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 used, and await other editors, curators, contributors, and researchers.)

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’ll just head over to LInkedin…where I see we’ve breached 7 of 9 planetary boundaries, 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.

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.

LISTEN TO THE BIGGER PICTURE

You can listen here or read the transcript with credits here

“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.

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?”

• quoted from TheSiamSociety.org Lessons from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation: International Best Practices in Thailand

  Richard Engelhardt, Montira Horayangura Unakul and Julia Davies

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.

The September Issue: Drop is "the future of delivery"

“What does it look like when a pre-Series A startup is on newsstands in three national industry magazines at the same time? ”

— Like this!

Congrats to the young diverse team at Drop Delivery which Marijuana Venture calls in its cover story "The future of delivery".

Marijuana Venture writes: “After revolutionizing delivery tech in 2020, Drop Delivery is empowering businesses with even more customizable features to improve efficiency and increase sales.”

Women & Weed calls CEO Vanessa Gabriel “the delivery diva”.

Cannabis & Tech Today says Drop’s on a mission to help retailers optimize their day-to-day operations and delivery services with cutting-edge technology for a monthly subscription fee. That’s the SaaS model.

Why am I writing about Drop?

If you missed it, I’ve been pleased to be bringing my experience to Drop as their chief operating officer since last November!

The tech + cannabis industry space is having a particular moment, as legalization spreads to more states and during the pandemic “cannabis has become an essential household item.” California, which began adult-use sales in 2018, saw consumers rise to 45% of all adults in the first half of 2021 according to BDSA’s business intelligence and market share tracking. Consumption is on the rise across the nation.

“Cannabis has become an essential household item. Consumerism has exploded. Delivery is the future.”

…and the news does not stop.

Yesterday, Drop won the Poseidon Asset Management Green Shoots Pitch Forum, a special event that connects top-performing cannabis companies across all verticals (licensed and ancillary), with accredited investors. It’s organized by Poseidon, a first mover in the cannabis investment space named Top Hedge Fund Q3 2020 by Barclay Hedge. Winning sends Vanessa to pitch to investors on stage during MJUnpacked in Las Vegas in October, an industry conference for brands, retail executives, and investors.

Welcoming a babytech unicorn to the family

Mine is a household of entrepreneurs. My husband Burc and I have both been working in the tech venture and startup world for decades. We’ve done startups together too!

Today the Silicon Slopes Series-B IOT company he joined last year — Owlet Baby Care, which makes a smart sock to measure blood oxygen levels in infants, among other connected nursery products — announced their merger with a special acquisition corporation at a Wall Street valuation of more than $1 billion. That’s a unicorn in Silicon Valley parlance.

Among the new partners Owlet is gaining are some fashion world luminaries like Tommy Hilfiger and the chairman of Tom Ford, Domenico De Sole, who are sure to take Owlet from Utah to the world.

Congrats to everyone who made Owlet a success!

If I were writing the book on 2020, this would be the BLUF

“We are at war but most Americans don’t realize it and even fewer know the American president was installed to destroy us.” #fridaymorning #quoteoftheday #TrumpFailedAmerica #TRUMPDestroyedAMERICA #BookBoost #amwriting #Election2020 #VoteForOurLives pic.twitter.com/STOHuisOnF

— Trust is a license. Renew it. (@actuallyreal33) July 17, 2020

This is how a book written by the ‘generative journalism” account/“knowledge service in an infodemic” I contribute to would start. I believe that’s called BLUF: bottom line, up front.

What would the first sentence of YOUR book on 2020 be?

Making early sense of the pandemic

“I saw the coronavirus coming in January”

I saw the coronavirus coming in January and have been tracking the pandemic ever since. It’s been uniquely disturbing to see a mysterious wave of illness and death surging toward us, with far too many people refusing to face it.

~ Andrew M. Slavitt (former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)

“A wave of illness and death is surging toward us with far too many people refusing to face it”

I’d been looking to see which flus were coming out of China as my family members and business associates were heading to CES in Las Vegas in mid January. I wanted to know which bugs they might be dealing with at the massive consumer electronics trade show.

I’ve been highlighting points made on Twitter by various sources about the COVID-19 pandemic — and the antivax movement, which as it happens will be even more destructive a force in society with this true-blue no-vaccine killer virus on the loose.

So I found the pandemic in January. In February I found the general response we’d need to preserve our medical system and suppress the spread of the virus.

I'd discovered the below graph of Philadelphia vs. St. Louis deaths from the Spanish Flu, showing how social isolation helped depress the infections and deaths in one town while the other’s lax policy resulted in a spike of unnecessary deaths.

A response blueprint in February

I saw a German computer scientist share this Spanish Flu example of what we need to do as a society to flatten the curve of COVID

Correct public health policy saves lives

A French multinational biotech company shared this study of how public health decisions saved citizens and flattened the curve of the Spanish Flu

It was great to see a Bloomberg deep dive on the same example when it came out a few weeks later, and the term “flatten the curve” make its way into public health communications on COVID.

Collecting resources for all in March

Click through to reach my list.

I also follow these COVID lists, click on their names to see: Kim Mai-Cutler and Brian Koppelman.

I started a Twitter list of COVID-19 expert sources in early March.

It seemed especially important to gather my own science and public safety sources (and follow other lists compiled by early pandemic watchers) at a time when the president and far too many government leaders were ignoring or downplaying the disastrous and monumental impact of this virus on the planet’s human population. The disinformation campaign against early effective action will go down in history as a genocide.

“People said “I don’t need that leaflet - I don’t live here.”
That’s ok, viruses love to travel! ”

In early March I was activated by the Fire Department as an emergency response worker for disaster preparedness. SF had declared a health emergency the prior week. The activation meant passing out coronavirus health department leaflets downtown (wash your hands, don’t touch your face [impossible for humans I believe], elbow cough, make plans).

Handing out public health COVID preparation leaflets on that busy Financial District street corner was brutal. People didn’t want to hear it.

Some people laughed, some people said no!, some people said “I don’t need that - I don’t live here.” I thought, That’s ok, viruses love to travel! A handful were grateful and said “hey thanks for doing this.” They knew we’re all in it together and with 2 community transmission cases in SF that very day, the virus was already here, and also waiting in a cruise ship off the Golden Gate.

To be continued…