SXSW07 Panel Notes: World Domination via Collaboration

I've started going through my detailed SXSW notes, with the hope of pulling together my thoughts on what I've learned as it applies to my future plans. I remember having those thoughts, but now I've got to make them real.

The first panel up is World Domination via Collaboration, moderated by BlogHer co-founder Jory Des Jardins. She happens to be one of my favorite writers on the web too. The gist of the panel: running a community in a business world, an idea that makes me clench my teeth in anticipation of the gnashing that might normally follow. However, it's actually been successfully done; on the panel was Jessical Hardwick of SwapThing, a community-driven online barter site (note to self: cool!); Jenna Woodul of LiveWorld, an online community-building company; Betsy Aoki, the mastermind behind Microsoft's ten zillion blogs and rescuer of fallen communities; and Lisa Stone, media strategist, blogger, and BlogHer co-founder.

As an aside, I didn't realize it at the time, but the idea of community would continue to pop up throughout the festival. Although I tend to think of myself as not being very sociable, I've actually been involved with online communities for quite a while; Jenna's background was helping run AppleLink Personal Edition, which was my first online service experience in college. I became an Apple Forum Consultant for the Apple II Graphics Forum when I was 20 or 21, became a chat host, and was part of various online communities from 1989 to 1997. At that point I became too busy with work and detached from the Internet, but in 2004 I got snagged by Orkut and rediscovered the power of online cameraderie. And you know what? It feels good. I have an inkling that was a key component of whatever was in store for me. Plus, I have always been amused by the idea of "World Domination" in the Pinky and the Brain cartoon-like way. But I digress...

Key Ideas from the Panel (that I happened to write down)

Unfortunately I didn't always note which panelist said what, so I've sort of jumbled them all together below; I'd categorize these as answers to what are some factors that contribute to successful integration of community and business needs?

• Community Relationships: Lisa Stone said this throughout the panel:Ask, don't tell. The gist is that your community is the prime source for ideas and suggestions that will create a better community, which is what you ultimately want. You're unlikely to be able to come up with it all by yourself, so let the community answer your questions for you. Your job as a community leader is to provide community standards, culture, and to set the mission for everyone for community benefit.

• Corporate Adoptation of Community: Jenna Woodul observed that there's a tendency for companies to think about community as technology, when it's really about figuring out what the "linkage" is with the people you want to the site. Jenna mentioned the Dove What is Real Beauty campaign as an example (you may have seen the transformation video, here's the behind the scenes clip on YouTube). Note to self: Yes. I have been thinking about not working on projects that demand either technology or design ahead of content. It seems insane to me to do it that way, but people keep asking for this. I think it's partly because technology and design are much more tangible, in some respect, than ideas. Hm, is this what being a "Strategy Consultant" is all about?

• Community Forgiveness: Forgiveness is almost infinite if you get the community to contribute to the solution. Great quote from Jessica Hardwick.

• Community Needs a Voice: Betsy Aoki, queen of 10,000 blogs, described how she revived a dying community by becoming the public earpiece that people could complain to. She acknowledged the validity of every complaint, explained the situation, and bought some time for the community powers to make changes. Awesome! When you respond in person, take responsibility, and make something happen, that's an opportunity to turn back the tide of negativity one person at a time. But boy, you had better deliver. Otherwise, you're just another P.R. flack.

  On another note, people tend to look for a voice, and rally around it. The qualities of a voice, from my limited experience, is that of authenticity, the ability to effect change, a certain selflessness, connectedness with what's going on, good timing, and a practicer of community values. Once you're the voice, you're it. People look toward you as an authority figure and you become the primary anchor for the chains of trust that start to grow. So remember that. The same lessons apply to CEOs and squad leaders.

• Letting Go: Letting a community forum grow organically seems to work best...from the community's perspective. This doesn't always sit well with corporations, who have an innate fear of bad press except it's in committee and therefore even more difficult to overcome. The same principle from Betsy's observation. However, when people get together they will talk and getting this kind of feedback from people is invaluable if one knows how to deal with it. You can either acknowledge and fix it (creating customer loyalty) or ignore and bury it (creating customer apathy).

• Grassroots Support, Trust, and Transparency: Joining any kind of community is the beginning of a relationship. So NEVER LIE. And ENFORCE community standards in person, don't just delete posts. Someone pointed out that if someone is acting out in a real community, someone would take that person aside and see what was up. You should do the same in a virtual community. Make sure those standards are clearly stated too.

• Clear Community Standards and Enforcement: As the community leader you're establishing the rules so everyone can have a good time. It's also good when someone other than the community leader can take the heat, because sometimes people aren't comfortable talking to the chief. BA had a good story about how when things once got a little heated, she invented "Norbert the Cod of Conduct", which was a fish somewhat like a character out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. Norbert would speak in a chipper tone to help moderate the conversation in an entertaining way. Genius :-) W

  Betsy Aoki made an interesting comment in the beginning of the panel: A common threat that faces online communities is the lack defense mechanisms to use against the trolls, spammer, griefers, and pains-in-the-ass who want to ruin the site for everyone. It can take done the tone of a community very quickly. Giving community members the power to self-police bad behavior with tools (flagging, for example) is a wonderful thing. You still need the firm hand of authority guiding this, of course, to ensure that community standards are truly being upheld. I wonder what books on law enforcement say on this matter; it reminds me a bit of a community watch program. I would theorize that effective community defense of any kind is comprised of three parts: empowering the neighborhood watch, providing absolutely clear guidelines for both positive values and bad behavior, and having the will and authority to enforce compliance with transparency and justice.

• Identity: The following is my reflection on the subject, not a paraphrasing of the panel: A community thrives not only on participation, but on characters as well. You know the type: funny comeback guy, helpful guy, information guy, pleasant guy, the upcoming noob, etc. Even if you don't know their real names, their identity is something that you come to know, and becomes precious. The TV version of Densha Otako, a story about an otaku who with the help of an online BBS learns to date beyond his "social status" (think of it as "an original manga" version of a Japanese Beauty and the Geek), does an interesting job of dramatizing online identity with intercuts of the actual people behind the screennames. If you've got a cool sister like I do, she will bring over the ENTIRE TV SERIES and make you watch the whole thing by her side. And you WILL understand online identity, and why it's so important. There's also a movie, but I didn't like it quite as much.

  Anyway, being part of a community means you create an identity, which doesn't necessarily have to be based on your REAL WORLD identity. An identity is something that people invest in, and you need to provide the tools to allow this. When you have a community that values identity, community-based action tools (moderation, self-policing) becomes much more powerful because accountability starts to mean something. One of the panelists mentioned how this attitude toward identy can be baked effectively into the community technology itself; for example, Slashdot allows anonymous posting, but labels them as "Anonymous Cowards" in the comment stream. A general rule of thumb I came away with is that while you can allow people to not use their real world names, completely anonymous contribution is more like a a "grafitti wall" (Jenna Woodul). There's some instances where that might be desirable, but if you want a community with substantive participation, participants must have an identity.

• Engaging the Lurkers: It's difficult to engage an entire group 100% with the same kind of activity; in an online community, the primary means of participation is through writing. Since not everyone is comfortable writing publically, providing other ways of participation is a Good Thing. There are ways that people can contribute and know they are "making a difference": polls, uploading photos, pointing out corrections, etc. From a game design sense, the general principle is that for every action there is some kind of discernable benefit (or disadvantage, in the case of behavior that is against community standards).

  Betsy and Lisa described some of the other challenges of engaging the lurkers, which I'd broadly describe as issues of community leadership. If you want people to feel comfortable posting, then you need to set that example of openness yourself. If you want more people to start participating, you may need to provide training or guidance to help people get over that initial hump. Everyone can use a hand at some point, and an encouraging cameraderie can make all the difference. Sometimes it's hard for lurkers to see the value of what they might contribute, so some private 1-on-1 can help. As was repeated throughout the panel, communities are built one person at a time.

Application of Community to Business

I've been thinking a lot about community these days, because I'd like to be part of the population that builds "creative sanctuary" in the world. I don't know why this is---I could blame my exposure to idealistic, hard-working people like my parents or reading Robert Heinlen before I learned to think for myself---but this is a path that seems natural. So how do I apply these lessons of community toward this?

Mechanically speaking, I think the general community-building process can be distilled to this:

You can provide the tools and the resources to build a community, which will result in one of the following outcomes:

A. The community grows organically, growing first from the energy you supply, then feeding on its own energy as passionate, active people and their followers contribute to its life. You don't know what exactly is going to come out, but once it does you'll have an opportunity to do something with it.

or

B. The community dies because you've undernourished some aspect of it, or people have decided that your community isn't for them because their needs are not met, or the benefits to them are not clear.

I find the similarities between successful community and successful company very interesting too:

• To survive, both entities need the attention of people. This means attention on the part of the leaders, and attention from participants to create a critical mass of social interaction that produces more leaders, more meaning, and more energy.
• Each also needs strong leadership to set the tone, direction, and vision for the organization. Without this, a community may grow "wild" and fracture in unexpected ways. This may or may not be important to you if you just want to see something grow, but if you are thinking of harnessing that energy in some manner, then you had better be on the ball.
• Each entity needs to offer a compelling reason for people to join or use their service/product. Again. Clear benefits.
• People will stick around only if the benefit is tangible, and the experience of getting that benefit is mostly positive for them.
• Remember that not every company or community appeals to every type of person; this is a case where the desires of the individual is not as important as the overall vision and tone for the community.

The differences between a non-monetized community and for-profit company are probably assets and control structures:

• In a community, the main assets are identity, reputation, information, and support. In a company, the main assets are the people you've got (or "own" through employee contract in exchange for cash and benefits) and revenue-generating products and services.

