Robert Paterson's Weblog

The Natural Organization - The Metaphor in Reality - Chris Corrigan on PEI

Chris spent the week with us on PEI. On a walk the other day we were struck by the contrast between an old meadow and a plowed field. All that he and I have been thinking about Natural Organization revealed itself. 5 minutes of pure insight.

The Future of Public Media? Is this it?

The web is killing the value in traditional media. But I can now see a way of using the web to add value back.

Part of the value will be in aggregation.

Not the Google News machine aggregation. But the old fashioned kind known as Editing - editing as  to you and me as the old skill of Editing as pursued by people such as Harold Ross or William Shawn of the New Yorker. The Uber Personal Editing style of the Magazine's heyday.

Part of the value will be in Niche - a powerful bond of shared interest. This will be a product of the editing process.

Part of the value will be in making a connection of the niche back to the home brand.

So teasers over. First let's look at the new/old editing and connection and then let's look at how we link this back to the home brand.

I have a "News" routine every morning. These days, I start with Twitter and see what "fish" the net of my network has caught. My Twitter Peeps are making personal choices about that interests them. They scour the world for material and also offer their own content.

I use Tweetdeck to provide my front page and also to limit my "go to" peeps in a limited field that I can comprehend. I have created my own Newspaper.

I then go to the New York Times online (I live on PEI in Canada) and see what the official world of North American Journalists sees as being important that day. Again the process is actually the same here. The editors at the Times filter all the content and make a personal call on what goes on the precious real estate. The NYT is the editor. I skim the headlines and always pass on Sport. I have my own NYT.

I then open up Mediavore - an aggregation of the best of public media - to see what Todd and Graham have decided is their catch of the day from what they feel is the best of public media FROM ALL SOURCES in the public system - TV and Radio National and Local.

Todd and Graham make no pretense - this is not a filter of ALL of public media but it is THEIR PERSONAL TASTE.

I could also do all the work that Todd and Graham do and search out all of pub media - but I don't have the time. I also like their POV. They have made it easy for me to see a broad picture of what is going on. 

Many producers have made it easy to offer a feed - the NPR API etc.

When Todd and Graham started this work, they assumed that they would use the API etc and in effect be a bit like Google News. But they have found that this is not the best way. They use the feeds to collect material for them but they make a personal choice on what they then offer to their readers. It is the personal choice that has the value.

At the moment, Todd and Graham have a News focus. Their niche? The Newsaholics!

But when we talked last week, Todd made the point that this format could go nichier - they could have an arts POV that again would aggregate from ALL that Public Media had on offer on Arts. You could even go more narrow and only do Jazz.You could have a cooking channel. The choice is limitless. The tighter the niche - the stronger the attachment and engagement.

In the fall, the amount of content that all public TV and Radio producers will put on the web will explode. Any topic, maybe other than sports, will be open to this kind of aggregation. Public Media will have every taste and interest available in Lego brick form - all that is needed is a master Lego builder to make what ever is wanted. 

But how do we bring this home? How do we locate the value at the station level? How does a regular station capitalize on this bounty? More on that in a minute. For there is even more quality "Public" content to consider before we go to delivery.

The choice for Niche Editors will be even greater than the huge amount available from the Official Public Media.

There is also a deep pool of wisdom in every field that is being produced by the "Public". Produced by people with profound knowledge that far exceeds what any journalist or producer of media could deliver.

A good example of how this kind of specialty material is being offered is how my pal Steve Kurtz serves his "club" of like minded folks.

Every day I get maybe 6-8 emails from Steve. Steve is the epicenter of a network of lists and groups that collectively explore deep thinking about what is really going on in society and the economy.

Each list he draws from is itself the product of a personal filter of people in forums. The Oil Drum would be an example.

Steve is then the uber filter. Steve's network is a two way network. It is not that big - a few hundred - and he knows the tastes of each party. So I get a personal view from Steve's larger menu as do all the others. We also send him our personal view of what is best within the field.

