Archive - Jan 2007
Managing Transitions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/31/2007 - 08:43
(Cross-posted at Toomre Capital Markets)
Over the past few months, many people have wondered why Ned Lamont lost to Joe Lieberman in last November’s general election. There are many possible explanations which have been discussed extensively elsewhere. One that hasn’t been discussed much is based on the idea that a campaign, in many ways, is much like a business startup.
Campaigns usually start with a lot of enthusiasm and great ideas, but without a lot of funding or necessarily a clear idea about where things will go. They try to build a strong organization out of nothing. If they are successful, at some point they need to manage the transition from an insurgency to front-runner, similar to how a startup needs to manage the transition from startup to a major corporation. It is a difficult transition for many campaigns to make, just as it is for businesses to make that transition.
I’ve often hoped that some day, a group will come along with the expertise necessary to help campaigns make this transition, and I imagine that many investors in startups have similar hopes for a similar sort of group for technology firms.
My thinking about this has been shaped by my work as a technology executive on Wall Street. During my tenure in two different leadership roles, I used the services of Sharon Horowitz, PhD. as an executive coach and organizational consultant. I learned a lot from her about things like managing corporate politics and getting technologists to work better together. It was a great help as I moved into leadership roles. She has now teamed up with some other interesting luminaries to form CenterNorth, an advisory service helping technology organizations and companies in all stages of development, including startups.
While CenterNorth does not consult to political campaigns, I wonder why there aren’t companies out there helping campaigns better manage their growth cycle. I believe it would have helped the Lamont campaign and other campaigns I’ve been involved with.
CenterNorth appears to be offering a valuable service to technology firms. I wish the folks there well and will be interested to track their success.
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Rate on NewsTrustJanuary 30th
Law and Order Liberals and the ballad of Ken and Scooter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/30/2007 - 10:06
Yes, I’m a Law and Order Liberal. My father-in-law and mother-in-law are retired Special Agents for the U.S. Treasury Department. Many of my mother-in-law’s relatives are local law enforcement. I honor and respect the jobs that all of them do, often putting themselves at personal risk to assure our safety and rights as citizens.
I guess that is part of the reason I get so annoyed when people do things that recklessly put law enforcement officials at risk or squander our taxpayer dollars that are supposed to be used to make us safer and protect our rights.
So, it looks like I may get bloggers credentials from the Media Bloggers Association to help with the coverage of the Scooter Libby trial. Scooter Libby is on trial for obstructing justice, making false statements and perjury in the investigation of who outed information about Joseph Wilson’s wife. If the allegations are true, he contributed to making our country less secure.
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January 26th
The problem is not the calendar
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/26/2007 - 08:52
(Originally published at Greater Democracy)
On a couple mailing lists I’m on, people are talking about different ways to address problems in our electoral system. There are, of course, the issues of voting integrity, but there is also an interesting discussion about changes to the primary calendar. I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about this and have a different view from many of the folks on the list.
Let me suggest that we are looking at the issue the wrong way. Perhaps the issue isn't that because a few small states like Iowa and New Hampshire vote early, they get more say in whom our next president will be. The idea of spreading out the primary season across several months so that we can have more retail politics, more chances for people to shake hands with the candidates is, IMHO, a great ideal. Perhaps the problem isn't the schedule, but the way it is being manipulated by corporations and large money donors.
People look back at 2004 and complain that the race was over before most of us even got a chance to vote. They cite examples of the way the media played the Dean Scream. Well, the problem with the Dean Scream wasn't a problem with Gov. Dean or the people of Iowa. It was a problem of the large corporate controlled media. Until we address that problem, it doesn't matter whether we have all our primaries on one day or spread out over several months. The media will control the message. Focusing on Media Reform is likely to have a bigger effect on making the primary process much more open and inclusive then any juggling of the calendar will. I do agree with some of the people on the lists that juggling the calendar without addressing this issue could make the problem even worse.
The other major complaint is the role of money in the campaign process. If you don't do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, your money dries up and your campaign can't keep going. Again, is this a problem with the folks in Iowa or New Hampshire, or is it a problem with the role of money in the political process? The Dean campaign did some amazing things getting everyday people to contribute small amounts to his campaign. In the end, that didn't do the trick, but it raises a couple interesting points.
First, if we want to address the problem with primaries not being democratic enough, we need to do something about the role of money in campaigns. We need to fix the campaign finance system. This takes me back to big media. What is the biggest expense for campaigns? TV Ads! Yup, that's right, it goes back to funding those large corporate media institutions that are thwarting our democracy. If we want reform, we need to move campaigns away from the 30-second spot to something that encourages democratic participation. An interim step might be to free the airwaves and allow campaigns free airtime to get their message out. The big media corporations will fight tooth and nail against this. After all, they get billions of dollars from political advertising. So, if they won't do this, perhaps we need to pull and end run around them. That is why posting video online is so important. All of the Democratic candidates are ramping up their online video capabilities. This may have more of an effect than any changes to the schedule will have.
