The legacy of the Groundwire Dream Team

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Adapted from a note I sent to the Web of Change alumni listserv upon hearing of Groundwire shutting its doors on March 1. I felt compelled to pay some respects… 

Groundwire (and ONE Northwest) represented something of a North Star for me when i first got into digital strategy and online organizing work… coming out of a transformational but electrifying experience messing with technology and organizing on the Dean campaign in 2003, i was desperately looking around to see if anyone else was excited about the potential for organizing and social change in a networked world, and Gideon’s Movement as Network – and Marty Kearns’ Network Centric Advocacy – were among the only things around… Both pieces heavily influenced me as we tried our hand at working with orgs and started EchoDitto.

A few years later, my friend and mentor Leda convinced me to come to Web of Change, where I met Jodie Tonita and Steve Andersen, two of the smartest and most interesting people I had ever met in our world, and they TOO were part of this amazing group of people who identified as ONE/Northwest! (the mystique was even greater to an east coaster who had never really been to the PacNW)

The incredible organizing work that Jodie did to create such a powerful Web of Change event in 2006 is why I’m still involved today.

Steve turned me on to the power and potential of data, long before “big data” was Big Data — writing pieces like this about he we can be smarter about tracking and engaging supporters. Today he’s unsurprisingly part of the leadership team at the Salesforce Foundation, helping the entire NGO sector get smarter with data.

Then i finally met the rockstars that are Jon Stahl, Dave Averill, and Karen Uffelman not too much later, only to find that the genius — and nice people — pool at Groundwire ran deeper than any other place I had encountered.

Some of the most influential and important and well-articulated thought leadership in our space has come from this team.

Know what the #1 Google search result is for ‘engagement pyramid’ (at least in my bubble) — it’s Groundwire’s incredible resource which i’m sure countless members of this network have pulled out in trainings, presentations, meetings, planning sessions — i know i have: The Engagement Pyramid: Six Levels of Connecting People and Social Change

Karen’s ”What’s Your Engagement Superpower?” question has also become a staple for me.

The DIY Engagement Benchmarking Survey is a work of art in my book and has some of the best diagnostic questions anyone could ask in working with a team or organization and getting them to think about if and how they value people. Hats off to Drew Bernard who was behind Groundwire Labs and made lots of stuff like this happen before launching ActionSprout.

And Jon’s recent Engagement Organizing report continues the trend.

I’m sure there’s plenty more i’m missing, i just wanted to share a few of the big ways that Groundwire has made a difference in my life personally and professionally over the years — and, i believe, had an outsized impact on our entire community.

I’m so grateful to everyone who was part of the team and have deep admiration for the legacy you’ve left us. I’m consoled by the fact that the individuals who made Groundwire what it was will continue to do what they do best from many great new perches and have just as much (if not more) impact.

With great respect
Michael

Making sense of the datastreams of my life

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For a moment, looking at the data, I was beginning to conclude that my year had been a miserable failure.

I went into this year with a “Big Data” mentality — boundless enthusiasm to track as much of my life as humanly possible, with blind faith that all of these new data points and pretty dashboards would reveal fresh insights about how I live my life that would make my days on earth even better.  

I could lie and tell you that I went into this year with all kinds of clear goals that could easily be quantified or numerically tracked. But that’s precisely where I went wrong. Sure, there were plenty of things I wanted to make happen this year, and many other good and bad things that I could never have planned for. That’s life.

Few if any of the things (or experiences) that I wanted for 2012 could easily be monitored by a Fuel Band or Gmail meter. Which is why today I find myself sharing a seat with many a misguided digital director who, tracking only vanity metrics, finds himself crowing about how many page views or retweets he scored but knowing very little about how his work (or data) rolls up to anything that really matters. 

For example, isn’t it great that I put nearly 800 miles on my bike this year? Traveled to 32 cities in 8 countries? Well, I don’t know. Is it? (Cycling and travel destinations unrelated, but that would have been cool.)

I love cycling, so anything greater than 0 miles should mean that I spent at least a portion of my year doing something I love — 49 hours and 55 minutes to be precise, if Strava is to be believed. 

But the data doesn’t say anything about that epic loop Savage and I did in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom over the summer — chasing storms, cows, dirt roads, and our own physical limits. Nor does it capture the satisfaction of being submerged in Lake Anna moments after unclipping from a lake loop with Jake. And what about the tourists standing next to their cars atop Cadillac Mountain, begging Dave and me to explain how we got up there. Or the pride of completing my first metric century on West Virginia’s country roads.

Those are the datapoints I want to see at the end of a well-lived and hard-faught year. And they’re well within the realm of technology to deliver. New apps like Everyday.me and Timehop.com are already helping us remember what we did one or two years ago, so I can easily imagine similar tools for helping us surface the qualitative highlights of our year along with all the numbers. 

