Great News! The next CyborgCamp will be in early May of 2010. That means its time to start planning!

This meeting is everyone’s chance to brainstorm on location ideas, sponsors and speakers. What kinds of topics are of interest to you? How has the idea of Cyborg evolved over the last year? What new kinds of technologies have arrived on the scene?

We’ll discuss volunteers and the wiki too. Come along, especially if you helped make CyborgCamp PDX ‘08 so excellent in the first place. Bring snacks and drinks to share with others.

This planning meeting will most likely be followed by general networking and fun at a local haunt.

RSVP on Upcoming.org

Where:

AboutUs.org

107 SE Washington Street, Suite 520
Portland Oregon 97214
United States

When:

Tuesday, January 19, 2010 from 7–9pm

—

What is CyborgCamp?

CyborgCamp is an unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. We’ll discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

CyborgCamp’s aim is to have many communication channels, such as Twitter, Flickr, UstreamTV, Video and Audio recordings and live chats displayed on the screen.
Why May 2010? In March 2010, CyborgCamp will make its way to Brazil and back before landing again in Portland, Oregon for its second year.

—

Questions? Contact Amber Case @caseorganic or MJ @mama_j.

You can also follow @cyborgcamp on Twitter for updates.

Today I was excited to speak at BoCo, a great new conference developed by the Boulder Tech Community, especially Andrew Hyde. Rick Turoczy was there, among other awesome Portlanders, San Fransiscans, and Boulderites. It  was a sunny day and there were beautiful mountains all around. The morning sessions dealt with food and music and were very wonderful to listen to.

I spoke about Cyborg Anthropology, which is the study of human computer interactions and how technology affects the way in which we communicate with one another.

We Are All Cyborgs

When you read this, you are acting as a low-tech cyborg, because you are using a computer to view text that I have written. My writing is stored here in my website, part of my actor network of external technological devices that, when taken together, comprise my technosocial self. As cavemen, we began skipping evolution by crafting spears instead of growing teeth. We began making hammers as extensions of our fists.

My social self is part technology and part human. My technological self does a lot of networking for me through my social networking profiles and my Google search results. So do yours (if you have them). My technosocial avatar of a self networks for me when I’m not there.

Distributed Social Selves

Each piece of my distributed social identity leaves a geological trail of past self that my present self can interact with. These all comprise my future self, which your future self or selves will most undoubtedly interact with. The online optimization of self, when coupled with the analog optimization of self (i.e. real-life networking, person to person) is the creation of a stable identity that is uniformly distributed and presented all over the web.

Technology Resembles Magic

Technology is almost magical. Like the scrying pool of the past (or of fantasy novels), the iPhone or computer monitor allows us to view anything anywhere in the world through YouTube and Twitter, News sites and Facebook. We can summon up an image with a simple spell (a simple text entry into Google search or Twitter search) and we can extend our speech and ears across very large distances in seconds with the mere touch of a button.

Technology Gives Us Superpowers

Technology, when used well, gives us amazing superpowers. We are like gods, until we forget to charge our batteries. We are like gods, until we forget to upgrade our devices to the most recent operating system or device number. Our external prosthetic devices turn against us when they get old. Our old clothes go out of style. Our brick phones make us get laughed at in the streets.

From Physical Transportation to Mental Transportation

In the same way that cars transport our physical bodies, computers and cell phones transport our spiritual bodies. Don’t like the word spiritual? Use the word mind instead. We’re increasingly entering into a world of mental machines - mental transportation devices. These devices transmit our thoughts invisibly to others. They are taking up smaller amounts of space, until vehicles, who require increasingly large highways.

Mental Traffic Jams

We have traffic jams, too. Mental traffic jams. Jams on Twitter. Twitter fails. Rush hour around important events and deaths and wars and crises. We can now have multiple views of the same event.

Telephonic Schizophrenia

When telephone technology first came out, people felt it was crazy. The idea of going into a room and speaking into a machine sounded schizophrenic.

More

There is more: enough to fill up a hour and a half speech, but I’ll leave that to you to see the next time I speak. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic, or you can check out BoCo.

Yesterday I attended WebTrends Connect ‘08 in Seattle, Washington with Ryan Summers of ISITE Design.

The event was three hours long, and fast-paced. We arrived at 9:00 Am to find a speaker from WebTrends discussing the future state of news. He asked us to consider what could happen if one used online traffic to drive what is written about in analog newspapers.

As the seminar progressed, the ability to stitch together a holistic view of customer experience became a primary area of concern. One of the first major points was that Marketing and IT need to be working together.