Then, there is the issue of people saying that they don't need to vote because it has already been pretty much decided in Iowa and New Hampshire. Yup, it's those old cynics fouling up the works again. Well, personally, I believe that my vote matters, even though I vote much later in the cycle in Connecticut. I got out and voted for Howard Dean last time. What we need to do here, again is less about catering to cynics, then it is about trying to promote civic engagement. Let's teach civics! Let's get people involved. Spreading out the primary calendar so that there can be more one on one engagement between candidates and voters probably does a better job of it than compressing everything into one day.
For me, I believe that I can be more involved, living in a state a couple hundred miles away from an early primary state with the current calendar than I could be if we had one national primary day. I can go to New Hampshire and freeze my butt off, meet some candidates and have some real conversations. If they change the schedule I can perhaps volunteer to serve appetizers at a fund raiser for people contributing $2000 each in New York City, but I'm not likely to get into any real discussions about where we need to be going as a country.
Yes, we need to change things to make sure that everyone gets to participate in the presidential primaries. I believe that Media Reform, Campaign Finance Reform and better civics education are much better tools to make this happen than moving to a national primary day.
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January 25th
Quick Random Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/25/2007 - 09:59
I've recently been in a comment and email discussion with Pamela Weatherill, who writes a blog called the New Century Notebook. She is doing a quick and easy survey of bloggers. If you blog, please stop by and fill it out.
I was also on a conference call yesterday with Sen. Schumer, where he talked about his new book, Positively American. It sounds like a book worth reading.
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January 24th
Virtual foreign exchange trading
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/24/2007 - 10:50
(Originally posted at Toomre Capital Markets.)
Every day, around $2 trillion of currencies are traded, dollars, yen, euros, as spot trades, as well as various types of derivatives, including forwards, forex swaps and options. This sort of volume makes the $200,000 traded daily on the Second Life spot exchange seem particularly small. However, with Second Life’s economy at least tripling annually, it may well be a market worth exploring in detail.
There are various things needed for an efficient market. First and foremost, you need good market data. Second Life provides some good economic data on a daily basis, but is it possible to get this data on a real time basis? Could we set up a market data feed?
At TCM, we look at how to pull together emerging innovations in the financial services industry by thinking outside of the box. Read more to find out what we’ve done so far with Second Life and how it could be used with other emerging tools.
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January 23rd
Let the conversation begin
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/23/2007 - 11:00
(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)
At the Journalism that Matters conference, JTM, in Memphis the other week, I was struck by the parallels of the second and fourth estates. For the second estate, I’m thinking of that political class that most resembles the nobility of the Ancien Regime.
For the past forty years, political discourse has been dominated by broadcast politics, the art of the sound byte. Starting somewhere between 2000 and 2004, the interest started to change these dynamics. Jock Gill has suggested we are moving into an era of post-broadcast politics, and Nathan Wilcox has refined this to talk about networked politics.
Whatever we call it, political discourse is moving from a broadcast monologue to a dialogue or perhaps even a multilogue where even lateral communications is encouraged. At JTM, I wondered aloud if we are seeing something similar happen in the fourth estate. No longer are the readers and viewers of the press satisfied to simply be told what local editors or the most trusted man in America thinks is important. We want to talk back. We want to engage in a conversation.
In 2004, Gov. Dean was noted for saying, “The biggest lie people like me tell people like you is that if you vote for me, I’ll solve all your problems. The truth is, You have the power.” Perhaps readers and viewers are looking for the same sort of transformation in the Fourth Estate. We can go to our conferences on Media Reform where one new organization or another tries to position itself as the group that will solve all our media problems, but perhaps what we are looking for is an editor or anchor to acknowledge that we have the power and to work with us in making the best use of that power.
Many people attribute the printing press as the tool that brought about fundamental changes to the First Estate. Will the Internet bring these changes to the Second and Fourth Estates? Will a leader in the Fourth Estate rise up and tell us we have the power of media reform and help us make the best use of that power?
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January 21st
Bridging Media Reform
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/21/2007 - 12:18
There have been two parallel conferences in Memphis dealing with media reform. One was the Journalism that Matters conference. (See Ilona's write-up about this event.) This was a small group made up mostly of print journalists and academics struggling with changes in the economic models affecting the news industry and how journalism can survive, and to use the language of one attendee, be deserving of its first amendment rights. The other was around three thousand grassroots activists. I was fortunate to attend sessions from both conferences and have been thinking a lot about what goes on from here.
The stodgy old print journalists used open space techniques to promote conversation, and while I as one of the few representatives of new digital media may have been perceived as a threat or interloper by some, we had great discussions. The conference ended with people sitting around in a circle talking about next steps. What sort of innovations will be brought back to the newsrooms across our country?
The facilitator of the sessions had commented about open space techniques being used for large conferences as well. Some may be skeptical of whether this could be used at a conference as large as the National Conference on Media Reform, it is an interesting idea to ponder, because the media reform folks, struck me as much more traditional. There were the standard keynotes. Sen. Sanders delivered what in other circles might be called a good ‘red meat’ speech to fire people up. Although, here, it might better be referred to as a well seasoned tofu. There were the panels, mostly white men sitting up front, broadcasting to the audience, with the token woman or black, and the token Q&A at the end of the session.
