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Why I still love Ignite Phoenix

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Image (cc) Sheila Dee on Flickr
Image (cc) Sheila Dee on Flickr

When Ignite Phoenix started several years ago the goal was to create a venue for people to share ideas and topics they loved. There are now a lot more events and groups in the Valley that encourage people to share in different ways, and Ignite Phoenix has evolved. There are still two aspects of it, though, that are incredibly important to me, and why I keep investing time in this crazy thing.

Finding the Extraordinary in the Ordinary

We rarely share the things we truly love with each other. We talk about work, politics, and the weather, but what about the things we obsess over until the wee hours of the morning when we know we should be in bed? People think nobody wants to hear their weird passion, and that’s just plain wrong.

When someone gets past the things they like, and past the things they love, and into the things that really consume them, we all want to hear it. We connect with that energy. When people share their passions they start waving their hands around, they talk faster, and they lean in. And we see that and lean in ourselves to listen. There are many stages for professionals and luminaries to share their ideas from the top down – Ignite is a stage where we can share them with each other.

Encouraging Serendipity

Ignite Phoenix brings people together in unplanned ways. We don’t have enough happy chaos in our lives. We go to the same places, same jobs, same social events, with the same people. Our lives have patterns. The range of topics at Ignite means someone may come because they are curious about storm chasing, but leave blown away by 3D printing. Or vice versa. You will meet people you have never heard of, doing things you never knew existed. Ignite Phoenix doesn’t have an agenda other than to bring people together in unusual ways.

When I hear people have started a new hobby, changed careers, launched a business, or made new friends because of something that happened at Ignite Phoenix, it’s because that little bit of chaos and serendipity entered their lives.

Pure Selfishness

I love ideas and hearing people talk about what drives them. I love it when experienced speakers get nervous because for once they’re talking about something really important to them. I love it when people who are scared stiff still walk out on that stage because they want to tell people their message. I love it when people tell me months (even years) later that they did something they never would have otherwise done if not for their Ignite talk.

I love it when I find myself looking at my friends, myself, and community around me in a new way because of something I learned from presenters and their topics. I love it all.

If you’ve never been to Ignite Phoenix, you should come. If you have an idea you want to submit, you should do that.

But whatever else, figure out what your own passion is and tell people about it.

Speaking of Death – What happens when you address a silent topic

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Starlight by Pankaj Kaushal
Starlight by Pankaj Kaushal

Last August I gave a talk at Ignite Phoenix After Hours on why death is something we, as a society, need to discuss more openly. The talk, and what happened afterwards, hit me rather hard so I haven’t discussed it much since.

I believe there is nothing more precious or personal than our own lives, and we should have the ability to end our lives with dignity whenever we deem it is no longer worth living. We cannot have strong Right To Die or Assisted Suicide laws unless we discuss this openly.

I also believe that many people needlessly take their own lives in moments of depression or despair, when they think there is no one who can help them or understand. We can save lives if people feel more open about discussing thoughts of suicide with those they love.

I’ve spoken many times in front of crowds, but my talk at Ignite Phoenix After Hours was the toughest I’ve ever given. There is no video, but you can read the bulk of what I said on my earlier blog about choosing to die. The talk itself went well, but as I came off the stage I was not prepared for the reaction.

Nearly twenty people approached me that night. One woman worked in a Hospice. A man was caring for his terminally ill mother. Another woman had attempted suicide when she was younger and knew how hard it was to talk to people. People kept coming up to me with their stories until I left the venue and went home to collapse.

They talked to me about it the next day. The next week. Nine months later, I had someone come up to me out of the blue at a grocery store and thank me for my talk. I was overwhelmed.

It kind of spooked me from posting anything more about the topic, which is ironic given the message of my talk. I didn’t want to become “that guy who always talks about dying”. I also felt woefully unequipped to respond to some of the powerful things people were sharing with me. Even though I knew most people just wanted someone to listen to them who understood, it was still very difficult to do.

Which is part of the whole issue here, right?

There is nothing more intimately, mortally personal than our own experiences with death, and I stood up as someone willing to talk about it. It doesn’t mean the topic came easy to me. I carry around a lot of the same cultural baggage on this topic as everyone else. It just means I’m willing to try and work through it, and be willing to listen when others want to talk.

And I encourage you to do the same. If you make it clear to the people you care about that you are willing to talk about suicide, living wills, euthanasia, and end of life care, you may be surprised who you find in your life that really wants to have that conversation.

