This article is part of a series addressing the topics discussed during our March 30 Salon Discussion, Connecting to Your Community.

Previously in this series: Part One, Setting the Stage | Part Two, Identifying Your Motives

Becoming a Catalyst

HYPOTHESIS
The best way to balance our commodity-driven culture is to contribute to the community through the open exchange of knowledge, ideas and information.

What is a catalyst?

In science, a catalyst is an agent that increases the rate of a reaction between two or more compounds. But what’s interesting (and in my opinion, essential for this comparison) is that despite participating in the reaction, the catalyst is not consumed by the reaction itself, so the compounds in the chemical change aren’t reacting with the catalyst, they’re reacting because of its presence.

Agents for Change

When I was just out of high school, my good friend John served as an agent of change for those around him. After being diagnosed with bone cancer that had already spread through vital parts of his body, John spent several years fighting tooth and nail for his survival. After a leg amputation, numerous bouts of radiation and chemotherapy and rigorous physical therapy, he bounced back, conquering the cancer and entering into full remission.

But despite the ordeal, his eternally positive attitude and inspirational enthusiasm lent him to being a catalyst for those around him. No matter who he met or how long he got to know someone, from his doctors and nurses to his close family and even casual acquaintances, he initiated a change in them for the better. He had the uncanny ability to put a smile on the most pessimistic of faces and give hope to the hopeless. He was a catalyst.

Around this same time, John introduced me to another catalyst (the more catalysts you meet, the more you’ll realize they tend to stay connected with one another). At the time, Kevin Carroll worked at Nike under the title of Katalyst (the K is for Kevin). Kevin’s sole responsibility around the Nike world headquarters was to be an agent for creative change.

He initiated campus-wide guerrilla games of tag, held employee soccer tournaments, introduced leading athletes to students and children with terminal illnesses for inspiration, told his inspirational Red Rubber Ball story and much, much more. He had no shortage of wacky, zany, crazy ideas intended solely on inspiring creativity and provoking thought. He was a catalyst.

Passion, Enthusiasm and Strengths

I mentioned passion in the last article as a driving force for your motives, but you can also lean on your passions to guide you into becoming a catalyst. What strengths can you contribute to the community that you are joining or creating? Every community has needs and no one is expected to give 100% of themselves 100% of the time. So what can you give? Where do your talents lie and how can you apply them to this situation to become an agent for change? Is there a part of you that’s currently unused?

Skills and talents aside, the biggest part of ourselves that we can use to develop a reaction in a community is our enthusiasm. If you have a passion for something and let that shine through in your words and actions, you will motivate, encourage and ignite action in the people you serve or with whom you work.

One thing that Kevin Carroll embodies as a “Katalyst” is enthusiasm. No matter what he did or what he talked about, he was genuinely excited. He couldn’t wait to tell you a story or initiate a new project or show you a new perspective. That enthusiasm is what drove people to play along and join in the fun. And that enthusiasm is what makes him so successful in being an agent for change among his community.

What strengths do you have that you can offer up to your community? When you excel at something, there’s a certain level of confidence and positive attitude that shines through while you’re doing it. It could be writing, it could be web design. It could be meeting people and building relationships, or it could be planning events. When you believe in a cause and devote a portion of your positive side to it, you can initiate a positive reaction for change (and not be consumed in the process).

Collaboration: Be a Team Player

I have a confession to make—I’m a control freak. What’s worse, I only realized and accepted this over the course of the last year. Thanks to a wonderfully patient leadership council, I’ve learned that I can’t try to do everything all on my own. It’s exhausting, for one thing, but it’s also not fair to the other community members who are also putting time and effort into building something that we’re passionate about. I was not being a very good team player, and no matter how much energy and enthusiasm I put into the program, it cheated my fellow teammates out of the full benefits of sharing the load and working together.

There are a lot of buzz words floating around these days when it comes to working with a community. Collaboration, cross-pollination, synergy, team-building, social practice, community engagement—I could go on. But while I’ll dive into some of these more deeply with the next part of this series, Creating Synergy, I have to highlight the importance of working as a team.

Chemical reactions must involve at least two compounds, and with an agent for change, that makes three. There’s no I in three. Truly effective teamwork prevents burnout (a phenomenon that’s all too common these days), fuels the team’s fire and enocourages growth and success. Shared responsibility results in shared goals and shared pride. A catalyst initiates and encourages action without taking charge and consuming everything.

When it comes to team work, and especially when a a project is just getting off the ground, flexibility to shape and modify things as the community responds is essential. We must be open to change and evolution—communities are living, breathing entities, and we must live and breathe with them.

Encourage and Facilitate a Culture of Proactivity

Stop letting things come to you—go out and find them. Our culture has encouraged us over the years to become more and more lazy. Our smartphones notify us when we have a new email. We shop online instead of going to brick and mortar establishments. We like being waited on.

But all too often we find ourselves sitting around and waiting for opportunities to come knocking. It’s time to retake matters into our own hands. If you want to start something, then start it. If you want to meet someone, then call them up and meet them. Putting yourself out there shows initiative, demonstrates your desire to participate and puts you on the right path to becoming a catalyst. You become the driving force that allows others to join in and make change.