It is not too hard to put together a really great niche site - 1- 4 hours a day for one person. (based on my talks with Todd and Steve)

So where do you put this product so that value can be found in it? How can you bring this value to your place?

If you are starting from a Green Field it is easy - you open a site such as Mediavore. Any one of us can build a high traffic site based on the principle of aggregation and niche. We will see many such sites emerge where an editor takes a POV about a niche.

But what if you are an existing pubic media station?

The current web offering of radio and TV stations focuses only on what will be on the schedule.

The real estate is full both on air and on the web. But now there is new web real estate that is ideal.

CPB have funded a national project in 32 markets involving 76 stations in both TV and Radio. The goal of the project is help local communities help each other get through the Mortgage Crisis. Stations are convening the many local non profits who can provide advice and help and they are connecting those with problems to this help. Many Radio and TV stations in the same market are collaborating in this work.

All will build a dedicated NICHE website to support this work.

Here - Here - and Here and some examples. Here is the Beta site that will showcase the entire national project.

In 32 markets, Public TV and Radio will have a Niche website that offers a joint TV and Radio perspective on the local economy of that community. A Niche site attached to the Linear Banner Site.

Each local TV and Radio station can add in the best content, based on their knowledge of their community. These sites are filling now with great local content that get to the heart of what is going on locally.

But now they can do more. They can add material from NPR on the economy - from Planet Money - they can add NewsHour or Frontline material. They can review the content from the other 31 markets and add pieces of that as well. The Local/National world will be covered. Using this new real estate, the full value of Public Radio and TV is now available. They can also dig into the work of people like Steve Kurtz who can make it easier to find more context.

Today we take the first steps. I can see in the future that your local public radio or TV station can be the starting point of a myriad of local/national/global "channels" - There is no limit to the number of niches or to where the content comes from.

At the centre of the station will remain the traditional appointment radio or TV. Surrounding it an ecosystem of Niche channels that aggregate the best of the global, national and local content that fits that niche. All that means the most to the local community will be there.

That is value

When will all be born equal? In about 20 years! Time to get ready

Richard C. Duncan, Ph.D. originally predicted and explained our present political-economic crisis in his Olduvai Theory written in 2000:

In 1989, I concluded that the life-expectancy of Industrial Civilization is horridly short. This hypothesis was defined in terms of a measurable index, world energy-use per person (e), and named the “transient-pulse theory of Industrial Civilization.” I sketched its maximum point at 1990, followed by a persistent decline. By 1996, however, I had successfully tested the Olduvai theory against numerous sets of data. The following facts emerge.

• The broad sweep of human history can be divided into three phases.
  
  
• The first, or pre-industrial phase was a very long period of equilibrium when simple tools and weak machines limited economic growth.
  
  
• The second, or industrial phase was a very short period of non-equilibrium that ignited with explosive force when powerful new machines temporarily lifted all limits to growth.
  
  
• The third, or de-industrial phase lies immediately ahead during which time the industrial economies will decline toward a new period of equilibrium, limited by the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources and continuing deterioration of the natural environment.

Duncan's analysis says that the world is rushing to an Equilibrium - where the differences enjoyed in the west in energy consumption will settle out with the energy use of the third world.

His analysis is that this process has begun.

All men will then surely be born equal.

Local food and local energy are not way out ideas in this context. On PEI we can be self sufficient in food and have enough energy if we start to think about this context now.

Upward Spial - How Just you and I can make a big Difference

Small things are happening on PEI - Tim Banks land offer, Dave Cormiers Web Offer - Josh Biggley's chickens. Maybe these things are not small???

Chris Corrigan pointed me to this 45 minute film - The film helped me see clearly how the world really works and how I could act- just little me - and make a difference - the most productive 35 minutes you could spend.

Property Tax - a new battleground

As property values fall - as people are squeezed to the limit - property taxes are becoming a battleground.

