Endless Knots

Boston Globe endorses John Barros and so do I

In a rare full-page editorial, the Boston Globe today endorses two of the 12 candidates for Boston's preliminary mayoral election next Tues: John Barros and John Connolly. For those not in Boston, this is a run-off to narrow the field to the two candidates who will go head-to-head in November.

If I lived in Boston, my vote would go to John Barros.

I know John very well. I've sat in dozens of meeting with him, have spent many hours talking to him about strategy, have seen him present to large groups and small. John has vision, compassion, and intelligence, and, over the course of the campaign, I've watched his ideas about how to run one of the world's premier cities evolve.

It's very easy to idealize politicians and celebrities, even in this cynical world, and I can easily see John being lionized given his smarts, charm, talent, and good looks. But like all of us, John doesn't walk on water and, when you work as closely as we did (see below), you see "improvement opportunities," things that made me hestiate at first when I heard he was running. As I've watched the campaign (I went to see him talk at a friend's house very early on and fired off a note the next morning with suggestions for how to improve his pitch), I've seen him grow and become more clear about his plans, expand the purview of his concerns beyond education and the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and clarify what he means by "changing the conversation." I think he would make a very good mayor. 

Now, for those of you who don't know him...

Only 40 years old, John has seen a lot. The son of Cape Verdean immigrants, he grew up in the 'hood, went to the private Jesuit school, Boston College High, and Dartmouth, opted out of a career in New York finance in favor of coming home to work in his community. Anyone who's interacted with Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) knows the measure of its work: providing 225 units of permanently affordable housing on its 32 land-trust protected acres in Roxbury; working to create a charter school just a few doors from its office; helping engineer the turnaround of one of the city's most troubled schools; aiding scores of community residents with problems; and winning one of the US Department of Education's treasured Promise Neighborhood grants.

I first met John in 2010 when the Barr Foundation provided a grant to Interaction Institute for Social Change to hire network experts as advisors to three of its projects. Both Jeff Stamps and I were assigned to work with John at DSNI. I'd known about DSNI because I knew its first executive director, Peter Medoff. But I didn't know John until we started working with him. Soon I realized that this was a remarkable person, confident without being arrogant, warm without being fawning, and sought after without becoming a diva (what's a male, a divo?). He also has a great devoted family, including his wife Tchintcia, her siblings, and parents, and their growing family--two little sons and counting. (He once told me that they wanted to see a child in every seat around their large dining room table.)

It was one thing to be an external consultant to John, seeing him every couple of weeks, but after my husband died in June 2011, I was sitting in a meeting with John a few months later and impulsively agreed to be his "executive advisor," a fancy title for helping him with his correspondence and schedule.

Everyone who knows the work I do -- and have done over the years -- thought I was crazy to take this on, i.e. I essentially became his administrative assistant. The job itself was not the point for me. Although I had my usual roster of client engagements -- speeches, trainings, consulting -- I had a lot of time on my hands after Jeff died. Because we'd worked together for our entire lives with our home as our office and our schedules intertwined, I suddenly found myself in our life-long house alone day after day. I needed structure; I needed to see people; I needed a reason to get dressed. Anyone who's been through the death of a spouse understands.

So I took on this part-time job, which provided everything I was looking for, including learning first-hand about the nonprofit world in Boston, making some very good friends, and allowing me to have my Barbara Ehrenreich-like moment (see her book, Nickle and Dimed on her taking on menial jobs to write her book): I got to experience first-hand the difference between being regarded as a "world expert" and being someone's admin. (There are one or two people who've endorsed John whose behavior, I am certain, would have been quite different if they'd "known who I was." :) Another distinguished friend who works at Boston University told me that "most people wouldn't admit" to doing what I did.

Thus, this is how I got to know John -- very up-close. We didn't always agree. I've been working closely with senior executives in large organizations all my life so I had lots of opinions...but in the end (I left after nine months once I got my bearings), I came away knowing that he's a leader and he's a learner. Just right for Boston.

The photo here, courtesy of Travis Watson, shows Jeff and me at a meeting with John in January 2011. John and Jeff had special affection for each other and it's wonderful to be reminded of that in this picture. Thanks, Travis.

 

 

 

Mapping the president's org chart: Old post gets new life

Other long-time bloggers will recognize the phenom: a post written years ago suddenly gets lots of hits. I suppose it's no surprise why this post, written a month after the 2008 election, would be popular right now: "For Pres-elect Obama: Create transparent digital org chart."

