Community

End of an era.... Xitter no more

When you find yourself tweeting/retweeting like I did this morning the very real evidence of civilizational collapse all around us, maybe it’s time to do something different with those minutes and hours and days.

Today I closed my last Xitter account after 17 years of daily use.

SEVENTEEN YEARS!

I’ve had a few accounts, but this was the holdout account and it’s formed the content of my KIP sensemaking framework for the past five years. (That’s okay, it’s just the end of a chapter since the framework and the data still exist and can be used, and await other editors, curators, contributors, and researchers.)

Closing the channel of the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed with my carefully vetted lists of the best civic participators

Closing this particular social media account and ending my association with that platform is a great loss for me since it’s been my lifeline. I’ve just closed the channel of the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed with carefully vetted powerhouse lists and follows of the best civic participators and my custom search and consumption practices that have consistently generated sharp, expert, early insights into current events.

It was my lifeline to the best news and opinion I’ve ever enjoyed due to my carefully vetted powerhouse lists, follows, and my custom search and consumption practices that have consistently generated sharp, expert, early insights into current events.

I guess I’ll just head over to LInkedin…where I see we’ve breached 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, and we’re past the point of national-scale mitigation. The dire immensity of this moment is a lot to take in.

However I’m eager to partake in the different pursuits that open up for me with the new-found time and attention. Especially because community resilience, local survival plans, and protecting each other is the only way forward.

I’m eager to partake in the different pursuits that open up for me with the new-found time and attention.
— Especially because community resilience, local survival plans, and protecting each other is the only way forward.

Finding out if we can bring block readiness back to Cow Hollow & the Marina District….

Cow Hollow once had block captains. The Marina once had ALL of the San Francisco Fire Department’s certified neighborhood emergency responders.

That’s because after the destructive Loma Prieta earthquake, the Marina became the birthplace of the Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) program here in the city, and it has been a standard for the program spreading to other neighborhoods as 20,000 people have been trained in the past 30 years.

But the area’s readiness seems to have peaked and ebbed as people move away, follow other interests, age out of certain activities.

I have taken the pulse of the area as the official coordinator of Cow Hollow and Marina NERTs the past year and a half. I’ve discovered that NERT may have been born here after the Loma Prieta but there are only a handful of active NERTs left here.

I’ve had a chance to connect with former block captains and longtime NERTs in the area. “I couldn’t find anyone to take over from me,” one 80-year old block captain and former NERT told me. “The only person I still know on the block is 90.”

We have to take the baton from earlier neighbor responders, and pass it on to our neighbors of today. The people next door and the people across the street.

And there’s only one hour we need to focus on: The Golden Hour.

The Golden Hour, or first 60 minutes after a disaster happens, is when neighbors rely on each other. We can check on each other, treat minor injuries, and put out small fires.

The first 60 minutes after a disaster happens is when neighbors rely on each other. We can check on each other, treat minor injuries, and put out small fires.

A block - both sides of the street, about 20 homes - can learn to work together in “the Golden Hour” where we can make the most impact as neighbors.

Can we bring block readiness back to Cow Hollow & the Marina District? To do so, groups and leaders in our district can use this easy and free 9 step neighborhood response plan class that the SF Fire Department supports.

Do you know how to turn off your neighbor’s gas?
— It's one of the best ways to prevent fire.

Do you know how to stop a small fire from spreading from one home to the next home? How to shut off the water main so pollutants don’t enter your system? Or how to alert your neighbors you might need help?

Each block in our district and the city can learn these life-saving and property-protecting skills.

You can learn it in a free 9-Step block-by-block readiness program, like the one offered last week at the Golden Gate Valley Branch Library.

According to this SF Fire Dept preparedness program called Map Your Neighborhood (MYN), we do better in disaster response when we know each other.

As a NERT, the first households I am most likely to be able to reach and work with for emergency resilience are on my own block: gas turn offs, fire extinguisher shares, staging and gathering areas in homes and garages.

A year ago I took this 90 minute class, it covers what happens BEFORE NERTs deploy to help the wider neighborhood. We check our household, our building, our block.

I am probably the only person on my block to take the class, I believe I am the only NERT on my block. I wish I weren’t the only one who knows this. I see that NERT is a commitment and our area could start with something lighter weight like MYN. It’s an easy way to increase a block’s readiness for emergency situations that gets neighbors talking to each other about how we can each help. You can read about it here.

My takeaway from the class? I thought, “I’m not ready to tell my neighbors! That means….my block is definitely not ready.”

I can’t deploy as a NERT before I have taken stock of my own area. Since taking the class, I’ve been mapping my own block. I started talking to local neighbor associations about spreading the response plan to larger groups of neighbors.