Cities depend on property tax. They have the power to foreclose your house if you do not pay. But if they raise taxes, people will balk. If they foreclose, they make the situation worse. If they raise taxes people will not pay. In fact people want taxes to be reduced.

Cities and people are on a collision course.

Ms. Lynch, meanwhile, lost her job at a Bed, Bath & Beyond this year, and is behind on her mortgage payments. Shaving a few hundred dollars off her annual tax bill of $4,300 might not keep her out of foreclosure, but it would help, she said.

“Everything’s in God’s hands now,” she said.

Officials say stories like these are common as unemployment hits 9.5 percent and people seek to trim their budgets. Appraisers and assessors, normally concerned with land values and comparable sales, are becoming ersatz crisis counselors.

Jeff Furst, the appraiser in St. Lucie County, Fla., said a 62-year-old man recently walked into his office and described how his wife had been laid off and his salary had been cut in half. He was struggling to pay his taxes and looking for relief, Mr. Furst said.

“We’re hearing from people like this every day,” Mr. Furst said. In St. Lucie, which sits along the Atlantic, property tax revenue is expected to fall 20 percent, and tax appeals are 10 times as high as they are normally. “Most people are going to see a significant decline in their tax bill.”

As with employment - this is a structural issue that will not just bounce back or go away.

Dave's Appeal to Build an online Farmer's Market on PEI

Here is Dave Cormier's Appeal - I am in - Can you help too:

Please go to his site and sign up here if you want to help.

Hi,

My name is Dave. If you are a farmer on this island, odds are I don’t know you. I’m the web projects lead at UPEI and a social media consultant in Charlottetown. I didn’t grow up on the island and, while i’ve been here 4 years I’ve still not done a particularly great job getting to know the people who grow food here on Prince Edward Island. (i grew up in norther new brunswick) I’ve bought fresh eggs from one farmer, been to an apple orchard a few times, and am currently in the process of trying to go out an strawberry pick. I have a share in a cow currently being raised by a friend in his yard in NS.

I want to have a connection to the food i eat. I want my kids to understand that food comes from somewhere, and really like the health, taste and environmental advantages of buying local food that grows here on the island. We called around today, after looking at a bunch of websites (and i talked to people at the farm fairs last year who assured me that there were “lots of opportunities” to buy fresh food, but had no system other than ‘call whozit who has lettuce early). Some people told us that strawberries picking was starting monday, some said later next week, some told us our information was outdated and one nice lady called us back today and said “we don’t even grow strawberries, i don’t know where you got that idea”.

This is not going to work. I need a simple, one stop place to go to get this information, and I need to not have to call twenty people to find strawberries that aren’t shipped in from who knows where. Same goes for everything else grown on the island. This is not very hard to do. You can do this. I can help, advise, or send you to others who can help you do this. Consider this as my commitment paid or unpaid to be part of a solution for this.

Here’s what i think we need for a Farm 2 Plate website. (in broad terms, think about a page like amazon.com but for farming products on PEI)

1. We need a website that you yourselves can update with times and products that are available. I currently have a few hundred people doing this at the university… you can learn how, and we can teach you how.
2. We need a back up person committed to answering phone calls from people who are having trouble. Someone who will teach first but, most importantly, ensure that the information is posted.
3. We need an automatic way of updating people from around the island when a new ‘availability’ has been posted. This is also not hard. People would be able to subscribe to this website like they would to a newspaper, except they would get the update by email or other means as soon as you put it on the website.
4. People would need to accept that their product and the ‘client experience’ would be rated. Ratings are critical to success. We need to spread the good news and encourage others to do a little better.

There are a few technical details around this, we would need to decide what the ‘categories’ of food were, and how the content would get spread out. This is also not that difficult. It would require some cooperation, and someone in a position to make decisions, but it’s very easy to change this stuff on the fly. We could do it this way for this season and then talk about it over the winter when the timelines weren’t so short.

