Hi, I'm Jeff. I'm the most recent addition to the Raincity Studios team, taking on the role of Marketing Director, and have just relocated to Vancouver from Montreal. It's only been a couple of weeks and I'm just starting to get acclimated to the city, but my experience thus far has been great. I thought I'd share a few things I've learned about the city so far:

5. Vancouver has a (Beautiful) Reputation

It may not be the best gauge of place, but you can learn a lot about a city by what people tell you when they find out you're moving there. Sure, this kind of assessment is bound to be full of stereotypes; I received several comments about organic food, lulu lemon and general fondness towards the caliber of homegrown decriminalized products. But more than anything, Vancouver seems to be a city that is admired by people everywhere. It falls into the category of "Canadian cities people outside of Canada have heard of" and I often received the same response: "oh, I've always wanted to go there - I've heard it's soooo beautiful!" Well, it's true. Vancouver is beautiful. Even on an gloomy overcast morning, knowing the mountains are just beyond the clouds and ocean's a stone's throw away makes up for it all.

4. Everyone has an opinion on the Olympics

Arriving at the vancouver airport, it's overwhelmingly apparent to any visitor that the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games are coming to Vancouver. From the ubiquitous Inukshuk to the giant sized LED olympic rings that greet you as you're leaving, the airport, like the city, seems painted in olympic colours. And all of this excitement has indeed stirred up a bit of controversy as anticipated costs are beginning to soar and locals residents are voicing their concerns over how the city will be impacted during and after the games.

While the opinions about the games are mixed, everyone I meet at least seems to have one. Some people are very enthusiastic and excited about the attention the games will bring Vancouver while others are more critical of the effect the games will have on the city and local culture. While both sides may never be completely happy with how the games turn out, it's encouraging to at least see so many people engaged and aware of what's happening. Coming off of the last summer olympics in Beijing where media coverage was problematic, I'm excited to see how Vancouver is going to pull this off and hopeful about opportunities for social media creators to record and share their olympic experience. The more people who have an opinion, the more people will be engaged and the more people will participate and help to shape the character of these games and influence how they will be remembered.

To a software developer, there is nothing more gratifying than seeing your software being deployed and used in the real world. It's a cliché with awesome truth: real artists ship (mugs above!)! Over the last year and a bit, I have been involved in the Raincity SIFT Tool which is an SMS, MMS and RSS text, photo and video social media aggregator (check out the fabulous SIFT and mobile podcast recorded with the incomparable Dave Olson if you want to hear me pontificate about this in a vocal stylee!) developed for New Media BC's Mobile Muse 3 mobile cultural and artistic research platform. Over the last six months or so, SIFT has been deployed and used very very successfully in many many events by Vancouver's Fearless City and the Resort Municipality of Whistler. After the jump: highlights of those events, and more on the people and technology behind SIFT.

Building upon the work done at the Fearless Drupal code sprint last weekend, Kris and I are working with Irwin, Lani, Hendrick, Lorraine and others at Fearless City to gather up unused phones to redistribute to help DTES artists share stories, and tap into life, jobs & family.

We assembled this social media marketing campaign on a accelerated timeline to spread the message while so many people are getting new phone for a holiday gift and will end up with old phones which can be used to make media, document incidents, or provide basic communication. We used a variety of online media publishing and community building tools to create presences for Fearless City, then created the campaign materials using collaborative working tools and online photo tools to make the badge from Kris' sweet punk photo.

Finally, we unleashed the hounds (well Twitter, some blogs, Facebook, and such) to spread the word quickly on a Friday afternoon with a plan to pick up phones on Tuesday, Dec. 23rd on the auto-magic-Flickr-uploading purple Yahoo bikes Kris and Roland are rolling.

A look over kk's Twitter posts for today tells the story of how the plan came together ~ to quote George Peppard's character in the A-Team, "I love it when a plan comes together!"

Great Net Tuesday about Drupal and Non Profits tonight (check out the comprehensive as usual Mis 604 Live Blog from the event).

I'll lead with the last presentation, the genocide (with a spotlight on Darfur) prevention site, StandNow.org from Agentic that Phillip Djwa presented