Ringleader for True North Media House, Dave Olson. Photo By: Kris Krug

As the communications wrangler for the True North Media House, Olson is the “ringleader” behind a project that he expects will bring together over 300 bloggers, podcasters, photographers, and artists from all over during the Games. -Stephen Hui, The Georgia Straight.

Dave Olson was interviewed this week in Stephen’s weekly Geek Speak column. Dave recently spoke at Capilano University, BCIT, CiTR, CFAX BBC, CBC, and other media outlets about the role of social reporting at the Olympics. Thanks to Stephen for picking Dave’s brain on True North Media House.

An excerpt from Dave’s responses:

I think documenting the people’s history of how we see our communities ourselves is critically important to augment the mainstream media’s impressions of Vancouver that they’ll be spreading.

It’s [TNMH] become more of a thought-leadership, educational project than a resource centre. A series of meet-ups, events, get-togethers, photo walks, field trips to what I like to call internationalize—meaning hanging out and collaborating with international people hanging out and collaborating to make media.

One of the most valuable things that we’ve done to kind of make this all happen is we put together a huge reporter’s toolkit, which also includes a guideline of cans and can’ts—what you can and cannot do throughout the Olympics—as well as practical tips about blogging and Twittering and how to tag things and how to track trends.

Dave Olson is 40, born in Saskatoon, grew up in Surrey, and lives in North Vancouver. He covered the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. In January, he joined HootSuite as its community director.

Go read the whole article and get involved, follow The Georgia Straight and Stephen Hui on Twitter. Every Friday, Stephen Hui catches up with someone in Vancouver’s technology sector, video-game industry, or social-media scene in ‘Geek Speak’. Who should he interview next? Tell him.