2010 Year-End Blog Review
Filed under: Alberta, Arts, Calgary, Politics, Technology
On this exact day (January 3) of last year I wanted to take a look back at the previous year as viewed through the eyes of my blog. At the time I said 2009 “was a good year for me personally and I think this blog shows some of the highlights that come to my mind when I reminisce about the last year of the decade.” As good as 2009 was for me, I feel safe in saying that 2010 surpassed it in almost every way. From the election, to starting a new column for Metro, to finishing up a good run with Lunchbox Theatre, to the birth of my daughter (not to mention the whole pregnancy) I couldn’t have asked for anything better. It was probably the best year of my life – if I can declare such a thing.
So I decided to do what I did a year ago and instead of selecting my favourite posts of 2010, why not not just let readers “select” the top posts of 2010 by highlighting the most popular posts on this blog during the year, and then give some background as to where the post came from?
Last year I included the top 15 posts. This year I thought I’d shorten up the list on an even… 13. So without further ado, the most popular djkelly.ca Blog posts of 2010:
13. What CivicCamp is doing for the 2010 Calgary Municipal Election
May 18, 2010
In this blog post I revealed CivicCamp’s plans – and it turns out mine – for the 2010 municipal election. I think it was the night before that the “Governance Cabin” met at Eau Claire Market to finalize the plan. I actually posted details on the CivicCamp blog and then wrote this post to give more info into the rationale for the plan and to give my own personal opinion (which I didn’t think was appropriate on the CivicCamp site). Shortly after this I actually stepped away from the Cabin while I considered running for alderman — a rule the members came up with the ensure CivicCamp stayed non-partisan and that eventually affected Paul Hughes, our new mayor Naheed Nenshi, and volunteer extraordinaire Cheri Macaulay, all cabin members who stepped away to work on campaigns instead. After I decided not to run I returned to help execute some of the plans laid out in this post.
12. What data should be included in the City of Calgary’s Open Data Pilot Project
June 15, 2010
I actually meant to write this post months earlier, but I eventually did it in mid-June. My hope was it would help the City determine what data sets people might be looking for. The eventual catalogue release however only included mapping data. So while numbers 1 and 5 were included in public catalogue, we’re still waiting for numbers 2, 3, 4 and 6 to make the mapping data actually useful. Until then, don’t expect the catalogue to be all that heavily used. (Number 7 isn’t really “open data” but my hope is our new mayor may actually try to make it happen. It’s not something administration can do unilaterally.)
11. What most needs doing?
August 3, 2010
It took me a long time to make my decision not to run for alderman. It was hard because so many people had signed up to help run a campaign. In the end I had to ask myself “what most needs doing?” and I outline my answer in this post. At the time I said, “I believe I don’t need to be on council to help improve Calgary in a meaningful way,” and “meaningful public engagement may be something [alderman] want to do, but it rarely is something they have time to do at the level I believe we need.” My goals were to “raise the level of discourse around the election” and “[have] people who believe in the kind of public engagement I believe in helping create more people who want to, and know how to, become engaged.” I think I help achieve this so successfully in 2010 that the day after the election I remember breaking down in tears because I was so proud of Calgarians and the role I was able to play. (It could have been the lack of sleep however.)
10. How open data came to be in Calgary
March 22, 2010
This post sat unfinished on my work computer desktop for months. When it first passed committee I decided to write up all the steps that were taken to make the open data policy a reality. On the occasion of it finally passing council I finished the post and put it up as documentation of the process – mainly so I wouldn’t forget, but so that others could see how easy (or hard) it is to get a policy from scratch approved.
9. Calgary, meet your new council
October 19, 2010
It was a pleasant surprise to see a post election blog post make it on to this list. Although it was only written the day after the election. While everyone else was focussed on who won and how they did it, I thought I’d take the opportunity to be the first to ponder how this new group might work together. Some of the predictions are coming true already, others might still – or not – time will tell.
8. 18 to 34 Year Olds, Social Media and the Calgary Election
August 17, 2010
This is probably the most frustrating piece I wrote this year. Often I find myself writing things in the hope that once I do, and expose the rationale behind something, the issue will be put to bed and not brought up again. I wrote this piece in response to political pundits (specifically political scientists who had no idea what they were talking about) about the myth of social media being only about young people and thus it wouldn’t have any impact on the election. Balderdash I cried! And even after I wrote it I had to scream the same thing over and over and over. Those poli sci profs sure like their narratives. Even when they have no basis in reality. And even when they’ve been proven wrong by an election. Then all they do is twist things around a little to show how they were right all along. Cheeky buggers. Duane Bratt still owes me that beer he promised on Global Television on election night.
