At the turn of the millennium, sociologist Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, which observed that a successful community relies on successful community organizations and civic participation. “Researchers in such fields as education, urban poverty, unemployment, the control of crime and drug abuse, and even health have discovered that successful outcomes are more likely in civically engaged communities,” Putnam wrote.

It’s hard to argue with that. But Putnam also took the view that, because Americans in general were becoming less and less active in organizations like the Rotary and bowling leagues (hence the title), our nation’s civic life was on the wane — making our communities more vulnerable to social and economic ills.

I don’t really share Putnam’s pessimism — even if bowling leagues and Rotary clubs aren’t as popular anymore, I’m confident that Americans are finding new ways to engage with their communities. Then again, I say that from my privileged position as a resident of Portland, which is a community of remarkably accessible civic institutions.

Almost immediately after I moved here, nearly six years ago now, I joined the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee and started a blog dedicated to improving the city’s built environment. That, in turn, introduced me to people who helped me land my first full-time job here, and it put me on (usually) friendly terms with people from City Hall and various environmental organizations.

It’s not unusual for me to see our congresswoman, Chellie Pingree, out on the First Friday Art Walk, or to have a quick chat with one of my state legislators at the farmers’ market or the coffee shop. But easy access to local elected officials is only a small part of Portland’s civic life. The city has an abundance of volunteer committees and organizations that are dedicated to improving the city’s economy, environment, and the quality of life for its residents, from trade-oriented networking organizations to advocacy groups to social clubs.

Here’s a (very) incomplete bullet list of ready-made networks that are ready to make a newcomer feel at home, by empowering them to improve our community:

• The League of Young Voters – whose “Portland 101” series introduces people (of any age) to the workings of municipal government.
• The Telling Room – the volunteers at this nonprofit include many of Portland’s writers and journalists.
• SPACE Gallery – sign up as a volunteer to meet new buddies in Portland’s music and visual arts scenes (and get free admission to shows).
• AIGA Maine – this is a good network of Maine-based graphic designers and freelancers. They also put on periodic events, from cocktail hours to business seminars.
• Portland Society of Architects – for anyone in the building or design trades. Don’t miss their next Drink ‘n Crit.
• The City of Portland Boards and Committees – which offers up unpaid but influential positions in municipal Boards of Commissioners and Task Forces (including the Historic Preservation Board, the Public Art Committee, the Land Bank Commission, and many others). Check for vacancies here around the beginning of each month.
• League Night at Bayside Bowl – it may sound frivolous, but (like most of these groups) Bayside Bowl mixes good times with good citizenship: the owners are a state senator and a former ACLU attorney, and they host a nonprofit benefit night every Monday. Robert Putnam would feel right at home.

Photo: City Hall, by Corey Templeton. You can find many more photos of Portland on Corey’s Portland Daily Photo blog.

Erin Kiley and Nathaniel Baldwin went through two years’ worth of business planning, real estate hunting, and city permitting so that dozens of other entrepreneurs won’t have to. Their enterprise, the Portland Flea-for-All, is about to open its doors in 3 stories of a gorgeously wood-beamed former mattress factory in the heart of Bayside.

The Flea-for-All is a flea market for Portland’s craftspeople, yard sale recyclers, and other creators. When it opens for business on the weekend of April 14-15, it will offer a brick-and-mortar presence for dozens of small entrepreneurs for as low as $30 a day for a 6 foot square booth. The market will also sell crafts on consignment, and wall space will be available for artists to show and sell their work outside of a gallery setting.

“We won’t be a typical junk market,” says Erin. “We’re cultivating quality sellers, and a variety of goods — we’ll have furniture, housewares, crafters…”

“The more diverse our vendors, the more people we can bring in as customers,” Nathaniel adds.

“We want it to be a market for every age, style, and budget,” says Erin.

Erin and Nathaniel moved to Portland two years ago from Santa Monica, California. They came here, they say, because they were attracted to Portland’s affordability, its potential to grow, and its entrepreneurial culture.