Don’t get me wrong. There were some great presentations and I don’t think the conference was trying to simply meet quotas of people of color and women. There were also some great discussions, many of which took place over coffee between sessions. I was simply struck by the contrast between the traditional people exploring new ways of communicating and the reformers staying with fairly old methods.
Perhaps it was because of being included in the Journalism that Matters conference that I was thinking more about bridging between different groups, of being a bumblebee carrying pollen from one group to the next that I attended sessions that were not in areas I spend a lot of time thinking about.
I’m glad I did, because the two session I like best were “There is No Media Justice Without Women: Models for Feminist Media Action” and “Make the Music with Your Mouth Kid: Hip-Hop Activism for Media Justice” I was disappointed that more of the ivy league educated young straight white men were not at these sessions, because I do believe that the most exciting media reform is coming out of these sessions.
At the feminist session, my mind wandered back to classes in feminism I took in the seventies. There was a sense of the importance of looking at the underlying structures, which I wish more people were doing. There was a discussion about the importance of telling our stories, stories of real life, not filtered through the eyes of editors telling us what they think is important.
The Hip-Hop session built nicely on the feminist session and I have a few clips from it up on Blip.TV. Links that I brought with me from the sessions include Hip-Hop lives here, the Texas Media Empowerment Project, Third World Majority (Culture is a Weapon), Women in Media and News and Reclaim the Media. If you want to see exciting media reform happening, go visit these sites.
Sunday morning, I went to a session on a topic I’ve been following closely, “Civics on Steroids: Turning Average Citizens into Media Reform Activists”. Bob McCannon Rob Williams from the Action Coalition on Media Education (ACME) gave a shortened version of their shtick on media education. If you ever get a chance to here them speak, don’t miss it. And if you want to really reform the media, ACME is a great starting point.
The conference ended with Van Jones delivering a rousing keynote calling people to action. He pointed out that Martin Luther King, Jr. was known for saying “I have a dream”, not for saying “I have a complaint”. There is plenty to complain about with our media today, but conferences like Journalism that Matters and the National Conference on Media Reform can be venues to find powerful ways to bring about meaningful media reform.
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January 20th
Statewide wireless
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/20/2007 - 12:18
Over on MyLeftNutmg, MattW points out Rep. Tom Drew’s proposed bill, Proposed Bill No. 6502, AN ACT CONCERNING WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS.
That the general statutes be amended to establish a working group to make recommendations for creating incentives to expand or maximize wireless Internet access in the state.
On initial reading, this sounds like a great idea. Statewide WiFi. As I commented on MyLeftNutmeg:
As a starting point, every public building ought to have WiFi. Schools, libraries, town halls, court houses, police stations, etc. Some already do, and many others can without much work.
Getting WiFi at parks and Community Technology Centers probably brings even more bang for the buck, but is harder get through.
Yet the devil is always in the details. Who will be in the working group? What will happen to the recommendations? What sort of incentives are being considered? Will the group be made up of industry executives pushing for proposals for large corporate giveaways to get the corporations to make $30/month WiFi access more ubiquitous? Will the group be made up of technogeeks pushing for some wonderful but arcane and unusable solution? Will the recommendations end up being one more set of recommendations that get added to a library somewhere and not acted upon? We shall see.
How will this “maximize economic and other development” in our State? Will it be done in such a way that helps alleviate the digital divide, or will it compound the digital divide with policies that make it useful only to people that already have WiFi enabled laptops and the knowledge of how to use them.
I hope that we get a lot of people working together to make sure that this bill does bring about greater Internet access for a wide spectrum of citizens.
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January 18th
"The War on Journalism" - Updated
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/18/2007 - 11:36
This morning, I received a phone call from Sergeant Hanlon of Group 12, the internal affairs bureau of the New York City Police Department. My wife was a little concerned about why a Sergeant from the New York City Police was calling me, but when she understood the details, she handed the phone over to me. He was calling in regards to the email I had sent about "The War on Journalism".
Sergeant Hanlon said that the Police Department and received several emails about the event at the Mexican Consulate and that many videos had emerged online. The Police Department’s Video Unit is reviewing the online videos and will be providing information to Sergeant Hanlon. He will be handling the investigation from there.
If any people have additional information they should contact Sergeant Hanlon at 212 694 3115. Sergeant Hanlon was very helpful in providing information and hopefully will conduct a thorough investigation into what happened.
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January 17th
Are bloggers Group Psychotherapists?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/17/2007 - 11:33
This may sound like a strange question, but I think it is well worth exploring. I’ve been on the road for the past week attending two different conferences on media and journalism. One of the questions that always comes up is, “Are bloggers journalists?” It is an old question that many people are getting tired of. Blogging is a medium; websites with content posted in reverse chronological order. Bloggers may use this format for journalism, advocacy, naval gazing or a myriad of other purposes. So, on the simplest level, bloggers are not necessarily journalists, group psychotherapists, or anything else. They are simply people writing things in a specific format.
So, why am I asking this question then? Well, on my return, I found my mailbox full of all kinds of stuff to sort through including an interesting discussion on a group psychotherapy mailing list about the pros, cons and ethics of group psychotherapy online.
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