Some of my high points from Offset 2009:

• Scott from AAD, who did a great job of balancing a presentation of their work with a wider discussion about design and creativity.
• Design legend Massimo Vignelli, who was extremely engaging and funny as he showed us decades worth of his elegant work. He had an interesting insight for me about why perpetual calendars (which I am constantly tempted by but never buy) don’t work: you have to tell them the date, which defeats the entire purpose of a calendar.
  
  House Industries: I’ve been a big fan of House Industries for a long time and it was great to see their presentation. The attention to detail that they devote to their study of type is mind-blowing. Their Photo Lettering project – the preservation of a huge archive of lettering – is fascinating, and their Photo Lettering online tool will be a great resource when it’s ready. Also, their Alexander Girard collection made me whimper with longing.  I bought this print the same day that I saw their presentation.
• Chip Kidd showed us some of his famous work and explained his creative process, and on top of that was just completely hilarious.  He’s quite similar to David Sedaris, an author that he has worked with many times.
• I probably took more pictures of Oliver Jeffers‘ work than anyones, and he did a lovely little doodle and autograph for my small girl.

Dave McKean, David Shrigley, Linda Brownlee and Anthony Burrill were also notably wonderful. And my pals Johnny Kelly, Chris Judge and Gisele Scanlon were all fantastic too.

I was really, really impressed with the polish and professionalism of many of the speakers, and how funny and charming they were.  I’ve been at a couple of presentations and conferences since Offset, and they’ve really emphasised how good the Offset speakers were.  These are clearly some people who are extremely skilled communicators, not just visually but verbally as well.

I can’t recommend Offset enough:  I’m still racking my brains as to how they managed to present such an amazing line-up and only charge €150 per ticket.  It inspired me in more ways than I could have predicted, and I’ll be there again for sure next year.

• Sign Oxfam Ireland’s petition calling on the Irish government to ensure a fair deal at the UN global climate change negotiations at Copenhagen this December.
• Donate. The world’s poorest people are the ones most directly affected by climate change.
• If you have a blog, you can write about Climate Change for Blog Action Day too.  Full details at www.blogactionday.org
• This is a design site, and I’ll repeat the call I made to designers on Blog Action Day 08: think about volunteering some of your talents and time to a charity or campaigning organisation.   A strong image may only take you a few hours to produce, but a non-profit can get years of value from it.

I’m the Web Co-ordinator and Graphic Designer for Oxfam Ireland, as you’ll know if you follow this blog. There can sometimes, for me, be a disconnect between the work I’m doing and the work that we do. Sometimes it’s hard to connect sitting at a pc drawing colourful starbursts for Oxjam with our partner programs doing HIV testing in Uganda, or buying school bags for children in Tanzania. It’s also hard to talk about it without sounding sanctimonious, as though I’m praising myself for the great work that is done by our organisation, when in fact nothing could be further from my mind. I get to spend most of my working week being creative and learning new things, and the job is so incredibly rewarding: I feel very lucky to be here.

So when thinking about how to blog about poverty for Blog Action Day, I decided to briefly cover just two things:

How Little It Takes To Help

It only costs €18 to buy a set of schoolbooks for a child in a developing country. €18! That’s about four pints. (Note to self: try to stop always using pints as main unit for measuring cost.  It looks bad.) We all know that education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. Small contributions can change lives; don’t be put off donating because you feel that you can’t donate very much.

Why You Should Volunteer To Design For A Charity

Anyone who works in or cares about design knows the power of a strong photograph, a compelling poster campaign, a striking slogan. Charities often struggle to find the budgets for design work, and are endlessly competing for attention with consumer advertising. If you can donate a few hours of your time to design something for a charity, it could provide the charity with a cohesive identity for a project, and potentially be used in lots of materials. If you’re a photographer, a high quality photograph can make a huge difference in mailouts and press (photography, particularly, is so important to charities). Check out Volunteering Ireland’s arts and culture / office-based work sections or contact your favoured small charity and offer your services. People often associate volunteering with a regular weekly commitment, but a one-off or infrequent donation of skills can be really valuable as well.

