Here’s the outline for the workshop that Andrew and I did at PIX Fest.
I just posted 2 new posts for this guy who blogs from prison who I met doing pages to prisoners. One is about a character in prison and access to mental health support for prisoners. The other is about a penis tattoo. Both give a pretty interesting, personal, look at prison life. You can read them at http://shannoninprison.blogspot.com.
I wanted to write about Plan-It-X Fest as it was unfolding, but that didn’t happen. I guess I’ll try to write about it in retrospect. One thing that I’m really stoked about is that we organized an entire fest, with around 1000 participants, and spent less money on the whole thing than many cultural fests pay one artist!
Dear fellow residents of the City of Bloomington,
I am one of the people responsible for the influx of hundreds of people to our town during the past week for the Plan-It-X music festival. In conversations that I’ve had with residents of our community who were not involved with the planning or who didn’t participate in the fest’s events, the response to the additional people in our town ranged from excitement, to curiosity, to confusion, to frustration. Certainly, all the people who attended the performances, workshops, film screenings, and other events associated with the festival were a noticeable addition to the community. Our goal of creating an event that was very accessible to attend and which provided a very flexible framework for all the fest’s attendees to spontaneously create performances, learning opportunities, and fun events had a very high impact on the use of public spaces in Bloomington.
We hope that all the people and their use of these spaces still allowed others to share the spaces and created an exciting, interesting atmosphere for everyone and did not make Bloomington’s excellent parks, the library, or other public spaces inaccessible or uncomfortable to anyone. Still, we are aware that a very small group of people who did not participate in most of fest’s activities, but were most likely in town as a result of the fest, created some significant problems for local law enforcement, damaged some of our community spaces, and may have made many in our community, fest organizers included, less comfortable in our town. So, for better or for worse, having our event in Bloomington had a very noticeable impact on the city and its residents which, perhaps, was disproportionate to the relevance or participation of the community at large. In the context of conversations with community members about some of the more frustrating issues associated with the fest, the question was raised, “what is this event doing FOR Bloomington?” This is a valid, important question for us, and really, for anyone planning events in this city, and it is a question that I will now hope to answer.
The easy answer is that this music festival was planned as a benefit for a number of community organizations. In the end, $2,000 was raised for Rhino’s Youth Center, and $3,100 each was raised for Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard and The Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project. Beyond the actual dollars raised, though, this event demonstrated how people, with very few resources other than their time, talents, and energy, can use something that they care about personally, in this case independent music and art, to help support their community as a whole. Some people support their community through volunteer ism, others financially, others through participation in local politics. This festival is a reminder that it is a combination of all those things, and contributions and involvement beyond those traditional forms, that comes through our imagination and inspiration, that makes for a strong, sustainable community.
Beyond the money raised, or the reminder of what anyone from any background can do for the city of Bloomington, having over 1,000 people visit our city allowed me to see the strengths and assets of our community through the eyes of others. Countless fest attendees spoke to me about how they were impressed with Bloomington, and not just in terms of the spaces and organizations associated with the fest. They were impressed by the quality and multitude of the shared spaces in our town: the parks, the pools, and the library. They were impressed by the tree-lined streets, the maintenance of small-town character even as the community is visibly growing, the number of locally-owned independent businesses, and the network of community groups that allow residents of Bloomington to build and sustain their community and to support other members of their community. In addition, those attending the fest, appreciated not only the physical or institutional merits of our community, but the people themselves. Many commented on the friendliness by which they were greeted by the locals that they met, and the fairness that they experienced when conflicts did arise.
Certainly, many events, whether they are other cultural festivals like the Lotus Festival, or conventions and conferences hosted by the convention center or the university, bring visitors to Bloomington, and afford those visitors the opportunity to see the many great things about our community that I have mentioned. Many of those events bring numbers of visitors that are far greater than our festival, and with seemingly less impact. However, most of these visitors are older, more settled people, who will return from their visit to their own communities and the roles and routines that they have created there. The vast majority of the visitors who came to Bloomington for Plan-It-X fest are young people, most of them searching for a definition and model for community. We should be proud, as residents of Bloomington, that our community could make such a positive, profound impression on so many youth and that the things we have built, as a community, and our relationships with each other, as a community, may motivate the things that others build and the relationships that others find in the places where they are from.
The challenges of community are ones that we consistently face, the questions difficult, and the answers complicated. They are challenges that raise tensions between neighbors as much as they create a sense of solidarity. Ultimately, I appreciate the chance to see my community as others see it, and to be reminded why we continue to rise to the unrelenting challenges of building community and, together, search for those complicated answers to difficult questions.
Sincerely,
Geoffrey Hing
In a way, the question of how you deal with the scumfucks who probably have been breaking into buildings around the fest is the same question as what you do with the wealthy college kids who live in the fancy apartments, is the same question as the ones asked by “The Hardest Question Ever”. How do you deal with being part of the same community but having a relationship between people that is fucking disfunctional or even violent?
Other hard questions:
Did the costs that we thought we saved keeping the fest cheap and loosely organized just get transferred to the community at large?
I was told that content posted to myspace become’s theirs, but I never verified it for myself. Turns out its true. From their TOS:
By displaying or publishing (“posting”) any Content, messages, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, profiles, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) on or through the Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com, a non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, modify, adapt, translate, publicly perform, publicly display, store, reproduce, transmit, and distribute such Content on and through the Services. This license will terminate at the time you remove such Content from the Services. You represent and warrant that: (i) you own the Content posted by you on or through the Services or otherwise have the right to grant the license set forth in this section, and (ii) the posting of your Content on or through the Services does not violate the privacy rights, publicity rights, copyrights, contract rights or any other rights of any person. You agree to pay for all royalties, fees, and any other monies owing any person by reason of any Content posted by you to or through the Services.
So Oliver is trying to figure out what’s best for his kids, Stuse is working on an audio documentary about alternatives in education from the roadtrip of free schools and alternative schools she took in the spring, Ben is reading Teruvina’s copy of the Teenage Liberation Handbook, and Patrick’s friend Rich is working on a web portal designed to encourage science and engineering study for kids in Indiana, but seemingly lacking an underlying educational vision. All of these things came up in the course of one weekend, which is a little crazy. At least regarding Rich’s situation, I found this link on boingboing to the awesome Instructables website that shows a student in Ghana making his own headphones. So, it seems like the science fair on the Internet with feedback model has some merit. I think it speaks to one important idea – that kid-specific content and knowledge frameworks aren’t nearly as successful as kids finding an interface to real knowledge frameworks whether it’s the public library, Instructables, or Wikipedia.
If ever there was an epigraph for Chris Colvard’s Creative Commons/Free Culture talk …
John Battelle’s Searchblog: Memo to the RIAA: Don’t Screw This One Up Too..:
Good f’ing lord, RIAA. Wake up. This is how we use music in the real world. Get over yourselves.
I woke up today and still felt kind of sleep deprived, event after the longest amount of sleep I’ve had in days, so I spent today doing life organizational tasks rather than anything that is actually productive.
Going through notes and old e-mail as well as coming through recent conversations, I started to come upon remnants of ideas that I’d had, or others had that seemed pretty exciting, so I wanted to put them somewhere.
Megan suggested that this be screened in Bton on the aniversary as a split benefit for Critical Resistance and Pages
irc.nullus.net/#bw
irc.nullus.net/#bookwarez