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Thank you, Igal Koshevoy for the help and all you did for Portland. I will greatly miss your presence.

A last minute, short message letting me know a meeting wouldn’t be happening Tuesday night alerted me to something wrong. Very wrong. A few vague tweets later I could feel that something bad had happened in the tech community and a quick follow-up message “by now you probably just saw the announcement…” was numbing. Damn!

The world continues to feel senseless to me. I’m asking why someone who made this a much better place had to leave us now? There’s no answer. All I have are memories of how he presented himself and how much he helped.

I can’t remember exactly when I first met Igal Koshevoy, but I’m sure it was at Cubespace. My first recollection of him was picking up some bags of production gear as I was packing up an event there. I shot him a glance, like saying: “umm, where’re you going with my bags??” Wearing one of the heavy backpacks, he also grabbed as much as he could carry in each arm unbalanced and asked if my car was parked out front. I recall he opted to take the stairs and I worried that he was going to throw out his back or worse, fall down the stairs. He didn’t. I think this was a bit of a guy thing, probably part of his past as an Eagle Scout. I could relate to that.

Most often he would swoop in unannounced to see what he could do to help pack in or out- kind of like a conference ninja- I didn’t ask, he just quietly appeared with a smile. He had other responsibilities, but he always found some time for the ‘grunt work’. More importantly that’s what he did in the tech community as a leader. Ignite. BarCamp. Open Source Bridge. Ruby Brigade. ePDX. OpenConferenceWare. Calagator and Photographer & Artist. That’s the short list, but the things he did held a great impact on the people of the open source, startup and tech communities in Portland, Oregon and beyond. He was the definition of mensch.

We shared some funny moments during Open Source Bridge 2011. He tried to take some pictures of me at the podium while I packed up after the keynote. It devolved into me posing like a Roman Emperor addressing the Senate. He didn’t post the photos, probably for a very good reason. In 2012 I really wanted to catch up with him because there was an idea for a community project that I wanted his opinion and guidance on. I privately told a few people that I knew the perfect person to discuss this with, but we didn’t run into each other as had been usual and I completely missed the opportunity. I’ll have that to regret the rest of my life, wondering what guidance, input and advice he would have had.

Some people who knew him better than me have written eloquently about how he touched their lives. Pouring over his Flickr photostream, I’m reminded of the events and find pictures I hadn’t seen before. He not only documented the rise of this new Portland tech community from it’s beginning, he also captured in photographs some pivotal personal moments of mine. As I commented to a friend and someone who also knew him well, his passing is kicking over a few rocks in my life to see what’s underneath. That’s a bit tough to acknowledge at the moment, but reading the last section of this thoughtful blog post by Addie Beseda struck a nerve- that it’s time be open and public about how we feel and what we need from each other. Our social apps give the power to share the most intimate yet mundane details of our day to day lives, yet that seems to me a smoke screen, a diversion from the very real feelings we hold tightly inside. Like Igal showed up for our community events and projects, we must find a way to show up for each other during the times when selflessness can paradoxically turn to a feeling of isolation. That’s hard work but I’m reminded that Igal made hard work look fun in the context of community.

Thank you, Igal Koshevoy for the help and all you did for Portland.

We are planning a Celebration of Life for our friend and colleague, Igal Koshevoy. We welcome all who wish to participate, volunteer, and contribute to these efforts. Igal’s memorial will be Sunday, April 21st from 4-7pm at First Unitarian Church, 1211 SW Main St, Portland, OR. Please RSVP at Eventbrite so we can plan accordingly. You can sign up as a volunteer when you RSVP, or by contacting carolynn@tenx.org. We have set up koshevoy.net to help our community celebrate Igal’s life. Please share memories, photos or words of remembrance, and read what others have shared. We have also created a Facebook page, and on Twitter we request that you use the hashtag #igalko or his twitter handle @igalko. Stumptown Syndicate is accepting contributions on behalf of Friends of Igal Koshevoy, if interested please read the Contribute page.

