Jeff Jarvis has an oddly snarly post up today attacking the NYC Transit Workers Union for going on strike and demanding such things as the ability to retire at 55 on pension (after 20 years of service) and to maintain "artificial, wasteful, expensive manning levels" such as two persons per train. It got under my skin.
Leave aside the fact that the union is also fighting against the MTA's scary idea to run some trains without any human drivers or conductors at all, and the value of having a driver in front and a conductor in the middle of the train to make sure they aren't closing the doors on your leg before they pull out of the station. And leave aside the fact that the MTA has a billion dollar surplus and for years has carried two sets of books, to help hoodwink the public into swallowing fare increases that weren't needed (not something Jeff mentions).
What surprised me is Jeff's churlish attitude toward the notion that people ought to have a chance at a secure retirement after a lifetime of work. "I don’t have a pension, do you?" he writes. "I have a 401K, one for every employer in the last 20 years; I’m sure most of you are in similar boats. Retire at 55? Ha!"
I don't have a pension either, and I certainly don't expect to be able to retire at 55. But just because the private sector has been backing away from these kinds of obligations to employees, does that mean we as a society should embrace the notion of every-man-for-himself? That's what Jeff seems to be saying, and while I like and agree with him on lots of other things, on this one we part company. My philosophy is we're all in the same boat, and we have to look out for each other--not acquiesce in being divided and conquered.
My father and my in-laws all have solid pensions thanks to their years of service as public school teachers here in NY, and it's something my mother will have to help her when she retires, too. The generosity of those pension plans can be debated, and over the last few decades of contract negotiations, the terms have been altered to take into account different budgetary realities and different life expectancies. But the idea of helping working people to a dignified retirement hasn't gone away--nor should it.
Let's say you drove a bus for 20 years, or cleaned subway tracks. Twenty years in, and your body is starting to go. What are you supposed to do next, go to community college and learn to code html? Those of us who work in the knowledge business often forget that for our world to work, we still need other people to clean our offices, change the bedsheets in the hotels where we go to conferences, change the bedpans in the hospitals when we get sick, plough the snow off our streets, and make the trains run. Sure, it would be nice if they ran on time all the time, and if the conductors would hold the closing doors more often. But those people have as much a right to a decent standard of living--enough to raise a family on--and a dignified retirement, as everybody else.
Jeff, you've been running with the VC crowd too much. Get real.
Tags: transit strike Jeff Jarvis
That's what it should be called when you can post from your mechanic's waiting room. Yay free wifi!
Thanks, Billy!
Congressional Democrats are making a lot of noise about the Republican culture of cronyism and corruption lately--and with plenty of good cause. But in my humble opinion, they're going to have to do more than talk about how they're better than the Rs, if they're going to convince voters to put them back into power.
Two recent polls on attitudes towards political corruption ought to be instructive. According to an Associate Press/Ipsos poll, Democrats are seen as more ethical than Republicans by 36-33%, hardly a landslide. And the latest NBC/WSJ poll found a whopping 79 percent believe both political parties have an equal problem with corruption and illegal activities. Just 12 percent say Republicans have a bigger problem, while 5 percent say Democrats have the bigger problem.
The Dems could become more credible on this issue, but that's only IF they back up their own words with some actions. Unilaterally, they could change some of their behavior--say, by making public all their interventions with regulatory agencies--and then challenging Republicans to do the same. Or by listing all their earmarks. Or by rejecting all donations from lobbyists. Or, just for laughs, by posting all their votes on their websites. (Can you believe that almost no members of Congress even do that?)
My old pal Eric Schmeltzer has been on a tear about this for a while. See this post, for example.
Kent Bye has posted a long MP3 of a conversation we had a few weeks ago, sifting the lessons of the Rasiej campaign for open source politics. Check it out here. (And check out the rest of his site--he's working on a film about the media echo chamber and the Iraq War, and trying to do the whole thing open source. He's posted lots of video interviews of fascinating people, and if I understand him correctly, the video is there for other's taking.)