Taking the Plunge

Did you know that I’m an introvert? Anyone who’s ever met me might laugh and try to call my bluff, but the honest truth is that I would usually prefer to sit at home or spend time with my close friends than go out to a networking event and introduce myself to strangers. It gives me goosebumps right now just thinking about it. But while I may have a hard time putting myself out there, I understand its importance and my passions and commitment to programs like I Heart Art: Portland are what drag me out.

Other introverts like me are saying, “I’m too shy to just jump in.”

I bet that your closest friends would tell you otherwise. I bet that they see in you a fiery go-getter when your passion leads the way. The trick is channeling that passion into enthusiasm and forward momentum. Once you take those first steps, the rest is easy. For me, it was as simple as attending a meet-up in 2009. I met people that inspired me. I found a community that wanted me to succeed at making my art. That little kernel of excitement started it all.

Still others might wonder, “Why do I need to be a catalyst? Can’t I just be one of the other compounds in your silly chemistry analogy?”

The quick answer is yes. You can be just a compound in the reaction equation. But let’s examine the long answer and first think back to why we’re here: to connect to our community. We’re trying to balance our commodity-driven culture with meaningful peer engagement for mutual benefit. We’ve set the stage and identified our motives, committing already to doing something different than most.

Then, when you take a look around, you’ll start to realize that the world needs more catalysts. Like I said before, we have turned into a lazy people, and it’s time to turn that ship around. We need catalysts to make us think, help us make, ignite our creativity, pull us together, unite us in a cause, teach us how to play, inspire us to change, empower us to succeed, and much, much more. You can be a catalyst.

When you succeed, a new world will open up before your eyes. The result of the reaction that a catalyst creates is greater than the sum of its parts. You will be surrounded by collaborations, inspiration and unity. You’ll be able to solve issues in a community, offer resources to those without and forge new relationships. The benefit is mutual.

Agent, Environment, Reaction

Use your passion as your engine, your enthusiasm as your fuel and your community to steer the vehicle. Just like John or Kevin or any number of successful community catalysts, you can be an agent for change. Once you do, the next step is a big one—Developing Synergy.

To be continued…

Author’s Note: I do not profess to be an expert on the subject matter, but I do hold a special interest in this community and a passion for the topic. That said, I am still learning, and welcome any feedback in the comments, be they in agreement with what I’ve said, questions about finer points, or arguments in opposition. This is a conversation, not a lecture.

I want to give a special thank you to Diane Gilleland and Kim Werker for their incredible insight into this broad yet personal topic. I absolutely love collaborating with them on the series, and I couldn’t have assembled as coherent a presentation as I think this is without their help.

I was surprised by the news, and immediately searched for a formal announcement or press release of the change in leadership. I came up empty-handed. Then I found a Wall Street Journal article that broke the news and cited some third-party consultants and analysts about the ongoing disenchantment of Etsy sellers.

First off, I’ve neither met Rob nor Chad in my dealings with Etsy and the I Heart Art: Portland program. I’ve only heard stories about the company’s founder and his many eccentricities, so I don’t have any personal knowledge of how he ran the company or how his business decisions have affected the marketplace that we all know and love (which begs the questions, do we all know and love it?).

The most thought-provoking part of the WSJ article for me was the [limited] research done around seller confidence, stating that as many as 80% of the biggest sellers have major complaints with the site and its services. First, if you have nine million members, surveying two dozen isn’t a telling sample set. But statistics aside, I would have to agree that sellers are becoming increasingly frustrated with the site. However, my analysis of this will come here in a minute.

On Etsy

My own biggest beef with Etsy and their services is the inadequate search function. Veteran Etsy sellers have trained themselves to navigate the search results to find what they’re looking for, but when my father called me a year or so ago and said he tried to search unsuccessfully for me on Etsy, I knew something was wrong. There have been minor improvements over time, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

There are also legitimate concerns about abuse enforcement and site policing. With an enormous boom in membership and an inadequately disproportionate growth in staff, keeping track of resellers and imported mass-manufactured goods has been impossible, and despite submitting abuse complaints and self-policing by sellers, Etsy has not done much to make sure that their users are playing by the rules.

On Rob Kalin

This is the second time that Rob has stepped aside from his role as CEO to let someone else take the reigns. The first time, Etsy had not yet seen profit, so it seemed a natural fit to bring in a CEO with a better business sense and more experience in the corporate world to try and bring the revenue around. From what I understand, she took it too far, which is why Rob stepped back in and steered the company back onto its original philosophical track.

But for all his eccentricities (does it really matter that he makes his own underwear?), Rob is able to take a step back and do what’s best for the company. This turn of events tells me that he knows that he can’t do what the company needs him to do, and is passing the baton to someone that has proven himself over the past three years. And based on Chad’s letter to the community, I think Rob’s making the right decisions.

On Entitled Artists

The passion that stirred up this post, however, was generated from some of the WSJ’s statements and a lot of the comments. I couldn’t help but yell at my computer screen and angrily guzzle the rest of my coffee. Ultimately, artists have a tendency to develop this insane sense of entitlement about what they should be given for the piddly amount of money that put into something like Etsy.

“It’s hard to make a lot of money off the marketplace.”

In a sea of nine million sellers and 24 million items listed for sale, of course it’s hard to make a lot of money off the marketplace. Artists and crafters and DIYers need to get it through their heads—selling art is business. Just because you have a gift and express your creative juices doesn’t mean you can sit back and let the world’s collectors and appreciators come to you and throw money in your face. You have to work for it. You have to market yourself. And it’s hard.