“There is a lot of information locked behind closed doors”, said the next speaker, who was from TeraData. “There is no way to get the data out of the web analytics solutions and into the reporting dashboard.

He proposed the idea of business intelligence tools that could access this online visitor data and put it into an enterprise data warehouse.

He pointed out that one of the current difficulties of using data is that we are making a transition from 2nd Generation Enterprise to 3rd Generation Enterprise systems.

The 2nd Generation is Closed + Proprietary, whereas the 3rd Generation is Open standard-based. You simply can’t inegrate data systems when they are separated by proprietary, closed systems.

As O’Reilly once stated, “The internet is becomnig an enormous database that can be quiried, sorted, and applied to existing models and practices to change things”. WebTrends, TeraData, and other new systems seek to integrate many different systems with Analytics. The only way to streamline the spaces between data and change is to remove the closed doors betwen that data.

He stated that tech solutions should be open source based. These technologies seek to implement solutions that bring the two together and erases the nodes between them. He also pointed out that standards need to be in place that everyone agrees about across the organization.

Data Flow and Analytics

Online data can influence customer marketing, call centers, data warehouses, CRM and merchandisers.

Business Centric
—-
Business strategy
Performance Management
People — Processes
Analytics Processes
Analytics Applications
BI Platforms
Information Management Infrastructure.
——————

The next speaker was Paul Barrett
Global Director, Customer Management and DIgital Advertising

“How does one create one vIew of your customer?”, he asked, responding that the solution was “an Interactive marketing Intelligence across the enterprise”.

“Marketing an IT don’t like to play together — they have completely different mindsets.” A solution is to create Integrated Data warehouses so that the website and the customer service can blend into each other. Bringing that relationship closer together allows a more holistic view of all of the data coming into a company.

One of the most difficult issues is getting the recommended changes implemented in a shorter period of time every time.

It’s not about the data you can get at, but the risk of not knowing the data you’re missing.

The metrics are cheap, bu the metrics you don’t know are not.

Case Study: Travelocity

Tavelocity took the idea of using the CRM to drive customers to offers through the website. They had to avoid things like, “if you get a flight to NY for $500, and you log back out, when you next visit the site you can’t be shown an offer for $300, since you just bought the $500 one”.

They have a lot of dynamic decision making since you’ve already placed an order for $500.

Whne you become able to share the data between these systems, you become able to provide customized experiences for your customers with data that revolves around them.

You can also begin to bring unstructured data, such as the data on blogs into analytic understanding. For instance, when people blog about your website you can bring that data into your data warehouse.

The next speaker was Kevin Bobowski: Vice President, Client Services at Statigent

Stratigent is Partnering with Exact Target to provide a variety of KPI’s, such as benchmarkeing, competitive intelligence, visitor engagement measurement, optimization, proactive reporting and analysis, website testing and optimization.

“Don’t start with strategies that are too high-level that you don’t see value from them in the short term”, Bobowski said.

Primary challenges facing organizations today:

• So many initiatives and not enough time to implement all of them
• Picking and choosing what to do in a timely matter reduces liability
• Intense pressure to produce results
• Increasingly complex demands (coming from your business stockholders — their demand for information, customer insights)
• New marketing technologies create more data and more silos
• Balance to Building out these Capabilities

Strategy + Business Process

Do you have a unified strategy and clear goals that are measurement?

Infrastructure

Is realible and flexible technology in place to meet the evolving needs of ke sakehodes?

Value Creation Tactics

(Any processes a business uses to glean value from your data, testing, campaign analysis, conversion testing, customer segmentation).
What actions are you taking — on a consistent basis - to drive ROI?
Are the building blocks in place for this?

Isolated Successes vs. Long-term success

An organization with isolated successes - look at the successful campaign. This is often an indicator that there’s an executive sponsorship.

Where did you get your data, how did you get your data? instead of how to analyze your data.

Building a ‘culture of analytics’

The organization needs to invest in value creation tactics.
Demonstrate short term results that allow you to gain greater sponsorship and credit for lager projects — with the long term strategy and goals in mind.

He coined the term ‘Stratactical’, which he defined as, “of or relating to a strategy driven-approach using value based tatics”, adding that “while it’s great to have a long term strategy, you also have to balance it with results on the short term. You need to develop reliably, stable success.”

43 Percent of organization say they’ve started the process — but they’re not seeing any value.

How can you get hte results? How can you guarantee that those results will net short term wins

Key Preformance Indicators

It is difficult to show ROI from a seamless cross-channel customer experience with personalization and customization in place.