• In a community, control is indirect. It's applied through the setting of community standards and the mission that will promote the growth of the community. In a company, control tends to be applied directly; employees are understood to be contributors to an execution plan, with the overall strategy and end-game visible to those at the top.

• The corporate ideal is control leading to purposeful and efficient action. The community ideal is meaningful action arising from emergent community desire.

• In a community, a participant is rewarded as his/her identity is increasingly recognized. In a company, an employee is compensated for doing his/her job with money, though recognition is also a factor.

For those seeking to integrate the two---profitable company versus community---the differences would at first seem to be at odds with each other. However, this is only if you see traditional company structure as the equal of community; because I've presented an A vs B structure in my dissection, this may seem so. That's an interesting observation in itself, actually. We're conditioned by the media to believe that companies are somehow more powerful and capable of direct action than communities. Companies represent a concentration of will, and in a one-on-one battle will dominate an individual. Communities represents slow-moving tidal forces, a mass of individuals with a shared goal inexorably enveloping and overwhelming the relative few of even a large company. Ask who would come out on top in this matchup: LASER BEAM versus THE SUN. It depends on the rules of the game, of course. A fundmental rule is that while the correlated emissions of a company structure is capable of generating very high efficiencies relative to the unorganized masses, companies are dependent on biomass; that is, people in large numbers to buy their services. The larger the company, the more dependent they are on people as a statistical concept that plugs into their financial projections.

Nevertheless, a commercial entity is something that I'd like to have, because it would become the engine to fund projects that I think would be meaningful to the individual. Some successful hybrids have arisen that seem to have figured out a balance between the empowered individual and corporate profits:

• Businesses that include community as the motive force within the business model (e.g. Skinnycorp, which is more widely known for Threadless).

• Businesses that have a culture of empowering individual drive to help dissolve the barrier between company and consumer. Company employees are, in essence, community leaders, empowered to represent the company to the outside world. I can't think of any good examples...maybe Google or Southwest Airlines? Employees who are conditioned by culture to pay attention to the customer and bring that perspective back inside the company (where it can actually effect some useful change) are a powerful asset.

In my limited experience, I've found that companies tend to have an "inside" and an "outside" mentality. This is probably necessary for focus so people can actually get work done, but a good company should also be smart enough to know the difference between the "looking inwards perspective" (operations, covering your ass) and "looking outwards" (strategy, marketing, mission, products). The movement of ideas between the inside and outside, such that a transformation of process or understanding can occur, is where things get hard. Looking is not enough. It's easy to get caught up in what you need to do for your coworkers, and it's easy to forget that the people outside your company are more than just statistically-modeled sources of revenue. You tend to place importance on the people that you are interactive with directly, after all: your immediate coworkers, your manager, your family. The fusion of community with business may boil down to two main principles: providing the means to build individual relationships, coupled with tangible products/services that encourage both immediate and long-term formation of those relationships. And on top of that, the inclusion of community forces from the outside world into the business. Which means the dissolution of the wall that defines the inside and outside of a company.

Audience versus Community

There are some that are applying the community model as an engine for attracting eyeballs, which is essentially treating people as "biomass" to gather in one place, creating advertising and profile-raising opportunities:

• User-provided content companies like YouTube
• The American Idol music-making enterprise
• Entertainment-based portals like NewGrounds
• MySpace and SecondLife, which are more like new forms of "hot real estate"

They're all harnessing the power of individuals to cluster by shared interest, objects, or locations, and the companies that can track and agregate those individual attributes into statistically-meaningful channels and demographics can then "sell eyeballs" to those who want to get more revenue per advertising dollar spent.

This is a different sense of community than what this panel was describing...actually, what I'm talking about here is audience, which is one-way. A true community-based business of the first kind (e.g. Threadless) is driven by fulfillment of the desires of the member base. Businesses of the second kind are driven by getting in front of the best demographic for your product.

The former also implies (to me, anyway) that everyone benefits, while the latter is more for the benefit of the product seller. That's not automatically bad---after all, the product could be genuinely cool, and people just needed to find out about it. Perhaps I am also sensitive to this issue because I am trying to figure out the best way to start my own business doing more of what I like by making and selling things. Through these things, I want everyone to be empowered to pursue their particular form of happiness. Selfishly speaking, it's because I want the same thing. And for me, that comes down to creating community, not attracting an audience. It's a subtle distinction that I didn't pick up on because the mechanisms and metrics used (in my case, blogging) are very similar. The underlying motivation, however, is what's different.

Whew. I thought this post would never end :-)

I’m a Twitter

There was a lot of talk about Twitter at SXSW this year. Though the concept seemed trivial and useless to me when I first heard of it, it does do one thing very well: closeness through shared environmental context. A big part of friendship is just hanging out and doing things together without direct communication. You can learn a lot about someone by just watching what they're doing; Twitter is a kind of virtual version of that.

So here's my Twitter profile...I'm going to give this a try for a couple weeks and see what happens. The theory is that I might feel like I'm part of a tribe.

SXSW Tuesday: Finishing Well

I'm trying to think of a way to summarize the last day of SXSW07 Interactive. The phrase that comes to mind that it was a day of rededication. After four solid days of panels, a certain path is becoming clearer, and everyone I met today seemed to play a part in the journey. I'll likely write more about this once I get back home, and have had some time to reread what I've been posting over the past few days. I apologize for the raw quality of the posts; they are intended to serve as placeholders for my emotional response to the panels, which I am unlikely to remember in detail after a day.

Today was a pretty random day, as I hadn't really planned what panels I would attend. I again repeated my strategy of eschewing the more straightforward web development and design panels for the ones about people and content creation.

The Future of the Book: Dead or Alive

At yesterday's visit to the tradeshow, I had come across the Blurb Print On Demand Book booth and spent some time chatting with them. I was incredibly excited by the possibilities, and this got me thinking again how books as tangible artifacts were so much more appealing to me these days than computers. I saw that Eileen Gittins, the CEO of Blurb, was on this panel, and decided to check it out. An unexpected bonus was remeeting Britt, who I'd just met the day before, at the panel, and we had a fun conversation about books and shared some thoughts on the SXSW experience. The statement that I remember most vividly was how great it was to be in a group of people who were all so exciting about doing things that were inspiring and awesome...and this set the tone for the rest of the day. I was reminded that I have reconnected with the people who matter most to me. I also got a chance to chat a bit more with Andrew Switzky from yesterday, who was attending the same panel.

The panel opened with a wry observation that a panel about books seemed very out of place at a festival like SXSW. For me, I had picked this panel over the others because I thought as interesting as they were, a panel about books might offer the kind of historical perspective that the panelists were likely to offer would be the most valuable takeaway of the morning.

Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive, had some interesting statistics about how the cost of short-run book production has dropped due to toner-based technologies. Scanning a book costs about 10 cents a page to do it right, and reproduction in black and white is about 1 cent per page. To print a book, including covers, costs about $3.00. Wow. He also showed off one of the very hard-to-obtain OLPC prototypes, the $100 laptop for the "One Laptop Per Child" initiative. I got to hold it, and though the build quality felt a little on the chintzy side, what really grabbed me was the screen. It's a 200DPI screen that can be viewed in direct sunlight with 12 hours of battery life...this is fabulous. While the horsepower is pretty limited compared to other laptops, I'm excited by the possibilities offered by a display that's usable outside. If you've ever tried to work outside on a sunny day, you know what I mean.

Terri Ducay, VP of Cheskin Design, made an interesting observation about how books really about user experience. Books are more than just a vehicle for delivering words for people. She suggested that instead of asking whether the Book is dead or alive, ask what the new user experience is going to be. Note to self: I should investigate the user experience groups in Boston. I liked Terri's passion for it.

Another panelist made the observation that the traditional publishing model, which takes up to 40% of the book price for distribution, has parallels with venture capital. A publisher loans the author an advance against future royalties; they're essentially funding the possibility of a book selling enough to recoop the initial investment in an author. The ability to self-publish very small print runs for small groups of people (say, your grandmother) who really care about your book, without incurring the costs of a print run, creates some pretty wonderful opportunities for the independent content creator building a support community.

Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer

While I have been working to establish my freelance business processes, at heart I would rather be an independent developer doing my own thing. I went freelance in 2004 because I thought I would then have no excuse to NOT pursue indie development, but that didn't end up happening. This panel, featuring successful indie designer-developers like Nick Bradbury (creator of HomeSite), John Gruber (Daring Fireball), and Shaun Inman (Mint), sounded like it might give me some insights into the development process.

The panel itself was illuminating in an unexpected way: it legitimized the idea of being small and creating first for myself. There were several good tidbits:

• The Death of the Startup has been rumored since last SXSW. We're no longer motivated by the IPO, and we're fine being small.

• A quote from a book, "Architecture of Happiness": Great Design Speaks to you, it has something to say.

• The iPod Giggle: When you hand someone an iPod and they start using it for the first time, they invariably giggle. That's a wonderful thing.

• Iteration and learning as you need things is a pretty common approach. I liked Shaun Inman's approach: having the freedom to take tangents.

• Structure of the Day: This I was very interested in because I've been experimenting with my daily routine to see what might happen. None of the panelists have had problems with daily structure, but I think it's also notable that they are all married, which imposes its own structure: that of the loving relationship. That might be the best motivation of all.

There was other discussion about problems facing the single-person operation, such as scaling up, support, and so forth.

