• #HAILSTATE appears in the endzone of an annual football rivalry yesterday (Saturday, Nov 26)
• “Using a hashtag is [among other things] a way for someone to convey that they’re part of a certain scene.”
• In electoral politics, hashtags are becoming “an ideal way to snark.”
• Earlier in November: “‘#HashtagsArentAJobsBill.’ Oh, snap.“
• “The GOP got 20% more positive reactions [on Twitter] than Obama” on jobs (see chart)
• The #OWS presence on Twitter is more diffuse and widespread than the closed #teaparty network (see visualization)
• Campaign monitoring of Tweets for the 2012 election generates a tagcloud of top words in Tweets about the candidates and a column ranking of quantity of Tweets/candidate in real time (watch the data change)
• The overall rate of tweeting with the tags #ows, #occupy, and #occupywallstreet has been declining over the last 30 days (as of Nov 24) while the overall reach of tweeting with #ows has spread, globally

Today

“Twitter is the world’s largest focus group,” asserts Adam Green of 140elect.  Twitter is now being picked up and used by the political class (see “History” below). “The thing is,” explains Nancy Scola, “it’s not just the political class, traditionally defined. For every #FlipFlopMitt, a hashtag pushed by Perry’s presidential campaign, there’s an organic one started by some random person on the Internet.”  She continues, “Anyone with a free minute and a Twitter account can join in and, for better or for worse, find themselves part of a national media messaging battle.”

Since the police broke up Occupy Wall Street’s peaceful protests, maintaining momentum for #ows via social media may take on increasing importance. Meanwhile, Yochai Benkler at Harvard cautions that

“a complete retreat to an online-only form would be a mistake.

“The ability to focus on a national agenda will depend on actual, on-the-ground, face-to-face actions, laying your body down for your principles – with the ability to capture the images and project them to the world,” Mr. Benkler said, pointing to the outrage over the use of pepper spray at the University of California, Davis, last weekend [Nov 17-18] as an example of an encounter that ratcheted up the online conversation.

History

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a clear forerunner of Twitter in requiring users to compose short and clear messages, as well as providing precedent for the Twitter symbols of @ (for author identification) and # (for organizing content): IRC channel names require the first character to be either ‘&’, ‘#’, ‘+’ or ‘!‘ (”hereafter called “channel prefix“). In addition to inspiring the hashtag and address tag, just as Twitter contributes to the circulation of protest and repression that corporate-owned media chooses not to give much airtime, the IRC provided a communication route for news and information when mainstream media were being censored.

Writing for The Atlantic, Nancy Scola reports:

“Observers cite the 2009 Iranian elections (#IranElection) as the moment the tool really took hold in the political realm. Closer to home, the taxonomic application found high-profile usage when the White House encouraged people to use #immigration to discuss a major Obama immigration speech and #AskObama to group together questions for the president for an online forum hosted by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey.”

Then, a mere year ago, came the Arab Spring, fueled by social media – namely Facebook and Twitter.  These movements continue: #Jan25, #Egypt, #Tahrir, and #Syria. Protest spread from the Middle East to Spain in May: Take The Square.

And now, right here in the United States, #OWS.

This is how Occupy Wall Street began: as one of many half-formed plans circulating through conversations between [Kalle] Lasn and [Micah] White, who lives in Berkeley and has not seen Lasn in person for more than four years. Neither can recall who first had the idea of trying to take over lower Manhattan. In early June, Adbusters sent an e-mail to subscribers stating that “America needs its own Tahrir.” The next day, White wrote to Lasn that he was “very excited about the Occupy Wall Street meme. . . . I think we should make this happen.” He proposed three possible Web sites: OccupyWallStreet.org, AcampadaWallStreet.org, and TakeWallStreet.org.

“No. 1 is best,” Lasn replied, on June 9th. That evening, he registered OccupyWallStreet.org.

Orienting toward the Future

No one person creates a meme. Memes are articulations of a common consciousness, the expression of a deep and widely-shared intuition about lived experience at the frontiers of knowledge. Memes propagate because they resonate and are echoed by individual persons who recognize and act on an affinity with the images or sentiments the language evokes. Viewed historically, memes reflect the zeitgeist of an era; viewed contemporaneously – memes are best explained by the communication concept of interpellation. In plain language, interpellation is about being hailed, being called by persons, things, ideas, etc., into being “this way” or “that way,” into our individual/cultural/social identities: you and I are drawn to the things (objects, ideas) and people that each of us likes; why we like some things more than others has to do with exposure (familiarity) and difference (unfamiliarity). The important point is that being hailed is an interactive process, a dynamic exchange between those “things” (objects, ideas, other persons) and our selves (consciously and unconsciously).