“Concerns over privacy…”

There was a lot of hoopla in March over the Feedback system and its level of public accessibility, including tying accounts to specific purchases. While the matter was dealt with swiftly and professionally by the upper management, the blogosphere ran rampant with accusations of indexing all transaction data at the risk of exposing the privacy of Etsy members.

In the business of selling art, you are selling part of yourself, and in the handmade community, the barrier between maker and consumer has been completely broken down. There’s no art dealer managing a relationship, there’s no chain of supply from factory to warehouse to distributor to retailer like you would find for mass-produced goods. Art is personal, and artists need to feel comfortable putting their name out there. Your art is you, which means that you are selling yourself. And selling yourself means putting yourself out there in the public. (Now, you can control how much of your personal information is put out there, especially when it comes to physical location and family specifics, but at minimum your name should be Google-able.)

“The company is playing childish and removing the ability for some people to post their opinions in the main forums.”

Since the Internet was born as a series of tubes, the anonymity of self-generated user names and free reign of forums have incubated “The Flame War”, “Snark” and an “Open Platform for the Misdirected Expression of Anger.” Forum moderation, as such, has become a nasty, nasty beast, consuming hours upon hours of work by administrators.

If you have a beef with a company, open a support ticket or send an email to someone who can actually address the issue. Don’t post your frustration in a forum, where, fueled by false sympathy, disenchantment is bred like mold in a bag of week-old hamburger buns. The only people really paying attention to you are those who are looking for an excuse to bitch. You won’t find any resolution, so don’t give them the satisfaction. Use the forums on Etsy for what they are intended—building community and helping each other. I fully support their decision to lock down certain parts of the forums and focus on other means of resolving customer satisfaction issues.

It merits note that the 50+ comments on the WSJ article were almost entirely negative about Rob’s leadership and the current state of the site. The 500+ comments on Chad’s blog post over the weekend were overwhelmingly positive. Give people a place to bitch and they will let loose.

“All of us over at Etsy pay our fees with the same expectation of having our shops seen.”

Excuse me? That 20 cents per listing and 3.5% transaction fee can only try to cover the immense infrastructure that supports the site and the staff who run it. Can you really expect that you are entitled to exposure on the site just because you pay your bill every month? If so, you are completely delusional and should reconsider your business goals. Have you looked at how much it would actually cost to run your own e-commerce site and work on its SEO to achieve Etsy’s effectiveness?

It’s not Etsy’s responsibility to promote you. As I mentioned before, selling your creative works is hard. It takes work! If you want to get noticed, you need to be an active, social user who takes marketing into your own hands. It’s your responsibility to get noticed.

“No one is getting rich off the platform.”

I’ve never seen Etsy as a place where a seller can start a business, grow it, become prosperous and then watch the money roll in and live a fabulous life without want. Etsy, above anything else, is a tool—a launchpad. It’s a venue where the everyday person can list their work and have an easy, feature-rich way of selling their art online. Aside from a small percentage of exceptions, the average Etsy user shouldn’t expect that their business will be booming and self-sustaining within a given span of time.

I can list at least a dozen names off the top of my head of friends or community members who have seen enough success on Etsy to take the next step. Whether it’s setting up a MyShopify account and embedding it in their website, joining an artist collective or seeking wholesale accounts, these are common and natural next steps to make. It all depends on how well you pursue your business growth model and how well you market your work.

Wrap it Up

When all is said and done, it’s important to remember that Etsy is a corporation that happens to be founded upon good values, not some benevolent non-profit intent on spreading the handmade love. They have investors, they have bottom lines, they have staff limitations. And they’re still considered a start-up. Give them a break.

I wish Chad the best of luck in his new role as CEO. I’m confident that he’ll continue to use his powers for good and that all of Etsyland will benefit. And hey, if the search capabilities improve and the site enforcement beefs up, all the better.

IBW88keys

circa 1993
Platform: AOL 

Our initial Internet service was provided by my dad’s employer when we had an ISDN line installed into the home so that he could work remotely. Those were the days of Netscape Navigator and that oh-so-spectacular animated comet GIF that illustrated data streaming in from space and crashing into a web page. Or something.

But when the ISDN line was made more secure, we transitioned over to AOL, like most households I knew. My parents loved those parental controls, allowing them to limit the Big Scary Internet from completely corrupting their two wholesome sons (update: Mom and Dad, we were corrupted anyway… nice try).

So when it came time to choose my own login to AOL’s service, I went with what I knew—my initials and something representative of what I did at the time, play piano (there are 88 keys on a standard piano keyboard).

UORachy2000

2000–2002
Platforms: Yahoo!, AIM 

Once I graduated high school, I hadn’t been actively taking piano lessons for a couple years, and I thought that my old AOL name (which had lapsed into juvenile status) needed an update. The whole college world was in front of me, and the last thing I needed to do was proclaim to the world that I played piano. So I went with something a little more subtle, in my mind.

