taking a more conversational approach of viewing threads that blogs currently have.

You want to do things without forethought, but at the same time want to reflect on that after you’re done (reorder, edit, etc.)

There needs to be a perspective shift among new users who is just starting to use Wiki. Wiki is a work in progress forever, not something that you write in Microsoft Word, save and send to your friend via email. In fact, you’re not done even though you’re done, because the . It is a cultural thing, because user is used to finish a document, save it, and then be done with it, not remaining a work in progress forever.

For now, I’m just glad that the word “Wiki” itself is now generalized. People would say “Wiki this” and “Wiki that.”

Visualize Metadata
Wiki is a tool that doesn’t tell us how to structure. Problem is, we are so used to having a structure created for us.

Wiki seem to be dealing with a static truth (working toward a goal) but there are also non-static truth out there (that doesn’t necessarily have a goal.) Can there different kinds of Wikis for both situation?

I want a table where I can see who wrote on this page, and what else did they write.

I want a Time Machine for Wiki. Where you can click on a block of text, then use your mouse’s scroll wheel to display the previous versions of that text.

Most social networks says “build your network first, then use it to your advantage.” Wikipedia says that “build something, the network is the whole wide world.” This is a concept that many people struggle to comprehend with—the fact that the whole wide world, not just people you know or trust can freely change things.

Can we repurpose the Wiki so that you can contribute with whatever style you choose to contribute, and the system would intelligently transcribe it to conform to the ‘Wikipedia language’ and meld it into the existing article? This is comparable to a Machinima. Machinima is a film that’s generated by computer game engines. A user don’t need to worry about mastering the game engine to make a movie. They just need to make a character, put it on the field, position the camera, program the character and camera movements, then let the machine do all the work of translating these hard informations into a movie.

Can we have a Wiki auto-translate and maintain singularity of content between many languages? For example, if make a change to an article in French, the Wiki would automatically translate it to German, Chinese, Bahasa, and every other language, and then sync it to the appropriate pages—and vice versa. This will be very hard to achieve—maintaining language’s subtlety, context and all—but the big idea is this: if we can facilitate the free-flowing movement of ideas between cultures, there can and will be world peace.

*** END NOTATION ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝
Translation: Though attendees often spoke with programmer’s language at times, the subject of Wiki that was discussed was more abstract and conceptual rather than concrete and technical.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Think of it like this. You’re in the year 1992, and somebody decided to put a group of awfully smart thinkers in the room to think about a method to best to navigate, visualize and make sense of the then-wild frontier of the hypertext, err, I mean gopher.

While the discussion was highly conceptual and sometimes indiscernible to my non-technical mind, Ward and everyone was talking about something big. I can feel it coming. And I’m glad that it’s happening right here in Portland.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Humanity and technology, closer than ever.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-10/ Thu, 08 May 2008 08:59:21 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-10/ BarCamp Portland 2008
(All session post-it images are taken by Selena Deckelmann)

When: Friday, May 2, 2008 at 6:00 pm to Sunday, May 4, 2008 at about 3:00 pm, not including the impromptu after-party at Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub and 5 minutes of suicide drink-making act involving the full accoutrements of CubeSpace’s soda machine and syrup bar—“so,” one of the mixer said “you can confidently answer your friends when they asked ‘when did you have your last suicide?’ with ‘in 2008! What about you?’”

Where: CubeSpace, where Startupalooza was held two months ago.

What It’s About: Conference run by participants on various topics, ranging from Pirates Paying Artists to PostgreSQL, XFN to Lying With Statistics, followed by after-dinner Werewolf games—wherein I got hooked but remained very bad at convincing other that I was indeed a villager.

Personally, BarCamp Portland was one of the best events that I have attended in Portland. The atmosphere was both very collaborative and conductive to ideas. The people, extremely smart. And the most important thing of all was that, to me, it seems that participants were there because they wanted to be there, not because they had to. To the attendees, technology may or may not be their day job (in fact, there was a good number of creative and ethnographer types attending as web/graphic designers and market/user researchers, respectively) but it is their passion. And I believe that getting together with people who share the same passion is very important.