For a meme to take off and become a meme, it has to get traction – the traction comes from the hailing process. The meme hollers “Yo! I’m here! Whatcha think?” If it catches your attention, this provides some ground. If you engage it – in any kind of way, through agreement or disagreement or mocking or celebration or whatever – this starts the foundation. If few others engage, too bad – no co-construction, no interaction = no meme. But if others also engage – whether in a similar or distinctive way than you – a potential starts to build. The process can happen quick or begin slowly; usually there is a spurt when the sucker simply takes off. Spurting remains unpredictable. The best science cannot guarantee when a meme will burst into public consciousness; art may fare slightly better but most memes become obvious in retrospect rather than prediction.

"No one gets rich on their own."

One of the early contributions to the momentum of Occupy Wall Street is the clarity with which Elizabeth Warren explains the economic situation. The 2 minute youtube video pictured above was made prior to OWS.  an interview with Elizabeth Warren on CNBC’s Squawk Box about “the moment” being offered by an upcoming Economic Stress Test. On youtube, that video slides into “Elizabeth Warren Makes Timmy Geithner Squirm Over AIG and Goldman Sachs Bailouts,” and then into “WHY OCCUPY WALL ST?,WHY,WHY,WHY? (MUST SEE!),” which splices an incredible range of news footage together, including Alan Greenspan’s confession to Henry Waxman that the idea he believed in for forty years about free markets’ ability to self-regulate turned out to be completely wrong.

A Revolutionary Moment?

Kalle Lasn, one of the creators of the Occupy Wall Street meme (founder of the Canadian magazine, Adbusters) has described the police raid to clear Zuccotti Park as “the latest in a series of crisis-driven opportunities.” In his interview with Mattathias Schwartz, Lasn asserts, “World wars, revolutions—from time to time, big things actually happen . . . When the moment is right, all it takes is a spark.”  Lasn is calling the evictions the end of Phase I and calling for Phase II… Originally,  ”Adbusters invited readers to “zero in on what our one demand will be.” The suggested ideas included a Presidential commission charged with ending the influence of money in politics, and a one-per-cent “Robin Hood tax” on all financial transactions.” Instead, the movement chose the anarchist path, and has refused to coalesce around any one demand.

#BuildProgramsNotPrisons

The question is both literal and figurative. Occupy Wall Street is resistance to the “prison” of the financial game created by financiers and other high stakes gamblers. Likewise, profiting from the penal system encourages profiling and other forms of social injustice. As a result, too many prisoners are Americans that we need contributing actively to the economy, supporting their families and improving their communities.

What if the focus group dimension of Twitter described by Adam Green could be extended as a platform for aggregating collective intelligence? Could crowd-sourcing the issues and ideas allow “the solutions” of Occupy Wall Street to take organic form as dictated by all of its advocates – perhaps even in a kind of competition-based collaboration with its detractors?

Has Twitter become a sufficiently strong medium for asserting political will? Can codes, programs, and applications be written to assess the dynamics of issues vis-a-vis events? Or must we continue to leave the direction of the country up to the closed decision-making of extreme pundits and politicians, as vetted by the corporately-owned mainstream media?

Benkler and Lasn are pointing the way – more physical gatherings, people massing in public spaces. There will continue to be violence from the establishment against the resistance. I confess that I am not sure if I have the guts to put my body on the line in the way so many already have. What I can do, at least for now, is try to design and advocate for non-violent means to #keepspreadingthememe.

Day 72, Occupy Wall Street
27 November 02011

All Communication Coordinators, First Responders, and everyone with duties in the Incident Command Structure as well as reporters, journalists, meteorologists, and news media editors, non-Deaf observers, and digital volunteers are invited to use the November 9th test of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) to participate in a social media communication experiment with Deaf citizens of the United States.

One of the stated goals of FEMA/Homeland Security’s first-ever, national-level test is to “identify any areas for improvements in the operation of the system during an emergency.”

The #demx research project investigates whether emergency warnings reach the Deaf community in a timely and understandable manner.

Deaf EMergency X

Using the label “Deaf Emergency” is itself a test to see if these words catch the Deaf eye better than current methods. The “X” stands for any variable: sometimes there is advance warning of an approaching hazard (such as a hurricane or winter storm), but part of what makes a crisis an emergency is that it happens suddenly and unpredictably: you do not know you are in danger, or why, until the disaster has already happened.

The practical outcomes of this research study are two-fold.

1. Deaf persons will learn more about the emergency response infrastructure, including the need for self-responsibility for planning and preparing in advance.
2. Emergency Managers, First Responders, and Volunteer Care Organizations will learn more about failures and successes with appropriate and adequate accommodations for communicating with Deaf citizens, including improvements to live captioning systems and the integration of professional sign language interpreters into long-term mitigation planning.

One-Way or Two-Way Communication?

While the EAS test is specifically designed to get the warning out, there are also serious concerns about how well First Responders engage Deaf individuals who have been harmed or are at risk of harm because of a disaster situation.

