Rollins Pass-ion
Rollins Pass-ion: An advocacy and dispute resolution masterclass by B. Travis Wright, MPS
As presented at the Saving Places 2022 Conference and available on-demand
FEATURED ATTENDEE COMMENT
“Travis is a wonderful and inspiring presenter. Travis offered very great, helpful, clear steps to take in improving communication in difficult situations. This will be useful in lots of scenarios to do with current preservation projects.”
ABOUT THE PRESENTATION
Rollins Pass, located in the Southern Rocky Mountains of north-central Colorado, holds 12,000 years of history. In 2012, the area was listed as one of Colorado’s Most Endangered Places, yet new challenges continue to threaten the integrity of this complex cultural resource. This session examines how advocacy—delivered through breathtaking videography/photography, powerful presentations, and alternative dispute resolution—culminated in the collapse of significant threats to the area, including a proposed federal land exchange involving Rollins Pass. Participants will learn how alternative dispute resolution techniques are useful to not only collapse land exchanges but also how best to work with elected officials and land managers on other projects across the United States.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
As a published historian, public speaker, president of the board of four museums, and historic preservation commissioner, B. Travis Wright applies more than a decade of field knowledge to advocate for historic preservation across Colorado. After graduating summa cum laude from the University of Denver, he received a master’s degree with a concentration in alternative dispute resolution—helping to facilitate deliberative engagement methods designed to bring out the best in elected officials and volunteers while elevating community decision making processes.
ON WHY WE CHOOSE NOT TO SHARE CORE PRESENTATION MATERIALS AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
We sometimes receive inquiries about whether we can provide a copy of our slide deck via email, external hard drive, hard copy, or by an online link. Due to the extensive investment of time, effort, cost, and resources involved in creating our presentations, we have established a policy of not sharing these core materials and source files. The following points outline the key reasons for this decision:
Significant Investment: Creating and crafting our presentations has entailed tens of thousands of hours of meticulous work. This includes comprehensive research, the integration of high-quality images and videos spanning both historic and modern eras, and the development of custom and graphically-intensive content. Additionally, we have conducted extensive fieldwork to capture unique footage and engage in research as well as volunteer initiatives; our efforts directly contribute essential data to our presentations. For well over the past decade, we have continuously refined our presentations to ensure the highest quality and the incorporation of the most up-to-date information, coupled with new discoveries and streamlined historical research.
Complex Animations: Many individual slides contain up to six dozen layered animations, crucial for delivering dynamic, captivating content, and to aid the audience’s understanding of complex and conjoined timeframes and ideas. As a result, these intricate animations are tailored for live viewing and do not translate effectively to sharing or printing, often appearing overlapped and illegible when printed.
Slide Volume, File Size, and Technical Requirements: The master deck encompasses approximately 2,500 slides, with a variable core file size ranging from 30-40 GB in Apple Keynote format (file size varies due to new content under development and existing content undergoing revision). This extensive volume of proprietary content and large file size exacerbates the complexity of sharing logistics, notwithstanding the near-certainty of performance and readability issues on standard systems. The presentation is also not compatible with Microsoft PowerPoint. In fact, our presentation demands state-of-the-art hardware, specifically a Mac system powered by Apple silicon M-series Max or Ultra processors. Minimum specifications include a 16-core CPU, 40-core GPU, 16-core neural engine, two ProRes encode/decode engines, 128 GB of memory with a memory bandwidth of 400GB/s to ensure optimal functionality for building, preparing, and presenting our slide deck. These systems guarantee peak performance, minimal latency, and flawless delivery.
While the complete slide deck remains proprietary, we may entertain reasonable, individual requests from specific groups or agencies necessitating particular images or screenshots. Such requests will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Of course, a sampling of our delivered presentations remain available to the world on YouTube. We extend our gratitude for your understanding and respect for the significant effort and resources invested in the development of our presentations. Upholding their integrity and exclusive use, as our intellectual property, is paramount to us and to our efforts to protect, preserve, and restore the area for future generations.
The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.
