Hey there,

From March 31-April 4 I attended the NFCB (National Federation for Community Broadcasters) annual conference in Portland, OR. What struck me immediately when I arrived at the Hilton was:

1. I was one of the youngest, if not the youngest, person at this conference

Comment from Nickey Robare on May 11, 2009 - 4:45pm

Ha, I totally know that guy! He's big on the bike scene. He's pretty wacky, alright.
You should've emailed me, I woulda shown you around...

Comment from Megan Donovan on May 11, 2009 - 5:16pm

is your e-mail nickeyrobo@riseup.net? if so, then i totally did e-mail you on march 30th

Time goes by so quickly here in the mountains, but maybe that's because I've spent a good portion of the past month away from Whitesburg. I was in Oakland, CA, for a week for the Critical Resistance 10th Anniversary Conference. It was a great week of meeting people, and learning about other organizations and resources.

Comment from Morgan Sully on October 21, 2008 - 7:36pm

Awesome! Appalshop is one of our faves around here at the NAMAC offices. Loved their Facebook videos too! I didn't know you were in Oakland! Would have had a critical mass of VISTAs to meetup - currently, there are 6 CTC VISTAs within 30 minutes of each other.

Comment from Nickey Robare on October 24, 2008 - 7:48pm

I'm sure being in a tiny town like Whitesburg gets old, I really want to come visit! Maybe when I find that fabled money tree in North Portland... Keep having fun. :)

So I'm in my last three months here as a VISTA, things are really winding down. It's a lot different being on my own, the other VISTA Kevin ended his VISTAship 2 months ago but he had been working here pro-bono until he found a job (he just got one as of last week as a community development planner for the Human Services Alliance).

The N-TEN Conference and Meeting Other VISTAs

Photo: bensheldon

Last week, I returned from NAMAC's 2007 conference in Austin: The Frontier is Here. Being a dilettante professional relatively new to the field, this conference was a great view from the frontier. From meeting other media makers and supporters from the ‘old school’ to hanging out with fellow VISTAs working at NAMAC’s member organizations, I was thoroughly ecstatic to have attended.

Been a pretty hectic few days, I'm actually in the middle of a move from San Francisco to Oakland while planning for a conference - stressful, but I'm a bit excited about what's ahead in my life path...

  The Intel Computer Clubhouse conference is a time for Clubhouse Coordinators, Assistants, Executive Directors, and Staff within the network to reconnect and be inspired within their perspective clubhouses.  This year the windy city was honored to host the Annual Intel Computer Clubhouse Conference from April 23-27, 2007 at the Orrington Hotel in Evanston.

I'm just recovering from April 2007, which will forever be known in my mind as "the month of excessive conferences." It started with WAM!, then NTEN in DC.

But then a couple weeks ago I stole Ben from Project HQ and we headed over to the newly renovated Yawkey Boys & Girls Club in Roxbury for the 7th annual Boys & Girls Club of Boston Cyber Summit. We did some digital storytelling and Google Mapping with 5 youth from Roxbury and Dorchester. The youth did great, taking lots of great photos outside the Club around Dudley but we struggled a bit with technical aspects of embedding videos in the new Google My Maps functionality.

Well there was a lot of deliberation about me going to a conference around here. But finally it was decided that I would be going to the ACM 2007 International Conference & Trade Show.

But things have changed. And it's all thanks to that lovely bit of legistlation that SBC/AT&T pushed down Michigan's throat a few months back.

Comment from lauren bratslavsky on May 1, 2007 - 11:33am

Oh Rich- that's awful. Ohio may go done the path of Michigan. Too bad no one is going, the Grand Rapids CMC seems like one of the best in the country. Are you considering going to the Allied Media Conference in Detroit? (Finally, a media conference in the mid-west). Good luck with the youth media business.

Comment from danielle martin on May 1, 2007 - 2:28pm

Hey Rich,

That major stinks! I definitely feel the pain as we tried to outreach to public access stations to get VISTAs and they just can't do it. And I also know quite a few folks trying to convice PEG access stations to do more stuff digitally and they just can't imagine it. I actually sat in at a conference at MIT a few months ago where someone (a person NOT from the public access world) suggested that public access stations should accept their fate and come up with an "exit strategy" of moving to all online endeavors. It's a really hard fight to talk to folks about too - I mean, many people see public access as a bunch of Wayne's World like content that they don't care about.

ug.

-Danielle

Comment from cheryl jerozal on May 2, 2007 - 12:37am

maybe you could go to this conference: Communities and Technologies Conference

it's not too far away from you and maybe you could convince them you should qualify as a student so you could be a student volunteer