UPDATE: Kent wrote to clarify on that last point. He says:
I should clarify that I actually haven't released the video for remixing yet, and this will come after I finish my film. I've started to release some of the audio of the interviews and will be releasing more as I get the collaborative editing infrastructure up and running. I do however have many of the interviews transcribed and posted here.
I just posted this article over at Personal Democracy Forum. It's called: "Flickr, the Best $24.95 MoveOn Ever Spent."
If you’re a typical fan of Flickr, the community photo-sharing site that was recently bought by Yahoo, then you are undoubtedly already familiar with Flickr’s tagging system, which allows anyone who uploads a photo to the site to add his or her own topical notations to each photo. One of the site’s best features is its main tags page, where not only can you see some of the hottest tags in the last few days (snowday and lennon being two example), but you can also browse the site’s most popular tags, which are arranged in a “tag cloud” that shows each word (beach, birthday, cameraphone, japan, me, vacation) and indicates its relative popularity by the word’s type size. Click on any tag and you’re taken to a stream of recent public photos with that tag.
But if by some chance you stumble onto one Flickr member’s home page, you’ll discover a very odd-seeming list of tags in its cloud, led by antiroverally, approved, candlelight, cindysheehan, faceamerica, great, memberadded, mothers, photopetition, and vigil.
Welcome to the public Flickr account of MoveOn.org. With little notice, the giant liberal advocacy group has dipped its toes into the social networking slipstream, and so far it’s quite enthralled with the experiment.
Says MoveOn CTO Patrick Michael Kane, of the firm We Also Walk Dogs, “Flickr has got to be the best $24.95 we've ever spent. We've been able to review, organize and make available over 11,000 photos to MoveOn (and Flickr!) members.” In November alone, he says, the group uploaded over a gigabyte of photos, and it has been able to make photos from campaigns available in real time.
As far as I know, this is the first major use of Flickr by a political campaign. Individuals have attempted to make use of the site’s free service and simple tagging feature to express a collective point; for example the writer Rob Walker has spawned a haunting series of photos that are all tagged Mlkblvd to bring together photos of the many streets and boulevards across America that have been named for Martin Luther King Jr., quietly illustrating how far the country has to go before King’s vision of equality is realized. People have also spontaneously tagged their photos of political events, there are plenty of provocative photos that people have tagged “politics,” and Flickr does support the formation of groups around pictorial themes. But so far these efforts are very scattered.
Sharing the Work
MoveOn came to Flickr in large degree because its own internal system for receiving members’ photos of events, reviewing them and posting them wasn’t very functional. MoveOn has long used photos to show its members that they are part of something much larger; after the group helped spawn thousands of grass-roots candlelight vigils across America just before the invasion of Iraq, its staff put together an amazing page of photos showing how the events went worldwide. But managing the flood of photos that come in around each MoveOn event, Kane says, was complicated.
“Finding the best photos was difficult and the sheer number of photos meant that we often had to take photos offline to save disk space,” he explains. “The system was also very campaign-oriented -- it provided ways to get at photos in the context of a certain campaign, but not a great way to look at all the photos that MoveOn members had taken over time.”
Meanwhile, Kane says, he had been using Flickr to manage his personal photos and loved it. “So in March and April of this year, we started talking to the guys over at Flickr about the idea of building a distributed photo approval and storage application around their API.” An API—application program interface—is a bit of software that enables different programs to talk to each other. “The goal,” he says, “was to allow users to upload and view photos from any MoveOn event, while making sure that inappropriate pictures got filtered out.”
The system they built has two main parts: an email based photo uploader and a distributed photo approval application. It works like this, according to Kane:
We setup an email account for a campaign. Campaigners can associate any number of tags with that email account. Folks email photos in as attachments. A script looks at each email, finds the ones that have photos and uploads them to Flickr. On the MoveOn side, we keep some metadata about the photo: when it was uploaded, whether the person who sent them in was a MoveOn user or not etc.