7. Nuit Blanche Calgary update
June 16, 2010
This post might be artificially inflated on this list because it was emailed out to everyone who signed up at http://bit.ly/nuitblanchecalgary indicating they were interested. So it got about 100 extra visitors because of that. The post is a long overdue update on where things are at in the planning for a Nuit Blanche in Calgary. Something I’m long over due to do again… I’m excited at how the plans are shaping up. As I was then too.
6. Fun with Maps: Top 3 Calgary mayoral candidate vote share
October 28, 2010
David Johns deserves all the credit for this post. He made three great maps of how the three leading mayoral candidates did on election day. A post that obviously got lots of interest. Visual is better.
5. Comparing Budget 2010 to Budget 2009
February 9, 2010
In a year of municipal posts it’s nice to see a provincial one make it on to the list — let alone be written! This is a short post where I outline a nice easy way to compare the 2009 and 2010 ministry plans using Acrobat. It’s nice when the Alberta Government makes it this easy.
4. Loving or hating Calgary’s new bridge is not as easy as it sounds
July 29, 2009
In an odd twist this “oldie” was actually written in 2009. As a matter of fact, it was the 11th most popular post on my blog that year. Obviously in an election year as contentious as this one was it should be surprising that a post about a contentious issue would make it on this list, but I am surprised it is so high. I guess there are more people curious about why they are supposed to be so mad about that darn bridge than I thought.
3. If you want me to run for Alderman…
June 25, 2010
This post was probably the only one I’ve ever written that I passed by other people before putting up. It also received about twice as many unique visitors as #4. It’s probably the most important post I’ve ever written as I contemplated running for alderman. And people paid attention too: the post had the longest visit time of any I’ve written on this blog. The premise of the post was simple, I’ll do it if you are willing to help me win. Politics shouldn’t be about ego. I didn’t see why someone would announce they are running and then try to find people to help. That seems entirely backwards to me. In the end almost 100 people signed up to help me run a campaign, but I decided against it. See #11 on this list for why.
2. Calgary Municipal Election: 2010 will be a year of new faces
March 21, 2010
The top two posts on this list got more unique visits than anything else I’ve ever written. They both received about four times as many visitors as #3 on this list. (Which itself had twice as many as #4, so that’s saying something.) I’m not sure why this post got so many visits but it probably has something to do with how early in the year I wrote it. I don’t recommend making predictions seven months in advance, but this time it looks like it paid off and I was right: we did see “more turnover in one go round than many of us can remember,” with six new faces on council.
1. Who’s running for Calgary City Council in 2010?
April 3, 2010
Yes people were curious about who was running for council. From April until July I kept this blog post updated with the names of who had declared they were running for council. (Once CalgaryDemocracy.ca was up and running I decided to retire the post. It had served its purpose.) The post proved so popular that I eventually had to pin it to the main menu of my website. And even after I stopped updating it – and said I was stopping updating it – I still had people sending me tips and trying to get the list updated. If that didn’t prove Calgarians cared about the election I don’t know what would. (Aside from the voter turnout on the day of. Which also proved that.) It is the most popular post in my blog’s history.
"To tweet or not to tweet?" More like The Tempest!
At Lunchbox Theatre I floated an idea that was more than a little out there. I didn’t expect it to gain much traction (in marketing you get used to that happening when you propose things “outside of the box”). But it did gain traction. And after getting the approval of the AD, GM, Literary Manager and playwrights – albeit with BIG questions unanswered – we took a deep breath and moved forward.
The result is an experiment that is generating some controversy. I wanted to share one string of that controversy here because the conversation is a good one. And an important one.
The project we decided to undertake was to allow live tweeting/blogging at two selected performances of Lunchbox Theatre’s Petro-Canada Stage One Festival.
Here’s the media release that went out and was posted on the Lunchbox blog.
We won’t ask you to turn off your phoneBloggers and twitterers invited to live blog/tweet Petro-Canada Stage OneCalgary, AB – The Petro-Canada Stage One Festival takes six new Canadian one act plays and gives the opportunity for each playwright to workshop their script and collect feedback from audiences following two public readings. As an avid user of “social media” Lunchbox Theatre will be undertaking a pilot project this year suggesting audience members turn ON their cell phones at the beginning of the performance.
In order to expand the methods and tools for collecting feedback from audience members, Lunchbox Theatre has created a unique event for the bloggers and twitterers of Calgary. For the Saturday, May 9 reading of Emily and Roy by Paul Kaufmann and the Saturday, May 16 reading of The Boiler Room by Allana Harkin, bloggers and twitters are invited to bring their laptops or smart-phones with them to the theatre and live blog/tweet during the reading. All blogs and tweets from these patrons will then be made available via the Lunchbox Theatre Blog (www.lunchboxtheatre.com/blog) for the public to view.
