I was recently asked to reflect on my experience of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics and a project I participated in called the True North Media House (TNMH). TNMH was an Olympics-facing citizen media project initiated by Kris Krug, Robert Scales and Dave Olsen, then of Rain City Studios.
The RCS crew got the TNMH ball rolling with a series of meet-ups and open letters to test the waters around the role of social media during the Vancouver 2010 games. It was unknown how IOC and VANOC would react to an upstart org that proposed to organize social media coverage of the games. The rest is history, as they say.
I am a social media content creator and a creator of social media powered websites and campaigns via my company Catalyst Internet. I am an avid user of the technology as much as I am a technologist. I output a constant stream of variable content on Twitter, Facebook, flickr, my blogs, etc. I’m on pretty much every social network there is. I love it. I have fun doing it. And that’s precisely why I was drawn to the True North Media House project. I saw it as a way to enable and participate with social media content creators like me during a world-facing event.
There were two sides of the experience for me: content creation, and helping realize the TNMH vision. I’ll start with content creation.
I am a photographer. I post my images on flickr. My flickr stream gets a high level of traffic. People link to my photos from all over the world. I have my images in the Creative Commons so people can use them for whatever purpose they wish subject to the conditions of the CC license. For commercial images my photos are available to be licensed through Getty Images.
During the Games traffic spiked on my flickr stream, and I used the exposure to promote TNMH and Vancouver in general, and also talked about the experience of being a citizen in the host city as well. Using my photos as a starting point, people from all over the world commented on their shared experiences in visiting the Olympic Games, Vancouver and about how great the current games were even though they were watching from a distance. My flickr stream became a place where people came together to talk about the games experience and all the various issues around the staging of the games. I had about 150k views on my stream during the games.
I was also privileged to have one of my photos featured in the IOC-distributed broadcast titles used around the world during the games. The titles were produced by Petrol.tv in London, which of course is the site of the upcoming 2012 Summer games.
I also used my alternate flickr stream to document some of the non-games happenings including DTES protests, the progress of the torch, street parties, country houses, cultural events and Paralympic events.
I was one of thousands of people producing content using social media during the Olympics. Like me, many of those people were doing so as self-accredited Social Reporters under the auspices of the True North media House.
TNMH distributed quality printable credentials to anyone who was a social media content creator and registered with our project so they could be “self-accredited” as a social reporter. The project succeeded and our lanyards were spotted all over the city and up in Whistler as well. It was a great personal thrill for me to see my company’s work on the TNMH credentials being worn by strangers. The TNMH meet-ups I attended were very fun and I met some great people from all over the world. They had very diverse stories and reasons for why they gravitated to the TNMH model.
The experience of helping organize the TNMH effort was one of both elation and disappointment. Having people gather regularly at the Catalyst office in Gastown was fun and inspiring, and I established some excellent relationships during the process. I am very happy to have contributed to the success of the project.
Less enjoyable was my role as fundraiser. Given initial positive response from potential corporate donors I truly believed we were going to be able to raise the funds we needed to have a physical presence at 112 W. Hastings and work in conjunction with Irwin Oostindie and W2 Media Ats. We had big plans for telepresence technologies, ongoing parties and a range of facilities to support our social media content creators.
When it became clear that major corporate sponsorship wasn’t going to happen I had to have a conversation with Irwin, who had put a fair bit on the line in jumping into the space at 112 West Hastings. Irwin was really understanding about what I had to say, but it didn’t remove the sense of failure I had about not raising the money. Fund raising did not go as expected, to say the least.
Ultimately what caused the fund raising effort to fail was the reluctance of donors to run afoul of the IOC’s branding rules. I couldn’t believe how restrictive they were being on my main target donors. At the end of the day the donors I had been cultivating just bailed completely on doing anything during the games. It was a foregone conclusion that it wasn’t going to happen, but people on both our side and the donor side just weren’t seeing things as they were until late in the game. Rose-colored glassed firmly in place.
To Irwin’s credit, he took the idea forward and created his own successful facility. Hats off to the man.
The grand vision of locating our project in a venue had failed, but all was not lost. The watershed moment that created a successful TNMH experience was Dave Olson’s flash of insight that set us on a new track to being a virtual media house. It took our focus away from a physical presence, which wasn’t happening in any case.
This new approach was more within our means and was truly in line with the traditions and skills of the Vancouver social media cadre at the heart of the project. It made perfect sense that we should all be out on the street, at events and festivities, connecting with each other at existing venues and virtually through the tools that define our genre of reportage. If there is anything the folks who get involved in 2012 can take away from this it is that the presence is defined by the quality of the output more than anything. It is not about traditional media centre infrastructure or a party hall. It is about what is new in what we are doing and how old models of enterprise, collaboration and friendship are changing.
Another aspect I enjoyed during the games was the sense of being in the hunt along with everyone else who participated. Looking for stories and events to cover, being the first to get the photo up or report something breaking on Twitter. It’s fun. It’s also important and relevant. Social media is obviously here to stay as a major component of the Olympic experience.
Was Vancouver 2010 “the Social Media Olympics”? More so than Beijing and likely less so than London. I don’t think anyone in particular could make a global event like the Olympics social media or not. Social media happens. We helped people understand their role, provided resources, and got out of the way. I wish the organizers of #media2012 greater success.
TNMH was a successful step along the way toward understanding and enabling citizens to participate in telling the story of the Olympic Games. I’m very proud of what we did manage to accomplish on sheer volunteerism and inventiveness. Our hashtag #tnmh trended on Twitter several times during a period when there was a lot to discuss other than our project. People were following our initiative and consuming the products of our media creators. Citizen reporters were wearing our credentials.
Certainly London will have more of a social media presence and component and will build on the lessons of our project and others. I’m happy to have been part of the group of Vancouver pioneers who broke ground where this growing movement will now flourish.
