Being in the now and in the future

Reading this article Shaping the future: 7 predictions for the creative community by Scott Belsky, makes me think we’re so in the now and on the right track with To Culture With Love and To Culture With Love. Management, my little babies. I’m talking about the content, our topics as well as the way we organize ourselves and our work within the project.

I especially felt like his points “Crowdsourcing (As We Know It) Will Be Rendered Obsolete” and “The Rise of Creative Collectives & Mixed Media Partnerships” are relevant! I love the thought of crowdsourcing and it’s being done all over right now – and also talked about, but I don’t think it’s very sustainably organized for the long run right now. New ways of taking advantage of crowdsourcing, but still getting paid are very welcome!

And I would also love to sit in an office with people from different kind of backgrounds, working in different fields. Already sharing offices with different kind of arts people is rewarding, but having even more professions present would definitely help and stimulate.

Anyway, for the workshop in February we have over 70 registrations from 20 countries. It’s great to see how the project grows!

I can’t wait to go to Potsdam and meet all of these lovely people, new and old!

Berlin, my new second home?

I’m just home from being a few days in Berlin. This autumn I now been there twice and next February again. The occasion is To Culture With Love and the management workshop (BTW, registration is open!). We worked on both getting an association set up for the workshop and other future endeavours as well as planning for the workshop. 2011 is the BarCamp edition. Read about what a BarCamp is on the wiki.

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work and party

The last week has been filled with work and party. It’s been great!

Oblivia’s seminar, the one I’ve been coordinating went really well. The atmosphere was friendly, warm and calm. And the programme and timetables were greatly planned. I even had time to have lunch during the lunch breaks although there were also other things to do. That’s a rare thing when you’re responsible for the coordination.

The speakers were great. I’m now a big fan of Francis McKee from Center for Contemporary Arts. Borrowing the words of Anna: “I love these big brains.”

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The discussion on Cultural Coverage

Here’s the link to the conversation about cultural coverage that I was part of: Kulturtimmen Sociala mediersalong (in Swedish, available until Oct 29)

Some key notes from the ENCATC conference in Brussels

So, the trip to Brussels. Not a good idea. Now I’m even more sick. Bronchitis, such a joyful word in my mind. So I’m at home bored and frustrated. There is so much work, but I can maybe concentrate for a maximum of 5 minutes at a time. Great, right?

But anyway, some thoughts on the ENCATC Conference:

• Always, always have more than 23 minutes for discussion during a seminar!
• Some of the inputs were good, not in the way that I agreed or disagreed with them, in the way that they could’ve sparked a very interesting discussion.
• Having 5 men and 1 woman, all in the same age range, all in good positions in their organizations, belonging to the same class is not really a diverse panel.
• Separating students from the actual discussion will make them angry. (And you’ll notice :P)
• It’s always great to see people! And meet new people!

I definitely think that this conference gave me and the other Finnish people a lot to think about regarding next year’s conference. It’s going to be in Helsinki and I got the job as coordinator just before we left for this year’s conference.

My personal wish is that it will be more integrated, students and professionals working and discussing together and more arts and culture present in the actual programme. The first part will come quite naturally, I think. There is a dialogue between teachers and students. The second part I know a lot of us want to work on.

So we’ll see. It’s going to be an interesting ride!

Now back to coughing and being bored.

“You should always plan so that you have enough time to also be sick.”

Sounds very true and convenient but how many actually do this? Do you do this? I don’t.

So conveniently most of my flue-caused bedtime was on the weekend, a weekend I spent at my parents place. But Monday was definitely no day for work and today, Tuesday, shouldn’t be either, but there’s really nothing I can do because I’m going to the ENCATC Conference in Brussels.

Off to the airport!

How to work in a network?

Norbert Schmidt on the Creative Network Economy and the main things that play into it.

I’m part of a network project called Produforum and today we had a discussion about it from the point of Creative Network Economy, my friend Norbert’s thesis (download here) on the subject with Produforum as the case.

Discussions were surrounding openness, who’s the network for, what are the inputs and the outcomes of individual members and how does this relate to the marked based economy outside of the network and even further how can we deal with the tax office when we are working like this without them getting all the money and we none? A lot of questions and not so many answers. What you could see was that there are many opinions and the network is different for everyone.

For me it’s okay that we don’t exactly know everything and that this is just a platform to test different ideas (that’s what the EU money is for, anyway), but after being involved with the network for a couple of years through my studies and only last spring becoming a member I’ve only started to realize how hard it is to try to create your own system of working within an already existing on, the network based one within the market based one, when you are working freelance. You still have to get that money from somewhere.

I also see the similarities between Produforum and To Culture With Love. Isn’t the ultimate goal the same in both of them? What makes them different? And should they be more focused? When you are trying to work for better working conditions for professionals within arts and culture, are you taking too big of a bite? Can you actually work for everyone? Is that realistic or is that just another utopia?