At this point, the photos are all private -- the public can't view them. So, MoveOn volunteers use the "photo booth" application to review uploaded photos. Each photo gets at least two votes. If it's approved, the photo is marked public and becomes part of the Flickr photostream. Volunteers can also flag photos as "great", so we can quickly cherry pick great photos to highlight to MoveOn members.
By all indications, the system is working well. Since so many people are already familiar with emailing photos to friends or family, MoveOn’s email-based uploading process is a snap. And the photo approval process has turned into a great way to involve MoveOn volunteers. Kane reports that when the group was testing the review application, it asked volunteers to review 7,000 photos from previous events. “The folks that responded to the ask went through all 7,000 photos in less than 50 minutes and were disappointed when we ran out of pics for them to look at. Great stuff!”
Power to the Edges?
Apart from being able to save server space and involve volunteers, MoveOn’s engagement with Flickr has had some unexpected benefits that come precisely from using a platform that is designed to push power to the users. Kane recalls, “One of our campaigners wanted a slideshow of photos from a recent action and was able to put it together himself, just by selecting the tags he was interested in and using the Flickr slideshow app.” He adds, “It's also made finding pictures for the MoveOn homepage and other materials a snap -- MoveOn staff can easily browse photos by campaign or time period.”
And so can you. Kane says there have been more than a quarter million viewings of MoveOn’s photos on Flickr, and that’s without the group ever directly informing its members of the resource. MoveOn is also discovering lots of new contacts among Flickr users who have stumbled across its photos.
Though MoveOn is making only limited use of the Flickr toolset on its own homepage, where members are pointed to a simple slideshow, in the future Kane expects “to point folks towards the ‘most viewed’ or ‘most interesting’ lists for a given campaign, just like we point people to the photos that our volunteer reviewers have flagged as ‘great’ now.” He’s also thinking of adding geographic information to their photo-set, since they already know which event every photo has come from, and combining that with the Google Maps API to create instant national, state and local maps.
Where all this may lead is unclear. MoveOn members could start to use the group’s Flickr pages to engage in some lateral communication with each other, for example, since Flickr encourages people to leave comments on photos and also enables group forums. But it’s not likely that will happen without some instigation from the group’s leadership.
The larger lesson for other organizations is this: As social networking sites like Flickr, del.icio.us (also just bought by Yahoo!), and MySpace attract millions of users, it may make sense to go where the people already are and start playing with the same tools, not only because those tools may offer all kinds of benefits to the organization, but also to see what unexpected benefits may engage people. What MoveOn is doing with Flickr is just a beginning.
Is it my imagination, or has someone in Hollywood finally figured out how to make sure there's at least one decent film in the multiplex marketing pipeline every couple of weeks, instead of the usual shlock? Or are we just lucky to have Good Night and Good Luck, Syriana and Walk the Line playing in theatres these last few weeks? Or maybe the good people at Participant Productions (the producers of the first two films) have somehow managed to change the odds?
In any event, I just want to add my two cents to the pile. We saw Walk the Line this past weekend and really enjoyed it. Joaquin Phoenix (Johnny Cash) and Reese Witherspoon (June Carter) are both terrific, and that's without even realizing that they sing all the songs in the movie. Unlike Ray, another biopic about another iconic singer, Walk the Line stays closer to its personal subject and only occasionally reminds us about the times that were changing all around and through him. But the result is a richer portrait of the artist as a tortured man who doesn't even know if he deserves to live.
If I have any complaint about Walk the LIne, it's that it ends too soon. While I loved how the film uses Cash's famous 1968 concert at Folsom Prison to encapusulate his own redemption, I would have liked to see a little bit of the next 35 years--or, even better, a snippet of the real Cash performing later in life (the way the Tina Turner biopic ended with the real Turner triumphantly on stage.) Perhaps that's because I actually fell in love with Cash only recently, when I heard his rendition of U-2's One. There's so much pain and knowledge in his voice:
We’re one
But we’re not the same
We get to carry each other
Carry each other.
No matter. It's a great flim. See it before it's replaced by Dumb and Dumber 4.
P.S. Turns out my good friend Marc Cooper thinks the same way about both Walk the Line and Syriana.