Reflections from September Salon: Builders Role in the new Economy
Last month we tried out a new idea: instead of just talking with each other, let’s film brief interviews with the Salon participants. A local filmmaker Alan Rosenblith, whose work focuses on new and innovative forms of economic production, has begun working with MotiveSpace in this capacity. Alan hopes to profile our work is his latest film entitled Symbionomics, slated for release in mid-2011. It was fun to have him join the conversation and interviewing folks off to the side, and he wants to keep it up for the next few Salons! Due to some sound issues with the recording last time, the quality didn’t turn out well enough to parse into a short video. For this time we worked to extract snippets of the thoughts shared, and documented them online. Click here to review people’s ideas!
September Neighbors Salon: Builders’ Roles in the Changing Economy
The last two years have been challenging times for Portland builders. Architects, developers, contractors and tradespeople have seen demand for their services slow, and then stop almost entirely. Compelling project concepts were put on hold; some, thrown by the wayside completely.
Money markets are beginning to loosen up in 2010, and during the past couple of months some Portland builders are returning to work. The projects moving forward have some interesting characteristics in common. One of themost interesting for MotiveSpace friends is the trend toward people-first, non-speculative development. Many lenders and municipalities are putting non-speculative development clauses in their requirements for support – now more than ever, builders need to know the neighbors, organizations, or tenants they are building for.
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Reflection on July Salon: Bringing the World into the Room
During the July Salon we talked over tools and tricks available to document community conversations, without interrupting their flow or focus. Allison Park of Spark Loft Media came out to help guide the discussion, giving us a great overview of social media tools and tricks which can help.
We had a good scope of member representatives out- community leaders, builders, project captains and activists who ran the gamut between true luddites to saavy and experienced social media connoisseurs. We definitely benefitted from the differences between us, having a lively debate and discussion about the merits and downfalls of different ideas and tools for documenting conversations.
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