When you clearly see that every participant have brilliant ideas just waiting for the right kind of community to adopt and execute them, you simply can’t help but get excited.

BONUS: I see this atmosphere lacking in the creative/advertising community meetups, and would love to organize one. Tweet or email me if you would like to collaborate. Also, if you’re the talented designer in a Titanium Powerbook that came up with the Word Processor app working model that I totally dig (it was based on logical flows of the writing process instead of, uh, a blank sheet of paper,) but for some reason forgot to give me your business card, I would love to hear more about that.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Some sessions are technical, some are not (others are uniquely Portland.) Best of all, you get to pick and choose.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: I’d give it twenty bazzillion fingers if space permits. BONUS: @portlandpolice hinted an alleged appearance to every #Bacon session attendees’ shock and awe.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
More creative energy/sq.ft. than your digs.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-9/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 05:47:01 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-9/ Portland Mac Creative User Group (PDXMUG) – Kelly Guimont Talks Font Management

When: Tuesday, April 15th, 2008, 6:00-8:00 pm

Where: The MacForce store, whereupon I, being the overconfident fellow of the road that I was, thought could I find conveniently perched four–five blocks away from the Hawthorne bridge, which it was—if you take the right exit to the bike trail prior to exiting the bridge. Inside: appropriately themed decor—if you’ve seen their print ad on the paper—leaving nothing to the imagination down to the appearance of 50’s sci-fi movie and Apple ][ computer, perched atop a giant striped rocket ship. Okay, I was just kidding about the rocket ship, but that would be extremely cool, wouldn’t it?

What it’s about: Kelly Guimont, while being the online persona @verso, is secretly a type geek who work with Extensis. She gave a presentation on organizing a computer’s font collections, whether you’re a typophile who reads specimen before bed and gets high on printer’s ink or someone who just like to see his/her TTF/Type1/OpenType files sorted by names for easy usage. BONUS: I learned that the speaker had “seven to eight thousand” typefaces. If that isn’t typographically awesome, I don’t know what else is.

This presentation is well-suited to any designer or creative person, especially if he/she works freelance, since, like me, most freelancers have 1) a lot of typefaces installed in their systems, and 2) some forms of ADD or OCD that will cause them to misplace or mismanage their font library from time to time.

A very short summary of insights that I got from the event is thus:

*** BEGIN NOTATION. ***

While fonts are files, it’s best to not think of them as files, but as little programs that consume memory every time you load up.

Therefore, to make your computer run in its full snappy-performance glory, it’s in your best interest to only enable fonts that you and Mac OS X are going to use, which in most cases would be almost no font at all if you’re just going to browse your Facebook for 6 hours that day. This is where a font management program can come in handy, because hello, you don’t want to remove and reinstall fonts every time you’re using it, and besides, don’t even try to argue about how FontBook is a full-fledged font management program because when you have the entire Adobe FontFolio 11 installed in your system, you do not want to Ctrl+highlight+click 2,300 fonts to temporarily disable them, only to have them enabled again when you restarted your Mac.

NOTE: I feel that, since Mrs. Guimont wore a BATTLESTAR HELVETICA T-shirt that night, she will have more authority to explain the rest of the presentation.

*** END NOTATION. ***

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: You can participate, even though you don’t know that the name Mrs. Eaves implies a saucy, illicit, decades-long dalliance that involved many nights of hot letterpress action in the studio basement.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: the font format and management talk can be technical to some people, but the QuickType™ is sure to wow any client.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Installing 300 fonts will PWN OSX.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-7/ Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:44:36 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-7/ Beer and Blog – Brian Reeder Talks Gaining Traffic From The Social Web

When: Friday, April 4, 2008, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Where: Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub

What it’s about: Part how to thrive in the social media, part how to get your blog post Dugg or Stumbled. A more thorough overview (inspired partly by a nondirect request from @hockley) is thus:

*** BEGIN NOTATION. ***

It sounds bizarre, but only only about 1 percent of the users of most social news sites are responsible for about 80% of the content. They are:

• 5 or 10 top users or “social magnets.”
• About 20 power users, which include our speaker.

