Stream of Awesomeness

[fictivecameron-blog]

Kumon

There is a Kumon shop thing about a block from my new apartment. I walk past it when I get coffee in the morning and when I come back from the studio at night. Their branding is perfect. Nothing could better capture the sense of fear, bewilderment, and lopsided-headedness that is almost certainly experienced by each child upon entering a Kumon.

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My Insites Foreword

[note: This foreword was published in the Insites: The Book book. You can buy it now by clicking that link in the previous sentence. Figured I'd reprint it here to help spread the word.0 ]

Chris1 and I started Brooklyn Beta2 under the mantra of “Make something you love.” Take a look, dearest of dear readers, at what you hold in your hands3. That warmth radiating through your palms is love4. And love is what we need more of in this weird, 2D industry of ours. We need more ways of adding depth - a little meat and bones - to our online relationships.

We’ve been trying. We devised 48 x 48 px representations of ourselves5 to compensate for not being able to see each other face to face. We tap out 140 character quips and blog posts6 because we don’t have traditional conversations. We take filtered, square photos of every latte, sunset, or adorable baby7 moment so we can share experiences from afar.

This is a very now-centric kind of storytelling and we’re getting good at it. I can easily find out what you’re thinking, reading, watching, and feeling right now. What I can’t get is context. I have little sense of the past that brought you to that thought or the future that will bring you to your next thought / latte photo.

We need more of this kind of context. We need insite8 into each other’s past and future if we’re going to grow closer as a community. And it’s only through such closeness that we’ll have a real shot at driving the web and the world in a meaningful direction. The interviews in this book will help us. After reading through them Tina, Tim, Andy, Cameron, Jason, Jeffrey, Sarah, Trent, Simon, Jon, Ron, Josh, Ethan, Alex, Brendan, Mandy, Jim, Dan, Ian, Kevin & Daniel feel more real to me. Even the folks who I see on the regular have become more vivid. We owe Kier and Elliot a hearty thanks for putting so much love into this work. More please.

0 Also because they printed it without the footnotes.* *which is decidedly less good and some of the jokes no longer make sense.

1 Shiflett

2 the sexy-sweet conference I run with Chris and the other fine Fictive Kin folk

3 This may require grasping your monitor or picking up your tablet / smartphone

4 or the aforementioned monitor / device

5 If we’re lucky, these tiny frames contain an actual face.* *I am not a pipe.

6 RIP?

7 /kitten

8 see what I did there?

[fictivecameron-blog]

Backing Jack Cheng

When I sat down to write Jack Cheng's "bio" for his Brooklyn Beta 2011 badge, here's what I came up with:

" You are in the presence of one of the best writers on the Web. As such, I think you should make him write out his part of the conversation instead of saying it. Make sure he writes to you about the Disrupto team, the Disrupto culture, Memberly, custom arcade game cases. All of those things will make you envious. Not in an envy mood? Get him to write about tea or habit fields. Both awesome."

I love it when Jack writes. I had no idea until last week that he was writing a novel. I couldn't be more excited. So, of course, I backed it. You should too. http://kck.st/NbD2xC He's just $500 shy of his goal. Can't wait to read this thing.

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Valio Con

The name Valio, as in Valio Con, has an interesting origin. Drew Wilson, one half of the duo that organizes the conference, is a San Diego native and his father was a dolphin trainer at Sea World. Drew, who was homeschooled, would go with his father to work and consequently spent a great deal of his adolescence poolside with a bunch of dolphins and his old man. When he was 8, he fell into the water and was quickly scooped up by the dolphin that would become his long-term pal: Valio. Valio is gone now, but he lives on as the name of one of Drew’s many projects. But I digress.1 I’ve told you all about Valio Con’s porpoise but what I really want to talk about is its purpose. 

Valio Con’s purpose, as near as I can tell, is to provide a conference experience that is welcoming, exciting, informative, and uplifting. In other words, to create a conference that doesn’t feel like a “conference.”

I’ve talked before about “small, friendly web conferences” and I’ve been to one or two and tried my best to help throw one, but this time was different. I was in a much more observational mode. Drew, probably without realizing it, did me a huge kindness and put me first in the lineup. Speaking makes me very nervous and so normally I fret away the conference but this time I spent the event both chilling and relaxing.2 Taking it all in.

I noticed a few characteristics that were common to all my favorite conferences and I thought I’d share them with you so you’d have some signposts for determing whether you are, in fact, at an awesome event.   

