Thoughts & Deeds

We had an interesting experience in Portland this past weekend when our typically pristine water supply was tainted by e. coli, affecting west-side residents and businesses. That meant that anyone served by the tainted reservoir had to boil their water before using it — which is no big deal for people who are used to camping — and the city government had to get the word out about the contamination. Now that is a pretty big deal. … more

It’s become a dirty world in the creative community. “Crowdsourcing” often means a business has chosen to ask all-comers to submit responses to the businesses request – be it a logo, web site design, or engineering design for NASA’s next space shuttle – with no guarantee of pay or selection of their submitted work. On one hand, it’s a great way to get the community involved in solving a problem rapidly. … more

What started as a group conversation over coffee about the relevance of awards shows, professional organizations, and the establishment turned into a keen interest in organizing a multi-day convergence of events that would help Portland’s many voices to rise above the fray and be heard. These voices are those of the New Communicators, and they’re already evolving the way conversations happen. Isn’t it time we all listened and joined in? … more

Today’s Portland design community buzz on Twitter is the City of Portland’s decision to make a design contest out of the Portland Online website. Many of us reviewed the RFP released for project last month and found the budget lacking ($10-20k for a 140,000 page site? Right.), which may explain why they’re moving forward with a design contest. No agency worth its salt wanted to reply to such a poorly proposed project with so little funding.* I know we looked at it and decided to pass. … more

Portland is a funny city of transplants from around the United States, natives, and transplants who have gone native. While we’ve all come here for different reasons — the rain isn’t one of them — I think we’ve stayed for the same reason: Portland is awesome. … more

I’ve never been a fan of parades. For one, I’m only 5′2″ and can never see the floats and marching groups from behind that Really Tall Guy Who Always Stands In Front Of Me. Plus I don’t care for large crowds. But every year I make an exception for the gay pride parade, because it’s different. We’re not celebrating civic pride, we’re celebrating being ok with ourselves in spite of everything we may experience. … more

Last Friday I had the excellent opportunity to talk to interactive industry colleagues about something near and dear to my liver heart – homebrewing. I served five kinds of homebrew to warm up the crowd, then dropped an amazing 17 minutes of blabbing about beer on their unwitting ears. People were kind enough to laugh at my dorky jokes, too! What nice folks we have in Portland. … more

Now that Ashton Kutcher has challenged CNN to see who could reach 1 million followers first and won, people are wondering all about Twitter. CNN’s Quick Poll today shows that only 6% of people are using Twitter (as of April 17), which begs the question “Who cares?” So Kutcher got a million followers, so he’ll donate 10,000 mosquito bed nets to World Malaria Day, why does anyone want so many followers? … more

One of the things I appreciate about Sam Adams, the mayor of Portland, is that he’s tech-savvy. Like President Obama, he’s hip to the tools the internet has to offer. He has a Twitter account, a nice little mayoral website, and ran a good election campaign. His use of technology makes him feel accessible, and that’s important to me. … more

It’s not easy to describe how it felt when California passed Proposition 8 – banning same-sex marriages – last week. The same happened in Oregon four years ago. We search for words to express how it feels to know that secretly (and openly) 52% of people hate us. We rage and we cry and we feel empty. We try to forgive, to keep hope alive, to move forward despite this setback. … more