To succeed, it’s your job to woo these power users to Dugg or Stumble your site. To do that, first, you need to become a good social media citizen:

• Sign up for a DIGG of StumbleUpon account
• Find quality contents that you enjoy (either in a niche or not), most preferably those from sites less well known.
• Never ever self promote.
• Not have top users as friends, but have their friends as friends.
• Stroke their needs. Talk to them often (IM, Skype, etc.) and not just about social media stuff, please, because you’re already breathing it 24/7.
• With enough time and the right combination of l33t and social skills, you, too, would become a power user.
• At this point, thanks to your worldly connection, almost everything you put up will get Dugg or Stumbled by your friends.

Second, you need to blog about things that are socially friendly. Please note that DIGG, StumbleUpon and ReddIt users like to see different things, and their linkage to your blog will provide different kinds of benefit.

To write something DIGG-friendly:

• You only have 4–5 seconds to impress a Digg user. If he/she didn’t get your post by then, they’ll move along. Mr. Reeder stressed further that “you have to assume that these people [DIGG users] are parakeets [with short attention spans]” then also gave a tip that it’s very important to have a headline that contains a numeric character of some sort, coupled with the wittiest, most snarky punchline that your mind can think of at that moment. So:
  

  “Best Places To Pig Out Around Portland”

  Is less effective than:

  “13 Best Places To Pig Out Around Portland”

  Which, in turn, is less effective than:

  “13 Best Places To Pig Out Around Portland That You Probably Never Heard Of Before Because I Got All These Through My Twitter Followings”

• DIGG’s linkage to your blog will produce the infamous “DIGG effect,” wherein an unusually large number of people will flock, causing your hosting provider to call you at 11 pm saying indiscernible things and then if you can please keep our server racks in Boulder from melting down?

To write something StumbleUpon-friendly:

• We may think that StumbleUpon’s more direct article presentation, along with the relative ease to Stumble a site, puts everyone of its user at the attention level of a 13-year old at a Hannah Montana concert. Completely false. Mr. Keeder said that StumbleUpon users are more likely to stick around, and will probably read through a chunk of your article before they chose to Stumble it.
• However, it should be noted that StumbleUpon’s users are more finicky about the content of the sites that they choose to Stumble—sensationalist headline optional
• StumbleUpon’s linkage to your blog may not generate the ‘one-day spike’ that DIGG will produce, but the traffic will certainly be more sustainable, and thus might generate a more loyal base of subscriber.

To write something ReddIt-friendly:
Write anything ultra-liberal.

What you’ll get by becoming a respected power user and writing social media-friendly articles:

• In the case of DIGG: traffic
• In the case of StumbleUpon: Readership, return of business and del.icio.us posts

On becoming a user of good merit, Rick Turoczy (@turoczy) noted that the process is:

“…much like maintaining a good Twitter account.”

Translation: the ability to be social and give personable messages is paramount. This, after all, is a world called ‘Social Media.’

Justin Kistner (@metafluence) made a comparison that I’m still trying to decode (because I’m still learning this stuff as we go):

“Silicon Florist is to Marshall Kirkpatrick what this guy [Brian Reeder] is to PSHERO.”

Lastly, someone (possibly Mr. Kistner) said that:

“The ‘Send To’ feature in Stumble is the Jesus.”

*** END NOTATION. ***

Technicality: ☝ ½
Translation: Anyone interested in the dynamics of the social media, from a recently converted Mac fanboy to a hardcore Slashdot user, is highly encouraged to attend.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: Exploring this topic is like opening a whole ’nother can of worm. A lot of this was also about human nature and social behavior, two subjects that I always found to be inherently thought-provoking.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Blogless drinkers welcome. Drinkless bloggers welcome.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-6/ Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:56:44 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/04/03/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-6/ Portland Web Innovators – Publishing Platform Wars

UPDATE: A review from PDXWI’s honcho, Adam Duvander, filled with an “overwhelming amount of coolness,” can be found here.