The line between speaker and attendee is blurred. - There’s typically a great deal of white space for hanging out 3 and having conversations. When you spend that much time in conversation, everyone is a speaker and everyone is an attendee. 

Laid back - Schedules are loose. Speakers are relaxed. When things go wrong, everyone just rolls with it. No big deal. When the attendees are wearing the mixups with a smile, you know you’re in the right place.

You feel the personality of the organizers - This is essential. It gives the conference a humanity. Drew and Matt 4 were written all over this thing and they’re a great pair.  Matthew is written all over Grok. Simon5 is, literally, written all over Collycon. And, I’m certain that Andy is in the DNA of Build.

Delicious food - I don’t know if this is actually a requirement but I’m gonna say it is because I love it when conferences have delicious, local food. It’s been so long since I lived in SD that all the conference food was new to me and it was all great.

The only negative for me, as a San Diegan, was that there weren’t enough locals representing. We had folks from Austria, Atlanta, NYC, Chicago, Orange County, etc. but when it came to the San Diegans we had a relatively poor showing. I had some lovely conversations with quite a few locals6, but I would’ve liked to have seen more. No better way to welcome people to your neighborhood than with a strong turnout. Let it be known, if you’re from San Diego and you didn’t go to Valio Con, you blew it. It was a special event and I’m proud to have been a part of it. 

1 digression right out of the gates

2 whether or not that made you think of “chillaxing” says something about you, but I don’t know what that is.* *I would have thought of chillaxing so let’s hope it says something good.

3 bonfires. movie night. long breaks. poolside chats. a gilded couch with large stuffed octocat.

4 Who brought me a whole bunch of Scotchkins-approved leftover BBQ from Phil’s.

5 Greg also has a steady hand in New Adventures but my joke didn’t work if I mentioned him up there so I’m doing it down here. Hi Greg!

6 including another Cameron

[fictivecameron-blog]

Summer Camp & TechStars...

...sitting in a tree. F-U-N-D-I-N-G.

We have some super exciting news here in Summer Camp land. TechStars NYC and Brooklyn Beta are teaming up to give you yet another reason to stop what you're doing and make something you love.

Here's the deal. Any team that completes Summer Camp and is interested in TechStars NYC can auto-apply for their Winter 2013 program (which starts in January 2013) and is guaranteed an interview. Also, as part of this relationship, Brooklyn Beta will contribute half of their 6% equity toward the TechStars NYC program. 

Separately, each program takes 6% in exchange for investment and mentorship, but for any teams that do both programs, half of the equity for TechStars will come from Brooklyn Beta. In other words, you can go through the #1 startup accelerator in the world for an extra 3% of your company.

This is also a great split of roles. Summer Camp is the nudge meant to get you going, and TechStars is the accelerator that'll train you to reach product market fit and grow your startup. You'll also get access to their obscene mentor network with 3,000 years of combined experience at over 600 startups they've founded.

David Tisch will also be helping with Summer Camp as an advisor. We've known David for some time now. He is a tremendous investor with a strong product mind and an all around nice guy. This is going to be fun.

Happy Camping,

C&C

PS Don't forget that the deadline for applying to Summer Camp is May 31. Get Crackin'

[fictivecameron-blog]

"Once de Wiart evaded capture for eight days disguised as an Italian peasant, which is surprising considering that he was in northern Italy, did not speak Italian, and was 61 years old, with an eye patch, one empty sleeve and multiple injuries." 

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Rainbow Parade

On Saturday I set a world record. I joined Jessi Arrington's colorful cohort and marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in the World's Largest Rainbow Parade. It was supposed to be a cold and windy day, but Mother Nature loves her some chromatic celebration so instead we got sweet, sweet sunshine. 

As we marched across the bridge, people were naturally curious. We kept getting asked, "What's this for?" As it turns out, that’s not an easy question to answer. The parade is part birthday party, part regular party, part reminder of all things good & wholesome, but most of all it’s a celebration of color. Jessi likes to put color on center stage.

I’ve been to two other rainbow parades and both times I took the easy way out. I have blue jeans. I wear a blue plaid shirt all the time. So done and done. I’m blue. But because I always showed up in what is essentially normal attire, I never had the experience of really putting on a color and going out into the wild.

This time around I went red and the experience was completely different. When you're dressed head to toe in a single bright color, you tend to stand out. When you're standing next to similarly garbed humans, the effect grows exponentially (the result most often being stares and smiles). You also pay extra attention to what others are wearing. There were lots of greys, blacks, and navy blues. I started to think what the streets would look like if everyone was a bit more colorful. Would people be in a better mood? Would the kind of joy that we spread going across the bridge spread more readily?