It is less difficult to Show ROI from a trigger-based communications program with customer profiling and predictive modeling.

4 tactics for a successful business case

-Build an actionable strategy
-Connect your marketing data
-Establish relationships (where are the shared pain points across the organization? Data silos make it difficult to have everyone on the same page).
-Optimize, Test, and Repeat…
-Incorporate resting to amplify the value you generate

Building an Actionable Strategy

-Optimize the Media Mix (return on ad spend)
-Increase the most productive spend
-Increase E-mail spend if cost per acquisition is less than direct mail and other marketing tactics
Reduce acquisition costs and increase profits per customers
Find and understand the total cost per Acquisition.

5 Types of KPI’s

-Outcome/Business driver

Return on Ad spend (Answers the question of”how well am I doing?”

-Diagnostic metrics (Helps you answer the question “how can I do better?”. An example is a conversion rate — click through to a landing page).

-Smoke alarms (Helps you anticipate potential problems that may exist. Example is number of unopened E-mails. That’s an indicator that something might not be right — might be sending E-mails to the wrong audience. Allows you to dig deeper).

-Predictor KPI’s (Allows you to look into the future — Answers the question of will I do better tomorrow? A client may invest in a banner campaign. Customers may need an amount of time to evaluate the purpose. Banner clicks might not convert immediately — in a day, week or month. Some organizations know up front, and they can prepare for revenue and stock — for how well they’ll be doing in 45 days).

-Latent KPI (the most valuable of all. Helps you answer the question of where are my marketing opportunities. Can take the form of customer surveys on the websites. This data sometimes sits solely in the marketing department and is not let out, but the data there should be shared across many channels — because it can help every department understand how others are seeing their organization).

Business Philosophy

Don’t let the KPI’s change every week or month, or else everyone in the organization will have a difficult time synching with each new idea, method, or direction. Focus, and slough off things that don’t match that focus.

Connecting your Marketing Data

The question is where are you as an organization? If your organization is not advanced enough

ExactTarget Email Integration

You can exact a customer’s E-mail address and the Product SKU’s they’ve purchased/looked at, as well as sales funnel abandonment info.

You can use ExactTarget automation to pick a file up, bring it in, and send and email leveraging that data.

Creating a targeted,one-to-one message using our proprietary scripting language.
Press the “Start” button and go about you your daily business.

Promote product A, but you know that customers who purchase product A also purchase products B and C. So you can include those in dynamic E-mails based on their interest in product A.

Promote product B and C automatically, but only if that product is in stock.

Optimization

Optimization is bigger than testing but testing plays a key role in the organization. Testing can drive short term wins.

Optimize emails creatives to increase click-throughs

-Headlines
-Offers
-Message/Copy
-Images
-Call to actions

Try different calls to action — when you begin to use multi-variate testing, you increase the capability to really increase your ROI.

Increase lending page conversion rates by multi-variate testing in the same way

-Headline
-Form field
-Color scheme
-Calls to action

1. Be Stratatical. Make sure that strategy is actionable.
2. KPI’s. Abolsutley essential.
3. Breaking down data silos allows data to flow into larger areas. These data areas combine into one bigger view of the customer. Which allows a richer view of the customer.
4. Optimization testing. It cannot be said enough how important optimization testing is. How else can you know what is successful in the site and wha epople are looking at.

KPI’s can exist on every level.

For copies of the Slides, E-mail:
Kevin.Bobowski@Stratigent.com

Many Ways to Get One View

Barry Parshall, Director of Product Management

The more plugged in the rest of the organization is, the more successful that organization can work together.

We see more and more organizations taking the data out of WebTrends and turning it into their own

Microsoft has categorized all of their key metrics into dashboards.

WebTrends 8.6 Demo

The UI was taken from Microsoft Outlook.

OTBC Drivers

A means for getting direct access to WebTrends data bins with an ODBC-compliant application.

Same driver for WebTrends Analytics and WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

Easy to install and use.

Demo, WebTrends ODBC Driver

-Open Excel 2007
-Click Data from other sources —> from Microsoft query
-WebTrends Demo — the data source for WebTrends already set up.
-Click ‘ok’
-This will connect you to the webtrends backend — select the profile. double click the ones that one cares about. Can grab multiple data channels and pull them into the same Excel data sheet.
Next –> you can sort by anything you want.
-Choose ’sort by revenue’, descending.
-Click Finish.

Limitations

Ryan Summers informed me that, “you can only quiery one time period at a time. You can’t query two time periods”.