I had recently become obsessed with Rachmaninov’s third piano concerto, and while I knew that I would never learn to play it, the piece spoke to me and I often cranked it up on my stereo in the hopes of hearing absolutely every single note. One of my friends from high school had amusingly truncated Rachmaninov’s concertos to Rachy 1, 2 and 3 (pronounced “rocky”), so I ran with it. Coupled with my university of choice (University of Oregon) and, of course, my high school graduation year (because that was all that mattered at that age), I ended up with UORachy2000. Had I only realized that everyone who saw that would think that Rachel was a girlfriend of mine, I would have reconsidered.

ghotighued

2001-2009
Platforms: LiveJournal, GMail, Yahoo! and many, many more.

My best friend, Bonnie, convinced me at the end of our freshman year of college to create a LiveJournal account and start chronicling my menial life on “teh Intarwebz”. At this point I already realized how stupid it was to associate any kind of year into a screen name, so I sought after something new and different.

My culinary obsession at the time was Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream, a wonderfully sugary concoction of chocolate ice cream, ribbons of marshmallow creme and caramel and little fudge fish. But growing up, my mother, ever the wordster, had engrained a silly little anecdote into my brain about the “proper” spelling of Fish Food: ghoti ghued. It was phonetically based (kind of) and involved letters pulled from oddly pronounced English words. gh from enough, o from women, ti from nation, ue from due.

Wasn’t I clever?

This became my primary moniker for a lot of email addresses, accounts and sites, and I still use it occasionally to this day, though I’ve been transitioning as appropriate to my newer identity.

questcequeheck0

2004-present
Platform: AIM 

When I returned from my two-year stint in France and Belgium, I needed to change out my AIM account, which I had altogether stopped using. Unfortunately, I had at some point created ghotighued, but completely forgotten the password or the email address that was associated with it. One of the Tahitians that I spent time with while in Europe loved mixing French and English together, and would always say “Qu’est-ce que heck, man?” (“qu’est-que c’est” translating to “what is that?”) with his laid-back, ça beigne attitude.

But it was TAKEN! Qu’est-ce que heck, man?! I couldn’t handle it, so I just added a zero to the end. Lame, right? Oh well.

wakyzaky

2006–present
Platforms: you really don’t want to know

Okay, so there are various seedy or sketchy sites that I needed a user name for that I didn’t want to tie to my standard issue aliases (alii?). This one was pulled from an old nickname that my aunt used to call me: Wacky Zacky. We’ll just leave it at that.

ibwatson

2008–present
Platforms: web domain, GMail, Etsy, Twitter and most other accounts.

In 2008 I discovered my arch-nemesis: Isaac Watson. That’s right, Isaac Watson. Up until this point, the biggest name competition I had was either some black high school football player from not Oregon, or a series of old dead guys from the late 19th or early 20th centuries. Ah, geneology!

Once I started doing graphic design, photography and making my camera lens bracelets, I realized that I should probably start setting up a website for myself. So the first thing I did was try to register www.isaacwatson.com (fair warning, there’s a lot of douchey Flash involved there, so enter at your own risk). RUH ROH! There’s already and Isaac Watson with that URL! Say it ain’t so!

But wait, hold the phone. This is very strange: he was living in the same town in Belgium, working at the SHAPE base for the Armed Forces Network, at the same time that I was in that town in Belgium, spreading the good word and doing good little Mormon things (surprise! I used to be Mormon). WEIRD.

It was time for a showdown, but I knew I didn’t stand a chance, so I had to think long and hard about what my URL would be. First off, I had to distinguish myself from this imposter somehow. We were about the same age, and his Google rankings were far higher than I ever dreamed. Plus, I could not in good conscience associate myself in any way, shape or form with his god-awful Flash website. So I determined that I would from that point on use my middle initial (without the period) to identify myself. And after a lot of long, hard thought, I settled on ibwatson.com as being the most appropriate while being conveniently short and easy to remember.

And the rest is history. Looking forward, I don’t see any major online name changes on the horizon. It’s true that the world of the Internet is increasingly being directly associated with our tangible personalities. While the anonymity of monikers and avatars was comforting in the years of the Big Scary Internet, it has become a huge part of me and how I interact with the world, so I will also be associated with it.

This article is part of a series addressing the topics discussed during our March 30 Salon Discussion, Connecting to Your Community.

Previously in this series: Part One, Setting the Stage

Identifying Your Motives

HYPOTHESIS
The best way to balance our commodity-driven culture is to contribute to the community through the open exchange of knowledge, ideas and information.

KNOW YOURSELF

Before jumping into a community blind and flailing around without drive or focus, it’s important to take a step back and identify why you are doing this in the first place. And the key to doing that is knowing yourself.

This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell, my blessing season this in thee!
– William Shakespeare, Hamlet 1:3

Reason

Why do you want to connect? Your reason shouldn’t be because you feel obligated or because you think contributing to a community will generate sales for your business. There’s little more annoying than a blatant self-promoter who doesn’t understand where the line is drawn between self-interest and generosity. But perhaps you see a personal benefit in joining a community—this is not altogether bad.

Four years ago, my best friend told me about the volunteer work she had been doing at a local theater. Intrigued by the opportunity to see theater on a regular basis (and strictly limited to an art student budget), I joined the ranks of the volunteer ushers. During one performance of each play, we would take tickets, enforce the no photography rule and help patrons find their seats, and in return we got to see the play for free.

