5 Thoughts About Create Baltimore 2

First, let me admit that I haven’t always been the biggest fan of Baltimore since I moved here in 2009.  I also haven’t always been thrilled by the live events I’ve attended here, and maybe that’s led me to be a bit of a curmudgeonly misanthrope.  (Or, maybe I was just born that way.)  But I really do like the city, and I think it has incredible potential.

I just don’t always see evidence that the city of Baltimore loves itself, and that sometimes makes it harder to root for.

So when an event like Create Baltimore 2 comes along, I feel like I owe it to myself to see what the people who really do actively care about this city are trying to accomplish, and how they’re finding ways to work together.

175+ People Walk Into a Bar(Camp-Style Event)…

After a two-hour delay (due to Saturday morning’s burst of freezing rain), Create Baltimore 2 kicked off with a lot of energy and some grand intentions.  The returning attendees from the event’s first year seemed genuinely excited about this long-awaited reunion of the minds, which gave the first-timers (like me) a good amount of energy to draw from (which helped, since the coffee donation from Zeke’s was delayed by the weather).

While I didn’t attend the original Create Baltimore event, my experience as a founder of the long-running PodCamp Pittsburgh gave me an idea of what I should expect here.  It also gives me a firsthand appreciation of exactly what it takes to pull an event together — and how hard it is to factor in something as frustrating as a weather delay that’s beyond anyone’s control.

Now, a few days removed from the festivities (and the after-party at Mari Luna Bistro), here are my thoughts about Create Baltimore 2, and where we might go from here.

1. Neither Rain Nor Sleet Nor Snow Can Defeat an Efficient Organization.

In theory, Create Baltimore is an event that’s created by, shaped by, and ultimately succeeds or fails based on the efforts of its attendees.  But, like any BarCamp-style, attendee-fueled event, Create Baltimore wouldn’t actually exist unless a few dedicated people were pulling the strings to make it happen. Create Baltimore’s four main organizers — Scott Burkholder, Andrew Hazlett, Buck Jabaily and Dave Troy — ran the event with the skill and foresight of a group that’s done this all before, and it showed.  For example…

• They wisely warned everyone about a potential weather delay the night before, then announced the 2-hour delay by 6:30 AM on Saturday via Twitter and email.
• They used a public document to organize the day’s sessions — which were submitted by the attendees on notecards and organized into categories by Troy and Hazlett — and had the afternoon’s sessions printed out and posted outside the rooms by the end of the first session, so attendees without a web connection would still know what was available when.
• They took part in the sessions themselves, but did their best to not serve as moderators.  Instead, they encouraged the attendees to moderate themselves and organize their own conversations, rather than disseminating information in a top-down fashion.

Create Baltimore is also the first event I’ve attended that makes use of the Lanyrd service, which collects and organizes any relevant information and documents so all attendees can access them during and after the event.  Their EventBrite usage was streamlined and informative, their website keeps everything simple, and they’re on Twitter.  (They’re also on Flickr, but they really should release their photos for use under a Creative Commons license — otherwise, I technically can’t legally post their photo, above, on this blog.)

So, yes, this event succeeded in part because the structure they’ve created works.  Trust me, events like this don’t get done unless the core group of organizers can rely on each other to execute their individual responsibilities.  And yet, Create Baltimore has now reached the point where we need to discuss…

2. The Elephant in the Room.

As one particular (white) guy sitting near me in the kickoff session commented, “It’s a little hollow to discuss the future of Baltimore with an audience of mostly white people.”

He has an excellent point.  But before the audience for an event like this can become truly diverse, let’s first acknowledge how it came together in the first place:

This is an event organized by four white guys.

And since events like this tend to (initially) attract mostly people from the organizers’ own immediate social circles, we have an event called Create Baltimore that’s predominantly attended by white people.  This isn’t the organizers’ fault, because this isn’t anyone’s fault.  This isn’t a mistake; this is a beginning.