Oxjam blogs for Blog Action Day »

Irish bloggers on Blog Action Day »

I am back, back, back! from holidays and ready to post a few updates on this poor neglected site.

I attended a symposium this morning on Privacy vs Publicity in the Virtual World, which was put on by the Darklight Festival. The keynote address was given by Daniel J. Solove, of the George Washington University Law School, and the panel (chaired by digital rights expert Caroline Campbell) featured journalist Jim Carroll, Hotline.ie director Cormac Callanan, Relevant Media owner Niall Larkin and Irish blogger Damien Mulley.

The symposium was generally pretty good; although I find a common problem with these kind of events is that the information within is often pitched at quite an introductory or basic level. It has to be done that way for obvious reasons, but it can be a little disappointing when no new ground is covered. The main address was interesting and engagingly presented, but covered mostly familiar concepts and examples.

The panel discussion and Q&A threw up some newer issues for me. I have always been aware of the privacy issues that surround social networking, particularly Facebook, but was surprised to hear from one panel member that Facebook have a practice of providing personal info without subpoenas to US law enforcement.

Some other points were raised that may give you food for thought:

• Consider what goes on behind the scenes at a social network – you may have set your profile to private, but the social network still has all your data in their database. Are they sharing that data?
• The focus in the West tends to be on the use of personal data in marketing, but in repressive regimes breaches of online privacy have much more serious implications – see the Yahoo! China scandal.
• As one audience member pointed out – there is much more damage done to individual personal reputations by bloggers than by governments or corporations.

Fairsay site – lots of updates appearing here

ECF08 tagged links on Del.icio.us

Blogs:

Brian Fitzgerald of Greenpeace International

James Stewart of jystewart.net

So it was a late night and an early start, but there was still plenty of enthusiasm for the day’s sessions. We started off with a presentation by Xin from Greenpeace China, about the challenges of campaigning in China. Despite the multiple hurdles put in their way by the Chinese government, they’ve managed to already run a a really successful campaign to encourage people to stop using disposable chopsticks. After this the Open Space sessions began again. I first attended a really useful session on composing campaign emails – it’s a constant challenge for all NGOs to keep the emails relevant and inspiring for our campaigners. Once again, this session was full of practical tips from Ben of MoveOn.org. I spent the afternoon visiting a few different shorter sessions – the one on practical tools for online campaigning generated a list of about a hundred handy urls, as well as inspiring a useful discussion about the importance of meaningful, compelling content. It’s easy to get so involved in the medium that we obscure or don’t fairly represent the message. It was good to see that the people I spoke to at the forum were very mindful of that pitfall – everything always came back to the message and the people, and there was no feeling of getting lost in technological discussions. I also spent time in a couple of groups discussing campaigning on a shoestring, and working with external agencies – having listened to useful advice in most of the other sessions, I thought it would be good to go to a few where I could contribute some of my own experience. As the sessions concluded, we all met in the lecture hall to run through the outlines of the various group meetings – they will all be compiled and put on the Fairsay website soon, and I know they’ll be an invaluable resource for me. The day closed off with a few presentations on some ecampaigning projects that various attendees were running, a nice pint and sandwich in the lovely Royal Oak around the corner, and a mad panicked dash for the train to London.

Other stuff:

The Forum was a really valuable and interesting couple of days, and we’re all very grateful to Duane Raymond for the tremendous organising that he did.

I made a quick but extremely fruitful trip to Oxfambooks at lunchtime, where I got a first edition of Lolita for only £20! I can still hardly believe it. And also a HM Bateman collection, which is an excellent find – I love his work and I think it’s nearly all out of print now. And two lovely colourful kids books for Lily; one by Richard Scarry that gave me powerful nostalgia (I think I must have read it hundreds of times when I was small, as every page is hugely familiar) and a Helen Oxenbury counting book with beautiful 70s style artwork. One of the loveliest bookshop hauls I’ve had in ages.

