I think it’s a voice that needs to be heard. Bad news isn’t popular, and critique of pet projects that fail often ruffles feathers. I received quite a bit of grief when I expressed displeasure at the ThrivePDX effort for example. Everyone jumped all over me in comments here and on Twitter, but the event (and the whole effort with the indie techies and SAO) failed in a big way.

Ideally we can have open, honest discussion about not just successes but also failures. And in the spirit of openness and honesty, I’d like to ask the author of the Silicon Lumberjack to identify him or herself. Please don’t be that passive-agressive stereotype.

Shame on you, The Columbian, shame on you.

It’s a lot like one of those situations where everybody is laughing at someone, and the person being laughed at is laughing right along and thinks it’s hilarious.

If you’re from the Portland area and heading to BlogWorld, leave a comment below.

Observation: there’s the Beer and Blog crowd, and there’s the Social Media Club crowd. And there’s very little overlap between those crowds.

Good? Bad? Doesn’t Matter? Discuss.

Some of the event costs are fixed and mandatory (facility) or directly related to the number of participants (T-shirts), but others are variable and need to be prioritized. When it comes to food, there are a lot of options from cheap to fancy, with all sorts of options in between. I want to provide a nice meal experience for the participants, along with a reasonable supply of beverages. Other expenses are entirely in the “optional” category but are nice to have. There is a strong desire in the community (both locally and worldwide) to have sessions recorded or even better, streamed live.

The community would benefit from the streaming, but one could make a darned good argument that the first priority should be to the participants who are paying to attend the event in person. Last night I sat at my desk considering whether we’d be able to afford streaming, or whether to provide better quality food for the participants. There’s no one “right” answer. I think we have things arranged for this year’s event, but this is but one of many such choices to be made.

Ah, to have one of those trees that grows money for WordCamps…

Photos posted to Flickr by Igal Koshevoy; I’m not sure who the photographer was.

Last weekend there were a number of discussions related to journalism and “new” media, as well as the possibilities for knowledge transfer between traditional journalists and those with skills related to conversational media such as blogs and Twitter. As noted previously, Rick and I hosted a discussion on Saturday morning that focused on bloggers learning from journalists. The audio from that discussion is now available (approx 43mb, .mp3 format).

Following the first discussion, a related session led by three Columbian employees looked at the future of newspapers (timely, given that their paper had declared bankruptcy on Friday). I have a video of that session but need to figure out hosting options. John Hill (one of the Columbian folks) posted his thoughts on his blog.

We didn’t touch much on the conversation aspect of new media during the morning sessions, so some of us gathered for an afternoon talk about comments, Twitter, and the two-way nature of internet media as opposed to traditional (mostly) one-way media blasts. I posed a question, wondering if most newspaper and TV websites’ half-assed attempt at comment abilities were because the companies didn’t really care or want to hear the readers feedback and a couple of the journalists validated my hypothesis. That attitude will need to change. Tonight, @oregoniansteve linked to a piece suggesting that if newspapers aren’t going to do comments right, they shouldn’t do them at all. I wholeheartedly agree.

What’s next? Abraham Hyatt has announced Digital Journalism Camp Portland, to be held some time in August. Follow that link to find out more. The BarCamp discussions were a good start, but there is a LOT of conversation to happen in this area and I applaud Abraham for taking the next step to facilitate the learning.

While there are many folks in the media that “get” the internet, RSS, Twitter, and the like, there are many that still don’t. Fortunately there are a lot of folks in the digital world interested in helping journalists understand the new media.

Rick and I would like to lead a discussion to bring together bloggers and journalists at BarCampPortland to talk about journalism, media, and change. I think that traditional journalists can learn a few things from bloggers, and bloggers have a lot to learn about the practice of journalism. Let’s get some of the bright folks from both groups together and talk.

We need some help: while a lot of bloggers and geeks will be at BarCamp, odds are that many traditional journalists haven’t even heard of it. Any help in spreading the word amongst media folks would be much appredciated; hopefully we can have a great cross-section of folks in the discussion. BarCamp Portland is May 1-2 at CubeSpace (this discussion will be on Saturday).

Update: A few folks have asked about what time the discussion will be held. BarCamp is an unconference, meaning that the schedule and topics are set during the event by the attendees. Rick and I will target the discussion for the morning of the 2nd, between 9-noon. We can’t guarantee an exact time but should be able to narrow it down to that window. That said, if journalists are looking to get an insight into the blogger/geek/new media culture, hanging out for BarCamp (beyond the journalistm/media discussion) would be an excellent way to get a taste of that world.

Since the Legion of Tech folks seem reluctant to share how the process works, I figured I would share what I know. I was involved as part of the presentation selection committee for Ignite Portland 2. The information in this post is based on my experiences as part of that process. The selection process may have changed since that time, but here’s a look at how things worked in the past which may provide some insight. I do not represent the Legion of Tech, and this blog post may be completely wrong… but here’s what I recall:

Presentations were selected by a committee of 8 folks, all volunteer organizers of Ignite Portland. A shared spreadsheet was compiled listing all of the presentations. Each committee member reviewed all of the proposals and voted for each one as Yes, No, or Maybe. The vote was simply based on whether the proposal sounded interesting and would make a good talk for Ignite. Each presentation was then given a numerical score based on the votes (formula was (number of yes votes – number of no votes + 1/2 the number of maybes). The list was then reordered based on the numerical score.

For Ignite Portland 2, there were over 50 proposals. Two of them received Yes votes from all eight committee members. Two received unanimous No votes. Every other proposal fell somewhere in the middle. We had 13 presentation slots to fill. After including the two with unanimous Yes votes, there were several that were “almost perfect” in voting and were included.

After filling the eight or nine positions, we had to determine which presentations would make the cut for the remaining few slots. This is where the criteria got more subjective and we looked at three factors (in addition to the voting score):

• Subject matter: we looked for a mix of presentations on various topics (how to, tech, ideas/creativity, quirky, food, etc). If there were several presentations that were similar, odds are that only one would be chosen.
• Speaker skills: if we were waffling about a presentation, if the committee members had any first-hand knowledge that a presenter was a particularly good (or poor) speaker, that would potentially be a factor in whether or not they were chosen.
• Speaker gender: If we had chosen presentations strictly on the raw voting score, we would’ve ended up with a lineup that was overwhelmingly male. A majority of the committee felt that women should make up a larger portion of the show and I recall that one or two male speakers were bumped in order to make room for more female speakers. On the flip side, I’ve heard rumors (but do not have first hand knowledge) that for Ignite Portland 3, the reverse was true, and that at least one female speaker was bumped in order to allow for more male representation.

Based on those three criteria, we filled out the remaining slots on the lineup.

Personally I felt that the process worked well and has resulted in a good variety of shows over the four Ignite events thus far in Portland. I’m not sure that the gender bias factor should be included, but the Legion of Tech leadership on the committee felt that it should be a deciding factor.

I don’t offer this up as a criticism, or an endorsement, but rather as a look into the process since it appears that there is still some mystery to it all.

Postscript: what I’ve described above was the process as of Ignite Portland 2. Starting with Ignite Portland 4, the public could leave comments on proposals, these comments are taken into account when the committee makes the presenter selections.