Finding a space large enough and inexpensive enough for their vision was a big challenge, as was the long slog through permitting and financing the new enterprise. “For a new entrepreneur, it was often hard to find the right path through the process,” says Erin. Still, after nearly two years’ worth of groundwork, “at least we know now that we’re really ready. The fun stuff lies ahead.”

The Flea-for-All finally found a home in a former mattress factory between Preble and Elm Streets in Bayside, a former industrial neighborhood that has been the target of City Hall’s economic development initiatives for the past decade. They give their landlord, Tod Dana, a lot of credit for supporting their idea and sharing their entrepreneurial enthusiasm.

The market’s front entrance is just steps away from the western terminus of the new Bayside Trail (Kiley and Baldwin want to offer special incentives to shoppers who arrive by foot or by bike) and the new-ish Trader Joe’s. Bayside Bowl is a block away in the opposite direction. A string of empty lots alongside the trail, where a railroad yard used to be, may soon start sprouting high-rise apartment buildings. And their next-door neighbor is Portland Architectural Salvage, a business that seems to share the recycled-value aesthetic that the Flea-for-All aspires to.

“There’s good growth around here, a lot of potential,” says Erin. “I think we got here at the right time.”

Portland Flea-for-All will be accepting applications from potential vendors on a rolling basis, but if you’re interested in getting in in time for the grand opening weekend in April, you should fill out their handy online application by this Friday, March 16th.

Photo: Erin Kiley and Nathaniel Baldwin, founders of Portland Flea-for-All, on the top floor of the future market space. Photo by Christian MilNeil.

Ballet dancers and machine automation? A reference, perhaps, to the famous Dada film Ballet Mécanique? Nope, just the next networking mashup that is 2 Degrees Portland.

Calling all artists, professionals, entrepreneurs, and locals of all kinds invested in Portland’s creative economy. The place to be this coming Thursday, February 16, is Kepware, 400 Congress Street in Portland. That night, from 5:30-7:30 pm, the Maine Technology Institute (MTI) is sponsoring the first 2 Degrees Portland event of 2012. And dancers from the Portland Ballet will be there previewing excerpts from their upcoming production of Giselle.

If you’re not familiar with MTI, you should be. Since 1999 they’ve been promoting and supporting Maine’s technology sectors with grants and assistance. From start-ups to established innovators, companies throughout Maine—many right here in Portland—have grown and flourished because of MTI. (One of those local companies, by the way, is Kepware itself, a leader in automation software, helping sophisticated machines talk to one another.)

And just what is “2 Degrees Portland”? It’s a year-old program that connects people already living here with those who want to live here, or are newly arrived. As Creative Portland’s Jen Hutchins notes, “One reason people love this community is because it’s two degrees of separation, not six.”

On the 16^th, Portland newcomers will have the opportunity to connect with the creative community, and those who are established here can network with each other.  So, if you’re an engineer or a designer or a chef or an actor or a programmer or a photographer or a scientist or a…  you get the point.  The way to cross-pollinate is 2 Degrees Portland, and the place to do it is at Kepware on February16.

Early last month I went to see local bands AWAAS, If and It, Glass Fingers, and the Sunset Hearts play at 131 Washington Avenue, an abandoned print shop at the base of Munjoy Hill. It’s not the kind of place that you’ll see on Chamber of Commerce brochures, but it’s cheap, and the venue’s neighbors — the windowless Sahara Club, a state parole office, and an overgrown hillside empty lot — don’t complain if the music’s too loud.

In other words, it’s an ideal place for creative people to cut loose. The venue’s founding tenants are setting out to “provide an affordable and accessible creative space in Portland,” with rents for the smaller studios starting at $100 a month (see the Craigslist listing here). To meet that goal, they’ve been hosting a bunch of fundraiser shows in the unfinished space, and they also managed a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise $5,000 for renovation materials. That campaign, now closed, actually raised $5,772 — potentially enough to replace the outdoor porta-john with some real first-world indoor plumbing.