And that’s the thing. We could the earliest version of this running by next week. It would need to be worked on, adjusted and, if you’ll pardon the metaphor, weeded, but that’s not a problem either. It’s an organic process and there will be disagreements and frustrations, but i think this is important, and, as you will be in charge of your own content, you can make sure that things look the way you want them to.

I don’t know where we go from here. I would like to hear if you are interested, and how we can go about doing this. It may be that we talk to the government, or some other organization… i don’t know… but i do know that this is possible.

If you are out there and have done or are doing this… let me know about it. If i can help, great. If that help is just telling people about it… that’s great too.

Bruce Sterling - The next 10 years - reboot11

Manifesto for our time - John Robb's

So what are we going to do as the storm arrives?

I rarely quote an entire post - But John is sooo on the money here and this sooo fits my own view that I will:

"There are growing signs -- from a black swan in savings/debt reduction to massive debt loads to quarterly trillion dollar losses in personal wealth to stagnant/falling consumer purchases to persistently low consumer confidence -- that the parasite ridden American "consumer" is finally dead.   If this is true, the economic model of the latter half of the last Century is likely dead too, and that will mean wrenching change.  It's my belief that the dominant solution is to prepare for a local future to ride out this storm.  Here are some of my random (more random than I would like) thoughts on what you should do to prepare:

• Ruthlessly reduce debt. Nothing on credit. Pay off every loan. Strategically walk away from underwater assets (like homes that are worth less than the mortgage).  This will allow you to stay one step ahead of the death throes of the old economy.
• Turn your hollow home into a productive asset.  Most homes are devoid of any productive capacity.  Adding energy, food, etc production to them turns them into real, productive assets.  Get your assets out of financial derivatives (stocks, bonds, etc.) as fast as you can and put them into productive assets (not commodities) you can touch.
• Make everything you can yourself.  Grow your own food.  Produce your own energy.  Make/repair your own clothes.  Turn costs into savings.  Reskill to do this.  The new "fashionable trend" isn't what you can buy, it's what you can make.  Anyone that buys "designer or branded" anything is a fool.
• Work online.  Convert your skills into something that can be sold electronically (most of my complex work is done this way).   Develop the skills necessary to work as part of a virtual team.  Telecommute whenever possible (and push to do this, even if it means less money), reduce the number of cars/dress clothes/etc you own in synch with this conversion (and move to a less expensive locale when possible!).   Always have two jobs going at the same time.
• Build a local business.  Own assets that produce and sell that production locally.  Even if it is small, it will help down the line via contact networks/experience (a new spin on modern "networking").  Develop the niche skills that sell locally. Group/tribe up when possible to tackle larger opportunities.
• Barter.  Cashless trades.  Convert what you have to what you need.  Skill set bartering is amazingly effective.  Become part of a local barter network (the backchannel).
• Bring your family home.  Grow your home to accommodate more people.  Bring back parents and grown kids (with their families).  This will allow you to pool incomes and radically reduce workload/costs.  It's also beneficial for security.  NOTE:  I've found that consideration/compromise is the best way to handle an expansive family home environment.  
• Suggestions welcome!! 

This change doesn't require cute and crunchy notions about "lifestyle" environmentalism.  It's all about mitigation of stresses in the short to medium term as living conditions deteriorate, while at the same time preparing to ride the resilient community wave to rapid and sustained long term success/wealth."

Unemployment - A Tipping Point?

The official Unemployment rate is 9.4% but digging deeper suggests that the real rate in the US may be closer to 20%. Here is Paul Solman of the PBS News Hour exploring this possibility

We all think that Tipping Points are about good things - but the idea is neutral. It merely signifies when a system makes a phase shift.

Innovators account for 2.5 percent of individuals in a system.
Early Adopters account for 13.5 percent.
The Early Majority account for 34 percent.
The Late Majority also accounts for 34 percent.
Laggards make up the remaining 16 percent.

We are well inside the norms of 15% for employment to Tip - for job losses to cascade affecting housing and credit and in the end society itself.

