Wearing my ‘serial founder exploring starting a company’ hat, I advanced my passion project KIP3.
KIP is a seven-year long passion project to tackle the disinformation problem on social media that makes us poor information citizens and polarized neighbors who cannot take collective action in the face of threats like the climate crisis.
It’s a Wikipedia + Wordle for Current Affairs to make better citizens and voters…A comprehensive project that aims to promote trust and transparency in democracy while combating disinformation and corruption.The deliverables can be used individually or collectively to empower citizens with the knowledge and tools needed to critically evaluate information and build a network of trustworthy sources.Paying lip service is easy, that’s why people do it — to check a box that other people think is important, in the most efficient and expeditious way possible.
But lip service is also a waste of your resources, literally. You’ve wasted the opportunity to do something worthwhile for other people. Especially if you have a platform you can lend.
Washington Post says America needs civics and history to save democracy.
This is how the Post’s Editorial Board puts it today. “While the country spends about $50 federal dollars per student per year on science and math education, only five cents per year per student is allocated for civic education,” notes Lawrence Tribe whose tweet I first saw. “Democracy demands a population better educated in history and civics,” says the professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.
I said as much 8 months ago when announcing my pro-democracy knowledge project: America needs a re-education.
Helping people requires what one of my readers called “a new civil service journalism to inform citizens at a time when the Fourth Estate is dying and under attack, and news media has devolved into propaganda machines.”
My mission is to help with what comes next: when we dig out from the damage, there will be a massive need to educate people about what just happened.
Last June I wrote about my work on a curated knowledge & awareness project for concerned citizens.
Publishing friends, authors, business women, entrepreneurs: what do you think of this new initiative from Worth Media?
A new pipeline to publishing for their subject-matter expert members to help build and further their careers,
an opportunity for people who traditionally have a harder time getting published or recognized,
to be released through an imprint/house for an established publisher (Simon & Schuster),
and author retains the rights.
My first thought? Vanity press. In a downmarket for publishing.
And then, well, okay. It's a good business opportunity to provide publishing services direct to an underserved information-rich community. And, then, hey maybe better than OK. For everyone involved, including the readers of these books. Read about it here.
“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?
Our bookshelf of tomes about this dark chapter in American political history keeps growing…
“Age Of Lies. Rigged. Cold War. Hot Peace. Dirty Money. Unfreedom. Shadow State. Red Notice. Stable Genius. Untold Story. Putin’s People. Crime In Progress. Secret Meetings. Dark Towers. Trail Of Destruction. Age of Trump.”
We’ll keep adding to it until this chapter of history is fully written & in the dustbin.
Here’s to the heroes among us who are going to bring us through.
“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…