Datalinks for Microsoft Excel

From Business Intelligence, Inc. (a Portland, Oregon Company).

You can join all of that data with other data sources. Provides a real simple way to join that data with other data sources. Will also export the data intelligence to Excel — so that you can go to Excel, hit refresh, and Excel will auto update all of the fields.

Webservices API —> can directly implement data in and out of the data warehouse. Bi-directional data transport for WebTrends Marketing Warehouse
Based on SOAP.

TechnologyLeaders (New York)

Dynamic Alerts lets you know when to act — when a variable changes dramatically, you are sent a notification E-mail.
Event envelope based on historical norms. Alerts are sent when activites exceeded historical norms.

DataMind (Seattle, Wa)

They produce a very slick custom scorecard offering the capability to export all of your analytics to one place. There’s also a browser overlay application.

Demo

All Excel based. Data arranged by tabs. Capturing a thumbnail of your website and overlaying the analytical data over it. Consultants customize the scorecard for your business.

Data Scheduler
Allows the scheduling of an export for the underlying analysis tables that contains hundreds of thousands of data sources.

The WebTrends Marketing Warehouse

-A true data warehouse, based on Microsoft SQL Server 2008.
-Stores and maintains discrete records of visitors, and all “events” taken by them.
-Every campaign click-through, ect.
-Limitless correlations and audience segmentation capabilities
(Get me a list of visitors that met all of this criteria).

The fundamental difference between aggregate web analytics, and customer centric web analytics is the ability to run queries.

Case Studies

Orbitz, a TeraData customer, is using it for:
-Web behavior connected with offline transactions
-Combine data analysis, reporting in its own warehouse.
Polaris
-Web scoring accurately segments diverse audiences
-Use WebTrends Score to assign point values to particular onine actions (as a mean to quickly asses consumer interest in some products vs. others)
-On a nightly basis exact
use this to populate further interaction .

The Microsoft SQL Database is automatically populated with data and assigns each user action with a number.

Polaris Home Page (rule sets)
New vehicle interest: 1 (user clicked here but left after a few seconds)
Racing Interest: 0
Parts and gear interest: 15 (user clicked here and watched a video on parts and gear)
Engaged (how interested is your user?): 10 (video watching)
Total Score: 26

————

Conclusion

While some of these techniques are not new, it was nice to see many of them presented in three hours. It is apparent that bringing data from different sectors into common areas will help many to understand how users and companies are interacting. Analytics are becoming essential for companies to efficiently connect and deal with many customers at once while providing them with customized experiences.

I look forward to watching industries and products that help reduce the data silos that affect many current companies. The technologies are there — it is just an issue of getting these technologies into companies so that more users can be understood. I am sure that interest in these tools will only increase in the future.

———–

About

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and new media consultant living in Portland, Oregon. She likes to attend events and meet people in the industry. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

I wanted to write about this before, but I had to wait until everything was secured and verified.

In September, Steve Gehlen invited me to speak about Cyborg Anthropology at Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conference on September 5th of this year. The conference was a refreshing and entertaining look at where entertainment, art, culture, business, and social media are going. The keynote was Joshua Green of MIT’s Convergence Culture Consortium.

After Inverge, Joshua and I compared theorists and research, and had a great time socializing along with all of the other conference attendees and speakers. A month later, Joshua informed me of a conference at MIT called the Futures of Entertainment, and wondered if I would be interested in being on a panel on social media. He said that my analysis and understanding of both the academic and corporate world would provide a useful bridge between two separate fields.

Convergence culture has moved swiftly from buzzword to industry logic. The creation of transmedia storyworlds, understanding how to appeal to migratory audiences, and the production of digital extensions for traditional materials are becoming the bread and butter of working in the media. Futures of Entertainment 3 once again brings together key industry leaders who are shaping these new directions in our culture and academic scholars immersed in the investigation the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological implications of these changes in our media landscape. This year’s conference will work to bring together the themes from last year - media spreadability, audiences and value, social media, distribution - with the consortium’s new projects in moving towards an increasingly global view of media convergence and flow. Topics for this year’s panels include global distribution systems and the challenges of moving content across borders, transmedia and world building, comics and commerce, social media and spreadability, and renewed discussion on how and why to measure audience value.

I very carefully prepared two forms of submission — one on Cyborg Anthropology from the academic perspective, and another from the business perspective.

However, I feel that what I am doing pales in comparison to the accomplishments of those whom I will be participating with. I am both honored and overwhelmed by this opportunity. I hope to be able to add value to some aspect of the conference.

