It’s a history buff’s one-liner. The year is 1844 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, on a visit to a newspaper office, witnesses a technological milestone. The paper’s editor breathlessly announces that cable has been laid up and down the Atlantic, enabling the telegraph. “Now Maine will be able to talk to Florida,” he reputedly says. “Yes,” Emerson intones dryly, “but has Maine anything to say to Florida?”
More than 160 years later, St. Petersburg resident Bob Barancik is wagering that the two states have plenty to compare notes about. An artist and “creative facilitator” who dabbles in media from watercolor to video production and boasts a seemingly endless network of creative friends on the Eastern seaboard, Barancik lives part of each year in Portland, Maine and part in Philadelphia. A boomer who might be called a “third stager” — i.e., someone on a post-rat-race pursuit of creative fulfillment — much of his energy plays out through community engagement in the cities where he and wife Amy Blake reside, with an emphasis on arts and economic development.
But these days, Barancik’s pursuits paint a picture of the artist as an altruist with a Web 2.0 twist. Last week, he hosted an informal weeklong conference called CreativeShare on Peaks Island, a popular destination for summertime tourists near the couple’s home in Portland. Though the ideas up for discussion — the economies of both states, creative industries and genocide — were of staggering complexity, CreativeShare placed as much importance on mingling casually around a patio table with a glass of wine on a cool Maine evening as it did on brilliant presentations. About half of the approximately 25 participants who showed up in person to attend the event, which is free but by invitation only, call Florida home at some point during the year.
CreativeShareCreativeShare’s informal approach stems from a philosophy once considered radical but now increasingly embraced in business and educational contexts: namely, the idea that sometimes the people best suited to tackle thorny problems aren’t specialists or folks who’ve spent their lives working within a single discipline. Instead, insight springs from inviting feedback from someone with a different perspective: a theoretical physicist might give unexpected advice to a cardiologist; a musician might envision a new strategy for a museum curator; and a Mainer might have a few tips for a Floridian. In a reverse of conventional conference thinking, some of the most important participants are those who don’t even know CreativeShare exists yet: people who will stumble upon or receive an e-mail about creativeshare.org, where Barancik plans to post short video excerpts and audio files of the presentations and offer opportunities for feedback. In effect, he’ll create an online version of the conference in the hopes that digital passersby will become involved in future discussions.
So for its host, last week’s gathering in a vacation house with a view of Casco Bay was a planting of seeds. During short presentations, sometimes half an hour but typically 10-15 minutes, guest thinkers said their piece. (The influential TED conference held each year in California, for which luminaries like Nobel Prize winners are invited to speak for about 15 minutes about their work, inspires the brevity of CreativeShare presentations.) Seated in a circle in the Maine house’s intimate living room, a diverse audience of artists, activists, scientists, educators and business people, from 20- to 60-somethings, asked questions as a camera and sound crew documented the process. (I snagged an invite as a representative of Tampa Bay’s under-35 set.)
Florida historian Gary Mormino, a longtime professor at the University of South Florida, partnered with Joel Eastman, a retired professor of history at the University of Southern Maine who lives in Gainesville six months a year, to discuss the past and futures of both states. (Mormino, after drawing laughs with the Emerson anecdote, gravely announced that Florida is in the worst economic situation the state has experienced since the 1920s.)
Another presentation featured Deanne Roberts, a Tampa-based advertising guru and co-founder of CreativeTampaBay.com, trading thoughts with former Bass Shoes CEO Dan Reardon, of Portland. They admitted that neither city can ever hope to compete for young professionals on the same level as New York or San Francisco, but both might be able to lure established talent that can work remotely.
(Full disclosure: CreativeTampaBay employs me to edit its weekly online newsletter.)
A session on genocide was led by USM professor Abe Peck and featured call-in participants, among them CL theater critic Mark E. Leib and Erin Blankenship, curator of the Florida Holocaust Museum. Surprisingly, this talk dovetailed with the more economics-based presentations in concluding that a greater sense of shared humanity is needed on a global scale.
In fact, a theme that emerged again and again throughout was a backlash against what George Sherman, a professor of ethics at St. Petersburg College and a call-in participant, termed the “commodification of human interaction.” Everyone seemed to agree that a sense of community, in which people are valued as individuals rather than economic or ethnic units, is both part of the solution and an area where Portland and Tampa Bay come off looking pretty good when compared with larger cities.
Now Barancik waits to see what, if anything, will bloom from his experiment. (Though he has held the event twice before, this is the first year CreativeShare will include an online component.) Though he’d like to stage a counterpoint event in St. Petersburg in March, Barancik puts the odds that he’ll do it at about 20 percent. In the meantime, he hopes the conversation will continue online and in participants’ minds. Maybe, just maybe, he’s sown a seed of change.
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2008.