This research project is an effort to bring the needs of the Deaf community more clearly into view for visionaries within the field of Emergency Management.

Twittersphere
@Deaf_Emergency
#demx

Ben surveys a mile of huge stones carried by a flood

WAS*IS*WILLBE
Boulder, CO

Connecting the Dots

Will WAS*IS live?

Touched by the Weather

The continental United States experiences more sudden, severe weather than anyplace else on the globe. This astonishing fact occurs because of geography and patterns of wind. Less surprising but still fascinating is that most of the participants attending WAS*IS (including the social scientists) experienced a major weather event when they were young. Whether or not you believe humans have anything to do with global warming – or even in global warming itself, chances are increasing that you’ve been exposed to or affected by a recent severe weather event. At least, this is an assumption that social scientists can help assess.

• What are the costs of bad weather?
• Do we measure this in purely economic terms, or do we need to also understand the sociocultural implications as people adapt, grow, or fail to learn lessons from surviving a natural hazard?

The water is rising

Kevin and Bob: Doing Something Technical

The point of the Societal Impacts Program is to bring the social into team science:

SIP serves as a focal point for developing and supporting a closer relationship between weather researchers, operational forecasters, relevant end users,
and social scientists.

According to the veterans, some amazing things have happened during this 10th “summer workshop” exploring “what WAS to what IS the future” of integrated social and physical science. The representation of stakeholders at the 2011 WAS*IS is impressive: roughly half of the participants are professors, students and/or professional researchers from social science disciplines, with the other half including four television weathermen, two employees of for-profit business companies, and several National Weather Service employees, ranging from extensively-trained meteorologists and technicians in Weather Forecast Offices to national policy advisors and top-level agency directors.

We are, however, missing representation from the largest set of end-users, the diversity of publics who care about weather news. Social science is needed to identify

Caitlin and Jay, listening carefully.

• the very different reasons and diversity of needs of interested consumers of weather news;
• failures of education and training in making weather knowledge common – widely shared and collectively understood;
• social interactions of time and the timing of warnings with both short-fuse and long-fuse weather hazards (such as flash floods or hurricanes, respectively).

Did you know that the National Weather Service warning for Hurricane Katrina was the most precise and accurate warning in history? Not only did the official warning provide a very long lead time, it also predicted in acute detail the devastation about to occur.

A new line in the sand

Brittany's Emergency Management Support Statement

Including so many social scientists in the WAS*IS 2011 Summer Workshop raises the bar for organizers and participants too. The diversity of disciplinary backgrounds means the training model has to embrace new interaction capacities and grow. Just like people in other components of the weather enterprise, we are all responsible for keeping the relationships discovered here alive, active, and productive. Collectively, some stances need to be forged on a wider scale to support the emergence of this movement from its exclusive and cozy origins to an institutional force with considerable lateral reach. WAS*IS  is not only about the weather: its revolutionary model is an exemplar for harnessing collective intelligence in the face of our generation’s severe and complicated societal-level challenges.

Just as some of us will experience various emotions as this experience comes to a close, grief is part and parcel of the process of organizational maturity. It is like a phase shift from youth to early adulthood. The success of creating and delivering these great summer workshops leads to responsibility for nurturing the network’s potential to reach beyond scattered pairings and isolated studies. It is time for WAS*IS to become more than random motion in a chaotic system and self-organize into a system with power to lead institutional level change.

We have the technology!

(inspired by  Matt the Bionic Weatherman)

Spinney: Showing Us The Way

Bill Hooke flips the frame from defeat to opportunity

WAS*IS*WILLBE
Boulder, CO

“I’ll have some unleaded”

Alexis Networks argued that everyone should work a service job at some time in their life . . . she was trying to tolerate our waiter the human whirlwind – after all, we just wanted barbecue!  Her strategy was to jump scale: finding the direct interpersonal interaction challenging, she shifted her perspective to larger socioeconomic dynamics. This defused the possibility of unwelcome tension spoiling our meal.

Decisions: Economics and Value (I wonder: What is the price of ethics?)

We were recovering from a day of touring three flash flood scenes. The overall mood of the 2011 WAS*IS seems good – there is much laughter and comraderie despite the emotional undercurrents raised by facing the evidence of unnecessary human death. I am not sure how many of us were deeply contemplating the various roles we play in ‘the weather enterprise,’ but I think it had to be present. Queen Eve kept asking, How do we get people out of their cars and climbing to safety?

My (social science) answer is that we need to cultivate people’s ability to recognize what situation they’re in; more specifically, which timescale is most salient?

Caught in a storm

On Saturday, in turn with all the other social scientists here at WAS*IS, I gave a brief presentation on the methodologies from the discipline of Communication that I use in my work, ending with Bruce Tuckman’s model of the stages of group development:

If prevention is impossible, how do we recalibrate for continual recovery?

