In the last instalment of Offscreen mag, Kai Brach said in his editorial:
We cannot simply look forward to one day in the future when we will have ‘achieved’ diversity. Creating a magazine – or a conference or a business – will forever come with the vital challenge of discovering and giving voice to a variety of perspectives. The goal must ever be to inspire people to see the world through eyes other than their own.
Wonderful quote.
When I was in the organising team for Paris Web we strove to achieve a balance between newcomers and experienced speakers, between people unknown to the public and “stars” we wanted to see live because let’s face it we’re all groupies.
In a previous life I interviewed people in the comic-book field, and loved the moments for the sheer pleasure of meeting people I liked who took the time to talk with me. I then tried to do the same with Trois questions, a defunct endeavour with Vincent and Christophe to interview people in our Web industry.
Our experience with Trois questions was that if you do not see people in person and interview them by email, a lot of them tend to lag behind, and sometimes tend to not respond at all, because so many of us are submerged by email and the way new things pile on top on older stuff. Our questions would require the person to take time to reply, thus ended in the ‘later’ pile, which is below the ‘newer’ pile and ends up being ‘never’.
I miss these times and have decided to do it again, starting tonight. I’ll interview people (most of them not stars, by the way), for real, face to face. And also take pictures of them. We’ll see how this goes.