Thanks to 95 Kickstarter backers, a lot of DIY sweat-equity, and even more to the numerous local bands who sacrificed their shares of door revenues at the venue’s first shows, 131 Washington is ready to cultivate a new generation of Portland artists and musicians.

Image: screenshot from the 131 Washington Kickstarter video.

Like many of my generation, I spent a year after my college graduation in the other Portland, where I’d also been a student. The bike lanes and parks were nice, but working the same mind-numbing lifeguarding job I’d labored in all through my college years was a drag. I’d naively thought that my degree in math and economics would be practical, but whenever a promising job opening appeared, I found myself competing against hundreds of other highly qualified, under-employed people just like me.

There’s a problem I have with the phrase “quality of life” as it’s most commonly used. Where’s the “quality” of a life in a place where you need to spend half of your income on rent for a lousy apartment, where there’s no time to spend on your own creative pursuits, and where PhD’s are fighting over barista jobs at Starbucks?

Portland, Maine, does have a fair share of the conventional “quality of life” amenities, and they’re showcased extensively here on this blog (oceanside parks, good coffee, public art, etcetera).

These are great things to have, no doubt about it. But we also have two things in spades that you won’t find in Manhattan, Austin, or San Francisco: opportunity and egalitarianism.

These qualities mean that Portland is still a place where a newcomer can arrive, meet people, and set up a successful new business on a shoestring. It hardly matters whether that newcomer is from Santa Monica or from the horn of Africa. Our city is affordable, connected, and wholeheartedly supportive of small enterprise (this website is but one example, closest at hand).

Still, our sense of economic opportunity and egalitarianism will be harder to maintain as the city grows and becomes more successful.

As LiveWork Portland’s newest blogger, I’m looking forward to crowing more about the city’s more affordable, more authentic quality of life. I hope that this can, in some small part, help attract to Portland more people who share our egalitarian, hardworking values — and by doing so, help to strengthen those civic virtues for our entire city’s future.

Stuyvesant Town photo (above right) by Flickr user EssG.

Creative economies prosper when they think creatively about themselves. In Portland, you can see that in action in the “Springboard” sessions run by Common Good Ventures.

Every month or so, Springboard pulls together local business leaders to think as out-of-the-box as possible about a nonprofit organization’s problem. In just 90 fast-paced minutes, some of Portland’s most resourceful businesspeople cluster around a table and help the organization develop ideas about a better business plan, more savvy marketing or, really, any business issue.

It all happens at the offices of the VIA Agency, in the historic Baxter Library building, which they have completely retooled for their own look and style. Around the table are local representatives from the worlds of marketing, law, finance, media, retail, and more. Up steps the nonprofit’s Executive Director and he/she walks the group through the organization’s background and particular issue.

What follows is a zippity-quick process of tossing out ideas that are posted on the wall, with time for explanations. In a structured format, the conversation goes back and forth boisterously and convivially. At the end of an hour-and-a-half, the nonprofit comes away with a raft of implementable ideas and perspectives. The for-profit attendees come away knowing that they have had direct—and quick—input into a local organization’s core concerns.

For example, a Springboard session this morning focused on Community Television Network, Portland’s cable access channel. CTN wanted ideas on how to boost sales of their video production services, which in turn support their nonprofit programming. By the end of 90 minutes, the wall was covered with colored stickies categorized into topics like Outreach, Cool Quotient, Social Media, Re-Branding, and Local Products.

Will Springboard replace McKinsey’s management consulting teams? Unlikely. But the process does provide a way for Portland’s nonprofit and for-profit communities to interact in a cooperative, non-threatening, results-driven atmosphere. Plus, it’s free for the nonprofit—and fun for the participants!

You can contact Chad Sclove if you want to attend the next Springboard.

Photo by John Spritz

When people think on innovation and creativity, they tend to think big. And there’s been no one bigger on our minds in those departments lately than Steve Jobs. For everyone intimidated by Jobs’ formidable accomplishments, Malcolm Gladwell of the New Yorker offers a bit of a revisionist spin: Jobs was a tweaker.