• forming
• storming
• norming
• performing

Ben The Curious asked what I’d observed of our group so far. My answer in the moment was positive and optimistic – I still believe! – but the critical discourse analyst in me started wondering: is this group going to engage ‘the storm‘ or skirt right through it? Will we ‘norm’ in ways that avoid the tensions among us or will we recognize the various timescales present and make decisions accordingly – and will we implement these decisions collectively or individually?

Weather and the challenges of forecasting are perfect metaphors for the development of the WAS*IS movement, especially if you take into account all of its participants and nested timescales.

Better Wet Than Dead

A locus for action?

Just like a severe weather event, group dynamics play out on multiple timescales. It is the convergence of trends and factors that generate a storm.  The group development stage of storming plays out, simultaneously, in the course of:

• a single day in the WAS*IS schedule
• the course of the 8-day workshop
• the life cycle of the WAS*IS movement

It seems to me that all of us ‘innocents’ in this year’s WAS*IS are witness and participant to a storm occurring at the higher level of the movement’s life cycle.  Whether we’re willing to get wet (or prefer to stay in our cars) is a collective decision that will have bearing on the future of these summer workshops.

Oh yea. I’m home. Not just back in Colorado, but in the company of ‘my people.’

Dan and Todd at the Weather Forecast Office, David Skaggs Research Center (NOAA), Boulder CO

At least at first glance, most of us appear to share an ethos that gathering in groups to work together for social change can lead to large-scale effects.

Work, by the way, is used here in the physics sense – “the amount of energy transferred by a force acting through a distance in the direction of the force.”  From my disciplinary perspective, the force at our disposal is language; the energy comes from each (and all) of our separate, specialized knowledges. Energy, in the physics sense, is an indirectly observed physical quantity.  In other words, even though energy does not have a form directly observable to human perception or technological detection, parameters can be established that allow the effect of energy to be measured.

Meteorologists are constantly grappling with the indeterminate appearance of energy in weather systems. Based on two and a half days of participant observation, the language of weather forecasting seems to mirror the chaos and uncertainties of severe storm emergence.

Mark Trail and The Weather Enterprise

What's missing?

Kinetic Kenny explained the marketing strategy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) to use the Mark Trail cartoon character (invented, 1946) to promote the use of weather alert radios (1997).  The ‘work’ that Kinetic Kenny and Julie the Jewel did in the opening WAS*IS presentation was to bring the social scientists in the room up to speed with the meteorologists regarding the mission of the National Weather Service. In other words, their energy was intended to transmit their intelligence through space in order to draw us all in to the weather enterprise.
<

Merger: physical science and social science

Problematics of definition and control quickly became apparent in the formative stages of the 2011 WAS*IS group’s discourse. Weather Forecasters and Broadcast Meteorologists want people to understand risks to their safety and take proper precautions. These professionals hold themselves to high standards and agonize over fatalities – especially those that are preventable. Why don’t people heed weather warnings?

“This is water and you will drown!”
(attribution credit requested)

Decision Support is a Communication Activity

Bill Hooke should give a TED Talk

When, how, and why people choose risk over safety is social behavior that has more to do with time than space. This is my hypothesis, anyway, and I’ll be grateful to anyone and everyone who shares research and resources on this matter!  Control is a discrete, technological phenomena usually achieved under (please correct me if I’m wrong!) strict constraints of immediacy: as soon as temporality extends beyond the limits of the Here-and-Now, prediction typically begins to weaken – especially if human beings are involved.

Even in the most tightly-circumscribed human process there are “too many factors,” as attested by Gaby Who Reads Minds. These factors are psychological and social: they multiply downstream during the inevitable unfolding of severe weather events. One must begin, therefore, with generalities – the patterns evident from aggregating the entire range of actual behaviors and correlating these directly observable phenomena with indirectly observable sources of influence.

Here’s what I see:

The primary pattern of meteorological communication with the public is confusion.

Lack of intradisciplinary agreement on meaning

The human element: Talk about uncertainty!

Which is worse: a watch, a warning, or an advisory?  The definitions combine spatial and temporal criteria in ways that make your head spin. As social media and other technologies allow the evolution of codes, the infighting over ownership of words and terms is intense (so I’m told). How is the public to be engaged in the co-communicative process of understanding the significance of weather measurements? Comprehension is mutually created – whether this is between individuals, among people with different demographic characteristics, or within hierarchical structures of policy construction, implementation, and enforcement.

Opening Reception: Rainbow over Boulder

Culture Change Underway!

