Intervention: The Conference Celebrating Internet Creativity

Culture

from the we-need-more-of-this dept

This is a guest post from James Harknell about an event he’s putting on that we thought would be of interest to folks who like Techdirt

Anyone who is a reader of Techdirt knows that we are in a time of publishing disruption — one that has the potential to cause a huge repressive backlash to this wonderful thing we now call the Internet. Everyone from governments, legacy publishing companies, and large IP and patent warehouses are trying to figure out a way to clamp down on the ability for new business models, and even regular people, to compete using this new egalitarian international distribution system. It simply caught them entirely by surprise, and now they want to kill it or regulate it to their sole advantage.

So how do you fight back against this looming threat? Like Techdirt and many other rallying websites, you bring people together to talk and build a strong community of informed creators and fans. Mike and the other contributors to this site are doing an excellent job of doing this online, but there is also a benefit to physically bringing people together to discuss these issues and work directly as a community.

This is part of why we created the yearly event Intervention. Onezumi and I started Intervention (a combo of the words “Internet” + “Convention”) in 2010 as an outgrowth of our own online work in webcomics — an area of internet creativity that has led to multi-million dollar business entities and phenomenal crowdsourced kickstarter campaigns, and has made many fully self-employed independent artists a living in its short history. While many other types of events have online artists as guests, and also some related programming, none were specifically designed around the needs of the DIY and indie online artist crowd.

Besides the combo of words that created the name Intervention, we chose the name for exactly what it represents — an Intervention to both the business world and the creative world; a notice to those who refuse to acknowledge that things have changed and business adaption is needed for survival, and a call to action to artists who feel that they aren’t good enough or capable enough to succeed on their own. This is your Intervention, a yearly place for you to learn and teach, to build a community of like minded artists, and to pass along your knowledge to the world and be a spotlight on the possibilities that the internet offers — and to show what can be easily lost if we choose not to fight to keep it.

Our next event is scheduled this September 21-23rd in Rockville, Maryland. We hope that you can attend and help us grow this important conversation and be a part of “Your Online Life, In-Person.”

Filed Under: conference, intervention, publishing