In The Tweaker, Gladwell writes, ”Jobs’s sensibility was editorial, not inventive. His gift lay in taking what was in front of him… and ruthlessly refining it.” Jobs himself admitted that his gifts were more combinatorial than generative, “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”

Stepping into the time machine, Gladwell cites an article by the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr to explain why the industrial revolution began in England. Britain, they say, had a “human-capital advantage—in particular, … a group they call ‘tweakers.’ They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.”

Now what has this all got to do with Portland, Maine? Well, I spent last weekend at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden trying to get a handle on how the creative economy and the innovation economy are intersecting in Maine. For that reason, I focused on the break out sessions that featured innovative companies and technologies, and I was not disappointed. I came away with the feeling that some of the most impressive innovations did not involve inventing ground-breaking technologies but in crafting creative ways of delivering existing technologies.

One of the most moving and impressive presentations was by Jon Calame of Thermal Efficiency Eastport during the “Risking Energy Revolution” panel. Calame is an internationally award winning architect with a background in historic preservation. He is passionate about architects’ responsibility to make buildings work for people—especially in challenging times in northern climes. Driven perhaps by the thought that historic buildings can’t be preserved if the people living in them can’t afford to heat them, Jon has taken on the urgent problem that the British have named “Fuel Poverty.” Jon has relocated himself and his family from Portland to the tiny city of Eastport (population about 1,500), which is indeed the easternmost city in the continental United States. Thermal Efficiency Eastport is a long-term project to demonstrate how applying “proven fuels, equipment and structural upgrades … in all kinds of buildings [can yield] clear, measurable advantages.” The real tweak in the project is not some new kind of furnace or insulation, but the packaging of economic arguments that will allow these retrofits to be financed and broadly available to the entire town.

Yes, that got the attention of all the bankers out there! The creative and innovation economies need creative financing. They also need people who can look at technologies and put them together in new ways. And finally, they need people who can tell compelling stories about these innovations to help attract customers and capital, retain workers, inspire students and generally connect the dots. And all of these are jobs for tweakers! Maine has lots of them and Portland is particularly dense in finance, marketing, design and story telling.

The lesson of Steve Jobs for Portland and the creative economy is not only the first part—the obvious part—of his advice to graduating Stanford students, that “the only way to do great work is to love what you do.” It’s in the second part, the tweaking part, “If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. … you’ll know when you find it.”

In a world of uncertainty, why celebrate risk? Why put everything you have into a crazy idea with only the barest beginnings of a plan? Ask that to Corey, Tyler and Seth, above, when they leave Love, The Bus in LA and fly back to Camden to be among the keynote speakers at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden on November 4 and 5th. In the case of Tyler Dunham, Seth Brown, and Corey McLean, these three “lifelong friends, filmmakers, and adventurers from the coastal town of Lincolnville, Maine (pop. 2,042). …[are] brimming with optimistic energy and a desire to accomplish something epic.” So they converted an old schoolbus into a grease-powered, web video road trip mobile and have been travelling around the country raising money to fund projects for community organizations and uploading the results in real time. If they can do all that, what else can they do?

And that’s just the point. The creative economy, the innovation economy, the experience economy—these are all expressions of the fluidity required by this crazy world—call it the improvisation economy. The Juice Conference is dedicated to bringing together a wide range of creative, innovative thinkers who have figured out how to put their ideas into action. Speakers and panelists include Maine heavyweights like Governor Angus King, Eliot Cutler and Roxanne Quimby, art world luminaries like Louisa McCall, Donna McNeil, and Eric Fischl and technological innovators like Kerem Durdag, John Ferland and  Steve Page. Portland’s creative economy is well represented by Ben Sawyer, of Digital Mill, Josh Broder of Tilson Technologies, Paul Dobbins, of Ocean Approved, Stephanie Volo of Planet Dog and Jaime Parker of Portland Trails.

One of the highlights of the conference is the pitch contest with $150,000 in financing to the winning business plans. (The deadline has been extended to Friday, October 28, so there’s still time to apply). If you’re not up for facing the “shark tank” in the pitch contest, they also have a short film contest (the deadline to apply is also now this friday.) Putting business plans and people who think about making business plans in front of investors and experts about those businesses is exactly what Juice is trying to do. And if your plan sounds like a mystery bus ride, what start up these days doesn’t?