Revisiting the Trade Show

I went back to check out the difference between Blurb and Lulu.com in terms of printing quality...I am SUPER FUSSY about stuff like that. So now I'm torn:

• I liked the Blurb booth a lot...it was very much about empowering people (yeah!) and was staffed by friendly creatives that were totally jazzed to be providing this service. They had books scattered all over the place

• The Lulu booth had a good selection of their products, which is broader than Blurb's offerings. I didn't quite feel the same connection, though, as I did with the Blurb booth.

The dilemma: I liked Lulu's print out better than what I saw at Blurb's booth. Kevin Kelly reviewed both services some time ago and says they both rock. His article notes that these companies use different print engines, and to my eyes this was apparent: Lulu output was less shiny but more uniform in color surface finish (a sort of semi-matte). Text was also crisp and black. Several of Blurb's books, by comparison, had a kind of low-res color-fringe look to the text, as if it had been printed 4-color instead of straight black (I didn't have a loupe with me, so I couldn't really check for certain). When I pointed this out to a staff person yesterday, she said it was because that particularly book had be laid out completely in another application, not Blurb's tool. I looked again today to see if it was something I could live with...I'm not sure. I think most people are not as anal as I am about stuff like this, and wouldn't notice. What I'll do is prepare a sample on both services and see how it goes.

I also ran into another reader at the trade show, Lance Romanoff, who had written to me just prior to SXSW. We chatted a bit about parties we'd been to, and found we had a common desire to have QUIET alcohol-free parties. Lance is also in New England, and we chatted about the New England New Media group I used to run more actively...I'd like to resurrect it. Between the people I've met at SXSW and Barcamp, I think pulling some kind of get together in the near future will be possible. Community!

Will Wright Keynote Speech

Will Wright presented a very fast-paced, articulate, and intelligent discussion of storytelling and game structure. Between this panel and yesterday's Warren Spector presentation, I've been feeling the tug of nostalgia for game design. The main takeaway from the speech is personal: I really should start formalizing my thoughts on design and storytelling for myself, so I can articulate them with greater ease. I would say my design process at the moment is more intuitive and based on having grown up playing and building interactive systems, and I think it's time to start laying down some principles as the basis of my practice. The trick will be laying them out in a flexible way that guides without binding.

Girl Video Gamers Teach You the Facts About Successful Marketing

I actually was planning on going to the Avatar panel, but ended up in the wrong part of the building. So, I went to the Girl Video Gamers Marketing panel instead...it was my second choice anyway. I got a chance to catch up with LeaLea, who I had met at the Boss Lady panel a couple days ago. I have been following her website on-and-off for the past year or so, which is a really impressive example of how a self-starting, professionally-minded graphic designer can start growing her business. I find that really inspiring and encouraging.

The panel featured two gamer girl clans, the Frag Dolls and PMS Clan. The Frag Dolls are sponsored by UBISOFT, a game publisher, and because of this they are sometimes assumed to be "fake" girl gamers hired to dupe wide-eyed 14yo boys into parting with their allowances. However, this is not the case, and Amy Brady will kick your ass if you say otherwise. I was watching her gleefully slaughter a number of sullen young males in some version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter at the Screenburn Arcade. What was very cool was that the online marketing manager for the Frag Dolls, Morgan Romine, was also a Frag Doll and actively competing. I should mention that they're a professional gamer group in the growing sport of competitive video gaming. There's real money and skill in these tournaments, and it's largely dominated by male teams. The mission of groups like PMS Clan (an independent clan) are to support and grown the woman gamer demographic, which I think is totally awesome because it is one more way that a disenfranchised group (girl gamers) can pull themselves up to the level of recognition that they deserve.

The theme that rang through the panel was that authenticity is absolutely critical to their existence and effectiveness in reaching their demographic. The authenticity theme has been repeated in every community-related session I've attended. It was fantastic to see three women who were so utterly devoted to being the real thing, as role models for their chosen constituency, and in pursuing their passions in the face of a sometimes-hostile environment (smack- talking egotistical males desperate to mask their incompetence through bullying).

On a side note, I re-met Christine-From-The-Balcony. She was someone who I met on the smoking balcony at the last SXSW; she'd helped me take a picture of myself. It's nice to reconnect with people! We had a brief-but-interesting chat about cultural gaps in certain concepts. Did you know that Korean and Slavic languages have no equivalent construct to the double-negative? When you're working with programmers in those countries, you have to be careful to provide instructions in a culturally-compatible way, otherwise the work won't get done right.

The Global Microbrand: Are Blogs, Suits and Wine the New Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll?

The last session of the day is traditional Bruce Sterling's SXSW Closing Rant. I loved last year's rant, but I'm also pretty sure that the podcast will capture a lot of the fire. Instead, I wanted to close out my SXSW experience by seeing some of my personal blogging heroes in one last panel. As it turned out, this was probably the most important panel for me for the entire festival.

So what is a global microbrand? Hugh McCleod relayed a story about a 200 year-old English shotgun manufacturer that decided to stay small. If you've got $80,000 and a need for a custom shotgun, these are the guys you go to. This is an example of a global microbrand.

It had never really occured to me that becoming a "global microbrand" was the path that I'm on, but I reckon it's true. I really want to make great product that is genuinely useful to people, and I love working on it. What's been the challenge is figuring out how to "monetize" it without losing the essence of what I'm doing. And that essence was very well summarized by Kathy Sierra's "7 Virtues" to follow. These have worked for her:

• Be Grateful -- There are 55 million blogs on Technorati! That anyone is spending time reading YOU for even 30 seconds is a rare and wonderful thing. It is the gift of attention. Receive it mindfully.

• Be Humble -- It's not about you. It's about giving your readers the credit for being who they are.

• Be Patient -- It takes a while for the seeds you're planting now to sprout into traffic. It took CPU about 1.5 years to start really catching on.

• Be Brave -- Avoid death by risk aversion! Some people will hate your stuff, others will love you. Avoid that zone of mediocrity, where you try not to offend anyone.

• Show Respect -- The value of the time your readers give is really worth a lot, so be respectful of their time. On a side note, this is something I should work at...I tend to write waaay too long (these SXSW posts, for example).

• Be Generous -- Give people super powers, give stuff away, help people in any way you can. Put that karma out there, let people use your stuff.

• Be Motivating -- As an outside influence, you have the power to help people get going ("outside expert syndrome"). Talk to the brain, not the mind! Don't name drop!

On that last virtue, I've been guilty of name-dropping over the past few days, though at the time I was doing it I didn't think it through. I like dropping everyone's name...if I met you and we talked about something cool, I want to mention it to everyone. My reason for doing this is motivated by---and I might be rationalizing this---the desire to present a level playing field. I use myself as an example for a lot of the weird ideas I have about the psychology of productivity because (1) I'm an easy target and (2) by being as open as I know how to be about my experiences, I am hoping that people with similar issues can see maybe they're not alone. I know what that feels like, and it sucks to be in that dark place wondering what the hell is wrong with yourself. Well, you're NOT alone. It's just sometimes hard to find the person standing right next to you, until you learn to squint in the right way.

Where was I? Oh, it was a great panel, and provided the right finish to the festival for me. Hugh said something pretty wonderful at the end, that the reason we're here is because of LOVE. That is, at heart, the business that we're in, and at the moment he said that a lot of things clarified for me. First, I knew I wasn't alone in thinking this, though I hadn't even thought it out loud. I had used words like "empowerment" and "passion" to distance myself from this very intimate, powerful, NO TURNING BACK ONCE YOU'VE SAID IT turn of phrase. But yeah...I think this is it. I want to be a part of this, because for whatever reason I just want to love in the way that Hugh implied. It's a personal commitment without expectation of return, except we know that it IS karmically connected back with us. And it's the right thing, for us anyway, to do.

All through the week, I've been thinking about community, passion, authenticity, empowerment, storytelling, sharing, participation, and collaboration. Just about every panel i attended amplified one of these themes. I had been thinking how to apply these ideas to my own practice, which was great. But I think what this last panel has done is reconnect me with the sense of mission that I'd lost several years ago. At the end of the panel, I realized that I was quite probably in a room full of people who believed in the very same thing, and that I wasn't alone.

It's going to be hard to go back to work tomorrow plugging away at the legacy HTML project I'm doing, but I'm excited to have (at least for the moment) my direction recalibrated and pointing true once again.

SXSW Monday: Hitting My Stride, Finally

Another quiet day, and yet I'm just starting to feel like I'm getting comfortable and hitting my stride. Maybe it's because today pretty much focused on going to things that I thought were interesting, and asked people questions when I was curious about something. There's a certain level of socializing I'm comfortable with, and I've decided to just let that happen. The entire morning went by without me meeting anyone I knew, which is understandable since I have been going to the weirder panels related to open source, community building, storytelling, and digital convergence.

Revisiting Commercial Open Source Business Models

I thought I would mix it up a bit and check out a panel related to business plans. However, I thought that this panel would be about business plans that were themselves somehow "open sourced", like a free franchising system. In actuality, this panel explored the use of open source software in (yawn) businesses.

I decided to sit through the session since I had gotten a net connection and could at least check my mail, and the panel actually became pretty interesting. The takeaways:

• Open Source may not help a large player in a market, but for marginalized smaller players, it helps even out the playing field by providing a tremendous amount of quality software.

• Convincing your clients that it's the right choice for them, though, is trickier. Since the software is free, you need to convince them that you're providing additional services of clear value using the open source solutions as a solid base. That allows your clients to spend more money on actual improvements, and less on rebuilding the wheel. And, since the software is not proprietory, you don't lock your clients into a custom solution.

• Sometimes, the argument against Open Source software from corporate counsel is not so much the legal threat, but legal incompetence. Some lawyers do not have the experience in the implications of open source licensing, and this creates more work and uncertainty for them. However, every piece of software, commercial or open source, has conditions for use. It is possible to work out policy to meet those needs.

