Ignite Portland Recap

Dana and I had a blast at Ignite Portland last night. The presentations were wonderful, entertaining and thought-provoking.

If you missed the event, you can still watch the videos of the presentations courtesy of Linuxaid.

One of my favorite parts of the evening was meeting people. Some of the people I met I’ve been following on Twitter. Twitter has contributed to a sense of community in Portland’s tech and creative circles that I haven’t seen before. It’s a wonderful thing.

While all of the presentations were interesting, I had a few thoughts I wanted to share on a couple of them:

• Where Does Imagination Go? — This may have been my favorite of the funny presentations for the night. It was riddled with Lewis Carroll-like quotes such as “Where does imagination go? I don’t know. Imagination can only go where we imagine it to go. And imagination has never gone where I imagined it couldn’t.”
• That’s Entertainment: Politics as Theater in Campaign ’08 — One of the slides showed how politicians have to be performers. Bill Clinton had to play the sax. Mike Huckabee on guitar. It reminded me of running for student government in high school all over again. Except it’s not high school.
• Time for Portland to Take Its Place — Great stuff in this presentation. The ideas of following our passions, swing for the fences and build great companies. Portland is the place this stuff can happen. We just need to shoot higher.
• Beauty in Abandonment — It was great to see Peat on stage and Lyza‘s photo. I didn’t realize Peat was a photographer as well. More to talk about the next time we grab lunch.
• A History of the Stick Figure — This was a five-minute version of the Helvetica documentary. Great info and history that I didn’t know.

To sum up the evening, Dana turned to me and said, “You better invite me to the next one.” Consider it done.