Anyhow, not sure about all that but I want to say thank you to Jessi, Martha, Workshop, and the Hungry March Band for a perfect Saturday and for helping me to see color in a different light (pi).

considerately places mic back on mic stand,

Cameron

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Grokity Grok Grok

Just wanted to tap out some quick notes on the lovable Greenvile Grok before it got too far into the past (curse you week long sickness!). Last year in my Grok writeup I was able to get super personal, but this year, because it was a significantly larger event, I can't really pull that off. Instead, I remember Grok as a blur of good feelings, nice conversations, reconnections, beer drinkings, game losings (sorry Bethany), and most of all10/20s. 

Even though Grok tripled in size, Matthew, Erin, and the GG crew were able to keep things intimate and once again I came away with a lot of food for thought. I also came away with a lot of food in my belly. Tasty. The caterer did a great job and there's no shortage of great restaurants out on the town.

Last year, we were mostly at CoWork and I didn't get out and about into Greenville proper all that often. This year, I walked all over the town and felt more a part of the community. There's a great park along the river and one of the coolest bridges I've ever been on. It was impossible not to get caught up in people's enthusiasm for Greenville. It’s like the whole city is in a good mood. There was gorgeous weather, more people outside than I often see in Brooklyn, and live music. Sweet, sweet, live music. 

For those who couldn’t make it, it’s worth noting that what Matthew & Co. have done is create not just an event but a format as well. Anyone could put on a Grok in their hometown. They’re remarkably extensible. Grok requires no speakers because everyone is a speaker. It requires only a decent venue, some thoughtful folks willing to share what they’re thinking, and a bit of your time. A Grok could be a half day, a full day, or three days as GG was. The point is, if you want to bring a small, friendly web conference to your town, Grok is just what the doctor ordered. I’m not even being abstract here. Bermon Painter who I met at last year’s Grok has already run 3 groks in his hometown of Charlotte, NC. What are you waiting for?!

I’d really love to see the Grok format spread and hopefully Matthew will have some time to share what he’s learned in two years of running them when he’s not reinventing how commerce works. 

I'm gonna wrap up this post by saying... 

...to the old faces - It was great to see you again. You haven't aged a day over 365 in the past year.

...to the new faces - Nice meeting you. Cool story and high fives.

...to those I missed - Names not known - Sorry we didn't get to Grok it up. I was the big, loud guy in the plaid. No. The other one. No. The other one. No. The other one. No. The other one. No. The other one. No. The other one. The other one. Yep. That one.

...to Matthew, Erin, & crew - xoxoxo

Gently places the mic upon the ground.

[fictivecameron-blog]

Brooklyn Beta & Summer Camp

Lots of BB news today. I've got some thoughts here, but the more official launch post is on Tina's blog. First, we’re super excited to announce the dates for the 2012 conference. They are October 10th,11th, & 12th. In case you don’t know, BB is the conference that Fictive Kin puts on with our friends at Analog. It’s a good time. Chris has a mini-recap of last year’s event and this video by Nate Bolt and Captain & the Fox probably does the best job of capturing its spirit.

If you head over to the new Brooklyn Beta site and give it a looksy, you’ll notice something else new besides the conference dates. We’re calling it BB Summer Camp and it is our take on Y Combinator. As I mentioned in my ALA article, I’m a huge fan of what YC has done for developers and developer co-founded startups. We’re hoping to show some of that same love to designers because we think the best teams have both. If all goes according to plan, we’ll be able to support a group of campers whose products show off just how great a designer-developer team can be.

Summer Camp is our first step towards creating something that is bigger than a conference without simply creating a bigger conference. It’s another way to try to deliver on our twin goals of bringing designers / developers together and encouraging people to make something they love. We think this is a step in the right direction. 

I’m really excited about the new BB stuff and it objectively would not be possible without the help from these fine folks. 

Eli Rousso, fffunction, and Nate Abele made the site possible and sultry.

MailChimp, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Engine Yard, and Etsy made Summer Camp a reality with their generous support.

All our advisors. You are heroes and saints and professional athletes all in one.

Betaworks, our new PICs. Keeping it real.

Love you all.

Cameron

[fictivecameron-blog]

2012 Wrapup

I usually try to do my yearly wrapup by February 1, which is already late, but this year has just gotten ridiculous. Last year, I went with a nutrition facts theme which was kind of cool, but we took down the other pieces of my blog for a bit so there is no link. This year is busier so I’m going old school with just a regular post. Here’s how I did on my plan for 2011.