When: Wednesday, April 2, 2008, 7:00 – 9:00 PM, though some stayed on for approximately 20 minutes to talk and (possibly) get a beer afterwards.

Where: ISITE Design, who probably has the only building in Portland equipped with to a “Push To Exit” button, whose conference room was fully stocked with coffee, pizza, Rice Krispies Treats®, a wireless network with a melody that one must hum following connection time—all prerequisites for having a proper geek gathering—as well as a projector that’s so small, it might as well be an ADSL modem.

What It’s About:
Strengths and Weaknesses of 3 Content Management System.

• WordPress, presented by our hosts, Will Moore (@syrupcore) and Paul Farning (@waytoocrowded.) Most people in the audience already used WordPress on their blogs, but molding it into a CMS is an entirely another thing. I learned that WordPress is at once as simple and not as simple as it looked.
• Drupal, presented by Lev Tsypin (@loubabe), which looked to be a very powerful and extendable system that can do almost anything—from blogging to building a VIRB clone to feeding your 3 Laperm kittens and predicting the result of the 2008 election—but as a result has a relatively steep learning curve, and, as Jason Grigsby (@grigs) mentioned, a rather trial-and-error approach to plugins.
• ExpressionEngine, presented by Josh Pyles (@pixelmatrix), which I think had the right amount of feature set to be useful for people who demand power but are not coders (ie. designers and visual people.) I appreciated the fact that the speaker emphasized this during his presentation.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ½ (Adam had also let me know that not all PDX Web Innovators events are this way.)
Translation: While the presenters did demo the installation and implementation process, a basic knowledge of CMS is recommended—where by “basic knowledge” I mean “having the experience of maintaining any blog on any platform.” Since most, if not all of the people who were present already had this skill, my original score was two and a half. I added two because people went into the technical side of things like implementing custom scripts, which, while I’m going to admit was very useful, did require some basic PHP-include knowledge.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Thanks to this event, I’m now a newly converted ExpressionEngine believer and Drupal watcher. I’m still looking to see how platforms like Movable Type compare to the three CMSes.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
WordPress 2.5 = sexy. Bird poop = not.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/portland-creativetech-event-review-5/ Tue, 01 Apr 2008 01:49:30 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/portland-creativetech-event-review-5/ DorkBot PDX 0×01

When: Sunday, March 30, 2008, 6:00 – 8:00 PM, and, like most geek events around Portland, tends to have the addition of spontaneous speakers, finish about an hour later as a result, and use way too many commas in a paragraph.

Where: PNCA Graduate Studios, one of PNCA campuses that’s located beside REI, wherein my journey to get to the said place can be described as thus: 1) Left a friend’s apartment nearby, 2) Approached main campus, 3) Attention diverted by two guys talking in front of the PNCA entrance across the street, thought that the event might be held there, proven wrong, 4) Walked across the street to the main campus, asked receptionist, directed to “the building across REI,” 5) Went to the instructed building, which was in the same block as the one where I asked the two guys, 6) Instructed that I approached the wrong building again, and that the phrase “across REI” really meant “across from REI’s side entrance,” 7) Realized mistake/silliness/bad sense of direction, 8.) Proceeded to the correct building, wherein a ‘DorkBot PDX’ sign was conspicuously posted on the inside window, set in all caps (typeface: probably Helvetica), each letter printed on a sheet of paper. Entered with glee.

What It’s About:

• Lego robots built by highschool girls to make art, thereby ensuring that “web developer” and “computer engineer” were firmly planted as their future career choices. The most concrete and decidedly un-geeky out of all three presentations.
• Biologically inspired robots that also make art, but were composed of $1 processors, conceived and explained by the founder of Wiki himself, Ward Cunningham. In Mr. Cunningham’s own word: “I make stuff that’s simple enough, the whole thing can be illustrated in ASCII art.” Bonus: robot that waves flag around (that I truly regret for not having any evidence thereof.)
• Constructing your own programming language from FORTH. Based on a premise that if “all human languages are convivial, why aren’t all computer languages?” Bonus: ASCII-style presentation in a text editor (!) on Linux.