In my Ignite presentation I referenced the powerful BBC documentary, Choosing to Die, in which author Terry Pratchett grapples with his own thoughts on suicide in the face of advancing Alzheimers. The entire video is on Vimeo, and you can watch it below.

Terry Pratchett – Choosing to die from Lisette Leona on Vimeo.

In Terry Pratchett: Choosing To Die, He explores the realities of medically assisted death. Having been diagnosed with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's disease in 2008, Terry considers how he might choose to end his life as his condition progresses. In a moving documentary he meets those who, like him, would like to control the way they die including a men suffering from degenerative conditions and he is with a British motor neurone sufferer as he carries out an assisted death at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland.

A personal thanks to the Ignite Phoenix team

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Ignite Phoenix 7 In 3D
Image by Moriartys via Flickr

Ignite Phoenix 7 wrapped up, and I’m in that lull where I’m excited by how well it went, and partially relieved to not have it looming for another few months.  This Ignite was by far bigger and more complicated than any we’ve tried before. It was the first time with a theme (Art Of…), first time at the Phoenix Art Museum, biggest audience (600), a live band, catered food, an ATM, and geeze… I don’t even know all what else.  In the course of this process we managed vendors we’ve never had to before for chairs, projection systems, a stage, pipe & drape, bartenders, security, and that danged ATM.  We also had out whole site nuked to some malware, took on new sponsors, participated in a design contest, and drank a whole crapload of coffee.

It’s quite possible we’ve lost our collective minds on this, and the post-mortem was definitely a high-energy meeting, but overall the event was just incredible. That happens as a result of many great groups of people coming together – the presenters, our sponsors, the audience, and of course the team that puts it all together. We start months in advance ot get everything going, and by the time Ignite happens we’re meeting weekly to keep on top of things. It’s a huge commitment and effort, and I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge some of these kick-ass people:

  • Michael Barber – In spite of picking to run an Ignite at least twice the size of the past two combined, he knocked it out of the park. He kept a ton of moving parts from colliding or stalling and did whatever necessary to make things come together. He also is some sort of doughnut zombie, and if if your ever hear him grunt out “Loooong jooooohnnnzzz…” get the heck out of his way.
  • Brian Carson – The man, the myth, the coaching machine. He doesn’t get rolling until the presenters are selected, then we all dive for cover.  I don’t think many people realize how much he works with the presenters in a ton of personal and technical ways to help often novice presenters step up their game. From his coaching sessions to whipping together the final videos, he helps makes the presenters shine and their message get heard.
  • Oden Hughes – The Grand Taskmistress kept track of all the things needing doing, and there were plenty! From organizing our meeting locations to smoothing out our event project plan, she kept it all aligned. As wrapper-upper of our event post-mortem she is often one of the first in and last out of every event.
  • Jana Knapp – Not only did she make sure we had enough funds to pull this nutty thing off, but also helped coordinate our great shirt contest with the PHX Design Community and put together our incredible programs. Her Scotch consumption likely tripled during this event, but she never wavered.
  • Matthew Petro – Communication and blog machine! This guy kept all the info flowing and people up to date, and single handedly had more bandwidth in motion than AT&T. This was also his first Ignite rodeo, but you would not have been able to tell the way he rode – and dealt with – the bull.
  • Dannie Moriarty – My poor, long suffering wife handled the budget, venue items, and a whole lot of ticketing. How she manages to do all this and not stab me through the eye as I grumble and churn over each event is a mystery to everyone who knows her.
  • Alan Dayley – If there is a job this guy won’t step up to do, quietly and without complain, I have yet to see it. Even the horrible Ticketing Role cannot slay him. He is a voice of reason in a lot of what we do, and a great balance to the team whose contributions are a lot more significant than he gives himself credit for.
  • Andy Woodward – A close friend for the past millenium, he grabbed technical issues, video grunt work, layout coordination, and stage managed with an incredible finesse and a Checklist of Destruction that keeps everything rolling seamlessly.
  • Fred von Graf –  Our video maestro, he juggles and maintains our video process with a level of determination that also disappears behind the scenes sometimes. This has been an area of considerable challenge for us with the past few events, but Fred is always there with ideas, solutions, and a way to make things work.
  • Brandon Franklin – Though I think we often drive the guy crazy, our ticketing wizard ran one of the most infuriatingly complicated parts of the event – getting people to their tickets and into their seats. If you think that sounds trivial, I highly, highly suggest you do not say that to his face. You may feel the business end of of a Taiko drumstick.