Throw an awesome Brooklyn Beta 2011

Against all odds, this went very well. Chris and I were both very terrified that conference wouldn’t live up to expectations but somehow the combined forces of Analog, Fictive Kin, & Workshop were able to pull it off. I’m really proud of the event we threw and it feels good to know that people enjoyed it. Extra major thank you and hugs to Jessi, Josh, Creighton, Teams Fictive & Analog, Studiomates, our speakers, and all the attendees for making it great. 

Finish off our TeuxDeux bug / feature list.

We did zero things on TeuxDeux this year. Goose Egg. Nada. Considering it is an app that I use every day, I don’t feel great about that. We’ve got some ideas for how to change that in 2012 and I hope they turn out to be good ones. 

Publicly launch Gimme Bar

We did this. Gimme Bar is a maaaaaaaaaaassive app with tons of major components and nuances. Our little team has handled that challenge very well and I feel lucky to work with such nice, dedicated, and talented people. We’re deep in a redesign / rearchitecture that we hope will knock your socks off in the next month or so.

Lose 22 pounds

If you looked at me with your eyeballs right now, you would not be especially impressed with my level of fitness. That said, I met this goal. I’m down 34 pounds from my high of this year which is probably higher than when I wrote the resolution. So I can’t count all 34 pounds towards the goal, but I can still feel good about trimming down a bit. The key to it all was the diet I invented called Scotchkins. I hope to talk more about that later this year.  

Attend 10 Concerts

I killed it on shows this year. I saw incredible concerts, comedy shows, & broadway plays. Gonna be hard to top that in 2012.

Concerts

Jamie XX @ LPR

The Knocks @ Some random church

Fang Island @ Bowery Ballroom

James Blake @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

Godspeed You Black Emperor @ Brooklyn Masonic Temple

LCD Soundsystem @ Madison Square Garden (final show)

Animal Collective @ Great American Music Hall

James Blake @ Bowery Ballroom

Surfer Blood @ Music Hall of Williamsburg

Best Coast & The Decemberists @ Prospect Park

Bon Iver & Rosebuds @ Prospect Park

Jeff Mangum @ New England Conservatory

Nicolas Jaar @ Mo MoMA PS1 (5 hour show)

Comedy

Norm MacDonald - Cobb's Comedy Club

Bill Cosby - Cerritos Center for Performing Arts

Louis CK - Beacon Theatre (the show he sold for $5 online)

Broadway

Importance of Being Earnest

Book of Mormon

How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

Sleep No More

Jersey Boys

Concerts Skipped (sadly)

Mt. Kimbie - LPR

Nicolas Jaar - LPR

Air Guitar Competition - Bowery (So sorry Rob.)

Disintegration Loops @ The Met (Major Regret)

Read 10 Books

I read 13 books. A lot of them were short books, but whatevs.

Elements of Content Strategy

High Output Management

Managing Oneself

On writing

Impro

Born Standing Up

Why We Get Fat

On booze

Endurance

Delivering Happiness

Design for Emotion

Mobile First

Old man and the Sea

I also read a whole bunch of comic books. Work was hard this year, so comic books seemed a more manageable meal than a full-fledged novel.

We3, The Mighty 1-2, Locke & Key 1-4, Batmans, RAFL 1, Shazam, Incognito 1 & 2, Northlanders 3-5, Baltimore, Astro City Dark Ages 2, All Star Superman Vol 1, The Amazing Screw on Head, Daredevil, The Homeland Directive, Ex machina 4-6, & Silverfish (and frankly probably a lot more).

LCD cover miss you

I tried my darndest to get LCD Soundsystem to cover Miss You by the Rolling Stones. Give that a listen and tell me that’s not a noble cause. Anyhow, who could have predicted they would go and break up. I haven’t given up on this, but it’s not a 2012 goal either. It’s a long play. 

Close out NYC tourist mode

I was supposed to do The Statue of Liberty, The Empire State Building, and Harlem Jazz. I did none of those things. Gonna try again this year, but am more skeptical than I was before.

Speak at one conference

Great Success! I spoke at Colly Con this year and had a great time. This is the second time I've made the trip over to the UK to work at Mild Bunch and then catch up with everyone in Nottingham. Being a speaker at an event is very different and a bit more stressful. Really glad that the first place I spoke was at a conference run by my friends (Simon & Greg). Was also pretty darned cool to speak alongside 3 Brooklynites (Travis, Dan, & Frank), old friends (Trent, Robbie, Naomi & The Standardistas), and new friends (Denise & Ben).