Jeff Stamps, who invented OrgScope, the software that allows for digital mapping of complex organizations (all OrgScope posts at this link), took the lead in writing this post -- and he (not I, credit truly due to him) did the hard work of mapping the then-incoming Obama administration. In a few hours (we hope this doesn't drag on--it's election day in the US, all non-American readers), it will be time to update this chart again. We published this as a memo to the transition team, encouraging a style of open governing that would make it immensely easier for people to navigate government -- both those in the government and those needing government.

We've reprised these ideas more recently in regard to crisis mapping.

And while I'm on the subject of a single citizen/thinker/business person taking responsibility for researching and publishing information just because he knew it was important, I also want to point to Jeff's detailed work on following the money of the TARP (remember TARP?) funding back when the Bush administration first started bailing out the financial institutions.

OK. It's election day. What do I think? We need to update this chart with information for the turnover in the Obama administration that begins tomorrow.

 

Mapping the "New Citizens"

Thanks to our friends at TechSoup Global (see Glenn Fajardo’s, “Building Better Solutions Together, Faster”), we have been inspired to take a closer look at what’s happening with the “new citizens” movement, a grassroots effort that’s spawned its own ecology of adherents, events, organizations – and truly valuable output.

Known by different tags, including Gov 2.0 and civic engagement, and typically manifesting as, variously, hackathons, hackfests, startup weekends, and codefests, the idea is pretty simple: people interested in solving social/civic problems and who, bless them, possess advanced technology skills, come together for a time-bound event during which they take on thorny problems (see Random Hacks of Kindness, for example) and quickly turn out apps, platforms, and technology solutions that traditional IT organizations might labor over for long periods of time at great expense or perhaps never even consider. Consider just a few examples of events where savvy, energetic developers put their heads together to solve difficult problems in innovative ways:

• The Data Science Hackathon in April 2012 when some “200 data scientists from more than 10 cities around the world spent 24 hours in London designing solutions to help improve the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Air Quality Index,” according to Jessica Meyer Maria’s article in GovTech.
• Code for Oakland, now in its second year and part of the Code for America network, which tackled, among other things developing “a web helper” to assist kids missing class in getting caught up on work they’ve missed (see Angie Chang’s “Code For Oakland: The Most Diverse Hackathon Ever” on the Forbes site).
• Startup Weekend Seattle Gov, which spawned many good ideas, including the winner, WhichBus, which tells you, among other things, which bus to take.

Since so many of these efforts are cropping up, we thought it might be helpful to begin mapping a bit of this territory (we use OrgScope for this; here’s a link to additional OrgScope posts). Here is a first pass at mapping some of the groups:

Another cut maps efforts in a particular city, in this case Code for America’s 2012 work in Detroit:

Note that one focus area is Access to Transportation which, as a quick web search indicates, is similar to what is going on in Seattle where WhichBus won a Startup Weekend competition.

This is one of those posts that could go on forever, tracking down all of the cool things that are unfolding and discussing the seemingly endless possibilities for bringing in random developers to solve really tough stuff in record time.

If one goal of these collaborative efforts is to publicize and address complex issues, organizational maps can help organize and strengthen the terrain. The less isolated a network is, the better chance it has at succeeding. Why risk creating multiple, disconnected silos when an organizational map can help create a more elegant, highly-connected network of networks.

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"Make bureaucracy sexy"

Give yourself the gift of 12 minutes listening to Jennifer Pahlka's TED talk, "Coding a Better Government." She knows. Jen founded and is executive director of Code for America. Simple description: "Helps governments work better for everyone with the people and the power of the web."

 

I met Jen about five years ago when she called asking me to participate in what became Enterprise 2.0, then called Collaborate 2.0 ... I think. Liked her instantly. Plus she gave her daughter one of the all-time very cool names: Clementine.

We'll be posting more on this shortly but in the meantime listen to what she has to say. This great quote is at about 9 minutes.

 

 

The New Urban Mechanics

Now this is a really good idea from the City of Boston. Those in the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics have 21-century toolbelts, according to this article from Governing, naming "Mechanics" Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood "The 2011 Public Officials of the Year:"

When it comes to government innovation -- especially during tough times -- some of the best ideas come from thinking small. That’s the notion behind the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, a unique Boston IT agency focused on finding innovative ways to deliver services and increase citizen engagement. It’s like an in-house R&D shop for the city, and the two-person team that leads the office -- Nigel Jacob (left) and Chris Osgood -- says that a flexible focus on micro-projects is key. Most of the projects cost about $10,000, which may be subsidized through a combination of city operations funds and contributions from nonprofit and private partners. “In order to get these products up and running as quickly as possible and start showing value as quickly as possible, we try to make them as bite-sized as possible,” Jacob says.