Technicality: ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: if the premise of an all-out vi–Emacs war doesn’t give you an instant hard-on, you’d be better off staying home.

Interestingness: ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: I loved the concept, but wasn’t geeky enough to get it.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Intelligence +2, Wisdom +2, Charisma -2

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-4/ Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:01:37 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/30/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-4/ Startupalooza

When: Saturday, March 29, 2008, 12:00 PM – 7:00 PM, conveniently followed by a happy hour wherein the good folks at Vidoop kindly picked the tab up.

Where: CubeSpace, which, unlike the previously reviewed venue, had a clearly written sign on its front that was actually readable (props for using Helvetica)—although still without the traffic-facing billboard. Thanks to them, this event boasted one of the nicest cat herders, foamiest beers and largest concentration of ergonomic office chairs in the nation—not to mention one of the most prominent acknowledgments of geekiness in the open.

What It’s About: stories of successes, mistakes, struggle and perpetual ramen dinner from brilliant start-uppers who fell in love with Portland. Also, product demonstration that was guaranteed to keep you in the loop (and keep your inbox filled with beta invitations.) Bonus: an inside joke created in 5 straight minutes, involving trembling hands and a poke at SXSW’s blunder.

Technicality (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: half-and-half. The talks and panel discussion were fairly accessible, and the demos were pretty technical.

Interestingness (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: if learning from and having conversations with Portland’s greatest innovators (and, in some cases, even luminaries) for a whole day failed to excite your mind to want to create something bigger than yourself (a startup, collaborative, group, side project, community activity, etc.), I don’t know what else will.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Portland’s Creative/Tech Renaissance: so overdue.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-3/ Sat, 29 Mar 2008 19:25:12 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-3/ Beer And Blog – Scott Kveton On Implementing Openid On Your Blog

When: Friday, March 28, 2008, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Where: Green Dragon Bistro & Brewpub, a place that had no sign sticking out of the building whatsoever (although it was both painted green and decorated with a dragon)—a sign which can inform prospective visitors and event participants who may have circled a block only fifty feet away from the bar for twenty full minutes and is now late to the event—but one that also boasts great atmosphere and a humbling, full-on brewery on the back, and a set of bathrooms wherein someone who had been drinking too much that evening may interpret the symbol in front of its door as an inverted exclamation mark.

What It’s About: so you’re a totally rad, cyber-savvy sleuth who had, like, two accounts each on MySpace, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Ning, Stumbleupon, Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo!, iGoogle, Microsoft Live, Alltop and IconBuffet (you fully know about the fact that this one doesn’t allow more than one identity per person, but you happen to be very, very good at concealing it, so what the hell.) So, two accounts: one for your collection of Truemors and The Onion kind of news and your more reserved side of personality, and one for everything under the sky that will make your significant other jealous.

And say you had just opened an online banking account, and the password’s gotta be different because hello, it’s your/your child’s entire play/college money that’s in there. But you can’t possibly create and be asked to remember another 16-digit randomized password. Your brain know this.

So what do you do? You open an OpenID (ironically registering and generating another set of password while doing so) so now you can log in on almost all of the sites I mentioned above simply by hitting “login with OpenID” and then entering something like “brampitoyo.myopenid.com” or “brampitoyo.myvidoop.com” (where ‘MyOpenID’ and ‘Vidoop’ are the OpenID providers) in the box and clicking “allow” in the window that opens afterward. Doing this will then leave your brain with enough room to memorize that 16-digit combinations. Problem solved.

Bonus: imagine if I can shorten that URL even more—say, to “brampitoyo.com”—just by following a simple, ten-minute tutorial.