• The trustworthyness of open source is often questioned as software that "everyone" contributes to...so how good could it possibly be? It turns out that there are relatively few contributors to any given piece of software, because it's difficult to write sophisticated code. That's the difference between something like Wikipedia and Linux. Everyone thinks they can write text. Not everything thinks they can write good code. However, the non-coding users provide lots and lots of testing, which helps improve code quality.

The BIG takeaway for me is that I really should start leveraging open source software for my own business activities. It takes time to get familiar with a particular platform, but the investment in studying and supporting a give platform like, say, CakePHP, will give me a huge leg-up. I'm dumb not to.

Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins

I have been hearing about "media convergence" but had no idea what it was. I had never heard of Henry Jenkins or Dannah Boyd, so I took a chance.

While I was waiting for the panel to start, I turned to the fellow to my left and asked him if he could tell me something about digital convergence. He started to explain it from the technical perspective, and the fellow to my right, Andrew Switzky, started a spirited discussion about the nature of convergence. The guy to my left, whose name escapes me, was very much a distribution guy. Sitting in the front row next to someone is a pretty good way, I think, to start a conversation. The people who are sitting right up front are the most likely people to really care about the panel. I am going to try this again tomorrow.

Anyway, Henry Jenkins is awesome, and after one particularly mind-blowing statement Dannah Boyd quipped, with deep affection and admiration, "Can you see why I think this man is god?" I am right there with her. Some of the notes from Jenkin's talk:

• In the beginning there was the Fanboy, which was a marginalized and mocked member of society living in their respective basements. With the advent of the Internet, however, fans began to organize and become a signifant shaper of their popular culture, writing stories extending their favorite characters and organizing. Now, fan culture is starting to shape the source material, and is increasingly recognized as a powerful influence on the success of a particular element of our culture. He says what we're calling "Web 2.0" is the legitimizing name for fandom!

• Henry has always been a fan boy, and that makes him extra cool.

• Our culture is again becoming more participatory. He cited an interesting number that 57% of kids these days are producing their own media, and 33% of them are distributing it behind just their immediate circle of friends. However, there are political forces that seek, under the banner of "protecting the children in the 21st century", to restrict their right to participate and communicate with others without parental consent.

• The politics of fear, when it comes to our children, is both very prevalent and very effective. The politicians seem to agree that our children should be "muzzled". We are afraid of our sons (columbine), and fear for our daughters (myspace predators).

• There's a parallel between 19th century notions of showmanship and humbuggery and today's questionable authenticity of digital media. He told how PT Barnum and the Fiji Mermaid invited the public to come see this mysterious creature (which was a hoax) and determine for themselves whether it was real or not. And people were drawn to see it. So when scientists in Australia discovered a beaver-like animal with a pouch, a beak, and a poisonous stinger on its tail, people were incredibly skeptical. This laid the foundation for science education in the public, because people needed to learn something about the process of verification.

• Second Life is a place where we can practice for our First Life. It can be used to test new political ideas and notions of participatory culture. It's not unlike Carnival, when men dressed as women and women dressed as men. It was the one day of the year when "the rules" could be broken, because people were roleplaying as someone else. AND, this sometimes lead to actual political upheaval. Fascinating.

There was a lot more...wait for the podcast! It was pretty fantastic. Some of my own thoughts that came to mind were that people put their passion in different buckets, like IDEALS, FAMILY, CULTURE, and NATION. How they ACT depends on what they believe to be more important: the ability to self-govern, or the desire to live in security.

Tradeshow

The tradeshow was actually pretty cool, because I got to talk to a few cool companies. There were four fun ones I hit:

• Lucky Oliver, the community stock photo company, was there giving away t-shirts if you promised to link back to them on your blog. Since I have a blog, I got myself a t-shirt. I've actually been meaning to write about Lucky Oliver for some time, because they have some of the most awesome writing I've ever seen on a website. I got to meet Amy Hooker, the person behind the prose, at the booth, and shook her hand. Go check it out! The company was started by a bunch of graphic designers who were fed up with their choices in stock photo, and built this cool app. The photos are quite affordable too; I'm going to give them a try next time I need some stock photo or something for a project.

• Good Magazine had their booth, and I stopped by to ask them what the heck the magazine was about. I had picked up their premiere issue several months ago because I was curious, and couldn't quite decide if it was treehugger liberal's version of Martha Stewart Living. I decided, though, that it was worth dropping $20 for a 1-yr subscription, which also donated money to a selectable cause (I chose CC). This also got me an invite to the Good Party, in association with Creative Commons.

• The Blurb bookmaking company. I got a chance to flip through an actual sample book, and was at first disappointed by the quality of the type. As I was about to point this out, the blurb representative I was talking to noted that that was one that a designer had laid out themselves, and they had apparently not done the separations correctly (there were color fringes on the text, sheesh!) The books that were made with the Blurb Booksmart program were much crisper. The exciting thing about Blurb is that they have blog import tools, and for $80 I could make a hardcopy backup of my blog. That would kick ass! I'm totally going to have to try this out. I wanted to stop by the LuLu booth too, but didn't have a chance to talk to anyone there. Maybe tomorrow.

• I stopped by the Make booth to try to get my free gift, which turned out to be free copies of the magazine. I was hoping it would be something gizmo-like, but nope. However, Limor Fried herself was working the booth, answering questions about her awesome kits. If you bought the kit there, you could also build it there. She was busy dragging out a soldering iron. She was very cool in that creative engineering way, and as is (we used to say in the game biz) "hardcore". I made a joke about getting a kit signed in solder, which one of the other booth people thought would be cool, but Limor paused, and muttered "it doesn't work that way". I wonder what was going through her mind during that pause...so that's what that feels like being on the receiving end :-) I didn't end up buying a kit and building it there, visions of airport security problems dancing in my head, but I did get a 20% off discount coupon for purchases at the online store. I totally want to get the MiniPOV.

Dan Rather Keynote Interview

I didn't expect to be too excited by this, attending because I was mostly interested to see how Dan Rather was like in person undistorted by television. However, I was rather inspired because of his introduction by political blogger Jane Hamsher.

• He was there when John F. Kennedy was shot
• He was there asking Nixon the hard questions about Watergate
• He is an investigative journalist of the old school.

Investigative journalism! Getting to the truth behind the surface! These are callings I can get behind. Since I don't watch the television news, I tend to know Dan Rather only as a rather cartoonish newsman on a studio set, known somewhat for his very strange analogies. He's the real deal, though. It was good to be reminded that there were people like this still in the world, and I wanted to do the same to hold up my bit of it.

There was much discussion about the nature of journalists today. They've gotten soft, perhaps, not asking the hard questions because they're trading "access for playing along".

I must admit I fell asleep during the last half, but woke up when Dan Rather started to ask Jane Hamsher some questions. MY GOD...THE PRESSURE. It was wonderful to see an experienced newsperson handle the situation with authority. You could tell he was sort of used to taking charge and setting the tone of an event.

He closed with a powerful statement about world events as it relates to HDTV NET. He noted that we have a tendency to view horrible events like "10 people died in a bombing attack in Baghdad" as being "less real". He choked up a bit as he described the nature of war, having reported on it and seen some horrible things. The power of HDTV, with its increased resolution, is that it will make those events less cartoonish. If you've ever seen the startling clarity of HDTV compared to standard def, you will immediately grasp the significance of this. In the content creation / entertainment world, HDTV creates a huge production burden because you have to work a lot harder to make everything look good; this is also an issue with today's game developers because it creates a huge artwork creation and computer graphics rendering burden. So, I've tended to think of HDTV as a pain in the ass kind of thing, but heck...for real news coverage it will be absolutely amazing. I'm sold.

Warren Spector Presentation: The Future of Storytelling

I was excited to see Warren Spector's panel on the future of storytelling, as I've been a fan of several of his past games. Though I've been out of the game industry for quite a while, I still have a soft spot for game design theory. He broke down game narrative into a number of diferent types of structures, discussed the elements of the dramatic arc, and espoused some of his personal theories. Some of the takeaways:

• 90% of games are 'rollercoaster' games. You go from A to B to C to D, and you really have no choice except maybe what gun to use and enjoy the ride. Spector believes the medium has much more to offer, and said he tells those people who makes rollercoaster games to go make the movies they clearly want to.

• 99% of the world doesn't play games, because games are work because they require effort. And if games are work, the effort must be rewarded.

He said a lot more, and maybe I'll type it up more formally later. Tomorrow, Will Wright will be giving the last keynote, and I'm really looking forward to that.

At the end of the session, Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates happened to be sitting near me, and Kathy saw me and said hi! She asked if I was the one who had written something about deconstructing a story, and I couldn't actually remember. I explained, a little lamely, that I had just made a brain dump and was planning to find the patterns later. Kathy had found it interesting, and wanted to talk about it; I just looked at what I wrote on Saturday and here it is:

This was the second time I’d seen Kathy Sierra present, and I really like her sense of timing and sequencing. I need to spend more time deconstructing it later, but the first thought that comes to mind is that she does something that’s like storytelling except it’s not. It seems to have the FLOW of a great story, but it’s a different kind of narrative.