The critique I’m offering of weather service related jargon is not actually a criticism. It is possible only because of the clarity with which the WAS*IS community is engaging the known dilemmas of protecting the public with the scientific tools of weather prediction. More than any other physical science, meteorologists are embracing the work of social scientists in a way that foreshadows the best potentials of team science. The newly-coined science of team science has been established on the precedents of medical/public health and safety research but has been slower to embrace social science because of a fascination with the information-processing capabilities of social networking. It seems to me both are needed in order to address wicked problems.

WAS*IS*WILLBE heralds new intellectual terrain. Let’s keep exciting each other!

Arrival at the National Center on Atmospheric Research

Springfield youth were asked to come up with ONE WORD to describe everyone in their randomly assigned group.

A Taste of College:
Youth Leadership Development Retreat
Amherst MA

Whenever I work in teams, I always mention the significance of following. It is rare, however, to be able to carry that conversation forward. I hope this time is different. Following is something all good leaders do: they understand when to follow someone else’s idea – in other words, effective leaders are highly attuned to time/timing as well as to the content or substance of conversation and group dynamics.

The “Taste of College” Retreat is over, but the dynamics it set in motion are barely begun. Will the emotions raised during those three days become a ripple that soon fades or a wave that builds to a powerful crest? Will all of those emotions simply add to past history, reinforcing understandings and relationships as they are already established within the larger structure of our society? If the emotions grow and build, what shore will the wave crash into and wipe clean?

Filling the Void of “Silence”

Silence (when you're used to constant stimulation - talking, activity, music, etc) can be uncomfortable! (Image borrowed from a tutorial on making a Prezi)

One of the young people who attended the Retreat noticed how hard it is to facilitate when “no one is talking.” Being comfortable with silence, waiting for someone else to think of something to say, is one of the hardest aspects of leadership. Within the planning team for the event, I didn’t always do the best with this myself.

The manager in me was hyper-conscious of timelines for decision-making, as well as how much participation, input and feedback is necessary to create a quality program. In the end, on the surface, we had a successful event. The youth all got along with each other, named something significant that they learned, and many expressed the desire to come back again next year. The “Public Service Announcements” regarding their visions for the future of Springfield are creative and compelling.

Behind the scenes, however, a few things happened that did not – and still don’t – feel good. The wave – or the ripple – from the Retreat will be influenced more by how the background issues get handled than by the visible surface of shiny videos and memories of fun times.

Diversity: Tensions and Loyalties

Youth brainstorm traits, skills, and examples of leaders & leadership.

Everyone always has their own perceptions of their unique experience (what I called “biography” in the opening presentation). At the same time, people share perceptions of experiences that feel common (the “social identities” part of the opening presentation). These commonalities usually fall along

• the lines of the body (how one feels about the way they are treated by others depending upon how they look) and
• the lines of the mind (how one thinks about the usual ways of talking and making sense of things that happen).

History (things that have happened in the past) is a kind of container for biography. “We all carry our racial identities on our shoulders,” as a friend of mine put it. Or, “Acting white in Springfield will get you killed,” as a youth in the Retreat said during the “fishbowl” activity on code-switching. “What does it mean to act white?” another youth asked in response. As I recall, there was no specific answer provided at the time. Talking about whiteness is a challenge many of the adult staff have been trying to meet for a long time.

Acting White

Since I was in a leadership position before and during the Retreat, most everyone probably noticed some of the things I said or did. In general, it is fair to say that I “acted white” most of the time, during planning (in advance of the event) and during delivery (the three days of the workshop). Let’s break it down from the outside (what could be observed by others) and from the inside (my self-perceptions and conscious reasons).

Distribution of 'agreement' and 'disagreement' activity: Do Leaders follow or challenge norms? (Unasked: Whose norms establish the point of reference?)

First, by virtue of my body (now, as an older white woman) and the socioeconomic class that I grew up in (new middle-class), I am in a position to be a link to the resources of a university. As an activist in a white body, I have assumed personal safety and low risk for most of the social justice causes I have endorsed. Throughout my life, I have exercised the privilege to go wherever I wanted to go, pretty much whenever I wanted to go there. This includes not going to places where I didn’t want to be – both physically (as in, certain neighborhoods) or mentally and emotionally (as in, exposing myself to the suffering of others not as lucky as me).

In counterpoint, I’ve labored hard for some twenty years to un-do the entrained attitudes of privilege and counter the desire to stay safe within the psychological space of what is familiar. Nonetheless, I am still embodied and enculturated as a white American. I tend to prefer structure, order, and predictability – even if only to push against or work around! Leave me in a vacuum long enough, and I’m going to do something! In retrospect, maybe I could have waited longer and/or done less, in order to enable others to step into the empty space and do more.

Structure: Change or the Status Quo

Here’s the thing. Structure pretty much rules. We are all caught up in a system that has roots going back centuries. The way governments, money, the military, science & technology and the arts work today is institutionalized in layers upon layers of law and custom. In practical terms, everything a person does as an individual gets swallowed up by the system. Lots of individuals doing the same kinds of “individual” things (such as, everyone trying to be a leader) is what savvy marketers and politicians exploit: they hook us around selfish needs and desires, things that make me feel good about me.