Last week I attempted the next step: telling my neighbors about it (I even printed out flyers!) and inviting them to a class thanks to the dedication of the instructor of the class, fellow NERT Sue Brown. She is committed to making a regular schedule of events and bringing this class to a person on every block, and then to all the neighbors on that block — the class is a funnel of sorts, inducting us into a plan that only works if our neighbors know about it and take part.

I invited every household on my block to consider attending this event or another one upcoming. We can’t do the plan if they don’t know the plan.

In a disaster, when emergency responders like 911, fire, police, utilities, EMS are overwhelmed, we are the responders.
— That's you and me.

We can revitalize our block readiness

With a free and regularly offered 9 STEP PROGRAM supported by the SF Fire Department. Pictured at Golden Gate Valley Library with District 2 Supervisor Stephen Sherrill

I invited community leaders to take the class.

I also invited our new District 2 Supervisor, Stephen Sherrill, who joined the class. Supervisor Sherrill reminded me that he led hurricane response in the Office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York, and then two hurricanes hit the city, so he knows why we need neighborhood readiness training and he’s interested in what we NERTs are doing in Cow Hollow and Marina.

I invited Rich Goss, a member of the security committee of the Cow Hollow Association, to join the class to see how the free fire department readiness class can kick off block-level readiness in our district.

I hope to raise awareness on my block - and all the blocks - to let people know we have a 9-step plan to increase readiness with our neighbors. We just need to be walked through it. This class does that.

All it takes to get started with district readiness is one person from one block to attend the 90 minute class. 

The next classes will be at the Fire Department, Folsom & 19th, June 21  9am and 11 am. If you’re interested, but unable to attend these sessions, please contact Sue Brown, suebrown21@yahoo.com, for information on other sessions. If you’re in my district or neighborhood and interested, you can let me know too!

There’s also a Zoom MYN on June 19. Sign up here.

Drilling with my battalion neighbors at NERT's Citywide Drill Spring 2025

The NERT Citywide Drill Spring 2025 was held at the Couny Fair building in Golden Gate Park this weekend for SF Fire Department neighborhood emergency response team (NERT) volunteers. I’ve been a certified NERT since 2018 and this is the fourth citywide drill I’ve now participated in.

Besides meeting up with NERTs I’m in touch with as the Cow Hollow and Marina District coordinator role I took on since 2024, there were some new opportunities I especially appreciated. Among them:

BATTALION DRILLS

NERT has shifted from small neighborhood teams to Battalion-based groups that encompass 5 or 6 neighborhoods. It’s how we will organize and stage response together in a disaster. We drilled with our Battalion 4 mates, so got to meet them and work with them for the first time. There were 10-12 of us when I joined them for the ALL HAZARD ROOM, a drill that combines a bunch of hazards: water leaks, gas leaks, downed electrical wiring, a victim trapped under heavy rubble, an uninjured neighbor in a wheelchair who wants to stay with the trapped victim, a sudden fire that needs to be suppressed, and earthquake aftershocks.

RADIO OPS, STAGING AREAs

Most of the day I was with the Hams (I got my Technician license last year and haven’t had much chance to use it yet). At this citywide event, radio operators had drills: there was an Auxiliary Communications System Field Team, with Planning and Walking radio groups for two disaster staging areas that mimicked the staging areas we’d set up for each Battalion group in the event of an emergency. I shadowed/scribed for a radio operator taking down incoming incident messages from our Walker and random people coming to the staging area to report their findings, like building collapses, fires, and injuries needing medical attention and rescue, and then communicating that to ACS Field Leader who interfaced with Battalion.

STOP THE BLEED & OPIOID OVERDOSES

There was a short class on naloxone and tourniquets, which I hadn’t taken before. Now we know how to identify an opioid overdose symptoms, and administer a naloxone dose, as well as apply a tourniquet and make a tourniquet in the field with a strip of fabric and a ballpoint pen. Wouldn’t you like to know how to do this? I think we could all learn it. I want to see this common sense public service instruction everywhere, like on bus stops!

DISASTER VICTIM TRAINING VOLUNTEERS

I didn’t do the FIELD TRIAGE drill this time but saw children victim-actors with simulated injuries: broken bones, lacerations. The kids were disaster victim training volunteers and they helped NERTs practice what we’d do to help them if we encountered them in our neighborhoods after a disaster struck and before emergency services could reach them.


Take a look at a video reel of NERT’s Citywide Drill Spring 2025 from the fire department.