I’m writing from the Fairsay 2008 Ecampaigning Forum in beautiful Oxford. I’m very grateful to Oxfam Ireland for sending me here – I’m the only web specialist in our organisation, so its really great to be able to meet with and talk to people who work in similar roles, and discuss ideas. And here’s hoping it delays my transformation into a cranky hermit.

This is my first year attending the Forum, although it’s been running for five years. This year, there are over 100 people attending from over 60 different non-profit organisations. The biggest presences here are probably Oxfam, Amnesty and Greenpeace, but there are also lots of small NGOs with really interesting projects, such as Walk to School. I’m here with our lovely Campaigns Coordinator Rebecca Emery, many of my international Oxfam colleagues, and my old and dear friend Alice-Mary, who works with Trocaire. We sat together today in a lecture hall and sneaked looks at each others notes; it was like being back in college, except with less drama and alcopops. Although the night is still young.

The day kicked off with a speech from Ben Brandzel, who has worked with MoveOn.org and the John Edwards presidential campaign among others, and there couldn’t have been a better start to the day. As well as being a really engaging and articulate speaker, Ben gave us absolutely nothing but useful information – it was memorable and stimulating and set us up beautifully for the discussions that followed.

After Ben spoke, my colleague Karina Brisby from Oxfam Great Britain spoke really well about ecampaigning; showing examples of Oxfam’s work in the area, talking through tips and common pitfalls, and giving examples of successful and innovative ecampaigns, such as ushahidi.com, My ActionAid and the Burma Facebook group.

The afternoon discussion groups were set up using a technique called Open Space, something that was completely new to me. I am generally a bit too curmudgeonly to participate in activities that ask me to visualise myself as a bumble bee, unless toddlers are involved or I’ve been at the gin – or both, which I can recommend. But I have to say that this worked very well.

I attended four sessions in total, all of which were packed full of interesting questions, new issues to consider, helpful examples, tips and brand new technological concepts. I can’t overstate the value of this kind of face to face discussion, particularly for someone like me who is so busy that I rarely get time to do any research. In fact somebody in one of the sessions mentioned that they feel we should all be spending 20% of our time on research. So anyway, I attended sessions on 1) The Swarm, 2) Campaigning to a young audience, 3) The trends that are likely to affect ecampaigning over the next 3-5 years and 4) blogging. After this, there was a panel discussion on elections, and how to best use ecampaigning around them. I took copious scribbly notes in all sessions and will beat them into some kind of useful shape over the next few days. A useful aspect of Open Space is that notes from all sessions are posted on the wall, so I got some concise n handy tips from sessions that clashed with the ones I attended. I’m now all over stimulated and fired up, and will go to dinner and babble at whatever unfortunate is sitting beside me, and probably drink wine too quickly. Hurray!

Other thoughts:

• Happy Birthday Alice!
• I also attended an excellent pre-meeting for Oxfam Ecampaigners the day before the forum – it was my first meeting with this group, and it was really inspiring to hear about some of the great work that’s going on in the affiliates. Links to follow.
• If there is a box of Krispy Kreme donuts at an ecampaigning meeting and you eat 2.5 of them, you will feel like you need a shower for the next 24 hours (and counting)…even just after you’ve had an actual shower.
• Oxford is incredibly beautiful, the college where we’re staying is gorgeous, the anglepoise lamps in my little room make me feel all studious. I’m hoping to do more exploring this evening, and see more floppy-haired boys riding bicycles.
• It would appear that saying that the chef is ‘the best chef out of all the college dining halls’ is roughly equivalent to saying ‘he’s the best chef out of all the local prisons’.

I’d love to hear your feedback, please feel free to leave comments and questions below.