Lyrics to a rap by youth for the Future of Springfield

The only excuse I have for the design of the Retreat is knowledge. “I’ve been to a lot of retreats,” someone said, betraying (from my perspective) low expectations. I heard through the grapevine about someone else whose expectations were (perhaps!) set too high: that the Retreat would be “a life-transforming experience.”  My ambition was more in line with the latter. There was no reason for this not to be life-changing for everyone involved, except for the absence of adequate planning time before the Retreat, in order to forge more fundamental trust in the agreements we made with each other.

This means the knowledge I applied was riddled with things I did not know. Some of what I didn’t know I could have learned from co-organizers and facilitators in advance. Some of what I didn’t yet know was told to me both before and during the event, but I was not able to understand what it meant until after the fact. There are many more things that I do not know: either I have not yet realized the lesson or have not been exposed to enough variations to recognize the pattern. I still want to learn, so I can follow better and thus improve my own ability to inspire by recognizing when to follow and choosing to follow when following matters most to accomplishing effective leadership.

Acting into the Future – On Purpose

Between these two extremes of expectations that are “too high” or “too low” is the hard (sometimes even boring) work of co-creating new relationships based on the belief (one could call it faith) that humans can break free of the patterns of the past and become better at getting along and sharing the good things of life with each other.  If only it was so easy! I have not yet met anyone who was able to leap into the future without

• regurgitating a bunch of past experiences  (such as, making assumptions about others on the basis of stereotypes,
  

  Harder than it seems: Treating others with Respect & Learning each other's Languages.

  projecting a resemblance from someone else who wasn’t nice, etc.), &/or

• learning that what I know as polite and respectful is not necessarily understood that way by others.

Revisiting the “commonsense” guidelines shared by youth at the beginning of the Retreat, the example foremost in my mind is about the early curfew on Saturday. I sensed widespread exhaustion in the room, and had observable evidence to support it.  I did what I would want someone to do for me: set a limit so people could get more sleep. Turns out it was the adults who were so tired, not the kids! The “evidence” I observed from them had another cause. Unfortunately, I was not able to interpret their language quickly enough, and even when I became aware of a misjudgment I could not generate a remedy as fast as would have been ideal.

Sure wish I was better at adapting instantly to the need to change me! Finding myself caught up in patterns of behavior that look like the same old white ways truly sucks! I definitely missed a couple of special chances during the Retreat when I could have broken the mold, but they were not within my awareness at the time. Hints and wisps of feedback filtered into mind, but they all required the reinforcement of repetition before they could break through to realization.

It isn’t that learning is hard – our brains are wired for this. What is hard is letting go of what we already think!

The kids kept right on, though, putting what they need and understand into terms designed to show us grown-ups that the path toward a brighter future doesn’t have to be as hard as we sometimes make it out to be:

This equation was designed by a group of youth working exclusively in Spanish.

Facebook commentary after viewing the video

The unreality of DayGlow’s Escape Reality tour provides reprieve to the 24/7 demands of the socially-wired digital world. Some of my students think I would enjoy the concert. It seems possible, although the behavior required to secure tickets does not appeal. Descriptions of the emotions raised by the keyboard-and-mouse competition carefully calibrated to the timing of a ticket release has all the characteristics of addiction. A fan, however, might just call it passion. To be sprayed with paint while mass dancing to great music at eardrum-blasting decibels: you’ve always dreamed of it, right? Most of the young adults taking this class could hardly imagine anything better. The encompassing sensory experience fundamentally connects them with their bodies and each other in a shared physical space and time: it is as far from online social interaction as you can get. I suppose DayGlowers may text or Tweet or update their Facebook statuses just to tweak their friends – haha, I’m here and you’re not! - but the point of DayGlow is to experience an entirely different way of being together.

It’s about Identity, Stupid!

In the final small group discussion with the teacher, one of the students in class made an identity claim about technology that encompassed everyone regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and (to a lesser but still relevant extent) socioeconomic class. “Technology,” Jamar said, “is what makes us normal.” Orienting to society via the specific types of technology known as social media defines the digital native and simultaneously signals a potent site of contest over the future. What kind of person do you want to be? What kind of person are you now? Although these questions were not asked overtly, they underscored the Red Pill/Blue Pill debate over the prominence of technology in student’s lives. While embracing what they like and accommodating to what they must, many members of this first generation of digital natives are also deeply concerned about what it all means.