Memorial Site: http://koshevoy.net

Memorial RSVP: http://igal-koshevoy-celebration.eventbrite.com/#

Memorial Live Stream: http://new.livestream.com/bcHD/igal

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I’ve always been involved in some form of media making since I was in grade school picking apart/repairing cassette tape recorders, so get off my lawn. Specifically, outliers and mainstreamers that insist on coming up with newfangled media taxonomy every few years, primarily to define digital media and the Internet. One of my ‘favorites’ has been Transmedia which I’ve felt has been over-hyped and inconsistently defined. I’ve heard people stammer when I’ve asked them to tell me exactly what it is. Even Wikipedia and one of the key proponents of transmedia Henry Jenkins, appear to differ on the definition. It seems to me it has never adequately defined anything really new as Disney could be seen as a transmedia storyteller par excellence before the internet even existed. The problem these folks have is defining the unique little flower that transmedia is, and not to confuse it with cross-platform storytelling. Transmedia is a push the story and audience to the media platform exercise with either positive or negative results (Jenkins: “… are dispersed systematically across multiple media platforms…”). And let’s face it, it’s a marketing strategy to get paid more for telling a story in multiple places. There’s nothing wrong with that if you’re successful. If you create characters, back stories and story arcs that are compelling enough to bring an audience to additional media platforms then good for you, but there’s nothing new here. Marvel, Lucas, DC, Dark Horse, Roddenberry have been doing this for years, well before the 1991 invention of the term transmedia. It’s just cross-platform storytelling.

Why am I bringing this all up now? Partly because the transmedia folks will mention interactivity among the storytellers and audience, though this seems lacking in the formal definition. Marketing proponents push to the platforms and have even fought their audiences from time to time, sometimes by declaring full creative ownership or even copyright infringement control over their fans. I think that violates the original intent of transmedia. I think transmedia should be wholly redefined from what it currently is: pushing a story to multiple media platforms, to the better definition of pulling fans to media platforms for the purpose of sharing the storytelling experience.

Enter Minecraft. This amazingly popular indie game released in 2011 after 2 years of alpha/beta development that I became aware of during a presentation at the XOXO festival last year by Portland’s 2 Player Productions who created a beautiful documentary about it: “Minecraft: The Story of Mojang”. And then around the holidays my tween daughter began to enthusiastically play the mobile version, watch YouTube videos and talk to her friends about it. What did I discover?

Minecraft is different. It’s a game with an audience. It’s an open ended game- you can do what you want, which is a key to it’s popularity. Participants create worlds, characters, stories and challenges to their heart’s content. They create elaborate scenarios- dare to call them stories on their own. This personal walled garden of storytelling between the participant and their device of choice (PC, game console or mobile) is by default not a shared experience. The shared experience comes when Minecrafters make videos (mini movies if you will) exploring their creation to share with an audience on YouTube. There’s no push to YouTube as a platform, rather it’s a natural choice to share what was created in the Minecraft game world. Like evolution taught us, pick the best tool for the job and the job at hand is to share my creation in Minecraft, and the best tool is a YouTube video. Because this is a purely creative endeavor, the YouTube video is the perfect platform to share the experience of your creation without actually being there. Think about composing and performing music. Because space and time won’t allow me to sit and listen to Bird perform his music for me live, I can purchase a recording that I’ll enjoy without actually being there. Or perhaps it’s the artist who shares a photograph of her painting on Facebook. A large part of the history of recorded media is about encouraging new fans to an alternate creation of the work.

Minecraft videos are very popular on YouTube. They spark interest in people who don’t even play Minecraft because these presentations tell a story of creation, survival, exploration and discovery. They can be engrossing if you take the time to watch a few choice videos. They even have their own creative style: typically hosted by one or two presenters either showing off an original creation or exploring a world created by someone else and downloaded as maps or mods. This is a feedback loop in it’s purest sense of creating game play and passively viewing that story. That’s a natural call-to-action that inspires to create and share more in Minecraft. The sharp growth in new videos posted and purchases of the game should be a marketers dream…