Maine is full of smart people doing interesting things, but we may all be a bit too independently minded for our own good. That’s why conferences like Juice (and TEDx Dirigo) and places like Portland are so important. As the innovation economy spreads out through Maine, Portland has a role to play as a place to bring people together, to develop stories, to share a great meals, to cross-pollenate and propagate. Josh Broder of Portland’s Tilson Technology was just named to MaineBiz’s Next List for 2011. In the article he predicts that certain parts of the economy are poised for significant growth, “especially in those industries with strong ties to the creative economy. ‘American centers of innovation are our capital—the companies coming from technology, software and social media,’ he says. ‘All of those new things require significant infrastructure, and we’re the infrastructure provider.’”

And the same could be said of Portland. If risk is the juice of the Maine’s creative economy, Portland is it’s glass.

Photo from Love, The Bus

The First Friday Art Walk has entered a new phase in its life cycle as the flagship of Portland’s creative economy. Since July, designer Jennifer S. Muller has been producing a beautiful broadside map and program distributed the previous Thursday in The Portland Press Herald. The way the heavy, uncoated stock of the piece absorbs the ink makes it look more hand made than commercially printed, which is just the right touch for the Art Walk that aims to stoke local commerce through the propagation of fine art.

And building on the uproarious success of the What Cheer? Brigade at the SPACE Gallery Block Party, tonight’s festivities include New York’s Asphalt Orchestra for more street band fun. (Thank you, Portland Ovations) Programs? Marching Bands? And soon food carts? This is beginning to sound like a sporting event for creatives!

Some of tonights highlights include: a performance at 4:30 in Congress Square by The Milkman’s Union presented by the Portland Music Foundation to highlight this year’s Portland entries in the NYC’s CMJ Music Marathon; the opening reception of Good Design is Good Business: The Elements of Branding, the 2011 AIGA Maine Annual Exhibit at the Lewis Gallery, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square; an exhibit of photographs from the Portland Ballet’s “Who’s Your Dancer” project will be  on view at the KeyBank Monument Square branch; and the work of at least one Portland mayoral candidate is on view!

For the intrepid Portlander (including your devoted editor) next Saturday promises to be even more immersive than usual. From 9 to 5 I will punch in at the Portland Stage Company on Forest Ave. and have my head filled with “Maine Ideas Worth Spreading” at the second annual TEDxDirigo conference. Then, at quittin’ time, the more than 200 conference attendees and speakers will pour out onto the street and find themselves just half a block from the second coming of the creative Portland carnivale that is SPACE Gallery’s Block Party. For the next three hours, the Portland Arts District will be filled with creative manifestations of all kinds. Think FirstFRIDAYxSteroidos!

And interesting for us that this is the second year that LiveWork Portland has been around to cover these events. TEDx Dirigo wasn’t on our map (literally) last year because it happened in Brunswick, at the Frontier Café near Bowdoin College. This year they hope to triple the attendance by hosting it in Portland. We were particularly enamored by the steamroller stunt at last year’s block party, and while no steamrollers are on the menu for this year’s event, there is a much longer list of individual artists and groups staging installations and performances than last year. And although they only come from Providence instead of Brazil, this year’s party band, the What Cheer? Brigade, is a 19 piece sometimes marching brass band that “mixes the sounds of Bollywood, The Balkans, New Orleans, Samba and Hip-Hop, with the intensity of a punk rock band.” Wow!

When I think about it I imagine a day of extreme cultural and intellectual density. The kind of experience you expect to find only in big cities. But these things are possible in Portland because of an unusual balance of factors—call it “small density”—that puts lots of smart people in proximity to each other without crushing overhead or soul-destroying commutes. And all that extra time and energy fuels a community of non-profits robust enough to stage ambitious events like these—sometimes two or more in a day. Portland is itself a “Maine idea worth spreading.” Pass it on!