“We have been using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our blog to broadcast information about Lunchbox for some time now; however this event provides an opportunity for users of these tools to interact with our work on a whole different level,” says D.J. Kelly, Marketing and Communications for Lunchbox Theatre.
“Petro-Canada Stage One readings are all about collecting patron feedback to help improve the scripts as they move on to the next phase in their development process,” adds Caroline Russell-King, Literary Manager for Petro-Canada Stage One. “It is in our best interest to gather as much feedback as possible and in as many different ways as possible. The honest comments generated through this will be used to make the plays better.”
Bloggers or Twitter users from Calgary are invited to contact Lunchbox Theatre Box Office with their blog address or Twitter username to purchase a ticket for $8 at 403 265 4292 x 0 or boxoffice@lunchboxtheatre.com. Tickets may also be purchased online from tickets.lunchboxtheatre.com.
The world’s longest running lunchtime theatre, Lunchbox Theatre is a professional company that caters to downtown office workers over the noon-hour by producing at least six plays per year as well as the Petro-Canada Stage One new play festival and the BD&P Emerging Director Program. After 33 years, Lunchbox Theatre has recently relocated to the base of the Calgary Tower.
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As you can imagine this generated some nearly immediate feedback from members of the arts community. Perhaps the most notable was/is local actor Hal Kerbes who has worked at Lunchbox Theatre many times before. Here is the text of his note he published on Facebook:
You may or may not have seen this post this morning. And it might be better for me to just shut up … but there are some things that simply cross a line.Those of us who work onstage have had to learn to contend with the occasional errant audience member whose phone goes off during a performance. Then came newer communication technologies where people could be connected to everything, any time, anywhere.
I had the personal challenge, at one performance, of completing an intense & demanding scene culminating in my death while tied to a chair, where I remained for the final 20 minutes of the play. During this entire time, approximately 10 feet from me, a young woman was busy texting away, her little “tikka-tikka” sounds making me want to commit potentially justifiable homicide.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of new technologies. But there is a time and a place, and I personally do not think, either as a performer or as an audience member, that this (from this morning’s CPAA bulletin) is it: [see the release above]
His note, understandably has already generated 23 comments – a fair number for a Facebook note I’d say! Of course the majority of the comments focused on what Hal was specifically talking about: the distraction of texting to the actor. This of course is a MAJOR concern during a regular performance. That is also why we chose to not run this experiment on a regular performance. Here was my explanation in the comments to Hal’s note:
We carefully considered the options and decided to try it as an experiment. The idea of Stage One is to solicit audience feedback – we do this in feedback forms and post-show q&a sessions already – and give this to the playwright to do with it as they will.I’m certainly not advocating for this to be a standard practise at a performance. The Edmonton Symphony Orchestra tried that about a month ago and it had all the negative and positive impacts you can imagine and that others have pointed out here.
But doing it during a reading where audience feedback is already requested is another thing entirely. The public readings are about feedback for the playwright at their heart. That is what this is meant to give.
Why not try it out before dismissing it? New technology does not necessarily need to be feared in this context. It may provide some amazing opportunities to the playwright never available before.
On the distraction comment side: We are doing these on the 2nd public reading of the play so the creative team has one traditional reading under their belt free of online influence. We want to make sure the playwright gets the same benefit as the playwrights working on non-live blogged/tweeted shows. In addition we selected a performance that had sold zero tickets up until that point.
I’d also like to note this is Lunchbox Theatre. We allow people to bring their lunch into the theatre. The rattling of that can be far more distracting than someone in the back row typing on their BlackBerry. Actors here operate in an environment expecting a certain level of distraction during their work.
So there it is. Will the “experiment” work? How do we gauge success? The important thing, to me at least, is that we are looking at something new that may help the play development process. Something that may even open up Lunchbox to potential new audiences.
None-the-less it is important to not dismiss points such as Hal’s and those in his comments. They are very real concerns. (Among others that we at Lunchbox have that haven’t been discussed.) And to that end here is the text of a Facebook message I sent to Hal for sharing his opinion:
I wanted to thank you for posting your thoughts on what Lunchbox is attempting. I especially appreciate it because your comments are EXACTLY what ours were when we first started talking about the possiblity of doing something using social media to better interact with our audiences.I get really excited when projects like this get this kind of attention. And it certainly does deserve this kind of attention and the discussion it’s creating. You’re points are important and it is good to constantly remind ourselves of what is important.
I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how the two readings play out. Will it be useful for the playwright? Will it be unacceptably distracting for the actors or the audience? What are the possible outcomes of having these comments available online? Will anyone even bother to show up to twitter or live blog?! No one knows the answers yet.