And this all takes place on the media platforms that transmedia pundits have been babbling about for years: digital video and games. Advertisers should be salivating as creative agencies have been striving for years to crack this duopoly of mediums in the hopes of getting twice the audience and theoretically, twice the payout. But the natural tendencies of this symbiotic relationship between interactive game and passive viewing experience were baked into this product from the start. Minecraft itself was created as a space to build. More options, fewer rules, open to modification- this starts to look less like a game as we’ve come to know them and a little more like those silly virtual worlds like Second Life that we would all be immersed in by now. We’re not of course because those worlds are just as advertised, a second life not really well integrated into our first life, the one we already barely have time for. A game field with open play, come as you can, build as you can, share when you can, integrates very well into our day to day first life just like building a project in Legos (an obvious Minecraft inspiration).

So how do we monetize it? That’s the question everybody want’s to answer, right? Well let me tell you something right now, you can’t. Period. Move along. You may think you can: hey, how about targeted in game ads? Nope! Lower thirds? Nope! Pre and Post rolls? Nope! You may see these in videos and game play and whether they’ll be effective or not for the ad platforms that use them, they won’t be for you. Game over. Why? because they interrupt the open feedback loop. They put unwanted graffiti on a special place created by someone who wanted to share it. It’s within our nature to be creative but we also must be able to trust ourselves and the audience in order to have the confidence to share what we’ve made. Invasive advertising breaks that trust by cheapening the platform.

So begin with the idea that you can’t monetize this at all, at least not in the ways you’re familiar with. Then look at the success of it, the millions of viewers and almost 10 million paid downloads of the game. What does that tell us about successful campaigns or content? Are you the one to shoehorn a story across media platforms in order to push your audience there, or would you rather ride the natural pull and symbiotic feedback loop between platforms? The key I think is allowing your fans to build the world, the message, the campaign, the story, in an unrestricted and natural way using the media tools they’re familiar with.

Simply put: Don’t push. Let them pull.

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I have been blessed to be thrust into the world of conferences these last few years as a planner, producer and videographer. Not the trade shows and expo floors that I’ve worked and attended in the past as a corporate technical marketing engineer, but special interest groups, birds of a feather type affairs that typically attract an audience of bright people to watch engaging speakers give their talks. For me it started small with something called a “Cyborg Camp” (how cool is that, right?) at a former SE Portland co-working office called Cube Space and then Bar Camps, Journalism Camps, WordPress Camps (a lot of camping in there) and on to larger Open Source community conferences. And Portland, Oregon has hatched several of these gatherings, large and small, with WebVisions being the largest homegrown gathering of web and mobile designers in its 12th year and growing annual events in New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Barcelona to Open Source Bridge, the Portland conference for open source citizens in its 4th year and Word Camp (Portland Edition) in its 5th, for the community of bloggers and developers on the WordPress platform. What makes these conferences work is the people involved, from attendees, speakers, organizers and volunteers who put their hard work and love into the event each year. Sometimes these gatherings can find the right venue to fit the atmosphere of the event and sometimes, for several reasons finding the right place to hold an event is a challenge.

Part I: Say Goodbye to Conferences, Say Hello to Love @XOXO

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It was at the height of election night that I sent out this tweet based on a conversation I just had with my daughter about the Obama vs. Romney presidential race. Seeing the truth in this simple idea isn’t that hard. You will read much more complex arguments as to why Romney lost his bid for president, but I think it was just that simple.

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It’s this week’s little 10 minute talk that finds it’s way into 2 hours of The Weather Report every Monday at noon on House of Sound. I like the brevity of this little nibble of a podcast. Will it grow to 15, 20 or 30 minutes in the future? Perhaps. Let’s just see how this all goes, shall we?

My pre-show antics were consumed watching a live stream of Charlie Hales and Jefferson Smith debate- well gosh, that’s such a strong word here in Portland isn’t it? Let’s say discuss why they think they’d do a really swell job if elected mayor of Portland. Sure, I miss the spikey days of classic American political debate like a Burr vs. Hamilton, but this is the 21st century and Portland after all. Which is why I started to question- why is this mayoral race so boring? Where’s the keeping it weird Portland vibe that we all love in our politics?