TBT 2011, 2013: false cosmopolitanism & brand mismanagement on social media

The Bellyflops of Social Media Mismanagement

I posted this in 2013 on my Medium page.

On the precipice of war, overreaching false cosmopolitanism continues. Plus, parents plan for unsustainable digital abstinence.

Today the Kenneth Cole Twitter account tweeted something thoughtless about “Boots on the ground” or not, don’t forget about sandals and loafers.

Nope.

Boots on the ground mean soldiers going to war possibly to be maimed or killed, and to wreak havoc on the lives of others. The precipice of war is not an opportunity to remind people you make loafers.

Feels like deja vu for Cole. Because it is. The brand flopped just like this in 2011.

In 2011 I made the connection between global mishaps of high profile brands and the false cosmopolitanism we’re all suffering.

There was Groupon’s SuperBowl ad fiasco, when the company attempted to mix consumerism with sensitive political, environmental, cultural, economic and social issues, and the Kenneth Cole Twitter debacle which appeared to make light of unrest in Cairo.

I wrote about earlier instances of the phenomenon of false cosmopolitanism in 2010. See links to that, and my influences below.

Access to the worldwide web makes us imagine we’re global thinkers. But most of us aren’t. Not even close.

In order to truly be global thinkers, we’d have to be xenophiles, actively and constantly bridging cultures, immersed and knowledgeable about multiple worlds.

Most people hang out in “like-minded microcosms” and when we cross a boundary online the new light shed on everyone’s prejudices and assumptions can take us by surprise.

This “xeno-confusion” is happening more often in the virtual realm, with higher and higher stakes.

Today’s other big story of social media mismanagement has been swiftly answered by Alexandra Samuel of Love Your Life Online. It falls into the category of unsustainable digital abstinence to solve problems that may crop up in the future.

“Don’t be scared to Facebook your kids,” she responds to Amy Webb’s piece at Slate “We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online.”

Samuel writes: “Parenthood is such a central experience that there’s no way to cut it out of your online life without profoundly compromising your own ability to have authentic, meaningful connections online.”

That’s exactly right. Plus, digital abstinence doesn’t prepare you for the world your child will grow up in.

How are you preparing yourself for a wider world?

Improving a local gateway with indigenous plantings

Saturday morning spent planting native, drought resistant plant species with North End neighbors.

This was the plan: a Saturday morning spent planting native drought resistant plants with my neighbors and others. We would replace a gnarly grass lawn with the hope to make “Richardson and Lombard Streets a more welcoming and beautiful gateway into San Francisco”, in the words of the Cow Hollow Association, and rehabilitate the natural habitat as well.

“Plant food instead!” yelled a drive-by troll.

Thirty of us were on our knees in the dirt, with pick axes and knives, loosening the roots on plants we had just removed from their grow pots. The sun was surprisingly hot for 9:30 a.m., usually this area is slow to warm with all the tall trees and vegetation edging the Presidio not to mention the fogline that people like to say ends at Divisadero, a few blocks further into the city.

“Plant food instead!” a man yelled at us from a car. Literally a drive-by troll.

We were on the highly trafficked road that guides drivers to the Golden Gate Bridge in one direction and welcomes you to the city and neighborhood of Marina District in the other direction. Lots of cars, and carbon monoxide exhaust.

In the Bay Area, people speak their high mind. He’d already zoomed through the intersection but I knew what he meant: create a community food garden, for humans. That’s definitely needed in every area, and I suspect each project needs a plan and resilient support. Yelling the command from a car like a community edge lord doesn’t move the needle much.

It took me a second to react. This IS food, too, I would have told him.

This IS food. These 300 or 400 indigenous plants we’re putting into the ground feed birds, bees, and butterflies.

🤔💭 Our natural resources project with neighbors wasn’t the result of a split second decision, like his, to answer the question “Should we use this particular plot for food for humans or nature?” This particular plot was solved long ago, by a grass lawn. Agitating to change the lawn took three years and a lot of people.

The improvement melds the distinct situation and needs of the land with the ability and interest of the people and organizations around to care for it. Once these small plants and seedlings - grown from seed by the Presidio Nursery where I started volunteering last year - are established, they will not require further irrigation efforts or costs. They are intended to be hardy, and withstand the vagaries of the weather and rain seasons, and carbon monoxide from cars, and thrive.

Excerpt from Cow Hollow Association newsletter, November 2024. You can donate towards the fencing right here.

The Richardson Gateway Project is the work of numerous area leaders like former city supervisor Catherine Stefani who secured the initial funding of $50,000 three years ago, and Cynthia Gissler of the Cow Hollow Association who invited the neighbors today. We were joined by members of the City’s Department of Public Works and the Presidio Trust, supervised by National Park Service and Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy Volunteer Supervisor Staff. Cynthia’s Aunt Caroline, a nonagenarian retired public school teacher, handled our release form paperwork for the day.