When I wrote this, I was capturing a feeling that I had while replaying the presentation in my head. Thinking about it now, her presentations are packed with information, but instead of being structured in a hierarchical or block-diagrammatic way, they're sequenced in a way that links from idea to idea. Perhaps the feeling of story I'm picking up comes from the way the ideas are presented like little scenes. In the sequencing of the ideas, we enjoy each little nugget for its self, but that nugget does not telegraph what the NEXT nugget is going to say. Many talks, I think, "telegraph the punchline"; you can generally see "the setup", "the supporting statement", and "the logical conclusion" far enough in advance that there's no dramatic tension. It's boring! There's never any surprising conclusions, twists, or shifts in perspective. Except in Kathy's talks, which are more like an action serial like Indiana Jones than a mere talk. What keeps all the surprises from becoming a mess is, perhaps, the constant callback to the main idea or principle that she's based the talk around. In a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, the equivalent to principle is (and I admit this is a stretch) the everpresent Nazi threat. Every action in the Indy universe is framed in terms of that tension.

I'm trying to think of other good presenters...the only one that comes to mind is Steve Jobs (though admittedly, I've only seen the online quicktime movies). His talks seem formulaic that has a very easy-to-guess narrative structure, and maybe that's because the whole point he's getting to is the REVEAL. That's the big moment that Jobs seems to cherish...it's kind of like a soap opera. I wonder what the writers of Ugly Betty would do if they got a hold of a Steve Jobs keynote; that's an interesting example of storytelling in a genre (the night time soap) that is ordinarily quite formulaic itself. That's not to say Ugly Betty isn't formulaic---the constant in the show is how Betty always does the right thing, even when it's a struggle and if it's misguided---but there have been moments when my mouth has hit the floor at the audacity of the plotting. Didn't see that coming! Compare this to a show like Heroes...there isn't anything in the show that has really surprised me...the expectation I have is that new pieces and relationships to a big puzzle are released every week. This is a more strategic kind of mental engagement, but since we're not completely familiar with the rules of the Heroes universe so it continues to hold our attention. Compare this to a late-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which had such a formulaic structure that you could practically set your clock depending on where you were in the story arch; it was more value affirming ritual than dynamic storytelling at that point, in my off-the-cuff opinion. But I digress.

On a side note, one of the other panels ("People Powered Products", I think it was) attempted to apply what the moderator called "The Kathy Sierra Puppy Effect" to cause something good to happen in our brains by typing in a few search terms into Flickr. The funny thing was that the moderator was unable to find sufficiently cute puppies, and the effect was lost. You can not win over an audience with a marginally-cute puppy...it's almost insulting in a way. I could sense the algorithm he was using:

1. Puppy or Kitten
2. with Large Eyes
3. and posed in Cute Position

For some reason, every picture he threw up there were distinctly un-cute. He may have cued off large eyes without perceiving that the shots were very wide angle (and therefore disturbingly distorted). Or maybe he just had poor taste in puppies. Casting univerally-cute puppies for your talk is an important skill! If you choose poorly, you bring your talk to a screeching halt! I could very well be imagining this.

Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy: Rights, Ownership and Getting Paid

The last panel of the day, discussing what content creators should know about digital rights and mashup culture. It was a pretty interesting panel, actually, featuring an online record label (John Buckman), a lawyer for YouTube (Glen Brown), a business person for Eyespot and DotSub (Larie Racine), the Creative Director for Creative Commons (Eric Steuer), and the publisher of Good magazine (Max Schorr).

The takeaway for me: heck, I should really consider open-sourcing or providing remix-friendly versions of my tools. It would be cool, and a great experiment for me. Giving up control of my design is kind of a scary idea, but what I might learn in return might be the key to greater exposure and opportunity.

Parties

This was the first night I actually got to some of the party locations, though as soon as I got to the places I remembered that I am not a big fan of them. They're loud, dark, crowded, and filled with booze. As I don't hear or see well, dislike crowds, and don't drink, these are exactly the wrong sort of place for me to be. I did spend about an hour at the Good/Creative Commons party, since I had the invite, and the music was cool and the bar was open. I even talked to a few people in a friendly manner, unprompted. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this social thing after all. Next year, it would be interesting to have an event at the Austin Public Library for people like me.

Sleepytime!

SXSW Sunday: “Heroes”, The Show for Web 2.0 Enthusiasts

I might be imagining it, but I've been noticing that the television show Heroes comes up a lot in conversation here at SXSW, or "South by" as it seems to be called by the natives. "Do you watch Heroes?" is one of those questions that seems to pop up just before you're about to cross the threshold of mere acquaintance to actual friendship. If you watch Heroes, that says that you believe in good, evil, doing the right thing, following your inner geek, building alliances, and searching for purpose in a world of seemingly infinite possibility and coincidence. And you're probably working on a new community-driven Web 2.0 application, building a brand new conversational marketing model for your business, or pushing the frontier of digital convergence. The question has even been asked by panel moderators..."How many people here have seen Heroes?" Colin Devroe's been making the rounds for Viddler, the video sharing community startup, scaring people like me with surprise interviews. And yes, he asked me about Heroes. I guess that means we're buds now.

Sunday was an odd day, feeling much like a rainy Wednesday. I was a rather hermit-like mood, but I decided not to let it bother me because I was "wasting" the opportunity to meet a zillion people.

I'm Feeling Hermity

A friend of mine sometimes likes to go to public sporting events to be by herself. There's something about the crowd of people around you that provides a kind of social energy, yet you are anonymous. This was one of those days for me...though I did encounter a few people I knew, my energy was definitely way more low key and I generally kept to myself. It was a day of recentering.

Game Perverts

The first session of the day I attended was Game Perverts: A Robot, a DS and a Dot Matrix Printer Menage a Trois, part of the expanded Screenburn (video game) track of panels. The topic was the use of game console hardware for purposes other than playing video games. I was hoping to get some inspiration and insight into the homebrew development scene. There were four panelists:

• Rodney Gibbs, moderator: An executive studio director for a console gaming company, Gibbs kept things moving along between the three showcase hardware and software hackers:

• Rich LeGrand, Charmed Labs: The first guy to hack the GameBoy, he sells a product called the XPort to allow you to use a GameBoy Advance as a robotic controller.

• Bob Sabiston, Flat Black Films: Got a Nintendo DS devkit and created a pixel editor with animation capabilities. It's pretty cool.

• Paul Slocum, musician hacker: He's part of an 8-bit band called Tree Wave, doing some very cool hacking of old Atari 2600 consoles, dot matrix printers, and other vintage gear to create music.

All three guys were the intense hacker type I hadn't seen much of since I worked in the game industry, and it sort of accentuated how much my path has diverged from where I thought it would have gone when I was in my 20s. They all kicked ass, though the panel would be what I call "low energy" due to some technical snafus with a missing RCA cable necessary for Bob Sabiston's dual-screen projector for the NDS. I actually asked a question about where to get started with homebrew development, my first of the festival. I guess I'm warming up. I hope these guys check out some of the product and self promotion panels here at SXSW; at the end, a question was asked about how they went about quitting their day jobs and making a living from what they do, and it seemed that at least two of them were looking for a way to make it happen.

Making Your Short Attention-Span Pay Big Dividends

I was originally planning to see Non-Developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care entire because I wanted to see the moderator, Elisa Camahort, do her thing...she knows how to run a brisk and interesting panel, and all the BlogHer-related panels have provided me with a lot of insight about how people really feel about a variety of important topics. However, at the last minute I found out about Making Your Short Attention-Span Pay Big Dividends, and thought that is so totally what I need. As a bonus, it was Jim Coudal and Brendan Dawes who got up there and told us that they basically goof off all day and try out lots of things that tickle their fancy, sometimes going so far to create complete creative campaigns and codebases to put the idea out there. And most of them end up in something Coudal calls "The Book", which is where unborn ideas are mothballed. Coudal said that some might call this a failure, but they are actually quite successful because something has been learned and stored, and that is part of the creative dynamo that they are fiercely protective of. Dawes, who I hadn't been familiar with until today, was an even more interesting creative who has done wacky things like McGoogle. A lot of what they do was not planned, but has lead to wonderfully creative and awesome things. The takeaway for me was that I have to now been really focused on trying to become more structured, which may be against my very nature. Almost everything I've done that I feel really good about has been impulsive or based on surprise flashes of insight. Instead of trying to convert this into a reliable engine as a commodity desire, I really do have the option of going the other way. The primary requirement is that the work I do is great, and that may entail restarting rather than continually revising. AND, most importantly, I have to get the work OUT THERE. This is a point that Dawes repeated several times; he quoted someone as saying "it's a lot easier to steer a moving ship than one that's still in port." It was an eye-opening panel for me.

Screenburn Arcade

For lunch I checked out the Screenburn Arcade, which had a few video-game related things going on. There were two areas with professional girl gamers (the Frag Dolls and Clan PMS) taking on all comers and slaughtering them in games like Halo and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. It was interesting to watch the precision with which they moved, which utterly demoralized the people I saw playing. Pretty awesome. A notable product I saw was a cool guitar music maker called Jam Sessions for the Nintendo DS, which will be coming out from Ubisoft in a while. It uses the touch-sensitive screen to simulate strumming a guitar, and you can pick your chords using the D-Pad. I had been thinking of something similar with a chord piano player, but this is even cooler because you can use a guitar pick with your DS. That rocks! Otherwise, there wasn't much to see in the arcade.

Keynote Conversation: Limor Fried / Phil Torrone

The keynote was in the 1300-person capacity Grand Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel across the street from the Convention Center. Limor Fried, a graduate from MIT who is involved heavily in the open source hardware movement, spoke with Phil Torrone about the DIY scene. People are making all kinds of wacky and awe-inspiring stuff. Very empowering stuff. I didn't take many notes during this session, other than to remind myself to subscribe to Make and check out the open source hardware materials on Limor's site. I was a rather indifferent EE student in school, but am interested in looking at that stuff again because now I want to make little clocks and timers for the productivity work I've been doing. Plus, this is another great community to be a part of.

