My professional and volunteer background contains a wide range of skills such as Business and Organization Management, Public Relations, Internet Marketing (Social Media Management and Search Engine Optimization) and many communication skills.
When I made my first website in 1998, I was also volunteering as a camera person for Videon, the public access TV sports show. I’ve long had an interest in video shooting and editing, and in the arts in general. From 1999 to 2003, I was the Burningman Regional Contact for Manitoba.
I dabbled in politics and was quickly hired as an Executive Assistant to a City Councillor representing Winnipeg’s Inner City – one of Canada’s poorest neighbourhoods – from 1999 to 2002. By far this has been my most rewarding job for many reasons. This role sharpened my community advocacy skills.
I worked on a lot of major civic issues during this time but most of all, it brought me great joy to help people with problems minor and major. In 2002, I helped craft the Animal Testing Ban By-law in Winnipeg, effectively cancelling the practice that saw animals found by city animal services sold (after only two weeks of not being found) to the University of Manitoba for animal testing.
I started the Skateboarding Association of Winnipeg in 2001 to lobby the three levels of government and the private sector for a world-class skateboard park to be built in downtown Winnipeg. After gaining 9,000 signatures on a physical petition and meeting with dozens of private and public stakeholders, letters to newspaper editors began to arrive in support of our cause which further snowballed popular opinion. A year later, the City of Winnipeg officially endorsed our group and mission to build a massive skateboard park in downtown Winnipeg.
The sport of skateboarding in Winnipeg was finally recognized by the City of Winnipeg in the 2004 Public Use Facility Study; adding skateboard parks to the official city list of recreational priorities. In 2005, a multi-million dollar 44,000 square foot skateboard park was built at the Forks in Winnipeg just as we lobbied for.
Fostering public recreational facilities remains a passion for me.
It was around this time, in 2001, I started an online news magazine that turned into an online forum that was quite popular for some time until 2011. From 2003 to 2007, I organized several community cleanups and successfully sought to fund a neighbourhood garden in 2005 on city-owned land. Around this time I also coordinated a neighbourhood watch for the West Broadway neighbourhood in Winnipeg for two years.
For over 15 years, I managed many aspects of a successful small Canadian web hosting company that was sold to another Canadian web hosting company in 2015. In 2009, I started a Vancouver web hosting & web services company with a focus on WordPress Hosting, MediaWiki Web Hosting and Moodle Webhosting.
I returned to Burningman as a Media Liaison from 2009 for three years and started a small visual art agency representing several Western Canadian visual artists for a short period of time. In 2010, I produced and edited a weekly video series called Art Tech Culture that was technically challenged with being recorded completely online via Skype and/or Google Chat with others from across Canada. This show ran weekly for 17 weeks.
I’m currently the Sponsorship Coordinator for the Velopalooza Bicycle Festival, a proud VOKRA foster and a Vancouver cat sitter.
I freelance online helping others with web research, personal assistant tasks, social media marketing, website help, and providing voice over talent, something I want to do more of. If you need help with any of this, contact me and let’s talk.
Check out some of my online contributions on StackExchange.
Why does this website exist?
I use this website as my primary form of digital identity. Sometimes it’s a blog, other times it’s just an archived collection of writings but most of the time it’s just this page. There are thousands of people named Alex Reid like me. I may be the Alex Reid you’re looking for, or you may be confusing me with another Alex Reid.
Feel free to contact me if you’re unsure.
Alex