My initial interest in the volunteer program was selfish (I wanted to see more plays), but after four years of doing it, I’ve become more interested in contributing to the theater as a place of culture than in serving my own desire to experience it. Even if you are enticed by the perks that some service can offer, you will quickly appreciate the benefits your service gives to the community.

Belief

Where is your passion? What is the fuel that keeps the fire burning? Are you committed to the community you want to join? To dive into an existing community without belief in its tenets or without conviction behind your intentions sets you up for uncertainty and possibly rejection. Find your drive, what you really want to GIVE to people, and look for a community that shares that. If that drive doesn’t exist, channel your ambition to help by creating a community. Remember, the circulation of gifts creates community. Start spreading gifts little by little, and see what kind of  community will grow out of it.

If, by chance, you find a community that you see is lacking something or that needs help, dive in and get to work. Just don’t try and be a savior—it comes off as cocky and is usually rejected by the community. Remain true to yourself and let it work organically. You can follow that oft-referenced quote by Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Time

Do you have the time to spare to meaningfully participate in the community you would like to join? Our desire to contribute and belief in a cause can often drive us to bite off more than we can chew. The second our passion ignites, reason can easily fly out the window, and suddenly we find ourselves treading water in a sea of deadlines, exploding inboxes and burdensome meetings.

Survey your weekly and monthly commitments, and determine how much time you have to devote to a community before diving in. Do you have five hours per month? Ten hours per week? Whatever your actual level of commitment, it’s valuable.

I have come to realize recently that I am a terrible estimator of time. For some reason, every to-do in my mind will take 30 minutes, but once I set to a task and dive into it, I look up at the clock and realize that two hours have passed!

Be realistic and learn to say “no”.

When asked to do something, take a breath and ask yourself how soon it needs to be done. Take a mental tally of what’s already on your plate (or consult your smartphone if you’re like me and can’t keep it all in your head) and then decide if it’s something you can commit to. If you can, schedule the task into your calendar, and build a time buffer into it in case it takes longer than you think.

If you can’t find a time to do it without leaving it until the last minute, say “No.” Nothing will gain you more respect within a community than being able to accurately evaluate your workload and be honest about what you can or cannot do. If you’d still like to do it but only have a limited amount of time, ask for help. If you’re working with someone on a project or a task, it’s harder to procrastinate, especially if you agree to keep each other in check.

But if all else fails, maintain open lines of communication. Is a deadline looming that you realize you can’t meet? Let someone know. Is there a meeting you know you can’t make? Find out when you can meet with someone to get back up to speed.

If you keep the channels open and follow through with your commitments, you’ll come out a winner and a champion. But the inverse is true as well. Falling through or flaking out could damage your reputation. You never know what doors might close to future opportunities if you let a community down. Manage your time well, say no or work with someone if you need to, and you’ll maximize your effectiveness in the community you’re reaching into.

I Don’t Know

At this point, you’ve likely asked yourself some cold, hard questions. Why am I doing this? Do I believe in this? Do I have the time to commit to it? And any kind of self-evaluation, especially when it involves soul-searching and knowing yourself, can lead to inarticulate shrugging or throwing your arms up in the air. If this happens, the most important thing to remember is this:

“I don’t know” is okay.

By searching within you and feeling around for your motives and intentions, you may realize that you can’t answer some of these questions. That’s no reason to stop. Saying “I don’t know” to ourselves is an important component to self-discovery—by identifying a hole in our knowledge, we open our minds to thepossibilities and begin seeking answers. This is a process, so don’t expect it to happen overnight. One of the participants at the salon discussion twisted JFK’s famous quote into a relevant quip:

Ask not what your community can do for your art [or gift], but what your art can do for your community.

In August 2009, I attended a meet-up when a handful of people from Etsy visited Portland. This was the first time I had really heard about the Portland Etsy Team, and throughout the course of the evening, I met some of the most inspiring members of the team. After a lot of discussion and sparking some meaningful friendships, I was amazed at the support and encouragement available locally for people like me who were just starting out as small, creative business owners. I left that evening feeling better about the handmade community than I ever had, confident that there would be some way for me to get involved.

Two months later, I happened upon an open call for a meeting about a new partnership between Etsy and PNCA. I attended, anxious to see how I could contribute, and immediately latched onto the philosophy of advocacy and support for the creative community on a local scale. Over the next few months, I Heart Art: Portland was born, and I’m proud to be a part of it. The work I do for the program is the most rewarding, fulfilling and satisfying work I have ever done.

Do some soul-searching. And once you’ve established that your motives are pure, that your commitment is resolute, and that you have the time to spare, you can roll up your sleeves and move to the next step: Becoming a Catalyst.

To be continued…

Author’s Note: I do not profess to be an expert on the subject matter, but I do hold a special interest in this community and a passion for the topic. That said, I am still learning, and welcome any feedback in the comments, be they in agreement with what I’ve said, questions about finer points, or arguments in opposition. This is a conversation, not a lecture.

I want to give a special thank you to Diane Gilleland and Kim Werker for their incredible insight into this broad yet personal topic. I absolutely love collaborating with them on the series, and I couldn’t have assembled as coherent a presentation as I think this is without their help.

This article is part of a series addressing the topics discussed during our March 30 Salon Discussion, Connecting to Your Community. Some background information about the subject is available in a preliminary post, Learn to Share.