Start a design R&D group

We ran two Design R & D projects this year and learned a lot about how they should work. I'll go into more detail later about what all this means. Gonna wait until we launch the relevant projects first.

Write a comic book

Once again in 2011, total fail. Given that this is two years of failure on this front in a row with no sign of even starting such a project, I think I’m gonna table this for 2012 and look to a possible 2013 reunion.

Discover Fountain of Youth and / or Holy Grail

I had no luck on this front. In 2010 I tried for atlantis, but Frank Chimero beat me to it. In 2011 I set out for everlasting life, but Jack Sparrow beat me to the punch. As it turns out, I’m terrible at finding ancient monuments, but excellent at predicting the years in which they will be discovered. 

Miss every single Nicholas Cage movie

This was easier than you might expect. Had I proposed this resolution in 2010, Kickass would have turned out to be a problem. But in 2011, it was a breeze. Monsieur Cage came out with 5 movies:  Season of the Witch, Drive Angry, Seeking Justice, Trespass, & Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. None of which were especially enticing and the last of which was mildly enfuriating. I’m going to try to keep the streak alive in 2012.

2012 Goals

10 concerts

15 books (i want to read more)

52 blog posts (I don’t think our industry writes enough)

Lose 25 (more) pounds (fighting shape!!)

Surprise people with the new Brooklyn Beta gumbo we’ve been cooking up. (It’s got shrimp!)

Launch 4 new applications (Rushmore, News, DnD, & Bright!)

Release a massive Gimme Bar redesign / rearchitecture (now with 50% more gimme!)

Miss every single Nicholas Cage movie (even The Frozen Ground w/ Vanessa Hudgens & 50 Cent!)

Exclamation Point (!)

[fictivecameron-blog]

You Can't Transfer Will

Last year, I met up with Josh Stylman. We took advantage of the small window of gorgeous Spring weather and grabbed a couple afternoon Negra Modelos at Pacifico. Josh is a former-entrepreneur turned investor / advisor and I asked him about that transition. He mentioned that part of what makes investing in startups difficult is that “will is non-transferrable.” You can advise and encourage a startup all you want, but at the end of the day, it’s up to them to exert the will and effort required to get things done. 

That phrase hit me hard. I called Josh a “former-entrepreneur” but that really just means that he’s an “entrepreneur between obsessions.” Entrepreneurial character traits are hard to shake even if there is no immediate project on the docket. Of all the entrepreneurial traits I can think of, self-reliance and strong personal will are the most foundational. People like Josh, myself, and the rest of the Fictive team have been conditioned to rely on our will to get things done and so it is frustrating to see its absence in a project you are involved in.

I don’t do a lot of angel investing, but in my personal life I often feel like a kind of early-stage investor. Instead of investing money in startups, I invest my time and energy in the dreams of my friends & family. These folks hope to build something great or change careers or advance in their existing careers and have asked me for advice on how to do so. I didn’t realize it until recently, but these personal energy investments bear a great deal of resemblance to financial investments. 

Once someone has involved me in the plot for their dreams, they keep a little piece of me with them, whether they know it or not. They can take that energy and turn it into something great or let it fade. Either way, I have a very real emotional stake in their outcome.

I used to think that I had near-infinite energy reserves, but it's become increasingly clear that, like a financial investor, I need a return on my energy investment. If people involve me and then go on to accomplish what they set out to do (or even just work hard toward it) I gain a great deal back in the satisfaction of knowing I helped someone. It's then easier to pay that energy forward to other folks who want my help. If they go on to do nothing, I lose the energy I invested and it won’t be coming back. 

This year, I’m making it a goal to fully internalize Josh’s comment. Will is non-transferrable. In order to have the biggest impact possible, I'm going to need to be increasingly discerning with my energy investments. I need to throw myself behind the most eager folks so my reserves stay full and I can keep being generous with my time and energy for a long time to come. 

[fictivecameron-blog]

Heroes

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

-Ernest Hemingway 

Understatement of the year in whatever year he said that. I’m not old, but I’m getting older and I’m hurting for heroes. Once you leave school, learning is no longer structured. You have to figure things out for yourself. You still want to learn because learning means growing and growing is the most enjoyable way to live, but it’s gotten a lot more difficult. I’ve discovered that I learn much more from other people than I do from textbooks. I also realized that these people - my heroes - come in three flavors, one of which is in short supply.