I’ll be participating on the social media panel, which is described as follows:

“Moving lives online, creating conversations across geography, connecting with consumers - how is social media defining the current entertainment landscape? As people not only put more content online, but conduct more of their daily lives in networked spaces and via social networking sites, how are social media influencing how we think of audiences? Video-sharing platforms have changed how we think of production and distribution, and Facebook gifts point to the value of virtual properties, how are these sites enabling other processes of production or distribution practices. Spaces where commercial and community purposes intertwine, what are the implications for privacy, content management, and identity construction of social media? How have they impacted notions of civic engagement?”

Conference Attendees

Kim Moses - Executive Producer, The Ghost Whisperer, Lost, Medium, Yochai Benkler - Harvard Law School, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press), John Caldwell - UCLA, Production Culture (Duke University Press), Henry Jenkins - MIT, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (NYU Press), Alex McDowell - Production Designer, The Watchmen, Kevin Slavin - Area/Code, Sabrina Caluori - Director, Marketing and Promotions, HBO Online, Grant McCracken - Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture (Indiana University Press), Donald K Ranvaud - Buena Onda Films, Amanda Lotz - University of Michigan, The Television Will be Revolutionized (NYU Press), Gail De Kosknik - UC Berkeley, How to Save Soap Opera: Histories and Futures of an Iconic Genre, Joe Marchese - socialvibe.com, Amber Case - Cyborg Anthropologist and Social Media Consultant, Hazelnut Consulting, Mauricio Mota - New Content (Brazil), Alisa Perren - Georgia State University, The Media Industry Studies Book (Blackwell Publishing)….more.

Steve Gehlen, Paige Saez (on a grant from PNCA) and Kris Krug will be flying out to join me at the conference. In case you’re in the area too, the conference information is as follows:

MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3

Friday, Nov 21 8:30a to Saturday, Nov 22 8:30a
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): Wong Auditorium, Cambridge, MA

Thanks

A great big thank you to everyone in the Portland Tech community for being supportive and welcoming of interdisciplinary thought. Special thanks to Joshua Green and Steve Gehlen.

—–

Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and New Media Consultant living in Portland, Oregon. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds?

Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers. But Portland’s own event, Ignite Portland, will be happening soon, and it is a chance for locals to make short presentations on anything they are passionate about.

When?

November 13, 2008. On the Ignite Portland Blog, Josh Bancroft urges Portlanders to Save the Date.

Ignite History

Local tech legend Raven Zachary told me that Ignite Portland was founded by Brady Forrest of O’Reilly. He was initially inspired by Japan’s rapid fire presentation method of Pecha Kucha and did an adaptation of that for technology. If you haven’t heard of Pecha Kucha before, it is Japanese for the sound of conversation. Attendees watch a speakers that have only 20 slides, with 20 seconds per slide.Portland Pecha Kucha Night was just last week.

Ignite Portland

Portland, Oregon has had some of the largest events in Ignite history. Ignite 2 packed the Bagdad Theatre with over 750 people, and many waiting in line had to be turned away.

Ignite Portland at Gnomedex

Several alumni of Ignite Portland will be presenting their five minute topics at this week’s Gnomedex 8.0, an annual social media conference organized by Chris Pirillo. Rick Turoczy has a list of the presenters on his blog, Silicon Florist, and Portland Ignites Gnomedex on TinyScreenfuls, the blog of Josh Bancroft, who points out that “The idea for Ignite Portland was hatched at last year’s Gnomedex.”

Ignite Portland Planning Begins Now

November 13th may seem like a long time away, but Ignite events take a tremendous amount of effort to pull off. Want to be part of the event and meet some really cool people in the process? The Ignite Planning Committee is always open to dedicated, passionate volunteers. Help make this Ignite Portland even better than the last three.

The Ignite Planning meeting that occurred at Cubespace tonight was there primarily to deal with a system in large demand. The first major thing discussed how the online ticket reservation system would function. Then, volunteer teams were developed. Currently, they are as follows:

The Presenter Team

Raven Zachary, Mentor iPhone developer and recently of Raven.me, an iPhone development blog. You can follow Raven on Twitter. He’s also a Legion of Tech Board Member.

Tasks

• Review and sort through all Portland Ignite 4 proposals.
• Ensure that all presenters submit 20 images, a Powerpoint, or PDF by the final deadline.
• Ensure that AV equipment does not FAIL upon deployment.

The Marketing Team

Josh Bancroft, Mentor of Intel, Kindle Evangelist, and author of the TinyScreenfuls Blog, and Legion of Tech Board Member. @Jabancroft on Twitter.