If I were training for something, then clearly some of these numbers would really matter in helping me track gradual progress toward milestones. But even without a race in sight, the Nike apps try to nudge me toward some kind of goals so that all this tracking they’re doing for me adds up to something  relevant. The Fuel band wants to keep me in a constant state of motion for as many days in a row as possible — and will offer me any flavor of goal and lots of reinforcement to make that happen. (I’ve taken 1.7M steps this year since June, for the record.)  

Nike+ has a famous person acknowledge me every time I beat my previous running time or distance, but it’s also pushing me to set some goals for how often I’ll run each week or month to prevent from leading me down another road of meaningless data. The latest message even comes with a generous dose of friendly peer pressure: ”Green level runners set a goal of 4 runs per week. Think you can handle it?” If I followed their lead, then maybe I’d know if i should be celebrating or crying over the 100.28 miles I pounded out since I started tracking in April. 

Before I give up on data for the sake of data, there’s one place where quantitative data alone may be useful – fact-checking our unreliable brains and, therefore, calibrating our perception of the world. Do you feel like you’re more diligent in responding to emails than everyone else? Gmail Meter‘s data on your emailing behavior would gladly tell you if you’re actually obsessive or just think you are. 

I knew I was traveling a ton this year, mostly all for work, and at a level that was starting to seem unsustainable. I estimated that I was gone nearly 1/3 of the time and averaging 2 trips per month. My reliable travel buddy TripIt tells me that I was, indeed, on the road 26 times in 2012, but away 41% of the year, which means that I actually underestimated how much I was traveling. Now I can use this intel to moderate my travel and set some targets for next year. 

But again, none of this travel data surfaces the indelible experience of smashing my head into a stone arch along the Great Wall of China. (Thank you very much, Qing Dynasty.)

Fortunately, much of this is changing. The various tools available for social media analytics (TwitterCounter, Crowdbooster, and the like) increasingly seem more geared to providing us with useful insights rather than simply summarizing our volume of activity: what are the best times of day to tweet to maximize exposure? which filters tend to correlate with the most likes on my instagram photos? etc. (check out statigr.am, very cool)

I’m an incredibly fortunate guy, as you can probably tell from all of the above, and I’m luck to have had an incredible year — full of love, new experiences, struggles, luck, loss, and everything in between. But I wouldn’t have known that from the stats of my life.

 

Remembering Gregor Barnum (1952-2012)

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I haven’t been able to board a plane without thinking of my friend Gregor Barnum since his tragic death several weeks ago.

Among other things, Gregor was obsessed with an obscure device called the trimtab, the tiny piece of an aircraft’s rudder which plays a disproportionately large role in keeping a plane in the air. He’d bring up the trimtab not just as an excuse to channel one of his favorite mentors, Buckminster Fuller (“Bucky”), but also to give us hope that no matter how small and insignificant we may feel in our work, we all have the potential for outsized impact.

I had the pleasure of getting to know and work with Gregor over the course of several years, after our mutual friend Jeffrey Hollender connected us to conspire on launching Seventh Generation’s first blog (including Jeffrey’s), the Seventh Generation “Nation” program, among other interesting digital engagement projects. “Work at Seventh Generation creating design science consciousness” he wrote in his twitter bio. 

In all his madness and endless circus of exciting activity, like helping to found B Corp and help set the gold standard for corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, he always found time to ask how I was during our weekly calls and meetings. The question was never a formality, and it was sacrilege to get down to business without covering our personal state of affairs, not to mention the state of world affairs. Sometimes we never made it to the official agenda. 


These conversations were the highlight of my day. Gregor, like few others, could make you feel like the exchange you were having was the most enthralling and fascinating part of his day. Remarkable. “Love the many to find the one,” he’d say.

“When my son was diagnosed with autism i began to see the world of specialness in people,” he explains in this interview, talking about some of the defining moments of his life. Here’s a beautiful video Gregor made sharing some moments with his son, Sean, last summer. 


On one occasion, I made the mistake of replying to Gregor’s “how are you doing — no, no, how are you REALLY doing?” questions by admitting that I was feeling somewhat overwhelmed. 

 

“What’s this BS about everyone being so busy!?” he yelped (more out of intellectual exasperation than actual frustration). “People keep telling me about their plates being so damn full. Since when was all of our life supposed to fit on a plate? Our lives are like airports, man. You just gotta make it flow — some things coming, others going, all at once. There is no plate — you just gotta be air traffic control.”


Gregor was the only student and philosopher of the world I’ve every truly met — constantly suspending judgement and evaluating the large, complex systems we find ourselves negotiating every day. He was never so wrapped up in it all that he couldn’t observe and question it, but never so removed that he couldn’t feel its pulse or disguise himself as a mere mortal when necessary. 


Some people walk through a grocery store and see products, price tags, or dinner. Gregor saw a tangled mess of supply chains, ethics, morals, and the future of civilization. It’s this kind of questioning and thinking that helped Seventh Generation design some of the most rigorous supply chain management and sustainability standards (and reporting) in the corporate world.

