Wednesday 7/15:

• Flew from BTV to PDX. Arrived at 1AM local time. Sat next to ACM sisters and brothers from Great Neck and The Bronx, NY on the plane.
• There was little food to be found anywhere near the hotel. Had to scavenge.

Thursday 7/16:

• First day of the ACM conference. Pleased to run into Elliot Margolies right away, whom I remembered fondly from past ACM events (check out his interviews with PEG luminaries here).
• Attended a panel on the Denver Open Media Project, which was the buzz of the conference from my perspective.
• Lunch at a lovely Vietnamese place with Spine.
• Following the conference I met up with my (ex girl) friend Deb for drinks. Spine joined us after he got out of work. (Note: most of my old friends here have become athletes — planning for marathons and triathlons and talking about running/biking half of the time.)
• Ended the day by taking in the new Harry Potter film by myself (Bear elected to stay in), which was surprisingly good.

Friday 7/17:

• ACM day two. The morning session was about building sustainability through documentary work. It was an inspiring panel and I came away with lots of notes to try and implement at VCAM.
• Got interviewed by Elliot for his afore mentioned interview series. Talked about videoblogging classes at VCAM, social media outreach and New Media Office Hours.
• Lunch with Spine, Carolyn and little Jolie at an Ethiopian place.
• In the afternoon I went to a (literal) nuts and bolts presentation on video engineering. I left early because I was losing steam and not getting much out of it.
• Bear and I attended the Hometown Video Awards, at which Bear accepted RETN’s Overall Excellence award. We were seated at the same table with Bill Nolan, author of Logan’s Run.
• After the awards, We avoided the inevitable karaoke. Bear went back to the hotel and I hooked up with Daniell from Telvue and Forrest from Manhatten Neighborhood Network. Thus began my long evening with ACM 2.0 folks — the young guard of community media — comprised of Denver Open Media whiz kids and 20 & 30-something staffers from NY, MA and OR. A hotel room at the Ace Hotel in downtown PDX (coincidentally where I’m typing this post right now) was our locale, and as Daniell said the next day, what happens at the Ace Hotel stays at the Ace Hotel (but of course, I have video).
• I made it back to my hotel at 2AM or so and learned there was a shooting nearby and that Snoop Dog was apparently staying at my hotel (these two events were unrelated as far as I know). Spent 30 minutes relaxing with some ACMers in the lobby before crawling into bed for a short nap before morning.

Saturday 7/18:

• The tension between old guard ACM and the new young turks was palpable at the morning session on open source community media centers of the future, but the moderator (Tony from Denver Open Media) was really great at threading that needle (though his co-presenters were less diplomatic). There is some understandable fear of technological change from traditional CMC folks and some reluctance to embrace a new model of organizing staff and resources — particularly a model that so fervently eschews traditional relationships with technology. It may take some time to sink in, but the DOMP folks “get it” and some older guard folks just don’t quite yet… but they’re coming around.
• The 2nd session I attended was on copyright and creative commons. The presenter was funny and smart, but the information was mostly review for me.
• The keynote luncheon was a panel and I got some good leads there on possible relationships for VCAM to foster and I really think we should have a presence at NAMAC in August.
• Hooked up with Spine in the afternoon and picked up XJ3 and prepped for our excursion to a big outdoor rock show featuring Andrew Bird and The Decemberists. It was beautiful.
• We followed the rock show by heading to a bar where a friend of Spine’s and XJ3′s was celebrating her 40th birthday. I saw a few folks I’d met on previous trips out here and had some yummy mixed drinks.
• We ended the night at a fries cart where I randomly ran into my friend Craig from Amherst Community Television. I enjoy bumping into friends in other cities. It makes me feel connected to things.

Sunday 7/19:

• Slept in, playing catch-up on lost sleep from the previous couple of days.
• Went to brunch with Spine at a great place called The Tin Shed. Best veggie gravy and biscuits ever. Went shopping in a little bohemian district of boutiques and comics shops.
• In the afternoon we met up with XJ3 and Susan at an outdoor theater-in-the-park performance of the classic Trek episode Amok Time. We had great seats and I shot some video, which I’ll post later (it’s on a HD at Spine’s). It was a crowd pleaser. We met up with my old friend Laura there and made plans to reconvene at her place in SE PDX that evening.
• Laura and Adam hosted a lovely summer evening dinner of gazpacho, berries and greens with lots of yummy beer. Deb, XJ3, Spine and some of Laura and Adam’s neighbors enjoyed the cool summer evening together in the back yard. We called it an early evening because Spine had to work the next morning.