This group of people collectively kicked ass with one foot, because with their other feet they were doing things like putting on music shows, helping raise money for epilepsy, supporting mini-Ignites, launching acting careers, starting families of their own, creating energy guides, teaching training classeses, running non-profit groups, putting together conferences, organizing meet-ups, having full time jobs, and I’ve truly lost track of all what else.

Debt management plans aren’t legally binding like IVAs so you’ll have more flexibility surrounding your payments, but your creditors won’t be bound by the terms you set out.

So many great companies, presenters, and volunteers go into making Ignite Phoenix happen that this is in no way meant to be an exclusive list. Just a bit of a fan letter to some really great people who I consider myself priveleged to know, work with, and learn from.

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Losing my faith in Community

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To what extent do participants in joint activi...
Image via Wikipedia

I started 2009 curious about community, by September I was being quoted about it in articles, but I left 2009 almost entirely convinced that “community” is a waste of time.

Not the people but the term itself. It has become a phantom banner that people wave to try and rally a cause – don’t we all care about the community?  Don’t we want to make it better?

Being in a community doesn’t inherently include a common goal or strong bond.  It most cases it is simply “a group of people with a common interest”, like a a hobby, a belief, or an idea. People who live in Phoenix may be in a community, but it’s their personal interactions that really connect them, not their geography. With everyone having a different perspective about the people and places around them, you get different forms of participation and the inevitable grumbling that there isn’t just enough community spirit/involvement/awareness. Some people want more parks, some people want more childrens’ programs, and some people just want to be left alone.

Community also doesn’t include motivation. In an artistic community, for example, some people may want to pursue technical perfection while others seek abstract expressions. It’s an amiable community until you try to set a direction for that whole group. Then people will start pushing the agenda towards their own views, and be shocked to find others pushing in a different direction. The connecting theme of the community has been exceeded.

Human nature complicates things further by assuming people who think like us in a few areas think like us in all areas. I ran into this with Ignite Phoenix when it got some wide local press. I was accused by some of betraying the community, when I was only looking to bring in new people and ideas. Attending Ignite Phoenix was the community theme, and I exceeded that limit and discovered there were a lot of wildly different opinions about what Ignite was and should be.

I’ve decided in my own local work to focus less on the “community” and more on simply doing things I’m excited about with people I respect. That will draw in people who want to participate, and save a whole lot of hopping about regarding what any group does or doesn’t want.

Community is an abstraction, and you really can’t grow, direct, or build an abstraction. “Community” is still great shorthand for a group of people, like “family”, but it isn’t an end into itself. Chase it too closely and you’ll lose the very people that make it up.  You need to focus on the people and their actions. Connect with them as individuals, not as abstractions, and realize no matter how hard you try there are some things they are just never going to do or be.

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Some Ignite Phoenix whyfors and wherebys

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acm_6991
Image by AmcePhoto via Flickr

Another part of my Year End Clear Out related to Ignite Phoenix, a few of the reasons things work as they do related to the event. My normal approach is not to air a lot of the internal stuff and just let people enjoy the show, but many people have been generally curious or offered other approaches so thought I would share how things are viewed.

Most of these are decisions by the Ignite Phoenix team, who I’ll encourage to chime in here, as not every one of us agrees with every approach. Most of these topics at least come up once each cycle to see if we need to modify it. None are set in stone, though a few of them I feel much more strongly about than others.

I’m going to try and be concise – a challenge for me as I’m getting my blog-legs back – and I can expound if anyone has questions.

Size of the event

500-600 people is as large as we want Ignite to get. We could fill larger venues, but then it becomes more attractive to sales-pitches and scarier to average people who want to give it a try. It also becomes harder to really interact with presenters during breaks with this many people. If it ever got so big that there was no benefit to going in person to meet the speakers, we would have lost something important.

Multimedia presentations

We keep a hard line on static slides without music or video. We’ve made an exception for music a few times (Ignites #1 and #4 come to mind)  but Ignite should be about a person sharing their idea personally, not taking time to show something prebuilt. As a bonus, this simplifies the tech issues enormously, but the core reason is to force the presenter to be the center of the talk.

Props & teams during presentations

We discourage this heavily for the same reasons as above, but have made some exceptions like with music. It has to be integral to the talk. Done right the slides are prop enough, but many people don’t use them as effectively as they could.

