I’m flying back from the Nonprofit Technology Conference (it was a great time – more on that soon) and we leveled off a few minutes ago.

So I thought I’d try something. I usually sketch in those minutes between the flight crew saying “Turn off your mobile devices! They are tools of the devil! Yes, you in 24A, I do mean you!” and that sweet moment when they permit us to go back to our productively wired lives (“Buh-CAAWWWWW!” “Oink, oink, oink.”).

Looking at my sketchbook just now, I wondered: could I post all of those sketches using only my iPhone? Read on…

It was a cold, cold Saturday night by Vancouver standards. I headed toward the Wall Centre in a state of frigid apprehension, my anxiety only partly numbed by the cold, and the knowledge that my trusty sketchbook was in my backpack.

While nearly every objective measure suggested the party I was supporting, Vision Vancouver, was about to win the city’s municipal election, a few recent polls suggested the race had tightened up sharply in the last few days. And they suggested the momentum was with the NPA, Vancouver’s right-wing civic party.

The NPA’s campaign had focused on several targets they evidently considered tempting, including the city’s urban agriculture policies, and new separated bike lanes on a few downtown streets.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so worried. One of the NPA’s last public events included someone dressed in a chicken suit holding a sign that said “Homeless Chickens.” Here’s a handy rule of thumb: If, a day or two before an election, you find yourself appearing at press events with people dressed as chickens, chances are the Big Mo is with your opponent.

The TV coverage I saw was on Shaw’s Community Channel 4, which (as far as I could tell) had managed to find a panel of four white male commentators. Come on, people, what is this? A tech conference?

For a brief while, Gregor Robertson’s NPA challenger, Suzanne Anton, was ahead by several hundred votes. But then a few more polling stations reported and their positions flipped. Not long after that, it became clear that every Vision candidate was cruising to victory, and the mood at the party switched from Confidently Hopeful to Awfully Damn Happy.

Once the results were more or less clear, Anton delivered her concession speech. It was classy and gracious, and I liked the part toward the end refuting the idea of politics as a thankless job.

Now, classy and gracious are good. But just once, I’d like to see a defeated candidate really cut loose on the voters.

Speaking of speeches – if you’re ever in the position of writing a victory speech (and here’s hoping you are!), you have one big challenge: the crowd is deliriously happy. That means every line for the first five to ten minutes is an applause line.

Every. Line.

(In my defence, a] I never claimed to be a caricaturist, and b] I was standing up and juggling a sketchpad, a beverage and a Sharpie fine-line marker.)

The final results.

I dropped in on SIGGRAPH on Wednesday and, at Alex’s recommendation, checked out the SANDDE system at the Emily Carr University booth.

SANDDE – which stands for Stereoscopic ANimation Drawing DEvice - bills itself as “the world’s first freehand stereoscopic 3D animation software”. What that boils down to is you sit in front of a sensor, moving a stylus in the air while you view a screen through 3D glasses, and watch as a three-dimensional drawing takes shape.

Munro Ferguson, who demoed the system, walked me through some very basic line drawing. (One fun aspect to all of this: the controller for this insanely sophisticated device is the stylus for a Wacom Bamboo, their consumer-grade drawing tablet.) Between rotating the pen to alter the line width, and moving it forward and backward to achieve depth as well as my usual 2D drawing, I found myself concentrating harder than I have in ages.

But I was also more thoroughly absorbed in the sheer process of drawing than I have been in a long time, too. This feels like a completely new medium, and not one where I feel nearly as sure of myself as I do with a piece of paper and a Pigma Micron.

I’m not just talking about technical skill which I gather starts to gel after about a week of using it. I mean the graphic language of 3D compared to 2D, and the way you tell a joke or a story in pictures. Can a gag cartoon – which relies so heavily on that sudden spark of realization and unexpected connection – work as well in a 3D world, which seems to lend itself more to exploration and unfolding?

If you’re in Vancouver for SIGGRAPH, then drop by the Emily Carr booth and see what you think.

Folks, you have to enter this contest. Here are six captions that won’t be winning:

1. Anyone know a cheap source of Imodium for birds?
2. Live-tweeting of Spring Migration 2011 not going so well.
3. Just blogged: update on avian flu threat.
4. Memo to self: there are worse things than commuting by transit.
5. Hey, @NikitaFromDivision – got an update on Operation Sparrow.
6. I just became Foursquare Mayor of 5,000 feet above the ground!

Sometimes while the kids are in the bath, I’ll notice a sketchpad and pen nearby. (Little Sweetie is constantly drawing; tonight, she bargained for a delay in bathtime until she finished the left profile, right profile and front-angle views of her drawing of a scowling convict.) And I’ll start doodling, sometimes taking off from an overheard snippet of conversation from the tub, other times just letting the pen go wherever it seems to.

Tonight, the pen was apparently in an… odd mood.

Last week, I released Noise to Signal‘s first annual wall calendar.

My plan was to offer it for sale on my Zazzle store – not because I expected to retire on the proceeds, but because it was the easiest way I could think of to create and deliver it.

But there’s a part of my brain that’s now been conditioned by the social web and – in no small part – by Chris Anderson’s Free. That part of my brain kicks in every time I’m about to set a price, and asks, “Suppose the price was zero?”

I’ve done that a few times (a short e-book about getting value from your blog was one example). Open SoSi has been my company’s most ambitious free project. And of course people don’t have to pay to read the cartoon itself, and there’s a Creative Commons license on it.

So I created a PDF version of the calendar. It required some extra work, because I didn’t have Zazzle’s built-in calendar template to create the calendar grids themselves. And after a fruitless search for public domain calendar grids that would work, I created them in Word. (This step was frankly a wee bit tedious and should have been a lot more automated than they make it. Memo to Apple’s Pages app development team: a calendar template would be much appreciated.)

If I’d stuck to my original plan, I’m guessing I would have sold a handful of calendars. Instead, several thousand people viewed the calendar on SlideShare or visited the calendar post on Noise to Signal inside of a few days (and that, during the pre-Christmas traffic slump). Hundreds downloaded the PDF. The calendar made the front page of SlideShare as their Presentation of the Day as well as their “Hot on Twitter” and “Hot on Facebook” lists.

In short, instead of making what would have amounted to pocket change from a handful of people, I reached thousands of people who are new to Noise to Signal, and offered something valuable to the cartoon’s fans. That, to my way of thinking, is a pretty solid argument in favour of free.

Of course, the calendar’s available on Zazzle if you’d like a nicely printed version (they do a great job). And I’m releasing the calendar grids themselves to the public domain (PDF, 280KB).

By the way, here’s the SlideShare version:

My friends Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer are releasing a new book next week: Open Community, chock full of advice for non-profits looking to use social media to advance their work on a wide range of fronts.

And I got to illustrate it, with a half-dozen or so original cartoons. So I’m pretty psyched. And to celebrate, next week will be Open Community week on Noise to Signal, with a new cartoon from the book every day.

I hope you enjoy them. And I also hope you check out their book – it’s terrific. If you’re already convinced, and you’d like to lay your hands on a copy, the order page is right here.