Gregor battled the ordinary… in pursuit of greater truths, trying to cut through “the constructs that just don’t work” … illusions of authority … to help us all design a better world. 

He was a provocateur in every way — from thought to poetic delivery. He questioned just about everything, and pushed anyone in his orbit to see the world in some radically new and beautiful ways, despite the grave challenges facing us. 

He never gave in to accepting the world around us as it merely was. Inkslinger, co-conspirator on the Seventh Generation’s blog project, put it best in his tribute post:

He was a mad man, a wild man, a sweet man, a brilliant man, and a magnificently beautiful one, too. To be in a room with Gregor was to be joyfully carried away to a place of hope and possibility that prior to my knowing him, I’d dared not believe in. That’s something Gregor would have no part of, for among all those here who hope so deeply and believe so strongly, Gregor hoped and believed more than any.

I take some comfort in hearing Gregor’s inspiring, curious, brilliant voice in this recorded conversation with Duke Stump as they deconstruct the worlds of marketing and corporate responsibility as we know it. Find yourself a nice perch and give it a listen. 

 

Here’s my favorite riff in that interview from Gregor – 

Bucky used to say one of the least used resources on the planet is all of this human consciousness that’s getting wasted in these very confined… these boxes we keep creating… there is a Phoenix happening. you ain’t gonna find it in the media. You gotta go and walk these communities and look into their eyes

There’s so much potential and possibility in all the broken people frm the old economy that are getting lifted in this phoenix feeling

I’m wrestling with my own discomfort over his death … not necessarily sadness, because he was so clearly in sync with the universe that I can only imagine he ultimately left in clarity and peace. Primarily I’m frustrated that the world did not get nearly enough time to appreciate and benefit from everything he was offering us. 

Here are some thoughts Gregor recorded (while driving!?) about existence… beginnings and endings… life and death… which seem especially fitting now:

 

Thank you, Gregor, for everything you did to help me and so many others see our potential to redefine this challenging world and make it a place that can thrive and survive for the next seven generations. 

See these interviews to learn more about this incredible man:

AlternativeChannel (2008)

Treehugger (2006)

 

UPDATE: Also see Jeffrey Hollender’s tribute to Gregor here on his blog. 

Entertainvertising – AVICII and Ralph Lauren “Silhouettes” music vid is example of advertising from future

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Why pay for the 10 second video ad that plays before a YouTube video when you can just make your ad the ENTIRE MUSIC VIDEO? (And reach a much larger and more desirable audience than from a TV ad)

That seems to be gamble that Ralph Lauren made with this new AVICII remix, which I stumbled upon today and think is brilliant. Sure, it’s also kind of gross in the “everything will become marketing in the future” kind of way, but that’s not my point here… 

Someone at Ralph Lauren was presumably responsible for marketing their new “Denim and Supply” line. Miraculously this person, or a forward-thinking ad agency / consultant, was given the leeway to try something new. 

Rather than produce a TV ad sampling a new, hot song and mixing it with some video images of young people having the time of their lives thanks to their Denim and Supply gear, they took they money they would have burned on TV and produced some high quality content that has the potental to move — a music video that you might actually want to watch and share, unlike the majority of TV ads. Plus they got 2.5 mins to tell a good story rather than 30 seconds. 

    So wha’ts the impact?

    • reach more of the demographic they want — young folks who are spending more time watching online video and hunting down new music online (actively) than they are watching TV commercials (passively)
    • audience will most likely receive this from others they know and trust rather than directly from the brand, which they are less likely to trust (see Edelman trust barometer on how we trust “people like us” over brands and indstitutions); looks like they also spent some money on online ads to build some initial awareness 
    • reach more people for less money; this is a guess as i have no idea the cost of the deal but dollar to dollar they cost of an online view will be far less than the TV view once they reach a certain threshold of views online; currently the video has nearly half a million views in just under a month)
    • create a positive emotional experience and assocation for the brand that is far more impactful and posiive and memorable than they could through a 30 or 60 sec TV ad
    • get more/better data about what’s working — digital is data-rich, unlike TV
    • the AVICII endorsement doesn’t really count for much since they arguably could have paid for the celeb endorsement in the traditional approach — although it’s possible that a popular DJ like AVICII wouldn’t have been willing to be part of a traditional ad for his own branding and identify purposes

    Faces of Memorial Day in Washington DC

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    I had a field day with my camera on Monday along the parade route on Constitution Ave. I’ve found that going to the parade is one of the only ways that I can properly appreciate the significance and weight of Memorial Day. 

    My neighbor and four time Purple Heart Ace Rosner used to drive his WWI Jeep in this parade, but he passed away earlier this year.

    There are many things to love about DC, but the setting and backdrop here makes universal things like parades and fireworks, which probably take place in every other town across America, seem that much more impressive, stately, and unique.

    Here are my favorite 30 shots from the parade – click slideshow / full screen mode.

    And a sneak preview:

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    Full set on Flickr >>