Tasks

• Spread the word about Ignite Portland 4 through writing on the Ignite Portland Blog
• Designate an Official Ignite Portland spokesperson to ensure uniform information gets out to local media connections.
• Monitor the Tweetverse for Tweets about Ignite Portland. Tweet from the official Ignite Portland blog, and answer questions as they are asked.

The Sponsor Contact/Site Team

Todd Kenefsky, Mentor CEO of Connect Interactive Media, an interactive marketing company, and Legion of Tech Board Member.

Tasks

• Convert Sponsor logos from .eps format to .gif or .jpg and place them on the Ignite Portland sponsor page.
• Help create sponsor slides

The Ignite Event Setup Team

Dawn Foster, Mentor, Consultant, FastWonder blogger, Legion of Tech Board Member, and recently, of Shizzow, an micro-geolocation released last Monday (a review of its beta release is here).

Tasks

• Help set up the venue during the day of the event.
• Organize attendees and help line flow.

Other Organizers

Adam Duvander also has a hand in organizing Ignite Portland events and has presented in past Ignites. Check out his blog, Simplicity Rules, and Adam’s Twitter profile.
~.—————–

For more information, check out the Ignite Portland Website.

Ignite Portland 4 will be on November 13, 2008

Bagdad Theater
• 3702 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd
• Portland, OR 97214
• 7:00 - 10:00 PM
• Ticketholders get in at 5:30 PM
• General Admission at 6:15 PM
• Admission is always FREE

~.—————-

Please let me know if I missed anything in this post. Feel free to contact the Mentors via Twitter if you’d like to add to the volunteer efforts.

You can follow me on Twitter @caseorganic. I’ll be on the Marketing and Sponsor Teams.

Thanks for reading Hazelnut Tech Talk! We’re proud to bring you event coverage from a mix of creative and tech worlds.

Volume Four of Portland’s Pecha Kucha Series was held last Tuesday, August 12th, 2008.

This particular session was located on NW 8th and Couch Street in artists place that was currently under construction. There was a random amalgamation of wooden benches on the floor facing a large presentation screen. The event was free, and so was free wine and beer. Not bad for a Tuesday night of entertainment!

At 6:30Pm the room was already filled to capacity. There is a large oriental carpet in front of the large projection screen, and the audience overflow is sitting on it.

What is Pecha Kucha?

Pecha Kucha is a Japanese word for the sound of conversation, or chit chat.
It is a presentation technique in which the presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds each.
In this way, an audience can absorb a large amount of information very quickly, because interest is kept up by the rapid change of images and speaker engagement. It’s a way to remove the annoyance that a standard Powerpoint presentations often bring to standard meeting experiences.

Pecha Kucha Presentation Summaries

Andrew Brahe

Confluence Project

Brahe received his B.S. in Architecture from Portland State University, and he has a passion for ethical design and strives for a better way to build.

His presentation started with an audience participation exercise. He had the right side of the room begin to snap their fingers, and got the middle of the room to begin rubbing their hands together. He made the left side of the room made slap their thighs. Then he urged everyone to do their part faster and louder, until the place was filled with a great amount of percussive noise.

Then he made everyone stop.

There was dead silence and darkness; then the first slide showed up on the monitor.

The presentation involved architecture. One of the best slides demonstrated a beautifully formed pedestrian bridge that had been built over a freeway near Ft. Vancouver. He said that this bridge would be opened to the public soon.

The image of the land bridge spanning over the highway was intense. It looked as if green grass had grown all over the highway in an organic arch, partially eroding away the concrete. In reality, the bridge was allowing animals and humans a way to cross over previously impervious territory.

There were a number of other architectural projects shown, including a tall bird observation tower in the middle of the forest with a long ramp all the way to the top. Brahe is also employed as a project manager with Maya Lin (the architect behind the Vietnam memorial in Washington D.C.) on a multi-sited art and architectural installation.

Diane Jacobs and Karen Maurer

Visual Artists

This presentation detailed a future interactive installation at the Disjecta art space in North Portland. The show encourages viewers to “See, feel, open, and act”, and “Find words that begin to transform the present”.

“We abolished slavery, except as a punishment for crime”, the presenter said.

The pieces were about bridging the gaps in multicultural understanding in Portland. One of the most poignant lines: “Don’t let anyone forfeit untapped potential”.

The art show opens Saturday, the 23rd of August from 6-9 pm at the Disjecta. 8371 N Interstate Portland Oregon 97217.
Gallery Hours are Fri-Sun Aug 24-Oct 25 / 12-6 pm, and the Artists Talk is Wednesday, October 1st at 7 pm.