But Jacob and Osgood’s small-scale focus has yielded big results. Their signature product, a maintenance-request app called Citizens Connect, has been downloaded more than 16,000 times and replicated in more than 20 countries since it was launched in 2009...

 

Tucsonans for Civility

From a friend of a friend who lives in Tucson in the winter. Take a look at what Tucsonans for Civility suggests. From his email:

As you can imagine, like everyone in this City, I am still mourning the senseless loss of life and injury to so many people. The shooting has caused great pain and sorrow, and yes anger, here and throughout the country...
 
For days after the tragedy, [we] thought about what we could do that might help the City move forward and at the same time help to create more civility in our private and public discourse across the country.
 
Last Tuesday we came up with the idea of issuing "A CALL TO AMERICA FOR CIVILITY FROM THE COMMUNITY OF TUCSON." Since then a small group of folks in Tucson have organized a web site http://tucsonansforcivility.com that calls on America for civility in our daily lives and in our political discourse. We hope that this Call will result in people across the country working to foster better understanding and constructive dialogue. As time goes by, we will also be attempting to initiate specific action to further this goal.

 

Medicare explained: Your monthly premium will be $0

Want to drive yourself completely mad? Help someone subscribe to the confusing insurance that supplements Medicare.

I don't mean supplements unless we're talking about Medicare Supplements which is different from Medicare Advantage plans, which may or may not be the official name of them, no, sorry, it is the name of some of them, which probably are Medigap plans that address the Medicare doughnut, which is not something you eat because if you're paying for it you don't have any money to buy food unless you never go to the doctor which you most likely would not be able to do because any doctor you've ever gone to or possibly heard of doesn't take whatever plan you're on, which is OK because you wouldn't be going for your annual physical anyway since Medicare doesn't pay for that, a nod, I would venture, to its illogic that prevention is not that profitable so why bother with that so having learned all of this through approximately three weeks on the phone during which time you contracted, suffered from, and recovered from at least the seasonal flu and perhaps swine, which you can't be vaccinated against due to the fact that you're not in a high risk group even though you got it, you call everyone else you know who had to sign up for insurance that lives in the neighborhood of Medicare whereupon you learn that, to a person, they impulsively signed up for something rather than jump out the window which would be unfortunate since your daily co-pays are so high that you'll lose your house if you even drive near the hospital, at which point you call your relative's primary care provider's office for the thirty-fourth time to discover that the doctor whom the insurance company just told you was covered by the plan is not covered by that plan ("it's a mistake on their site and we can't get them to fix it"), whereupon you scream ohmygodcanyoupleasejusttellmewhattosignhimupfor and the primary care's insurance expert, having run into this a time or two before, pulls the standard answer out of the pile, which is that there is only one plan that the office has a contract with and even though you've never heard of the plan and are slightly suspicious because when you look it up on their site you see that the monthly premium is $0 and think naturally it must be a total typo, leading to seven more hours on the phone wherein you make the insurance company representative swear in court that the premium is $0 (don't ask, Medicare just pays them a lump sum so they don't need to charge you, the consumer), which seems completely like a total lie and certainly has been designed to catch you out on your first claim, well, you're so exhausted by this point, not to mention your poor relative who's very good at abstract systems thinking and, shall we say, less inclined to tolerate this kind of thing, but who because he unlike you can read manuals actually reads the whole 3000-page document the government sends out, which means he knows a gap from a doughnut and you just say, ok, sign him up and if you never hear from me again it's because I have, as you can see, gone completely bonkers.

It's not covered.

The senior senator from Massachusetts

Once, at a memorial service for Irving, a shirt-tail relative whom I was quite fond of but in all honesty wasn't terribly close to nor had great contact with over the years, I became unreasonably upset.

Embarrassed, I said something to my cousin, who had been quite close to Irving (he was actually her uncle, not mine). "When someone dies, everyone you've ever known who's died dies again," she said, which immediately made me feel better.