The first group of heroes I think of as “role models.” The role model group is composed of my peers who are smarter and more talented than me in one way or another. I try to spend as much time as possible with people like this and, on that account, I’ve been very lucky. I’m surrounded by tremendous role models in my family, among my friends, at Fictive Kin & at Studiomates. Their proximity makes them incredible sources of learning. I can see their behaviors and ideas in action on a daily basis or I can go deeper with them on a walk home or a fireside scotch conversation. As such, no other group has done more to shape me into the person I am today.

The second group of heroes leaves the idea of proximity behind altogether and enters the realm of imagination. It may seem weird, but I look up to a lot of the fictional characters (Holmes, Protagonist, d'Anconia, Dantes) and historical figures (Franklin, Edison, Lincoln, Hemingway) that I find in books and movies. These heroes tend to excel at some aspect of human ability or spirit that I would like to see more of in myself or in others. Because they are essentially imaginary (even the historical figures) these heroes are aspirational in a sort of unrealistic way. Sure I’d love the observational powers of Sherlock Holmes, but that’s not very likely. That doesn’t mean I can’t learn from his character to be more observant in my day to day life. It does mean there are limits to the impact these heroes can have on my life. You never fully feel like it’s possible to accomplish what they accomplish.

The final group of heroes is a marriage of the first two. I like to think of them as the big “H” heroes. Mostly because I don’t have a better name. These Heroes are people have done astounding, almost unbelievable, things and yet they aren’t imaginary. They’re real. You can see them. You share the air with them. They’re existence makes the world seem full of possibilities because they stand as an example of just how far one person can go. My first love is products, so for a while now my only version of this Hero has been Steve Jobs. This article, which I wrote when I first heard about the SJ biography being released today, was meant to be a thank you to him for setting that kind of example. I’ve had to edit things because he is dead. Overnight, he was transformed into a historical figure. There is no next chapter. As of today, I have no living Heroes. I’m pretty bummed about that.

[fictivecameron-blog]

Brooklyn Beta 2011 Schedule

Wednesday

9:15 - morning hang

10:00 - in session

10:30 - small group love

12:00 - lunch

13:00 - in session

13:15 - small group love

14:45 - break

15:45  - in session

16:15 - big group love

16:45 - dinner & drinks

Thursday

9:15 - morning hang

10:00 - in session

11:05 - break

11:55 - in session

12:30 - lunch

14:00 - in session

15:00 - break

15:50 - in session

16:55 - dinner & drinks

Friday

10:30 - morning hang

11:00 - in session

12:10 - lunch

13:10 - in session

14:10 - break

15:00 - in session

15:50 - break

16:40 - in session

17:30 - dinner & drinks

[fictivecameron-blog]

Measuring our Environmental Impact

On Saturday night I was skimming through my Google Reader and landed on a Techcrunch post about the effect of commercial fryers on the environment. They highlighted the following impact: 

“If every large vat fryer in the [country] met the new Energy Star requirements, energy cost savings would increase approximately $81 million per year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the emissions from nearly 95,000 cars.”

We really need a better way to communicate the environmental impact of our actions. Who decided that we should use cars as the primary unit of measurement? If you stop using plastic bags for your groceries, that’s like one car. Recycle all your cans, that’s like two cars, but one of them is a Hummer. Stop driving you car to work, that’s like five cars (trust us). Presenting gains in terms of theoretical cars off the road only confuses the matter and does little to connect with us on a personal level.

There’s a story in Made to Stick about when CSPI wanted to get people to stop eating buttered popcorn because of the tremendous amount of saturated fat that was in it at the time. They used the following language:

"A medium-sized 'butter' popcorn at a typical neighborhood movie theater contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings — combined!"

That story is tangible, relevant, and personal. They compare food with food and require no mental abstraction on the part of the listener. The facts are startling and make you think, "Do I really want this popcorn when I could have all this other good stuff instead?" Probably not.

We can also see this kind of clarity in the message charity:water uses to help raise donations. First, they lay out the enormity of the problem to show that it is worth your time.

One billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water.

If they stopped there, the enormity of the problem would be clear, but would also be daunting. Few potential donors would feel that anything they could do would make a dent in the situation. But, thankfully, they do not stop there. They make it simple, personal, and easy with the following two figures:

$20 = clean, safe drinking water for one person. 

$5,000 = a well for a community.

And all of a sudden, my personal role in this huge problem is clear. All I need to do is come up with an Andy Jackson and I can help a single person get clean drinking water through the creation of a sustainable well. 