Author’s Note: I do not profess to be an expert on the subject matter, but I do hold a special interest in this community and a passion for the topic. That said, I am still learning, and welcome any feedback in the comments, be they in agreement with what I’ve said, questions about finer points, or arguments in opposition. This is a conversation, not a lecture.
Setting the Stage

HYPOTHESIS
The best way to balance our commodity-driven culture is to contribute to the community through the open exchange of knowledge, ideas and information.

In the creative modern world, our gifts usually participate in the market. And while the market isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, our guidance by it can sometimes overshadow the reason why we create in the first place—because our gifts compel us. As I examine this notion of balancing market-driven gifts and meaningful contribution to community, I break it down into five parts:

1. Setting the Stage
2. Identifying Your Motives
3. Becoming A Catalyst
4. Developing Synergy
5. Making A Difference

Gift vs. Market

Practices of many indigenous cultures and anecdotes found in fairy tales and mythology illustrate the idea of a gift economy—goods and services are delivered without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards—a culture without quid pro quo. The gifts are a form of reciprocal altruism intended to benefit the whole, not just the one. Everyone contributes in their own way, and everyone benefits.

Pardon my nerdiness, but any fan of Star Trek will nod in understanding of this concept. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock sacrifices himself for the crew of the Enterprise. In his last breathing moments, he presses his irradiated body against the window and justifies his actions to a grieving [and overacting] Kirk:

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one. … I have been, and always shall be, your friend.

The market (or sometimes barter) economy is one driven by products that hold intrinsic value. Money or other products are exchanged for an item based on its perceived or collectively established value.

Those of us who sell our artwork or handiwork are well aware of the importance of value when it comes to surviving in a market-driven world. Hello, capitalism. But while there’s no escaping capitalism—barring some cataclysm that utterly destroys the market as we know it and forces us to return to our anthropological roots—if left unchecked, it can consume our life and eat at our soul. I don’t mean to say that the market is bad in nature, but that imbalance can have negative consequences on our creativity.

Within the handmade market, though, we often find a barter economy. How many of you have scoped out a craft show in search of other vendors to trade product with? Bartering at this level, artist to artist, holds much more perceived value because we have a personal knowledge of how the object is made and are parting with something of equal value of our own making. There is much more emotion involved in act of the exchange than in parting with our money.

Money is typically disconnected from the labor that generates it by enough steps to dilute the emotional meaning. And in a market where mass-produced goods drive down the established value, the consumer gives more emotional weight to the amount of money they must part with than to the reasons why a handmade object is better than its mass-produced counterpart.

The maker, dealing with this dichotomy day in and day out, may feel burdened by the conundrum of making a livable wage while offering a marketable (read: inexpensive) product. This can eat away at the soul and lead a maker to severely undervalue their gift (which is another subject entirely).

The Strength of the Gift

So what is community? We all belong to a community of makers, and there are myriad sub-communities and super-communities that we can identify with.  Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, argues that the circulation of gifts creates community. So where there may not already be community, once a gift exchange is initiated, community is born.

We saw this happen first-hand with I Heart Art: Portland. By giving knowledge and providing opportunities for professional development, we planted a community seed that has since sprouted into a wonderful trove of talent, education and mutual support. Those who participate feel good about doing it, because they know they are benefiting others, just as they are benefiting themselves.

We nourish the spirit by disbursing our gifts, not by capitalizing upon them.  –Lewis Hyde

The spirit that Hyde speaks of here is the spirit of our own gifts—our own creativity, knowledge or talent. And by so nourishing our spirit, the community is nourished by the gifts themselves, the rewards of which are immeasurable.

Imbalance created by trusting too much of our own gifts or creativity with the market can then be re-centered by dedicating a portion of our talents to giving back to the community that nurtured our talent, nourishing our soul in the process and keeping our dependence upon the market in check.

Does this mean we should just grab a megaphone and a soapbox and stand up in the town square broadcasting creativity for everyone to hear? That just seems silly. By meaningfully identifying our motives, becoming a catalyst, developing synergy and making a difference, we can achieve a balance between the market-based world that we live in and the community that so openly embraces us.

To be continued…

I want to give a special thank you to Diane Gilleland and Kim Werker for their incredible insight into this broad yet personal topic. I absolutely love collaborating with them on the series, and I couldn’t have assembled as coherent a presentation as I think this is without their help.

Macroaphasia

I spent two years living in France and Belgium, immersed in the culture and speaking almost exclusively French. After my initial six-month learning curve, I adapted so well to the language that I started dreaming in French. In fact, I worked so hard on my accent, that when a French person asked me if I was Belgian (after just spending nearly a year there), I was absolutely honored!

When I returned stateside, I went through complete language shock. Macroaphasia, we’ll call it. At first I kept subbing French words and phrases for their English equivalents. Then it morphed into complete language breakdown. I would be trying to say something, knowing that there were words both in French and English to describe it, but not being able to wrap my brain around either. Sometimes I would make up words that sounded right, but were completely wrong. It was painful, but I managed to work through it. And honestly, I could have had worse problems! It still happens on occasion, but mostly I’m settled back into English nicely (after six years).

