This year is the fourth year of XOXO, and it’s starting to look less and less like an annual event and more like a community — a group of like-minded people all dealing with similar hopes, dreams, and challenges around living and working online.
Every year, we bring over 100+ artists, hackers, and makers to Portland to talk about their work, and 1,000 attendees to share in the experience. Since 2012, it’s led to new projects, new collaborations, and new friendships.
Ultimately, XOXO is an experiment. We keep changing it based on the stories we hear from you, and try to make it better every year. Fundamental to that process is writing about it.
We’ve been fortunate that XOXO attendees are anything but quiet — every year, they share their opinions about what they loved about the festival and how it impacted them, but also where it was lacking and how they think it could be better.
XOXO is a silly amount of work for us every year, but it’s your stories — your willingness to talk about what you loved and hated, and the impact it had on your lives — that brings it back every year, and keeps it evolving.
This year, Medium is a patron of XOXO, helping us fund all the ridiculous stuff we do every year.
We love this, because Medium has been a great way for you to share your stories with us in years past. Many of you already have personal blogs, and that’s great. We love blogs and are huge proponents of creating a space for yourself online.
But some of you don’t have a personal site, and others are looking for a wider audience for your words. For all of you, we’d encourage you to submit or cross-post those stories here on Medium — tag them as “XOXO” or let us know about them on Twitter or in the #medium channel on our Slack team, and we’ll add them to this new XOXO publication. Our hope is to create a space online that mirrors all the remarkable stories we hear from you every year.
We’d love to hear your stories about XOXO, but also the issues you’ve dealt with trying to make a living, find your place in the world, or find a community you belong to. Introversion, impostor syndrome, harassment, financial stress, performance anxiety, or just plain fear — many of us are dealing with these things, and sometimes, sharing them can help.
We’re excited to see you all in Portland soon, and thank you for making this thing so much better than anything we could have ever imagined.
Hugs and kisses,
Andy Baio and Andy McMillan