I don't know what the equivalent language is for understanding our environmental impact, but I'll be thinking about it a lot. The best language might be tied to relative measurements. What is my impact relative to my neighbors? What's the per capita impact of my community relative to neighboring communities? You could also make it about money. How much more does the greenest person on the block save than the most wasteful? Clearly I don't have an answer yet, I just know it isn't cars. If you know of folks doing compelling work in this area, please let me know.

[fictivecameron-blog]

Internships Part II: The Implicit Contract

For part one, go here.

There is an implicit contract that the intern and employer enter into when an internship begins. I think that because it is implicit, it is rarely heeded. I’d like to take a moment to make it explicit for both parties. This post has the same disclaimer as Part One which is that I am talking about internships with individuals or small teams, not larger agencies that have whole processes in place for chewing through interns.

Interns

Interns. It is your job to lighten the load or increase the capacity of your employer. You do this in exchange for valuable experience knowledge and industry connections. In most cases you should be paid, but not a lot. You are making a sacrifice early in your career for much greater gains as you develop. While you should expect to work on some interesting projects, not all of your work will be knowledge work. Gopher work should be a part of it too and you shouldn’t shy away from it. 

Because many employers are too polite to request help with menial tasks, you can distinguish yourself by spotting and doing them proactively. Offer to go on coffee runs. Clean up the office space without asking. If you see your employer, for example, taking out the trash every Wednesday, offer to save them the time & effort. If you find yourself without anything to do, feel free to suggest a project or a couple projects to your employer. It will be easier for them to pick something from a list than to generate something on the fly.

During your time as an intern, your goal should be to ship as many quality projects that you can show off in your portfolio as possible. Before you start your internship you should set this expectation and hold your employer to it. You should measure the success of your internship by how much work you ship and how much fun you had. The next step is either a full-time position at the place of your internship or some other interesting company.

Employers

Employers. When you take on an intern, you are agreeing to mentor them and help develop their skills. You should be consistently imparting industry knowledge and meaningful feedback to them. If you are doing that right, the intern will leave the internship more talented and more employable than when they started.

It’s ok and give interns some amount of gopher work as long as you are balancing that with meaningful project work that gets completed and published. Don’t take on an intern if you don’t have specific projects lined up for them. It’s not fair to either of you. An intern does not simply want to bask in your glow. An intern wants to ship. They may bask for a little while, but soon they will realize that you, like everyone else, are just a person. 

Set your internship for a finite period of time. This is a jumping off point for the intern and you need to ensure they do not get stuck. As the internship is coming to a close, you should be attempting to help your intern find a job. You should consider your internship a success if you either decide to hire your intern on a full-time basis or you are able to help them find a full-time gig somewhere else that is cool. If your intern struggles to find a job following your internship, odds are you didn’t do right by them.

This contract is sealed

If each side lives up to their end of the bargain, you have a smarter, more employable intern, a lightened load for the employer and a long-term industry friendship. This contract is sealed. 

[fictivecameron-blog]

Unclaimed Internships

This is a public service announcement for all you young designers & developers out there looking to get started in the web industry. There is a conversation happening again and again at Studiomates that I think you should be aware of. 

Studiomates is pretty high-traffic in terms of interesting guests covering a broad swath of awesome. Lately, at our guest lunches, we can’t seem to avoid the subject of interns. What I’ve found interesting is that the conversations all follow the same arc. They start out as a longing and turn into a sort of dejection punctuated with lines like “I’d love an intern, but they’re too much work”. 

I was raised in a “waste not, want not” household and I hate to see great potential internships go to waste because of some perceived quantity of effort. The reality is that internships only seem like a lot of work. When done well, they are a huge boon for both the intern and the employer, they improve the knowledge base of the industry as a whole, and they lead to life-long industry friendships. It wouldn’t hurt to have a few more around.

Quick disclaimer: In this article, I am talking about internships with individuals or small teams, not larger agencies that have whole processes in place for chewing through interns. 

Effort

Thinking of interns as “too much work” seems to put the blame on the intern, but the reality is that the employer holds much of the responsibility. The problem is that most employers are tremendous practitioners of design & development, but not as practiced in the art of management. After doing the work to find an intern, they don’t always know how to get the most out of them. There are two things that I think can improve the quality of the internship and reduce the sense of effort.

Ask for help with administrative tasks. Creative work is challenging when interruptions are high. Offloading your distracting, administrative tasks to your intern will improve your productivity. Sure, it can be uncomfortable to tell other people what to do, particularly if the work is not glamorous, but as long as you aren’t giving your intern only menial tasks, you shouldn’t hesitate to lighten your daily load by asking them to mail a package or make copies.