Deadlines, Clients and Cashflow: The Business Side of Web Design

Though my head is filled with dreams of community, impulsive creativity, and creative partnership, I've still got to get the work I have now done, so I attended James Archer's Deadlines, Clients and Cashflow panel. James is the CEO of FortyMedia, a bunch of really nice folk out of Phoenix, Arizona. He presented a list of a couple dozen things that FortyMedia has learned as they've grown their business. It was a good list...I'm sure it'll be posted somewhere...I'll back-anotate this post later when I have a chance to review my notes.

ValleySpeak for the Rest of Us: Developing Apps Outside InternetVille

The part of New Hampshire I live in can be considered part of the "Greater Boston Area", but it's tough to find people to work with. The premise of this panel, which featured Brian Oberkirch and Dan Cederhom, was the deconstruction of the difference between Sillicon Valley and Middle-of-Nowheresville. Two takeaways:

• With today's online tools, it's possible to collaborate from anywhere very effectively.
• Even if your talent pool is thin, if you focus on building the tribe you'll be much better off. Any tribe is better than nothing...get to know some people around you. You'll be amazed at who knows what and who knows who.

Cederholm also echoed a thought that's been at the top of my mind for the past few years: working with someone right next to you, in the same room and available to bounce ideas off of, is increasingly important.

People-Powered Products

The last session of the day: People Powered Products. The printed book schedule showed that one of the SkinnyCorp guys would be at the panel, but the panelists were the following: Derek Powazek, publisher of JPG Magazine, a community-driven photo magazine; Jeremy Hogan of Lulu.com, a popular print-on-demand book company that allows you to publish a book for practically zero cost; Matt Rubens, co-founder of online music mixing site Jamglue with a growing community of (as it turns out) 15 year old kids; Jason Levitt (moderator); and Heather Champ, community manager for Flickr. The takeaways from this session for me were that I needed to check out Lulu.com again to see what new capabilities they've added since I last looked at it a year ago, and that building a community around some products might be very cool. Thinking back to the earlier Phil Torrone / Limor Fried keynote, I wondered what the ramifications of releasing an "open source" printable ceo kit would be, and seeing what kind of community might arise from it. It's certainly something to consider.

A theme that I heard in this panel was that communities need to have publically viewable standards of conduct and values, and that the best situation was when the community itself was capable of policing themselves. One of the panelists asked us to think about what "community" was like in the real world; if you saw a member of your community acting all weird, you would take him aside and have a talk. The same rule applies to online community. While it's possible to just nuke people's accounts, the right thing to do is really extend the values of the community and offer the benefit of the doubt. I intuitively feel this is true, though I'm too sleepy to really describe it further.

Avalonstar Bowling Extravaganza

Awesome venue, and a really great place to get together and meet a lot of people. I wasn't very social myself, limiting my interaction to people in my immediate vicinity, but I had a good time and met a few new people, including a couple of readers: Helmut Granda who I met at Barcamp Austin in 2006, and Phil Freo, a web designer/developer from Florida. I know I've been griping about how I've found it really hard to just go up to people and introduce myself, but after tonights two encounters and others from the previous two days, I just realized that they've all provided really wonderful role models to follow: just walk up to people and say some nice things, exude warmth, and shake hands. Shawn Grimes echoed this same thing to me. I guess one could think of it as the "gift of appreciation".

I'm looking forward to the South By Veloso Expo next year...Bryan's getting pretty damn good at putting on these shindigs. Great job, dude!

Zzzz

Now I've got to sort through my cards and write down who I met and where, and get to sleep.

SXSW Saturday: Owning My Solitude!

[I'm going to back-annotate this post with links later...]

I awoke on Saturday morning with an odd feeling of dread mixed with elation, as I looked forward to another day of meeting in groups with random people and wondering what to say! When I'm faced with a situation like this, I have a choice: rush into it and be brave, or question the assumption that Ineed to know what to say. I decided that today, I would just mellow out and not worry about it so much. I would own my solitude.

The morning walk from the Radisson to the convention center takes under 10 minutes, and I joined a small trickle of SXSWers as we made our way down Cesar Chavez St. This was a nice way to settle into the day.

It turned out that this year's Interactive sessions were split between two locations within the convention center. The first session of the morning I attended, World Domination Via Collaboration, was in room 10AB which was accessible through a pair of 12-person max elevators from the 4th floor on the unknown third floor between the lobby and the top of the main escalator. I heard someone make a crack about Being John Malkovich...yeah, it was kind of surreal like that. Anyway, here's my panel brain dump. There is so much stuff going on every day that if I don't process the memories right away, something very bad might happen.

World Domination Via Collaboration

I have always had a soft spot for mad scientists and their plans for world domination. I guess it's because I appreciate anyone with a grand scheme, strong ideals, and the will to push forward. The panelists were Betsy Aoki, Jory Des Jardins (moderator), Jessica Hardwick, Lisa Stone, and Jenna Woodul.

I like the way that BlogHer runs their panels: they immediately open the panel to questions from anyone at anytime, which makes for a brisk and lively session without that lecture feeling. It's an open dialogue. Jory set the topic right away to get the ball rolling. The basic idea is that there's really a growing movement in business toward community. Sometimes the business itself is the community, and the community is the business. So how do you create the kind of community that becomes a powerhouse to drive increased use of your products, develops loyalty, and provides that feedback that marketing has been unable to find? And how do you keep the whole community from blowing up in yrou face? A very good panel, one of my favorites so far because it resonated strongly with the kind of ideals that I'm considering in forming some kind of real corporate entity. The values and methods they described that work really well with communities might be transferable to company culture; the challenge is to not only create the right environment that creates the positive behaviors we want to see, but also defends itself against principle rot by proactively putting the right vibe out there. And not tolerating behavior that directly violates those principles.

On the way downstairs I ran into Nathan Smith and (I think) Jared Christiansen, who were looking for the mystery room I had just come from. I proceeded to then not remember who Jared was, and only discovered some 9 hours later that he's a fellow 9rules member along with Nathan. I think I just need to ask people what their website is, because I can never remember.

The Influence of Art and Design

I went to see buddy Erik Sagen, aka Kartooner, do his first-ever SXSW panel. It was an interesting one, moderated by Daniel Rubin with panelists Glenda Sims, Dave Shea, Anton Peck, and Patrick Haney. This panel, in contrast to the previous one I was at, was more of a straight presentation with Q&A at the end. I was very impressed by Glenda, who is a museum technologist. The way she described how she wanted the interactive experience to be was exactly right: in the best cases, it should be a transformative, perspective changing experience. And again, this isn't about just having cool gadgets, but creating an enhancing experience, not a distracting one. Dave Shea talked about the history of photography and its acceptance as fine art. Eric Sagen talked about some of his favorite pop art heroes and tips for jogging one's self creatively by using DVDs and museums. Anton Peck used his "Voodoo Design Lounge" logo design as a personal illustration of the Michaelangelo quote, "I saw the Angel in the marble, and carved until I set him free." Photoshop is Anton's medium; he maniulated a digital photo of some kind of dead bird into something quite unique...conceptually quite similar to freeing the Angel. Dan Rubin made the observation that music has a profound effect on our perception of the world, with some examples of how period artwork tends to go with period music (this I actually thought was rather subjective), but that through music choice (even music we hate) our creative muses are stirred in new ways. Lastly, Patrick Haney talked about inspiration, from the Web, from quotes, from one's old work, and through favorite works. He said that he had a large print of Van Gogh's Starry Night over his bed, and that it helped put him in the mood to design. That's awesome.

I think it was at this panel that I say Stuart Coul, Shawn Grimes, and Carl Camera.

The Kathy Sierra Keynote

I camped out early for this one after having a quick lunch with Andrew, who I met on the bus on the first day I got into town. We got a good seat in the main room up front. I didn't take notes during this keynote, intent on watching and listening. The general theme: Being Human, and how that's really important. She opened with the question, "How many people are live blogging this talk"? and when a few people raised their hands, she commented, "So the rest of you don't really need to be here" because we could easily have followed this online. In fact, the majority of people in the room were creating wonderful Web 2.0 applications that made this kind of in-person meeting unnecessary. And yet...we are here. That's because we get something different from this experience, and it's part of being human. We're social critters, dammit, and face to face counts! In terms of software design, what are some things we ought to be doing? The Passionate Users creedo is to help people rock, and before they can rock out they've got to get past feeling like they suck. Kathy showed the "suck / rock threshold versus time" graph several times, and commented that the company that can move their customers the quickest from suck to rock is the one that wins.

The keynote shifted into an extended example about help, and what that really meant. To put in in a drab, unfunky way, one has to understand the psychology of the moment for a user. There was a great comparison between how authors of HELP and FAQs have a mental image of their reader being something like Pretty Smiling 90s Guy [insert slide], collar upturned and smiling warmly at the prospect of being helped. The reality of the situation, though, is more like Caffeine-Addled Post-Crash Stressed-Out Angry 00s guy [insert slide], so astonished by the sequence of UI-induced insults that his OWN COMPUTER has thrown in his face that he resorts to obscene hand gesture. If only the computer could recognize that emotion. Facial expression tell us a lot, and that's important context that the helpful UI designer should take to heart.

This was the second time I'd seen Kathy Sierra present, and I really like her sense of timing and sequencing. I need to spend more time deconstructing it later, but the first thought that comes to mind is that she does something that's like storytelling except it's not. It seems to have the FLOW of a great story, but it's a different kind of narrative.

I also struck up a conversation with the lady sitting next to me, someone named Anne who was is a Texas native. It turned out that Anne, Andrew, and myself were all moleskine notebook fans, and this created a fun moment paper geekness cameraderie.