Bill Dieter

Industrial Designer, TERRAZIGN, Inc.

Bill Dieter started Terrazign, Inc., a Portland-based industrial design firm in 1994. The firm works primarily with fabrics and hard woods. His interest is in “integrating the worlds of hard and soft”.

Zippable Plywood Trade Show Booths

One of the first slides demonstrated a trade show booth for a snowboarding company. He was able to integrate zippers into the polished plywood panels to allow the tradeshow display to be zipped together into a study shape and unzipped
into an easily transportable shape once the trade show ended.

“This is the only time I’ve ever gotten splinters from sewing”, he added with a smile.

All Weather Segway Enclosures

He showed off other industrial objects from his firm, including an all-weather enclosure for Segways that made the little personal vehicles look even more ridiculous——>in a good way. Here’s a link to an article (and photos) of the invention on Engadget called Meep Meep.

Backpacks and Military Projects

The next series of slides ranged from inflatable car seats for toddlers (saving time, space, and weight), and Compression backpacks, which do pretty much the same thing while looking awesome at the same time.

He outlined some of the military projects the firm has worked on as well, including a backpack with a hydration frame that made water the structure of the pack.

“This solved the largest issue of military life, which is hydration”. Placing hydration at the center of the bag allowed the soldier the capability to modify what they needed, because the backpack was also modular.

Sparq Training Equipment

Terrazign created a series of collapsible hurdles for Sparq, a training division of Nike. They’re lightweight and foldable, and can withstand and structure serious training.

They also developed weight vests, which were made from monofilament fiber mesh that allows for air flow.

Vertical Treadmills for NASA

Perhaps the most interesting part of Dieter’s presentation involved images of NASA members training for space missions on vertical treadmills. The treadmills were developed by Terrazign to create artificial gravity and the ability to retain bone density while in space. The vertical treadmill is effective because of its capability to simulate gravity equal to body weight.

A group of guys that were playing a series of Mexican folk songs on guitars strode by the event space while we watched a man running on a vertical treadmill on the screen. It was a strange juxtaposition of elements that made the audience consider really what they were looking at.

You can see images of the Vertical Treadmill at the NASA Website.

Severin Villiger

Designer, Teacher

Severin began by telling us that he was going to do a presentation about Italian Airplanes. He was wearing a leather coat, airplane goggles, and a big black biker helmet.

Apparently, he was a Vespa enthusiast. He showed pictures of pinup women riding the bikes, and even had a whole series of them inside the presentation space. The entire presentation was developed with a zany Swiss accent, which made his ability to make the crowd laugh even greater.

Vespa Mania

“Who thinks a Vespa is a toy?” he smiled, “I don’t”.

He showed an image of his group of Vespa riders doing all sorts of interesting activities, and then one of his personal collection of Vespa bikes.

“The best thing about a Vespa scooter?” he stated, “You have four…or ten”.

Want to join the fun? Check out the Portland Vespa Group for more adventures.

Intermission

Matthew Packwood

Radio Producer

“I’m going to do a presentation on Contemporary Classical Music. It’s kind of an oxymoron. Contemporary and classical shouldn’t go together, but they really do”.

“I figured that it is rather difficult to talk about music, so I brought four pieces to share with you, all of which have something to do with Portland”.

He then began to play each piece. Each song had four slides associated with it - a title slide, a picture of what the often complex music looked like, an image of the composer, and an image of what the original cover of the pieces looked like.

These four elements caused a greater understanding of each piece than if simply the music had been played alone. The images of the composers were probably the most compelling of all of the images.

Piece One

Two Celebratory Fanfares (1995)
Composer: David Dzubay (b. 1964)
Performers: John Rommel, trumpet, Edmund Cord, trumpet, Thomas Brown, trumpet, Richard Sandals, trumpet, Amy Schendel, trumpet, Robert White, trumpet, David Dzubay, conductor.

Piece Two

Incidental Music to Corneille’s Cinna (1955-1957) whose cover looked like an old book.
Composer: Lou Harrison (1917-2003)
Performer: Linda Burman-Hall, tack piano.

Piece Three

theater of mineral NADEs [excerpt] (1998)
Composer: Eyvind Kang b. 1971.
Performers: Eyvind Kang

Here, Packwood showed an image of one of Kang’s conceptual sketches. It was as intense as the image of the composer. Extremely detailed and poignant. It told the story of the composer’s mind almost as well as the music.

Piece Four

Open up your Ears. Composer: Bryan Johanson.
Performer: David Starobin, Guitar.