A system tends to Tip if about 15% of the total is reached with momentum. Well there has certainly been momentum in unemployment. It is also structural. The new Flat World - has shifted millions of jobs offshore that will never return. At first these were blue collar jobs. But now they include most white collar jobs too.

This is not your grandfather's unemployment!

If the real rate is close to 20% - what is the impact? Most Americans are 3 pay checks away form being on the street. How do millions come back from that? Most cities and states will surely follow.

Are we seeing anything in Washington that suggests that the full scale of the risk is understood? I don't.

What is the underlying problem?

I think that our corporate system is the problem. As a system it destroys jobs and distances the control of vital services from where they have to be delivered.

Jobs are exported or people replaced with automation. Maybe we have reached a Tipping Point in this process too.  McJobs are all that is left that have to be local - but you cant live on  minimum wage job.

Water, Food, Energy and Housing are all controlled by a system that has no accountability to the local. Maybe this process too has tipped.

It is no longer "just" the underclass who are affected. The middle class is now structurally jobless. Where are new college grads going to get work? Not only are they jobless but they also have college loans. Even the McJobs are taken.

Where is the career for them? Their parents are getting laid off in swathes too. Male boomers are especially vulnerable - how will they ever get jobs in the structure that we have today? We have in many families 2 generations of middle class unemployment or under employment.

How can we get work back?

I think that the only way we can get work back is to take back the key services locally.

Local Food - Local Energy and in the end a local financial system. Millions of jobs are to be found here. A local financial system will emerge too as a result.

This will become self evident soon to many.

Who is the "Tyrant" Today? NPR will shed light

After the Preamble - that we all know - Jefferson offers a list of the sins of the Government of King George - here are the top 3 - As I read them and as I think about how Washington has been hijacked by lobbysts - I see that they are back as key problems.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

Who is the Tyrant today?

Do you have confidence that our financial system will be reset properly? Do you have confidence that our healthcare issues will be settled in favor of the people? Do have confidence that Washington CAN govern on behalf of the people?

Who do they take orders from?

They have surely been captured by the lobbysts? Who are these people? Part of their power comes from the fact that their work is secret. We don't know who they are and we don't know their influence and power.

Well NPR is going to Washington like Mr Smith to help us see more clearly. Want better energy policy - let's see who is blocking it?

June 25, 2009; Washington, D.C. – Millions of dollars are pouring into Capitol Hill this summer, as lobbyists jockey to have their clients’ interests represented in three major pieces of legislation just beginning to take shape. The object of the lobbyists’ attention: massive bills on health care, banking regulation and energy.

In “Dollar Politics,” a multi-part, multimedia series beginning this week, NPR examines this extraordinary intersection between money and politics, and what it could mean for public policy. The series begins today on air and online, with pieces airing on both Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and continues occasionally through August. Part 1 is available now at: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105878862

As part of its effort to explain the lobbying effort, NPR will turn around to face the packed hearing rooms, to photograph and identify the men and women working to influence the legislation under review. The first interactive panoramic photo may be found at NPR.org. More photos will follow, along with profiles of key lobbyists, and explanations of the interests they represent and the objectives they hope to achieve. Audiences are asked to help identify the people in the photos by emailing dollarpolitics@npr.org and by following the series on Twitter @DollarPolitics.

“Dollar Politics” is being reported by congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook and Peter Overby, power, money and influence correspondent, with contributions from NPR’s Washington, Business and Science desks. In addition to following the trail of political money and profiling key lobbyists, Seabrook and Overby will also show how members of Congress are affected by the system. One example: members who win seats on key committees suddenly become recipients of political contributions several times what they received before winning those seats.

“Dollar Politics” is part of NPR’s extensive political coverage, with original, news-breaking reporting on every branch of government. Continuing at NPR.org is “The Obama Tracker,” an online interactive timeline – updated daily – that gives audiences the ability to follow the progress and actions of the administration on domestic, foreign and economic fronts. For all political reporting, columns, podcasts and blogs, visit www.NPR.org/politics