But we will know moving forward because of this experiment.
Again, thanks for taking the bold step of making your opinion heard. I hope more do the same on issues as artistically important as this.
-dj
Stay tuned for more and to see what the outcome of these two readings is on this front. And of course if you want to attend either of the performances – to live blog/tweet or just to watch – contact the Lunchbox Theatre at 403 265 4292 x 0 or buy online.
As a postscript, if you’re not reading this too late, you can listen to playwright Allana Harkin and Stage One Literary Manager Caroline Russell-King on CBC Radio One Calgary’s The Eyeopener Thursday, May 6 at 7:40 am. (1010 AM or 99.1 FM)
Another arts casualty? This isn’t looking good.
Also available on the Calgary Herald’s Q.
What a crazy week it has been in Calgary’s arts community. Upheaval galore!
First Jeffrey Spalding unceremoniously left the Glenbow and was quickly – and permanently – replaced by former Vice-President, Access, Collections and Exhibits, Kirstin Evenden as President and CEO after only 13 months. Then came the news that Martin Fishman artistic director of Lunchbox Theatre and their board were “parting ways” after Martin being AD for less than a year. He is being replaced on an interim basis by former Lunchbox artistic director Rona Waddington.
Then yesterday comes the news that Colin Jackson, a stalwart as 
CEO of the EPCOR CENTRE for the Performing Arts, would be entering “retirement” (as the press release called it) with no replacement being named yet. Colin puts a good face on things, but much like the previous two departures I list, there is no doubt dirt to be dished. In this case I hear “retirement” is a synonym for – in the words of Jeffrey Spalding – “not a planned departure”.
What is going on in Calgary’s arts community? In a time when “showing stability” is about to become the buzz phrase around most board of directors tables, there sure isn’t a whole lot of stability being shown.
Is it time to panic? Are things really as bad as these departures make things look?
Perhaps not. Love these three or hate ‘em I do hear there were legitimate reasons leading to the departures – most involving finances of the organization. Obviously I don’t know what discussions have been had around those board meetings or what level of involvement the departed had in their inevitable re-employment. Regardless, right decisions or wrong, I can say with absolutely assurance this doesn’t look good on the industry as a whole.
Some good news is desperately needed. Another Bob White/Vanessa Porteous/ATP story sure would be good right about now.
A Challenge: prove you are more clever than the average advertiser
Also available on the Calgary Herald’s Q.
I’ve been ridiculously delinquent here on this blog lately, haven’t I? Well, here’s why: about a month ago I took a new contract working with Lunchbox Theatre here in Calgary. The extra work has been cutting into my blogging time – aka “the workday”. (Lunch hour, naturally.) But I’ve got something fun for us all to participate in that makes everything worth it.
A little back story first. If you work in downtown Calgary you’ve probably heard of Lunchbox Theatre. For the past 33 years they have been providing professional “one-act” theatre (mostly comedies and musicals) over the noon-hour out of their theatre in Bow Valley Square. Shows start at 12:10, run for 40 to 45 minutes and then you are back at your desk by 1pm. (And yes you can eat your lunch in the theatre.) Tickets are $16 for adults. It’s been a pretty sweet deal for 33 years.
The problem is for the past couple of years Lunchbox has, in my opinion, relied a little too much on their core audience and haven’t done much advertising. Or, really, any advertising. And thus their audience has dwindled a little. This dwindling is further compounded by the fact that they will be moving theatres this summer. (No need for me to get into the details as to why here. What’s important is they are opening a brand new theatre at the base of the Calgary Tower!)
This is where I come in. Fix the problem, get the word out. So I’ll be kicking out a full on awareness campaign this August; the primary focus of which will be transit advertising. On the sides of C-Train cars and inside C-Trains and buses, that kind of thing. (Here’s an example on the right.) I plan on doing the ads as a throwback to what I think was Lunchbox’s most successful ad campaign of the past.
Those ads were funny and had sayings such as:
- If Romeo and Juliet ended after act one everybody would be much better off
- We write three acts and throw out the worst two
Pretty entertaining stuff for to read during your commute to work. (Better than the standard addiction counselling and continuing education ads that populate the bus roof now at least.)
So here’s where you come in: Do you think you can write a better Lunchbox Theatre slogan? Then go for it! Make sure you take some time to think about it because the best one will receive tickets to Lunchbox Theatre and if it is really good I may even use it on a bus. Either leave slogan(s) in the comments, or email me at blog@djkelly.ca.
Here are some of the ones Lunchbox staff have come up with lately for more inspiration:
- Play with your food?
- Do you have time for a lunch hour quickie?
Now it’s your turn. Prove you’re more clever than the average advertising copy writer. Shouldn’t be hard, right? We’ll see!
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