This was an overwhelmingly beautiful piece, and it was a classical piece inspired by a line in the Jimi Hendrix song ‘Can You See Me?’.

Packwood’s presentation was excellent because he chose to let the music speak for him.

If you want to learn more, please check out Packwood’s site Art of the States.

Greg Barton

Designer, Hurricane Katrina Revisited

Greg received architectural training from Tulane University, RISD, and , most recently, the Bartlett in London. He has created exhibits and installations shown in venues from Tyron Creek to AIA Portland Gallery to the recent “PDXplore: Designing Portland” exhibit at PNCA. Before moving to England, Greg worked for Hoist Architecture.

Barton was attending Tulane University in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina displaced his life. The event that caused 81 billion dollars in damages is still affecting the lives of many residents.

He reminded the audience that the hurricane has not finished its toll on the residents of New Orleans. There are 150,000 families still living in FEMA trailers, with an average of three per trailer. Many refugees live in FEMA villages, or “FEMA-villes”.

A far cry from the luxurious representations of trailers from the 1950’s in advertising, there are many health hazards present in trailer life. For instance, Formaldehyde exists in dangerous levels, and there have already been many C02 related deaths.

He then showed how pragmatic restraints began to reshape the public sphere. Some families had placed white picket fences or stone lions in front of their temporary/permament trailers in an attempt to trick their minds into feeling like they had an actual place to live.

Meghan Sinnot and Carl Larson

Advocates, SHIFT - Portland Biking Initiative

Meghan Sinnot came to Portland from Alaska and attended Lewis & Clark college to study Anthropology. Since it was way up on a hill, it was not easy for her to explore the surrounding Portland area without taking a long trek downtown on the college-supplied bus.

Then, Meghan discovered biking. Now she is an part of SHIFT, the Portland bicycle advocacy group.

She began the presentation by taking out a bike and pedaling on it while telling the room about her history.

“Who rode a bike here today?” she asked us. Many hands went up, including mine.

“What we do here at SHIFT is basically an ad-hocracy,” she stated, “but we do have a stash of cash in someone’s basement that they let us get at sometimes”.

She talked about the group’s attempts at serving breakfast to bike commuters on the bridges in the morning. And she talked about Critical Mass, Zoo Bombing, and Pedapalooza—a few of the great Portland bike events that serve the educate and create a nice ground for future bike advocacy.

“In Guadalajara,” she said, “there is one vehicle for every three citizens”.

You can find out more about Portland Bike Culture at shifttobikes.org.

TJ Norris and Chas Bowie

Artists

One of the presenters was masked, and the other unmasked. They talked about the modern condition, asking questions such as, “does the mask control the wearer?” (or does clothing or career control the subject?), and snapshot culture. Click Click Click Click Click Click. Tick tock, Tick tock.

I would write more, but I can’t really describe what they said in the way they did. I was very impressed though, so I am including some links to their work here.

Resources

Read more about TJ Norris, and his show at the New American Art Union. There’s also an article history for Chas Bowie at the Portland Mercury.

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Future Pecha Kucha Portland Events

I highly recommend attending any Pecha Kucha event. If you’d like to learn more about upcoming sessions in Portland or elsewhere, and possibly sign up to present, visit http://www.pechakuchaportland.org/.

For more information regarding ciyscope and upcoming events, please visit www.projectcityscope.org.

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Event Sponsors

W.PA - Works Partnership Architecture, LLC
Architecture Foundation of Oregon
FordGraphics
A to Z Wine Works (Delicious).
Quixote Investments (add this link).
Rogue Brewery
Art Institute of Portland

 

 Legion of Talk: Mark Shuttleworth [84:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (731)

This is the full 84 minute audio recording of the talk that Mark Shuttleworth gave on Monday, July 21st at McMenamins Mission Theater. The talk was sponsored by Oregon’s own Strands and Legion of Tech. Mark Shuttleworth will also be speaking tomorrow at O’Reilly’s OSCON 08, a week-long Tech Event here in Portland.

In this podcast, Mark talks about the Ubuntu Project, his time as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station in 2002, and the future of technology in developing countries.

Click to Subscribe

Hazelnut Tech Talk is very proud to have the ability to present Shuttleworth’s vision to a wider audience.

Transcripts to follow.

I have this great client who I am teaching Web 2.0 and Social Media techniques to. I figured that I might as well make a blog while teaching her, and that the blog could be a place to access and develop educational materials for her and others in the field of Non-Governmental Organizations. Check out The Social NGO in real life.