Technicality (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: even though I didn’t understand all of the stuff that was presented (note: Scott Kveton, the presenter, was a Terminal beast who, by some kind of a divine grace, is connected to everyone that matters in the ’net,) I should had I host Link En Fuego myself. In other words, if you’re an active blogger working on WordPress, you should be able to understand it.

Interestingness (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: Boy, is this a small town. I got to meet people who also went to the iPhone SDK event last monday, and will most likely meet again at the Startupalooza.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Two lines are all it takes. Yeah.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-2/ Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:46:28 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/portland-creativetech-event-review-pcter-2/ Friends of DemocracyLab

When: Thursday, March 27, 2008, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Where: East Burn, which has a bar downstairs, restaurants upstairs, patio outside, and a private meeting room so enormous, complete with two large tables and a yellow-tiled pantry, that contains within it several more private meeting rooms, and within it several more meeting rooms, and yet even more rooms within the aforementioned rooms—ad infinitum.

What it’s about: DemocracyLab, to put it simply, is a politically-centered wiki-meets-forum with a tiny bit of social networking thrown in that aims to shake down political apathy by splitting seemingly hard political issues into smaller, more understandable parts (values, positions, policies.) It’s a concept that even I had trouble of fully grasping because of its sheer complexity (even though it’s going to be dead simple to use) and mindset shift that will need to happen. Anyway, thanks to all this, and several other projects involving Oregon150 and school districts around Portland, DemocracyLab needs all the help that it can get. Bonus: Like everything else in Portland, it’s open source, community centered, and filled with some of the nicest and most brilliant individuals on earth.

Technicality (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: accessible to everyone. DemocracyLab was trying to get as many people into the game as possible. I put three-and-a-half up there, because the event got one or two fingers up until we discussed how the site should behave, wherein everybody went crazy with suggestions and critiques. All good.

Interestingness (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: I learned from firsthand account that night that the desire to be politically active is dismal, not only among the educated and well-off, but also among the poor and underpowered. About the only people who care about politics are politicians and lobbyists and people with special interests—and, hello, not enough regular citizens.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
With complexity comes possibilities, great ideation.

]]> http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/the-first-in-a-hopefully-ongoing-series-about-my-learnings-from-various-creative-and-tech-events-around-portland/ Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:00:54 +0000 Bram Pitoyo http://linkenfuego.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/the-first-in-a-hopefully-ongoing-series-about-my-learnings-from-various-creative-and-tech-events-around-portland/ All this in a column that I would call, somewhat bluntly, the Portland Creative/Tech Event Review (PC/TER).

Here goes nothing.

Mobile Portland

When: Monday, March 24, 2008 at 6:00 PM

Where: eROI conference room, perched atop what felt like climbing up fifteen flights of grey stairs in an otherwise nondescript and very cramped hallway—this, after incidentally bumping up into one of their staff at the place that they would sometimes mutter among themselves at lunchtimes and email litmus testing parties to be the “secret entrance.”

What it’s about: iPhone SDK and the ongoing debate whether how open or closed the platform really was, or is going to be. Bonus: a two-minute iPhone simulator demo that was met with a lot of cheer and desire to see more.

Technicality (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝ ½
Translation: if you don’t know the technicalities of Cocoa and the zen of writing in Objective C, you’d be better off going next door. Either Backspace or Ground Kontrol will do and be infinitely more entertaining.

Interestingness (on a scale of 1 to 5): ☝ ☝ ☝ ☝
Translation: I’m a wannabe geek who desperately want to get in the Portland tech community even though I have to lie my heart off. Just kidding. Actually, even though I’m not a developer/coder by nature, I am very interested in the prospect of using the iPhone platform to evolve the data collection/aggregation part of Account Planning.

What I Learned From The Event In Six Words:
Jailbroken by NerveGas, Sanctioned By O’Reilly.

UPDATE: much thanks to Jason Grigsby (@grigs) whom I met tonight at PDXWI’s Publishing Platform Wars and had let me know that he linked to this review firsthand, which then brought more attention.

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