Doing Collective Intelligence

In an example of what I call social metonymy, the students’ final team video projects expose individual ambiguity about their personal responsibility for choosing the reality that will define their lives. At the same time the two videos serve to represent this choice as an either/or dichotomy between the Blue Pill and the Red Pill.  In “DayGlow Makes Us Normal,” students blend a sharp knowledge of context with an unapologetic stance in support of ‘the blue pill’ – meaning an uncritical embrace of technology, particularly in terms of how it can be used to serve the needs of the self. These young people show us that they are doing their best to deal with everything; however surviving means sometimes choosing not to know in order to have the ‘escape’ that recharges them to be able to carry on. Dfoley explains:

…when Steph approached us and asked us to research deeper into DAYGLOW, ask questions and look into the three social relations, we as a class became defensive and responded first with a stern “NO!” and then eased out of the conversation with “What if we learn bad things?” We didn’t want to know how they targeted their audiences, what producers or distributors they went through, if they were in fact illegally using music or did they work with certain music industries and is the paint made in an un-ethical environment? At this moment, we didn’t want to know any of these answers; we didn’t want to know if the three social relations that applied to DAYGLOW were good or bad. Because the truth is, DAYGLOW was and is are [sic] escape, we leave all of our troubles at the door and it facilitates an environment that is blind to color or cultural difference but sees the common ground of the human race as a whole and understands that when we enter we all are in an agreement that we simply want to be. And enjoy the overpowering feeling of the love for life you feel as you live the music.

The other video is less ambiguous, showing more of the Red Pill approach through some critical juxtapositions that seem to ask  ”Do We Have to Be This Way?” If you enlarge the Facebook commentary photograph, you’ll see a student’s explanation about the DayGlow footage being replaced by activism by teenagers in Arizona regarding changes to the curriculum there. Taken as a package, the two videos provide a fairly transparent perspective on a particular demographic subset of the Millennial Generation. What isn’t necessarily evident in the videos is learning some students described about ethnic components of their identities:

Steph talked about the fact that many of us saw things in a “white way”. We never thought about seeing things this way but it was seemingly apparent that we did. Seeing in a “white way” is similar to the idea of heteronormativity. Heterosexuality is unconsciously perceived as the correct way to live and therefore heterosexual individuals are unfairly privileged in the same way that white individuals are solely because of their race. As Sgershlak said, many white college students do not think about the opportunities they are presented with because they have always been there. Many of them have not faced much adversity if any at all and this has influenced their perspective on the world. (Kim Delehanty)

Until I was 10 years old, I lived in Boston, where the lifestyle was much laid back. Many of my friends parents would often stay home, either unemployed, laid-off, or fired. There was never a real need to have a intellectual conversation with anyone, mainly because people around you did not complete much schooling. However upon moving to the suburbs, my identity changed in order to fit in with my surrounding environment. Conversations now stemmed to “what do you want to be when you grow up”, “what colleges do you plan on applying to”. Coming from a schooling system which did not produce many graduates, to one which produced more college graduates than Boston did high-school graduates, I would say my identity changed dramatically and maybe for the best. Being the most Americanized Hispanic, also meant when it came time to identify with relatives and family, my identity would also have to change, to incorporate an Hispanic culture which has not been present for several years. (Steve Baez)

Cultivating a Growth Mindset

I assigned the students in this 100-level course a nearly impossible task – to complete team video projects representing their understanding of how media and culture combine in their personally lived experience of college today. I wanted them to demonstrate to me that they understood the concept of articulation as it is used in communication theory.

With inadequate tools, little-to-no experience, and minimal guidance, they exceeded my expectations. We all wish the production values were higher but the meaning of these videos is the thoughtfulness with which these young people have illustrated the incredible tensions of being among the first human beings to live immersed in the digital age.

The intellectual prompt provided as an anchor for the course was obscure at first: “Digital Realities and Analog Living.” We also viewed the 1999 movie, The Matrix, for use as a guiding metaphor as well as an example of transmedia storytelling. The students composed individual videos for their midterm projects, absorbed my critique, and went to work to show me how it really is.

Cassandra Jackman is hot. If you are into dance and you haven’t yet heard of her, you will – of this I am sure.

Watching with Untrained Eyes

I had to be coached not to clap at the wrong time, to be appropriately attentive. I was exposed to dance (mainly ballet) as a kid and didn’t get it. Enjoyed an Alvin Ailey show at some point and knew there was something going on but didn’t pursue it.  Wire Monkey got me excited a few years ago. Going in, all I knew about UMass’ annual “Alive with Dance” show is that each number was an original work by graduating dance majors. These seniors selected their topics a year in advance, did research, created the choreography, auditioned and selected dancers from among their peers, designed the set and chose the accompanying music.  I was unprepared for the quality of every performer and absolutely blown away by what I experienced as the collective intelligence of the troupe.