Be willing to delegate. Too many folks in our industry micromanage their interns instead of trusting them. Of course interns will seem like a lot of work if you have to constantly scrutinize their work as well as your own. There’s no leverage in that. Let your interns solve problems iteratively. Check in at the end of each iteration, give thoughtful feedback, and point them in the right direction. It may take them a bit longer (in terms of days) than if you had done it on your own, but the effort required of you to get the project done will be minimal and the whole time you can be getting work done on your other projects.

The moral of the story here is that employers have just as much a responsibility to keep an internship effortless as does the intern. Let’s have a look at the intern’s responsibilities, shall we?

Initiative

Hi interns. This is may just be Old Man Cameron talk and I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for saying it, but it seems to me that kids these days have talent up to their eyeballs and initiative up to the soles of their feet (standing position, not jump kicking). If you are under 25 right now, I am almost certainly talking about you. 

I don’t think I am alone in thinking this way and it’s useful for younger web folk to understand that this is a prevailing attitude. The interesting implication of that attitude is that when you are trying to land an internship or even a great job, you aren’t really competing on talent. Talent is a prerequisite, but it doesn’t get you the job.

Instead, you should focus on your new favorite word: “initiative.” You need to be able to be given a problem and just go to town on it with little supervision. You need to be able to internalize feedback and make adjustments to your work accordingly. You need to be able to take notice of when you are idle and generate some possible suggestions for how you can be made productive. You need to be looking out for ways to help that your employer hasn’t even noticed yet. If you can do that you are invaluable.

The good news is that if you are one of the under-25 crowd and you are genuinely a hard-worker with some solid initiative, you are extremely well-poised to get great work and dominate the web industry. Your peers are weak sauce and you are Sriracha. 

Part II

This post was getting a bit long and, in deference to our modern ADD world, I broke it in two. The second post is all about the implicit contract between employers and interns and what each should expect of themselves and each other. Bon appetite.

[fictivecameron-blog]

Brooklyn Beta 2011

Despite our playful splash page inspired by one of our favorite Brooklyn beers, Brooklyn Beta does exist and it is taking place this year from October 12-14. Over the past six months, it has become increasingly clear that demand for BB tickets will far outpace supply. Lots of folks, including many friends I would greet with a hug, will be disappointed. This post is an attempt to offer some insight into the situation so everyone will know what to expect and maybe even take it easy on us when the tickets are gone.

At the end of last October, when folks were saying nice things about Brooklyn Beta, it felt good. Chris and I knew we wanted to create a conference, but it was by no means clear that we’d be able to create one that people liked. It’s not widely known that just two weeks before the event start date we had only 4 speakers (doesn't count as a conference) and stood to lose about $15K each (money that we absolutely did not have). Needless to say, we weren’t sleeping great. In the end we got lucky. @k and @marcoarment took a chance on us and rounded out our fantastic speaker list. H&FJ, Mailchimp, Fontdeck, Ning, Siteleaf, and WonderProxy took a chance on us and saved us from the poor house. It wasn’t just sponsors and speakers who took a chance on us, it was friends and even strangers travelling from around the globe to attend a "friendly web conference" (whatever the hell that is). These people showed up not knowing what to expect and then made Brooklyn Beta awesome.

This awesomeness did not go unnoticed and demand for tickets this year is nothing short of frightening. Chris has the details on how we’re doing the tickets this year. We've tried to be as fair as possible with the process, but we are also trying to keep a lot of the magic of last year alive. To us, that means a couple things. First, we're keeping the event small. We've made it about 30% bigger, which is not so much that it will lose last year's intimacy. Second, we are inviting back quite a few of the folks who took an early chance on Brooklyn Beta and helped make it great. This includes our respective teams and studios, last year's speakers and workshop leaders, our sponsors, last year's crew, and a small batch of positive people like @lachlanhardy & @scenariogirl who signed on to BB from day 1, travelled from Australia, and had two of the best attitudes before, during, and after the conference. That still leaves quite a few tickets, but again, demand is high.

If you don't get a ticket, please look at it as an opportunity. Build sold out in under 24 hours, 600 folks descended on Nottingham for Collycon, folks travel across the globe for Webstock, and people are currently kicking themselves for missing JSConf tickets. People want more friendly web conferences. Ones that are run by small groups of passionate folks. This is a great time to put on an event that shows off your neighborhood and your community. Put on a friendly web conference and they will come. (Me, too.)