Attendees at the 2016 XOXO Festival in Portland mingle and make connections.
XOXO / XOXO
As many folks learned during the pandemic, working online can be isolating.
Even before the pandemic, the XOXO festival in Portland provided a place for independent creators and designers to connect in person. After a five year hiatus the event is back for one final hurrah. Co-founders of the festival Andy Baio and Andy McMillan spoke with OPB Morning Edition host Jess Hazel about what to expect from the last XOXO.
The festival is sold out but you can watch videos of past speakers and other event highlights at the XOXO website.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Jess Hazel: Can you explain exactly what XOXO is for someone who might not be familiar with the idea of a community of online creators?
Andy Baio: XOXO is an experimental conference and festival that brings together creators of all kinds who primarily live and work online. They work on the internet. They are primarily independent, they’re bypassing traditional gatekeepers, like studios and publishers, and trying to do their own thing.
But over the years, it has evolved into really being more of a community that is supporting each other through the dark and difficult things, the challenges that come from living and working online.
JH: And since the last time this festival happened in 2019, the online working world has changed a lot. How have the challenges facing creators shifted with that change or are people still dealing with the same struggles as before the pandemic?
AB: If anything, things have gotten more online. The people that were online before throughout the pandemic moved to remote or hybrid. And so I think people just really long for that connection.
JH: You’ve said this is an experimental festival. So in the spirit of the experimental method, did you go into planning originally with a hypothesis in mind about what would happen? And has that hypothesis been refined over the years?
Andy McMillan: I don’t know that we stepped into this back in 2012 with a plan or certainly not a plan for what this is going to look like in 2024. We genuinely have done these more or less one at a time. And it was really sort of 2014, 2015 when we started to see this is growing to be a lot more significant than just a conference and some events that people show up to in Portland every year. Like there is a movement sort of coalescing around this. This community of people is what’s powering this. And so we have been constantly surprised by what that community has been capable of.
JH: This is going to be the final XO. Why is this the last one? And are you sure it’s going to be the last one? Because I’ve heard some folks joke that it’s like a last tour for a band that keeps on getting back together. Are you truly done?
AB: Yes, this is absolutely the last one. I think we got that reputation from early on when we started in 2012. We told people that we didn’t know if there was going to be another one. We decided each year at a time whether to do it again. And the first one was such a success that we continued it. But yeah, in 2020 we had decided that was going to be it.
The reasons are complex and multifaceted. It’s financial. Sponsorship isn’t what it used to be. It’s the complications of running a festival in a pandemic with seasonal wildfires. Also, we feel like we’ve said a lot of what we wanted to say. Now after five years, it feels like it is a combination of a closing party and a reunion at the same time. So we are so excited that we can properly close the doors on this thing that we really love.
JH: It seems like the community that’s come about because of XO is really important to the people who attend. What kind of connections have you seen happen over the course of this festival that stand out to you?
AM: There are a lot. There’s a surprising number of attendees who have gotten married over the years. We have XO babies at this point too. A lot of families have started, of course, you know, by and large, a lot of people come to the festival and they meet other people who are great weirdos who are extremely online. And those people get to talking and then they come back a year or two later. And it turns out they’ve collaborated on some project together.
It’s been great to see the different ways that community has sort of coalesced over the years and outgrown the format of an annual festival. And we’re sure even though this thing is going away, that group of people will continue to be in contact. That community will not disappear just because the festival isn’t there. The last five years have shown that. That group of people is still more than capable of holding together as a community even without the event. And we’re sure that will continue well beyond the festival this year.