Turning Blog into Books

This was a very interesting look at how these two guys, John Hargrave of zug.com and Tucker Max of tuckermax.com, turned their successful blogs into book deals. Some interesting notes:

• A standard book deal for a new author is $7500 advance against royalties. A first-time author needs to sell about 5000 books to break even on the advance.

• Tucker Max had a fanbase that was driving 300-400K uniques per month, with over a million pageviews, and enough fans bought the book to make the NYT Best Seller list for a couple weeks, which helped drive more media interest to his book. Because of his website, his book sales curves was very atypical, with a few thousand books sold every month for a year, with a big jump just before Christmas. The result was that he sold more than 200K books, which are great numbers. This got his second book deal, and the advance for that was $300K.

• How to get a book deal -- First, you need to have good content. There isn't enough out there...the industry is starving for good content. The problem isn't finding people to buy your good content; it's just that it's hard to GET it. And to get that to happen, you need to network and link your ass off to make relationships with people, in the right markets. Ask people you know who have sold books (and Tucker runs a business that develops blogs into books too) for a referral to a good agent.

This was a surprisingly good panel, very to-the-point and low bullshit.

Artist Entrepreneurship in Technology

This was more of a lecture, which had the interesting premise that to be an entrepreneurial creative was like following The Hero's Journey, as described by Joseph Campbell. The presenter provided a link to his lecture notes, which are very much worth reading.

Boss Lady

I attended this panel because my sister is a fan of Jenny Hart, and I'm really glad I attended because this was a kick-ass panel. This was a panel about business, with successful businesswomen sharing their experiences. It addressed a lot of what I've been experiencing and thinking over the past few years. I took a lot of notes during this one; tonally, this was probably one of my favorite panels to now. I also got to meet LeaLea, who recognized my nametag outside the room. She's a really inspiring and enterprising graphic designer whose site I've visited several times in the past. And after the session, I met a really nice person who I'll just call B because she is protective of her privacy. She reads the blog via RSS. Wow! We had a great conversation...she said she approached me because she had read yesterday that I have difficulty approaching people, so she's totally more brave than me :-) I'll have to follow her example today and say hi to someone I admire too. Thanks B!

Oops, I'm late out of the hotel...I better fly.

Ack, I need to run to the convention center

Friday SXSW Kickoff

Though it's not really even a full festival day, I found it plenty exhausting. At first I was wondering if my natural hermit-like tendencies would win out...I spent way too much time in my hotel room this morning. To my relief, I ran into several people who I knew, or knew me from last year.

• The genial Peter Flaschner was in the line behind me for registration. Peter's blog, particularly the tone of his open-hearted writing, was one of my early inspirations to "find my voice" because I thought him to be a kindred spirit who's a few miles ahead on the same journey of self-actualization.

• Anton Peck was at the top of the escalator. He's one of Zach Inglis' buds, and we're all on the same bowling team for the Avalonstar Bowling Extravaganza.

• James Archer and what seemed to be the entire 40Media Team were registering at the same time, and I am embarassed that I didn't recognize Dan Ritzenthaler as a fellow 9er. We didn't really get a chance to chat...I had about enough time to note that 40Media is a very TALL company. I guess it's got something to do with the Phoenix air.

• A pleasant surprise was meeting Matt Bob Jones, who was one of the first people to adopt the Printable CEO™ and write up his experiences with it. It was a pleasure to meet him; he founded the Random Shapes blog network for Teens. He was with the 40Media guys, since they're all from the same part of Arizona.

• While Matt Bob and I were waiting around for the 40Media guys to finish and pursue food, we got shooed away from the area by SXSW staffers who were ordered to "keep the area clear". We ended up in the Schwag Pickup room, and I ran into Jakob Heuser who I met last year. We ran into another guy and started talking randomly...unfortunately I didn't get his card, but we all went to have lunch at Iron Cactus. Peter had rejoined our crew by this point, and while we were at the restaurant he showed me the awesome task workflow index cards he's made. There's something, we agreed, about having workflow focused on these cards that is very powerful. Peter made the comment that it reduces the need to think so much about how to do things, because the thinking has already been done. Yes!

• After lunch I was thinking of going back to the hotel and taking a nap, but Jakob convinced me that sleeping was just a loss of opportunity. We went to check out the Lego Pile, where people sit and make things. Faced with the giant pile of lego bricks, I started to build something, but then something weird happened and I just started sorting the pile, to collect similar elements in similar piles. This says something about me. There was a guy there, Ryan Caraway, who was a native from Texas. So I naturally asked him if there was a regional breakfast that I could enjoy, and he filled me in on the nature of "breakfast tacos". While we were chatting, a fellow named Mark Nikolewski introduced himself to me, having been referred to me by Baba Shetty in Boston. Mark used to live in Austin, so between Ryan and him I got a nice list of restaurants to try. Ryan had a very cool card, I thought, which was made last-minute out of some manila folders and his wife's scrapbooking corner rounder on two opposite corners. The result, I thought, was an aesthetically-pleasing, stylish, and resourceful use of materials. The manila folder cardstock + black ink really worked for me. It reminded me of some kind of punchcard or ticket in feel which I loved...yeah, I'm a freak :-)

• It was time to check out the How to Rawk SXSW panel at 5PM, which was a high-spirited and ocassionally naughty primer on how to maximize your SXSW experience. I liked it for how it set the tone for the festival, and I learned about a few web services that I had not really been following. The advice I took away from the panel was that networking is as easy as walking up to someone and introducing myself, which I applied later in the evening for the first time.

• After the panel, I headed over to the New England Dinner Meet, where I met up with Ian, Kelly, and Mannix Muir from Manchester NH, a couple of other people from Hatchling, Marc Dole (CEO) and Zachary Pike. They have their short animation The Toll in the SXSW Film Festival; it's showing at Alamo Lamar 1 on Sunday, 2PM thiscoming Thursday. I also re-met Shimon Rura, who is a softspoken but highly-enterprising community oriented geek out of Boston. He's one of the Barcamp Boston organizers, though I didn't remember this until later. I also met Rob Landry, who runs a web design shop out of Portland, Maine. AND, he plays bass in a blues band. That is awesome. Finally, a fellow by the name of Dave Reaves, also from the Cambridge area, joined us toward the end. All in all, a pretty pleasant dinner.

• After warming up with the New England dinner, I steeled myself for my first actual party, the BlogHer Meetup. I'm a big fan of BlogHer, because I love their theme of empowerment and community. It's becoming quite a large and varied organization, and there are subtleties that I am probably failing to grasp. I was planning on taking the public bus, but after waiting 10 minutes I thought that maybe it would be faster just to get off my ass and move. I walked for 15 minutes down S 1st St from Riverdrive to Freddy's Place. It was not a bad walk, and it was a good way to burn some calories. And also it gave me time to psych myself up.

  I'm not a natural networker, and the idea of walking into a crowded restaurant filled with people I don't know who is kind of the nightmare scenario. It's a little different when you're actually in the convention center, because everyone there is a little more open and accessible. I hate busting in on people's conversations, but I wended my way outside until I came upon a group of people wearing SXSW badges. And Lo, I had happened to stumble upon the very table that Jory Des Jardins was sitting at. At that point, I think I turned like 7 years old and gushed something I don't remember (I think I said, "I'm a big fan!") and then got a chair. In a way I'm sort of happy that I can still be such a fanboy. I struck up a conversation with the fellow next to me, whose name I have unfortunately spaced. I had a pretty fascinating discussion with him, nice guy. Sitting next to him was his fiance, badge-labeled for easy memorization: Betsy Aoki, who was the community manager in charge of the blogs at Microsoft ("the blog queen"). She had some interesting observations about "corporate rules" for asian americans, particularly ones who had grown up with different values than the ones that work at the executive level. She highly recommended looking into an executive program for journalists offered by an asian american association of some kind...I forget the name.

  Then I got to meet Elizabeth Camahort, who remembered me from that post I wrote last SXSW when I was really impressed and moved by Virginia DeBolt and her story. Elizabeth will be doing Sunday's Open Source - Tell Me Why I Should care panel, which I wasn't planning on going to but after hearing her talk about it I am intrigued.

  I also got to meet Lisa Stone, who I promptly mixed up with Tara Hunt and Citizen Agency. By this time, I was starting to get the impression that maybe I was sitting at a table that was bursting with A-List bloggers, and what the hell was I thinking being there? But there's an interesting lesson here...these people are where they are in the community because they are at heart community builders, and they do this by reaching out to everyone and finding some kind of connection, then building upon it. I think that's part of the attraction I feel to the BlogHer organization, and the people who I've seen speak, write, and act on its behalf have impressed me greatly with their authenticity and thought transparency and their realness. They are excellent role models for community leadership, though there are challenges in maintaining the spirit of any diverse organization; apparently, there is a meme going around that BlogHer does not welcome men, but this is not the case at all: BlogHer welcomes everyone. So where does this come from, and why do these negative memes emerge in the first place? It's an organizational mystery, one that is common in any group of people 5 and up. And yes, I just totally pulled that number out of my gut. It's enough people to form more than two competing ideas, and it's enough people to create a majority, but it's the wrong number to create equilibrium in the decision making process. But I digress...it takes strong and consistent moral leadership---and by morals, I just mean having an articulated opinion regarding which values are the important ones to live by---to create an organization like BlogHer. Ensuring that this message reaches into every nook and cranny so it creates a resonance within the community itself...that's a different challenge. I'm not sure what the solution is. I once asked my Dad about how he felt about people in the Church who did not follow the ideals, and he said that he doesn't let that not see the good that the organization can accomplish; he works with it as much as he can. Dad's a long-time ordained minister, missionary, and the former president of a successful theological seminary, so I think he'd have a good angle on this. The answer did surprise me; I don't think I could have suffered through it...MEAN PEOPLE, YOU MAY LEAVE THE BUILDING IMMEDIATELY.