Perhaps this helps explain how many are experiencing Senator Kennedy's death and why so many have made the trek to the Kennedy Library in the past 24 hours to honor him. Reliving other deaths aside, he was our senator (yes, I'm from Massachusetts), has been my senator for as long as I've lived here, and present enough that I can remember going to a meeting with him at the local junior high school about, guess what, healthcare as many as 17 years ago. Occasionally, I thought I saw him driving past my house on the way to the private school up the street that one of his sons attended (and which he did as well).

I've already told my favorite story about him here. Please see "Oh, hi, Ted" for a small peak at who the man really was in a unguarded moment.

And with his passing, may the search for the cure for brain cancer be amped up. It took the life of my best friend's husband in the same time that it did "Ted's."

Congratulations, Mr. Ambassador

Perhaps your world is different but for me it's not all that often someone I've known for nearly all my adult life is named U.S. Ambassador to Italy. Such is the case with David Thorne, to us, half of "Rose and David," whose confirmation is titled this way in Glen Johnson's piece in today's Boston Globe: "Newly named ambassador to Italy has longtime ties to Kerry."

Much deserved. David's been a backroom force in Democratic politics for a very long time. Speaks fluent Italian; lived there; very smart; acquired and edited New Age Journal back in the day; and, yes, very close to Senator John Kerry, as per all the details in the article. But when I read a piece like this one, I see a different person from the David we've known. Not that everything isn't true; it is. When I think of David, I see someone with a very warm smile, who always asks a question about how you are, who always gives a kiss and a hug, and who's always on his way somewhere.

Through Rose and David, we met the friends who've been among our very closest for 30 years, the parents of our godson...and for that alone we'll always love them. Congrats, for sure, David. And, as I said to Rose when we first heard the news, I'm thrilled that her calm and contemplative energy will now be settled on the European continent. Have a blast, you guys. And, David, we're, of course, expecting you to now truly bring about world peace.

"Voluntary Simplicity" and "The Living Universe"

By Jeff Stamps, guest blogger for Endless Knots

This is Sunday morning, a time when people in my culture are used to receiving or giving sermons on the greater meaning of life and the practical applicability of the Golden Rule ("do unto others.."). Today's modest effort has been stimulated by a recent book, The Living Universe, by an old friend, Duane Elgin, whose 1981 book, Voluntary Simplicity, still resonates almost 30 years after its publication.

Our first book came out at about the same time as Duane's. In Networking: The First Report and Directory (see our books), Jessica and I recognized networks as a new form of organization in the grassroots movements of the 1970s. In the "report" part of the book, we chronicled the emergence of groups that were to become the centers for today's nonprofit world. So we often crossed paths with Duane and soon became friends.

Duane is a big thinker and a simple liver, and has devoted a lifetime to the notion of human transformation and inspiring positive change. He was a futurist researcher with SRI International in the 1970s, and worked on a number of cutting edge projects including Changing Images of Man, a stunning report with Joseph Campbell, Willis Harmon, and O.W. Markley.

His latest book hinges on a simple question, one you can take a moment to answer yourself before you go on:

Is the universe dead or alive?

Deadness is the prevailing scientific view, a container of inert matter that is the physical layer upon which the miracle of life grows. However, most people answer quickly, intuitively--in a "blink"--that of course the thing-as-a-whole is more alive than dead.

For me, it crystallized another question to pose about human beings, which you might also answer:

Are our organizations dead or alive?

Deadness is the prevailing view. The deadness of inert matter is found in our conventional "machine model" of organizations, particularly Big Ones, and most especially government ones. Many of our friends who promote networks dismiss the physical hierarchy as an antiquated machine relic rather than an evolving human organization that is becoming more networked. Our organizations are our greatest unexploited resource for addressing the confluence of disaster, change, and opportunity that defines our transitional time, so the answer "dead or alive" really matters.

While organizations cannot live without people, they are also different from people, yet still distinctly human--and alive. Two great networks--one social, the other organizational--intersect in the interrelated configuration of jobs, positions, and roles. Together, we get stuff done that as individuals we cannot do alone (see our Working Papers for some deep diving on this theme).

GM was the epitome of the industrial model, the archetype of the impersonal machine organization. 'Nuf said with Chrysler already in bankruptcy and GM headed there shortly.

Our organizations never were machines, but regarding them as such ensures a failure to adapt and learn and grow.

So this is where The Living Universe took me. If you enjoy a mix of religious and scientific views on the how the universe lives and why it matters, you should read Duane's newest book.