We were joined by the newly appointed city supervisor for District 2, Stephen Sherrill and his son.

🙏 to the people who honked with thumbs up, we did see you!

My wish for everyone out there:

I hope you find your chance to contribute to a local garden of your choosing.

If this particular block is anything judge by, community gardens are not “drive-by” efforts. They take commitment, leadership, time, resources, collaboration.

Among the hundreds of plants we put in the ground today: foxtail agave, coyote brush, monkey flower, buckeye, poppies, coffee berry, blue blossom, sage wort, deer grass, hummingbird sage, aster, wild rose, moor grass, anemone, sagebrush, seaside daisy, bluff lettuce.

Cassandra Awards for our news and information mapmakers

Our news & information landscape has changed. Our mapmakers have changed.
— Announcing The Cassandra Awards for civic participators/participatory media/Fifth Estate content creators, dot connectors, and sense makers in our networks

Image: Using AI voice generation for an audio script of numerous quotes from my curated KIP (“Knowledge is Power”) sources on Twitter/Xitter which begin to tell the larger story of this moment, all in 5 minutes. Read the whole transcript here.

Image: This is the conclusion. I announce The Cassandra Awards. You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.

You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.
— I invite you all to check their receipts.

With The Cassandra Awards and other information interfaces for you to engage with, my passion project KIP aims to re-educate the entire population in digital media literacy, information literacy, digital civic literacy, and help de-program those who have fallen victim to disinformation.

Until we learn to be better information consumers, we'll keep falling for disinformation

The day after the 2024 US Election.

Related data points in my timeline:

A certain personality type is found to most readily fall for poor information.

Also, news- information- digital- and media-literacy are teachable and learnable.

We need to help people be better information citizens.

That fact has never been clearer. It’ll help people be better voters, better neighbors, and better able to collectively work on our biggest issues, all the way to the climate crisis. It’s why I keep looking for ways to bring KIP, my passion project of the past 9 years, to the world.

Click on any of the tags below to see my previous posts on these topics which millions are now waking up to today. Click on the headline of each post to open it and see continue clicking on the tags in each post to dive deeper.

Let's recap

I nominate Stephanie LB @LincolnsBible Black for a Cassandra Award.

Here’s the summer before. 2018.

“Treason is the reason for the season, someone said on Twitter.

I shared it on my Instagram along with contemporary Tweets from Louis Neufeld who was very early on many germane threads that drive our headlines today. Her 2017 threads deserve a receipts challenge. I nominate her for a Cassandra Award.

Information war victims come for the meteorologists

Now they’re coming for the meteorologists. The right wing radio chemtrail folklore spawns death threats.

Another civilian victim of a military grade information war: he threatens to hang a meteorologist for treason. After the election we'll need to rehabilitate the information space and all the people who say "treason" but don't know where to pin it just like all the January 6, 2021 Capitol Attack insurrection dupes that are going to prison.

KIP and projects like it that can rehabilitate consumers of disinformation are greatly needed.



Citywide drill commemorates the Loma Prieta Quake that started the NERT program

Yesterday’s citywide drill for neighborhood emergency response teams in San Francisco noted 35th anniversary of lomaprieta quake, earliest NERT members from Marina … & the Japanese consul general joined (several other countries want to learn from this fire department program!)

Biodiversity hot spot grows 150 native species each year for Golden Gate National Parks

Since 1981, the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy has served as the nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, collaborating with the Presidio Trust, partners, donors, and the community to support the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA). The GGNRA stretches across three Bay Area counties, north and south of the Golden Gate Bridge, and includes iconic places such as Muir Woods National Monument, Fort Point National Historic Site, Alcatraz Island, Crissy Field, Mori Point, Lands End, and the Presidio of San Francisco.

I volunteer with park staff at the nursery’s indigenous species greenhouses, shade houses and lab for seed processing and sowing.

Presidio Nursery is a cooperative program of Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, National Parks Service, and Presidio Trust.

Since September 2023, I have done transplanting, pruning, and pot washing and look forward to work in the seed lab during winter 🥼 🌱

These are some of the other tasks available for volunteers at the Presidio Nursery:

  • seed collection

  • seed cleaning

  • transplanting

  • pruning

  • weeding

  • composting

  • pot washing

  • nursery maintenance

  • care of an educational garden

The Presidio is a haven for more rare species per acre than all national parks including Yosemite and Yellowstone.