  Incidentally, if you're in NYC, you should know that they're running BlogHer Business 2007 on March 22nd and 23rd. The program looks pretty cool, especially if you're interested in using blogs for business purposes. Plus, think of all the awesome people you'll meet! Totally, totally inspiring stuff.

• I did get up and walk to another group of people, looking to "break into" a conversation and introduce myself all around. It didn't quite work as planned, but it was a good experience. I will get the hang of this yet. While I was in the parking lot waiting for my cab, an elderly guy came up to me and started talking about tachometers and automatic transmissions. He might have been slightly sauced, but I had a polite conversation with him before ambled off. Maybe he was just being friendly...is it a Texas thing to talk to strangers in a parking lot? I wished him a good evening as he ambled away, because it was.

Tomorrow the festival starts for real...I better get some sleep.

Local Flavor

Several years ago I stumbled upon Gothamist, which is a city blog written by locals covering New York City. I really liked the local color of the reporting, and of course there's writeups about interesting food; this writeup of by Jen Chung about how she ran into Jeffrey Steingarten at a BBQ event is a good example. It's since grown into a urban blog network covering many major cities, Austinist being one of them. When I get home, I should check out Bostonist again to see if it's gotten livelier; when it first launched, it was a bit understaffed on the writing side I thought.

Anyway, I'm in Austin and I'm hungry, so I searched Austinist for recommendations and got last year's SXSW Chowdown Guide. Just what I needed. Now I have a purpose for getting out of the hotel room.

Today's Itinerary

• Kill time until around noon, when I head over to the Austin Convention Center to get registered. Maybe explore the area a bit. Study the bus routes. Do some more research on places to go and see.

• Noonish - head over to the convention center, check out the Interactive Playpen,

• 630PM - New England Dinner with Ian, Kelley, and maybe more, so we can start to form our first day scooby gang alliances. A quick cab ride!

• 830PM - Then I want to check out the BlogHer Meetup because I like the whole idea of empowerment that pervades the organization, and would like to talk to people about what it means to be a part of it. There's something very similar to what they do and what I want to do, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Of course, all bets are off if I collide with anyone I know and get steered elsewhere...this seemed to happen a lot last year, and it was kind of neat to just go with the flow. We'll see how that goes.

Google Transit and ‘Dillos

Google has been teaming up with public transit authorities around the country; I just read on Austinist that they've gotten the Austin Capital Metro database in, so you can now plan your public transit bus trip complete with maps and walking guides. Just in time for SXSW! Awesome! Here's an example: the route from my hotel to the BlogHer meetup.

Unfortunately they don't cover Boston for when I get home---good luck with that mess! There are also some caveats for public transit noobs like me. The last time I rode a bus was when I was living as a non-Chinese speaking kid in Taiwan, and I used to memorize routes by landmarks and cross my fingers. I had a few scary (for a kid) adventures, and as a result I have the tendency to over-prepare my travel plans as an adult. So here's what I learned the hard way as a kid:

• The return trip may not be the same bus or road
• There are alternate bus routes. Google Transit just picks what it thinks is the best one, and I've noticed small differences in how it picks the starting bus stand on the route. Nothing big.
• Buses tend to have hours of operation, so best check what they are. I am still looking into this.

Capital Metro, the city transit authority, also runs these free trolleys called the 'Dillo, which I may ride today to just get a feel for the city if I don't run into someone first. This is the first time I've arrived early enough in a city to explore it. According to this map I grabbed from the hotel lobby, the following Dillo routes seem to cover the nearby area:

• 470 - Tour the Town - Goes as far north as the university of Texas (21st St), circles the State House along the way, and then comes back down south over the river on Congress Ave to "Spyglass Road", whatever that is.
• 450 - Orange 'Dillo
• 451 - Silver 'Dillo
• 455 - Red 'Dillo
• 461 - Gold 'Dillo
• 462 - Blue 'Dillo
• 463 - Starlight 'Dillo

So grab the maps and schedules and go for a ride!

For Myself, By Myself

I've finally landed in Austin, Texas, for the 5 days of Web 2.0 community empowerment goodness that is South by South West Interactive. I had a few interesting thoughts on the flight over, while I was contemplating the nature of my bad airport meal (pictured left)...you know, anyone with a deep fat frier can create fast food and sell it. Hot grease covers a multitude of shortcuts, from the quality of the chicken in my "curry chicken egg roll" to the mediocre wrapping. Still, it wasn't bad...if it had been baked, it would have been totally awful.

The thought that arose from this poor meal experience was that it doesn't take much to credibly claim to offer a product or service or, in this case, an edible egg roll. This got me thinking to a conversation I'd had recently with Senia, during which I became re-aware that I was in fact embarassed by personal success, and that I'm rather bashful about wanting what I want. This was as much a surprise to me as it was to her; I'd thought I'd gotten over this years ago. What would it be like if I was totally not embarassed about what I wanted to achieve in my career life mix?

Hmm.

Careers and Expectations

I like to think that I don't fall in the usual career paths, having made the decision to make a few largish jumps in my training. From engineering to art. Then from art to management. Then from management to design. And now to freelance. I've covered a larger area than I might have if I'd stayed with one thing. I think that's pretty cool. However, in every case I have adhered to a basic guidelines: choose to practice a skill that has obvious value. In engineering, I was drawn to microcomputers for their ability to tell stories, but stuck with it because the degree had credibility. I was never happy with it, and finally I decided to pursue art school. Even there, I saw this as a move to combine my understanding of digital computers with aesthetics, seeing this as a powerful---and likely quite marketable---combination of skills. And so it has been. Every move I've made has been an attempt to define what it is I do in terms that other people could understand. I've written about this quite a bit in the past, because that question of identity has always eaten at me. It's partly an issue of wanting to find some peace with myself, and partly a challenge in marketing my skills and services. I have never found the right combination of keywords to describe what it is a do; it's a problem that faces a lot of people. On the one hand, there are no easy ways to describe ourselves, though we desperately want to so other people can understand us. Emotional gratification aside, being able to communicate our essential qualities to a prospective client is absolutely critical. I gotta eat.

The approach I've been taking recently has been to just accept the generic Designer label. It represents "problem solver" and "visual aesthetics" to most people, which is in the ballpark. The big breakthrough I made in 2005 was realizing that people didn't intuitively understand the terminology that quantifies excellence within my field, so describing what I did was doing no good. Showing people what I did and thought, through this blog and other places, was far more successful.

The epiphany I had in the airport today was that for all the progress I'd made, I was actually not addressing the root of the problem: that feeling of unease that I hadn't identified my passion in a way that could be explained easily. And this, I realized next, was directly impacting my ability to put a business plan together for whatever my next stage was going to be.

Up to now, my approach has been to define---maybe "evolve" is more accurate---a set of descriptive parameters that focused my energies productively toward a particular niche, and that felt like progress. With time to refine, I would certainly could define a workable business, then pull together a few key people and get going.

The problem: It didn't feel right. I was engineering a business plan according to a set of expectations that were not mine.

Mine versus Theirs

By defining a niche, I am actually creating a workable compromise of skills, interest, and understanding. My niche right now could be described as "graphic design for workflow, process, and productivity", and my skillset with new media allows me to create tangible pieces that can be applied by clients in their working contexts. This is all fine and good, but this is not actually what I'm interested in doing. However, I have trained myself to think entirely in terms of customer expectation management and delivering value, and have thought that finding a niche was my only option. I didn't even realize I was limiting my thinking.

What would I end up doing if I didn't have to think about meeting other people's expectations?

I gave this some thought on the flight from Baltimore to Austin, and noted the following:

• I like it when people feel good and make progress toward their goals.
• I like it when people feel comfortable being who they are
• I cheer when people pursue their dreams
• I love being around people who are positive and self-empowered

This is pretty much the same epiphany I had over a year ago in Passion Turn Me Round and Round.

If I were to really admit what I want to do, it would be this: I want to make things that empower people, as directly as possible. That is, the connection is from me to you. My dream business would be to create tools, props, books, software, and experiences that empower people. Everything I make will have to follow these guidelines:

• Insightful
• Fun
• Rewarding / Affirming
• Novel / Cool
• Affordable
• Tangible
• Fun to Share / Talk About

What I am trying to describe is a kind of agency of empowerment, using all the tricks from all media and psychology to create a transformative experience through the creation of useful kits, how-tos, books, party favors, funny noises...whatever it takes to get someone from point A to B and have a good time doing it. It's like being a game designer or movie producer, except the goal isn't just entertainment. It's empowerment, which includes the ability to inspire, educate, train, and guide people toward the fulfillment of their desires.

I'm not sure what to call it, and it sounds kind of insane when I type it out loud, but this is what I want to do.

Redefining Markets and Services

The market for an agency of empowerment is the DIY and self-improvement people, which I think is pretty large. I can design and offer products that cater to this, using my existing design principles. The service that I enjoy offering, though, is figuring out how people do things to achieve a particular end. This is a lot more interesting than it sounds, since a lot of time we don't really know what we want to do or how to do it. This is what is called discovery in a research or design project, and it's the necessary pre-step before analysis and strategy.

I have to outline this in more depth, but I think I'm on to something here. I really want to make my own products of a certain kind, and I will need to find people who share the same passion for this. Because I value competency in production, I tend to believe I have to be able to do everything myself. However, perhaps it is enough to merely guide the efforts of more skilled practitioners and focus on where I'm interested. I dunno...I figure SXSW will be a good place to figure this out.