MC Solaar

If you’ve never heard of MC Solaar, French rapper extraordinaire, I highly recommend you sample some of his songs. I fell in love with his style while living in France and Belgium. I’m not the biggest fan of rap or hip-hop, but what I like about MC Solaar and a lot of other French rappers is that their content is more political and philosophical than that of their American counterparts. Not so much bitches and hoes as institutional problems and reconciliations between cultures. Throw in a little true African flair and some jazz roots (those French sure do love their jazz), and you’ve got a winning combination. Sorry Missy, sorry Jay-Z, sorry Eminem. It’s time to class it up a bit.

Logo Turtle

Like most middle-class children in the 80s, our elementary school had a lab of Commodore 64 and Apple IIe computers. A couple times a week we would have a chance to play Oregon Trail, Number Crunchers and many more rudimentary games. But my favorite, by far, was Apple Logo, a drawing program using the Logo programming language, in which a small, hollow triangle called a “turtle” would be directed around the monochromatic screen with a series of line commands.

LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 50

I loved drawing with the little program, and there was a book of command series that would draw different pictures from a geometric shapes to a whale. Sometimes it would just show you the finished picture and you would have to figure out how to  recreate it. Either way, it was a good brain exercise. Something called body-syntonic reasoning, I’ve now learned.

Having returned home from two years in Europe and not able to afford leaving home yet, I decided against returning to University of Oregon and instead enrolled in the next best [local and affordable] thing: Portland State University. I had never really heard of graphic design before—I think I had associated it with computer generated images—but I nonetheless signed up for ART 100, Intro to Communication Design for Non-Majors.

Our instructor, Cameron Suttles, was for me the perfect balance between the logic of business and creativity of art-making. And the culmination of that introductory course, a travel poster using only the name of the assigned country and cut paper, instilled in me a passion and a curiosity about graphic design that was insatiable. That project was my first designed piece (and first typographic design), start to finish, comp to final product. I cannot describe the hours and the muscle cramps that my fingers endured, clutched around an exacto knife, cursing the shapes I had chosen. It still makes me proud.

Queen Erin
The Entertainer

Mistress Of All Things Teal And Gold
Duchess Of International Development

Erin and I met in September 2005 through a community on LiveJournal that we have both since come to dread (incidentally, we have also both left LiveJournal for better blog providers). I was looking to move from my increasingly expensive studio on PSU campus into a house share with some other like-minded individuals. There was a wee bit of interesting drama that happened with her and Jillian, her roommate at the time, and I recall sitting in the living room of the Skidmore house, meeting them for the first time, when I mentioned something about having the occasional sleepover with my boyfriend. Shortly after I moved in (and after Jillian unexpectedly moved out), Erin recounted that she had been surprised when I mentioned being gay. It would seem my Straight Boy Phase was still casting a shadow over my Inner Fabulous and she had misjudged my sexuality. I also learned rather quickly that she has the worst gaydar in the world. Nevertheless, we bonded instantly.

Our tenure in the Skidmore house with Carl—the pseudo-separated 30-year-old with an 18-year-old girlfriend on the side—was cut to an abrupt halt when the owners decided to renovate and sell it, and Erin and I found ourselves frantically pilfering through craigslist ads for a new place. Carl, on the other hand, got back together with his wife and got her pregnant. Now he’s a stay-at-home dad that plays World of Warcraft all day while she brings home the bacon. But that’s an entirely different story.

That’s when the Salmon Street Dynasty began: January 2006. Erin and I found a reasonably priced apartment nestled between Hawthorne and Belmont Avenues and made ourselves a home. Over the next year and nine months we kept our social life active. Erin and I organized and hosted a plethora of parties, each of them predicated upon elaborately conceived and designed invitations. Rock Stars, Willy Wonka, Hipsters, The City of Portland, The Letter ‘P’, and more. Our living room was defiled by the likes of Freddie Mercury, Alanis Morissette, The Scissor Sisters, Posh Spice, The White Stripes, Governor Tom McCall, Blazers players, proctologists, pedophiles, and Mayor Bud Clark. While I was able to lend my creative and culinary expertise to these events, it was Queen Erin who was the driving force behind their execution and the [inebriated] glue that held them together.

It was never a dull moment with Erin around. We often found ourselves chatting online (separated by only a wall and six feet of space) and simultaneously holding entirely separate conversations by yelling back and forth. Some days we just found ourselves holding spontaneous photo shoots in our underwear or holding contests to see who could create the best cat macro from photos of Portland’s mayor, Vera Katz (LOLKATZ, we called them).

Then there was the day that Erin tried to teach me how to properly apply lipstick. “Open your mouth like you’re suckin’ a cock, boy!” The riotous laughter that ensued only made the matter worse, and it was another ten minutes before my lips were actually painted. To this day, I still can’t properly put makeup on without reliving that vibrant moment.

Everything we said or did turned into an acronym, to the extent that anyone new to our social circle was confounded by talk of MGS, BAMF, PBR, CTRF, IPSH or OMGWTFBBQ24MILES. Our neighbors and landlord were each given personality-specific nicknames and And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the inside jokes ran rampantly out of control. Giant gold cubes, VIOLA!, and “Look at my a-hole I’m gay” are just a few.