As Shervonne Cherry mentioned on Twitter (in response to the above comment), this year’s event is already a little “browner” than last year’s was.  And when one African-American attendee noted aloud that the four oganizers are, in fact, white men, Burkholder thanked him for pointing it out and used it as an opportunity to remind everyone that they’re all welcome to get involved in creating this event from the ground up, and that includes joining the organizing team.

I know from experience that the core group of organizers for any time-intensive event like this usually only lasts about two or three iterations before it starts to change cosmology.  Attendees who’ve enjoyed themselves will want to get more involved, just as the original organizers will feel compelled to move on and allow a new generation to fuel the event’s evolution.

3. Sessions Without Leaders Create Leaders by Accident.

When Dave Troy was smashing suggestions together to form the sessions that would populate the day, he was taking risks.  If ideas seemed similar enough to have overlapping elements, he’d group them together, knowing fully well that proposed topics like “entrepreneurship” and “funding for the arts” don’t necessarily have the same goals in mind.

Then it was up to the attendees in these rudderless sessions to decide what their session was really about.

I doubt that anyone in the three sessions I attended got all the answers they were hoping for.  That’s the nature of an open dialogue: everyone adds his or her own comment, and then the conversation gradually becomes dominated by the handful of people who are organized enough (or loud enough) to keep the conversation moving forward.

And in a city whose demographics are overwhelmingly not white, it’s impossible to discuss anything from technology to politics to the arts without simultaneously acknowledging that what we’re really talking about are sub-communities who may operate under those banners but whose work doesn’t necessarily overlap.  Part of creating Baltimore’s future necessitates finding ways for diverse groups to work together, so there’s less internal division of “the other” and more awareness of “we.”  I’d say that was a recurring element in every room I was in, and it was a challenge we all seem at least subconsciously aware of.

But a funny thing happened after these sessions…

4. Like-Minded People Know How to Find Each Other.

Maybe you came to the “marketing and storytelling” session hoping to discuss social media.  If so, you may have been disappointed when the conversation was dominated by debates over how to tell the story of Baltimore itself, both internally and to the rest of the country.

But that doesn’t mean you had to leave the session empty-handed.  In fact, in every session I attended, the people who were more interested in the “marginalized” talking points than in the dominant narrative would make efforts to find each other afterward — in the room, in the halls, at lunch, at the after-party — and continue the discussion they wanted to have there, on their own time.

In this sense, the “sessions” at Create Baltimore are really more like icebreakers and litmus tests: you attend the sessions to see who thinks what about whatever; then, you chat up the people you think you can help, or who may be able to help you.  It’s in these hallway conversations that the real connections happen, but they’re triggered by the sound bites everyone drops during the sessions themselves.

But even those conversations have to end eventually.  So, what happens now, with the event over and the hashtag falling into disuse?

5. The Onus Is on the Attendees to Continue Conversations and Build Solutions.

During the wrap-up discussion, a representative from every session stood up and gave a quick overview of what that session talked about, and any conclusions or “next actions” that seemed relevant to the larger goal of improving Baltimore.  A lot of the actions centered on communication, and the difficulties even for people who live here to know what’s happening in the arts, tech and events communities without having to track down a dozen different news sources.  So, some central info hubs are now being built.

The session on urban planning spun off into a separate discussion for bicycle activists, who are now intending to form a lobbying body to work with local politicians on expanding bike rights and bike access within the city.

The artists in the “future of Baltimore arts” session were urged to tell their own stories and promote each others’ work to their own audiences, but also to find ways to package the city’s emerging arts scene as something “the county folks” will want to come to the city to see — a challenge that includes better marketing, transportation and self-organization.

In short, Create Baltimore 2 did a great job of raising the awareness of the city’s potential, its problems, and its possible solutions.  It also connected citizens from various careers and skill sets, all of whom have a vested interest in improving our quality of life in the city and its identity within the national consciousness.

What we have to do now is the hard part: we have to keep in touch, and keep building, when there’s no one telling us to meet in the same room at the same time and put our heads together.  So far, the signs are very encouraging.

I, for one, am very interested in seeing what we all do next.

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Tags: Armchair Sociology, baltimore, events, networking, perception