This international biodiversity hot spot grows 150 plant species and 150,000 plants a year for habitat restoration and reforestation around the Presidio and other parks.

Among other places, you can enjoy their plants at the new Tunnel Tops park at Speaker Nancy Pelosi Plaza. Thanks to Pelosi’s initiative to save the Presidio for the people, the Presidio was designated a National Park 30 years ago.

Repopulating the Presidio with almost-extinct manzanita clones one afternoon.

One afternoon we handled newly discovered Franciscan manzanita that had been cloned for repopulating the Presidio with the species. We washed 100 pots for them to be repotted into later (after steaming, sterilizing, bleaching) these plants are the only ones that exist other than the mother plant.

Here come the CONTENT CREATORS - 400 million impressions at the Democratic National Convention

I feel quite vindicated this month. The central contention of KIP, my passion project of the past decade, is hitting the mainstream. Everybody sees it!

A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.

What a masterclass in disinter-media-tion. The Democrats went straight to the people.

The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!

I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.

Journalists, it’s long past time for you to stop feeling insulted and get to work connecting with the people who are bringing news to us. They could use your rigor and training and experience, and we will all benefit from it. Democracy demands it.

By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.

Crazy Rich Asians & the impact of my work: I helped save an architectural gem in Southeast Asia

Remembering the time when I conceived, pitched, wrote, sold, published a three page story in a top newsweekly magazine out of Hong Kong that highlighted a historical building at risk from nearby development to 93,000 elite members of government, business and the arts.

The article had impact.

The year after the article was published, the building won a newly created UNESCO Heritage Award.

To promote the conservation of the greatest diversity of the region’s built heritage, in the year 2000 UNESCO inaugurated the annual Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, a program designed to respond to the question: “Within the realities of contemporary, fast-track development, what of the built heritage do Asians value and want to preserve from the past to inform the region’s place in the global future?”

In 2018 you saw this historic property in the film Crazy Rich Asians, which used it as a setting.

You know it from Crazy Rich Asians. I championed its story in 1998.

Video retrospective of GlobalNiche, my remote skills edtech startup 2011-2013 and beyond...

Her groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.
— Tanya Monsef

I founded GlobalNiche in Istanbul with Tara Agacayak after evolving my 2006 cultural book to a 2010 global citizen blog to an online skill building business, and Tanya Monsef joined us when I moved to San Francisco. Here’s what Tanya, the Dean's Executive Professor of Management in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University for the past decade, says about GlobalNiche in 2024.

Watch a quick retrospective, excuse any missing media.



"Anastasia’s groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.

Tanya recalls how I took my knowledge and prior success using book publishing’s “author platform” concept to reach the public with content marketing, branding and community outreach (that’s Expat Harem!), and combined it with the heavily-online techniques a serial expat like me has relied on during my overseas experiences, and then how I created a way to teach it to others, and then to scale it.

"GlobalNiche was a forward-thinking leader in digital solutions and thought leader to a global cohort of founders and business women, as well as organizations serving female innovators.”

This reminds me that Tanya and I continued to deliver talks and workshops well into 2014 and later, working with the Women’s Startup Lab in Mountain View, Turkish Women’s International Network in Menlo Park, and a women executives group at Cisco in San Jose, and I’ve guest lectured to her business students at Santa Clara University for several years.

“Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing an ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity.
— Tanya Monsef

"Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing her ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity,” she says.

"GlobalNiche was awarded Top Instructor by Udemy in 2013 as the most enrolled course.” You’ll see in the quick video above that Udemy noted we enrolled students from 17 nations in 2013.

Tanya recalls our 2013 win of an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women by national and international gender equality foundations, global health nonprofits, and academic leadership centers.

The multi-year strategic change initiative of San Jose State University, Public Health Institute (PHI), World Pulse, the Global Women's Leadership Network, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and the Global Fund for Women recognized GlobalNiche's pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools for connecting and transforming communities world-wide.

In 2013 GlobalNiche won an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women, recognition of a pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools.
— Tanya Monsef

ON CONTRIBUTING TO THE FUTURE OF WORK MOVEMENT

In 2014, I looked back on the workforce pioneering I’d done during GlobalNiche, and noted how awareness and adoption was coming for people who hadn’t yet felt the need for this online survival method:

“I’m proud to have added definition to, contributed to & participated in the movement toward every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting and creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone, the incorporation of location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers, a new seriousness around digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking in general for personal and professional development, reinvisioning the future of work with online collaboration and cocreation, the adoption of global communication best practices, the absolute tidal wave of online content marketing, the rise of the transformational consumer.”

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