Exceptions

We try to do 90% of the work by general rules we’ve set, but are always willing to consider exceptions. Nearly every Ignite has had at least one talk that has been non-standard in some way. We’d be stupid to leave out a great talk just because it was a little different.

Private voting

Ignite should never be a popularity contest. Some people already get very upset when their idea isn’t selected, and we don’t want to make that worse. We keep the process public but the votes private. Perhaps one of the few absolute rules we have is that judges cannot disclose anything about the voting results.

Why Wasn’t My Presentation Chosen?

I hate this question, but get it every time. Since I don’t pick the presentations, I really can’t answer it. Sometimes it is just the way the voting falls, sometimes we just get a lot of submissions on one topic and it splits the votes. Often times the difference between the 18th (Made It) and 19th (Missed) presentation votes are a fraction of a percent. One time we had about 6 all clumped together, so often times it just becomes a lack of space. We encourage people to resubmit, but very few do.

Three Times In Tempe?

We hadn’t planned to stay in Tempe for a full year (Ignites 3-5) but we made an agreement with sponsors back during Ignite Phoenix 3 and wanted to honor them. Overall Tempe was very hospitable to use – the vast majority of the problems we had were related to the venue itself.  Our plan now is to move around the Valley quite a bit more, but may still revisit venues if it makes sense.  We don’t want to be in one location for a full year again.

Involvement & Input

Holy crap, SO many people work to make Ignite happen, from the core team that meets for a few weeks leading up to it, to the volunteers who help the night of the event. We welcome anyone to jump in and grab a role and put their stamp on it, but we give preference to people who are really involved. We watch a lot of the general community feedback and take it to heart, but sometimes topics are a lot more complex (and sometimes stupid) than people realize so we don’t always react to public comments. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve invited someone to devote hours to make a change they proposed and they are never heard from again.

Wifi

Having wifi is a priority for us in all future venue selections, or at least not having a venue that blocks 3G and cell connections. Many people use their phones and other devices to tweet and connect during the events, so wifi may not be a deal breaker. We want people to be able to share and talk about the presenters on the back channel, and believe me – our frustration on this topic may exceed that of any attendee to date.

Charging for Tickets

As Ignite grew, managing the tickets against reservations became a real challenge for our volunteers. Ignite #4 used Eventbrite and the reservations came through to us very spotty. Plus, no-shows on the free reservations were nearly 40%. It turned that out since the tickets were free, people just reserved a bunch even if they weren’t sure they could come. (I’ve learned since then this is a common issue that events face.

If we have a venue box office do it, they charge a handling fee we can’t get around. Our solution for #5 was to set a price ($5) that ate the fee, gave us some revenue, and set the bar just high enough that people wouldn’t grab tickets unless they were fairly sure they would come.  It worked much better, but shifted the problem to the 100 free tickets we held back to give away that night – people heard we were “sold out” so didn’t drive down to claim them.

To be crystal clear on a related point, nobody makes a profit on Ignite. Nobody draws a salary or is in any way directly compensated for their time. All money – from sponsors and tickets – goes to pay the expenses tied to the event.  Money coming in from tickets just helps reduce our need for getting sponsors. Ignite still costs money to put on.

Our plan for Ignite #6 is to put all tickets on sale, except for the free ones that sponsors and presenters receive. We think this is the best balance between reducing load on our volunteers, and ensuring that anyone who wants to attend that evening can plan accordingly without having to show up way in advance to wait in line.

Mini-Ignites

There have been several topic specific, mini-Ignites over the past year, with the most notable being the Intel sponsored Developer Ignite, and the Ignite High School hosted by Carl Hayden High School.  We love these, and our hope is to have a few more of them each year, but not a flood so it overwhelms people.

We ask that some basic rules be followed, mostly around transparency, and that we cross-promote, but then let the mini-Ignite find its own style and voice. I think this is a great way to leverage the brand of Ignite Phoenix, and have new ideas and methods feed back into the overall event.  I love having the mini-Ignites have a different look and feel, and I hope to see a few more of these in 2010.

Blah blah blah…

Well, I still seriously suck on the brevity angle.  I held this back to try and edit it, but these are really all questions I get. It seemed dumb to make a series about it, so I’ll just put them all out there and discuss any that people find interesting.  I still have a post in mind about how to improve Ignite, which hopefully I’ll still get out this week.

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