Monday 7/20:

• Slept in again (ah… vacation) and spent the day in St. Johns where Spine’s house is. Wandered the village a bit and made lunch in Spine’s kitchen. Read the first volume of Y The Last Man (purchased the previous day).
• Drove Spine’s car into town to meet Spine and take the train downtown to a showing of Moon with XJ3. It was excellent — better than expected even.
• Post-film dinner and discussion was fun and delicious. Said goodbyes to XJ3 and entreated he and Susan to visit Vermont soon.

Tuesday 7/21:

• Today Spine is having his bathroom redone so I left the house with him in the morning and I’ve been spending the day in downtown PDX. Thinking about a matinee, depening on start times.
• Bought a copy of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (finally) and read more than half of it at Powells.
• Our evening plans remain unknown.

I’m taking the red eye home tomorrow night. It will be good to be back in Vermont, despite the despicable weather there this summer (all the more annoying in comparison to Portland’s dry, sunny, breezy summer). See you All back east!

• Attend the national Alliance for Community Media conference
• Visit with new and old friends
• See The Decemberists and Andrew Bird play an outdoor show
• See the movie Moon
• Attend a live theater-in-the-park performance of the classic Star Trek episode, Amok Time. Yes, you read that correctly.

Does that sound like a perfect week or what?

It turns out that Vermont is front and center for some of the more fascinating Constitutional legal questions currently being discussed. Sexting, border crossings and laptop seizures, Al Jazeera-English on Burlington Telecom cable TV, Burton snowboards featuring “indecent” art — these have all been specific issues here in Vermont, though not all of them have invoked actual litigation.

I’ve edited and uploaded the entire conference onto the Vermont ACLU’s blip.tv channel. It’s in seven parts and each part is labeled with the specific issue that’s discussed. I’m embedding my personal favorite segment here. It’s Catherine Crump, a staff attorney for the National ACLU in NYC, talking about privacy and free speech issues surrounding global, instant, digital communications tools. It’s worth your time…

Untitled from Graham Raubvogel on Vimeo.

If you’re reading this post on Monday June 29 between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., click here to view the live stream. The Burlington Free Press ran a story on the conference on the front page today. Read it here.

The implications of this are awesome. The future of live video is bright.

Between catching sessions on fair use and copyright and open video standards, here are some of the things I’m looking at today…

• The brilliant Pixar film, Up, made me weepy, but this made me weepier. (don’t click unless you have tissues handy.)
• Here’s a list of all the crap (literally, in some cases) astronauts left on the Moon (that the LRO spacecraft launched yesterday will apparently be taking pictures of soon).
• The headline reads: “Thieving Spider-Man with woman’s swimsuit, pink arm warmers caught in own web“
• Hmm, apparently rogue magnetars acually *could* cause us problems here on Earth (despite being amazingly far away from us).
• Vermont tweep Joe Mescher wants to help unemployed Vermonters make video resumes.
• Religious affiliations of super-heroes.
• An Arrested Development documentary? Yay!

The first was an intro I cut together for a Show I co-hosted and produced with Greg “Flameape” Giordano called Studio 8 Uncensored (later called Studio 8 Live and still later, Video Free Burlington). This may actually represent the very first thing I ever cut on a non-linear digital editing workstation. It was a Media 100 that Burlington College had on loan for a weekend workshop on digital editing. This is circa 1996 from a VHS bump I found lying around and digitized the other day…

Studio 8 Uncensored Intro from Bill Simmon on Vimeo.

Welcome to Reality was hosted by the inimitable Dan Zucker. The show was part hoax, part irate rant, part improvised theater, part social experiment and part deranged psychotic break.

This was edited using a “linear” tape-to-tape edit suite on 3/4″ U-Matic tape in 1997. That quick shot of me sitting in an edit suite in the studio 8 intro (notable for my lack of beard) was taken in the room where I cut the WTR intro.

Welcome to Reality Intro from Bill Simmon on Vimeo.

Apologies to Thomas Dolby.

In pursuit of this goal, a few of us have banded together and are evangelizing social media around this conference. We’ve agreed on a metatag for online posted media (“acmne09″) and the awesome folks at Found Line have built a little aggregation site (like the one they made for Vermont’s Town Meeting Day) that helps you organize all of the material coming in.

After having a miserable time trying to follow all of the SXSW tweets in March, it’s clear that this sort of page (and a diversification of relevant tags) is what that conference could have used.

Even if you’re not attending the conference this week, tune in and follow all the hot community media action! (The oening night party with a cash bar is tonight at VCAM so look for inappropriate photos tagged acmne09 on Flickr tomorrow!)

3-Point Lighting Explained! from Bill Simmon on Vimeo.

Anyway, Mark has uploaded the show as a series of podcasts. My interview was split into two parts — links to the mp3s are below.

Mark Johnson interview part 1

Mark Johnson interview part 2