My 25th birthday rolled around last year, and despite my extensive week-long celebration plans, the weather turned our river-floating trip into a no-go. Completely bummed out and ready to mope in bed all day long, I asked Erin to find something fun to do indoors to keep us celebratory. No less than twenty minutes later, she cried out “Eureka!” and made some phone calls. Three hours later we were at IKEA on a ridiculously entertaining photo scavenger hunt. It was so popular that two more episodes of the scavenger hunt have already been exacted since.

Erin has an affinity for baked goods; a talent that is reflected in her ability to craft the world’s most vibrant rainbow cupcakes and all manner of delicious cakes and pies. She also had an admirable will to eat nutritiously. I fondly recall perusing our modest cookbook library for healthy gourmet meals and planning out a week’s worth of dinners. Her distaste for beer allowed me to cultivate my taste for wine, and I cannot look at a bottle of Captain Morgan’s Private Stock without envisioning Erin, ear cocked toward the bottle, gently pulling on the cork until her favorite sound in the world is made. PTHONK!

Some of my most emotional times were witnessed by Her Royal Highness, a friend who was quick to lend her ear and a shoulder, some sage advice and laugh-inducing joke that made everything feel better. I cannot fully express the love that I have for this girl.

In August 2007 she announced that it was time for her to move into her own apartment, and September ushered in a new face and a new roommate. Erin made frequent visits to the apartment through July 2008, at which point she headed East to pursue a Masters degree in International Relations at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University (with concentrations in Middle Eastern Studies and Development Economics. Did I mention she’s brilliant?).

Our three-year history is tightly weaved together, and even though she has since moved off to Washington, DC, I know that every time I see her from here on out will be an adventure to be reckoned with, and a memory that will last forever. Erin has left a legacy as a hostess and friend of the highest caliber, the embodiment of all that is magnanimous, gracious, and sexy.

“Well, at first I was daunted at the thought of responding to your posting. How could I ever measure up? You even have a celebrity endorsement!!! Then I realized that if I were chosen to live with you it would only be exciting.”

—Jesse, Theater Tech from Boston, MA

“I would have copied and pasted the email that I’ve sent to all the craigslist postings, but I cannot, because you are special, and I must live with you.”

—Malia, Graphic Designer from Bellingham, WA

“Despite being mildly intimidated by your ad on craigslist, I shall endeavor to reply. Not in MLA format. Thank god.”

—Rei, History Wonk fresh from Montréal, Québec

“So, I think we should move in together.  I don’t generally write that, but I think it would be pretty awesome.”

—Soren, Ridiculously Traveled Philosophy Major from San Francisco, CA

I always admire flattery and self-confidence, so who was I to argue? I had successfully weeded out the uncommitted just by posting my novel of a classified ad and intimidating the weak of mind. My first contact was with Malia, a recent graduate from Western Washington University with a BA in Graphic Design and a minor in Business. In her words:

“You should choose me as your perfect 500 words or less because we have too much in common to not get along well.  I’m a designer and artist as well that dabbles in photography and carpentry.  I love to be subjected to elaborate gourmet meals and I will pipe in on your rants about bad typography, drop shadows, gradients, and the overuse of flourishing collages (although they are my guilty pleasure). I saw the first season of BSG this spring and I’ve been [dying] to watch more, so hopefully our mutual addiction to the show won’t hinder our ability to get out.  Apples To Apples is the only game that my family can happily play together, and for Christmas my wish list consists of subscriptions to Print, wallpaper*, GOOD, and a few others (suggestions?). Other things I like are hiking, biking, skiing, and camping.  I love the outdoors.”

She also included a link to her online portfolio, which made me giggle with delight. When I met with her in person, my heart went all a-flutter and we spent nearly three hours together talking about everything from design to cooking to Belgium. As we were about to part, I said to her, “I want you to know that you’re the first person that I’ve met with, but I feel like you would be a really good fit here. I don’t want to make anything concrete yet, because I want to be fair to the others and give them a chance…”

Right there she cut me off and said, smiling, “Oh yes, absolutely. You never know. You just might meet your long lost twin, and I totally understand that.”

“Wow, how very adult and MGS* of you! I’ll let you know by next week.”

And, as she walked out to the street, I breathed a sigh of relief. I knew it was meant to be, but I couldn’t bring myself to commit that immediately. I promptly scheduled meetings with the other three, knowing full well that not only had I pretty much made up my mind about letting her move in, but I was determined to meticulously analyze each of the others and measure them against her as the gold standard.

I really don’t know why I even bothered. Soren turned out to be an entertaining but riskily nomadic geek that exploits glitches in MMOs to make money and fund his travels. Rei’s intelligence overpowered her social prowess and lost major points when she told me she had “never successfully thrown a party.” And Jesse—a man whose email painted the picture of a young, energetic gay man—revealed himself as a thirty-something theatre nerd that wears a jester hat wherever he goes. Not quite my cup of tea.

And so, without further deliberation, I named Malia as the successor to the Great Throne of Magnanimity, Graciousness, and Sexiness. The nomination has been accepted, and the coronation is in place for the First of October.

But how can I speak of the successor to the throne without acknowledging those who have gone before her? Stayed tuned for the next chapter, in which the reigns of Queen Erin the Entertainer and Queen Megan the Acquaintrix are honored with reverence and gratitude.

*MGS means Magnanimous, Gracious, and Sexy—a phrase coined by Queen Erin to represent all that is worth pursuing in the world and qualities we should all aspire to embody.