A Visceral Experience

The first three dances washed through me like emotion. Color, motion and sound swirled and merged seamlessly, one piece into another. This was not a fluke: return viewings on the 2^nd and 3^rd night elicited similar responses.  With each show I realized there was so much I had not taken in, either not noticed at all or not been able to retain in the glut of stimulation. On the first night, during the fourth number in the first half of the show, all of a sudden I discovered myself wondering, “Why is that (big black beautiful) man naked?” (He wasn’t actually!) It was not that I hadn’t been paying attention – I was taking in all that I could! It was the surprise of his appearance that rippled my perception at a level of imagery below words.  Everybody needs to see this, I thought to myself. Something is happening here.

The Strategic Use of Body

The fourth piece in the first half of the show, Lateralization by Cassandra Jackman, highlighted an African/African-American couple. For me, it signaled a dramatic shift in the storyline of the show.  Prior to this piece I had not yet noticed individual details of any of the dancers; it was as if I’d seen with soft eyes, taking in only the gestalt. Suddenly, a focal point emerged, casting the previous pieces into the realm of context. I began to marvel at how these young people had orchestrated their discrete works of art into a collective statement about empowerment, including even race relations and suggesting optimism for social change. Parallels and a narrative became apparent in the second half. I almost came out of my seat during the final, closing number when Cassandra, cast in one of her classmate’s pieces, kick-starts a wild profusion of creative resistance to the masks so many people seem resigned to wear. It is as if she throws the switch that changes the game.

Starting with a Silent Bang

The audience’s pre-show hubbub quieted immediately to the Orwellian announcement about emergency exits and prohibitions on the use of technology.  A soloist is illuminated as soon as the curtain opens and begins to move. I found myself waiting, as if expecting something else to happen, and then realize this is it: the show has begun. One dancer becomes three, music swells, a welter of emotions, red leotards, steady rhythm, perpetual motion, different threads of story, expressions of life’s cacophony of light and dark, the soloist isolated behind a scrim, a graceful sense of mourning followed by the emergence of joy. Layer upon layer unfolds but all I really see is pattern and distinction, no details no brown or white only coordinated bodies.

Then the rain begins. Gentle. Persistent. The second dance resonates with the season of spring, moistening and warming the hardened remains of winter, offering salve for wounds not yet healed.  “We walk through the shadows our hearts cast on our minds.” Unless, that is, you are one of the perky pink girls who follows in the third dance – seemingly untouched by pain. Light and carnival-like, an assembly line of frivolous, interchangeable white girls provides an airy release from the poignant plunge of reality.  Give us the Scott Joplin illusion of that happy era between the World Wars!

Lateralization enters a consciousness already stretched to the edges of emotional exertion.  The fourth dance evokes the show’s beginning but with a twist. Like the show’s first scene, the soloist begins in silence. However, in contrast with the brightly illuminated first dancer, Tara Brown is shrouded in shadow, the outline of her body tracing lines of quiet force into empty space. Complication emerges swiftly: two small non-symmetric groups appear in vibrant turn. Their bold blue and striped black-and-white costumes and compelling motions fade into peripheral vision once the couple appears. Soon, Cassandra’s bold embodiment fixes my gaze.

A Catalyst for Movement

I needed to watch the show three times to grasp its structure.  No doubt there are well-established logics for sequencing a dance program of individual works. I’ve since learned some details about the motivations for a few of the pieces: taken individually my read is hopefully recognizable as a viable interpretation of each choreographer’s intent, even if I failed to grasp the exact details of their visualizations. I wonder how they imagined the accumulated narrative, with each discrete piece aggregated into a whole story . . .

The five pieces in the second half of the show parallel the first half’s four parts in a few interesting ways. After intermission Sabra and Faded and Alive present a mix of a varied emotions much as Trouver la Lumiere did to open the first half of the show. Then, the third number in the second half, It’s All About Me, I Mean You, I Mean Me, provides a contemporary commentary on the ‘50’s rendition of the Roarin’ Twenties. These sassy dancers move nearly always in unison, perfect clockwork functionaries keeping up playful appearances despite the harsh and cynical backdrops from Barbara Kruger depicting the ironies of what it’s like to live now.

Gimme Five by Angela Bennett was the most complicated piece. It moved the mechanical behaviors of technological living to the foreground, almost as a counterpart to the sociocultural perspective offered in Jackman’s Lateralization. The psychological fluidity of Cassandra’s piece is counterpoised by Angela’s representation of rote, routine, automatic surrender and recovery.  We watch humans copy copy copy each other, if not in mimicry than still in lock-step: one behavior triggering a reciprocal response in unvarying repetition as if this is the most to which humans can aspire.  Yet something does change in the end, the push-pull of exclusion/inclusion and competing desires for belonging/autonomy moves the singularity of our human being through time, enabling re-orientation should one choose.

I am fascinated by how the first eight dances of the show can be understood as a repeating cycle. The first four pieces in the second half of the show reprise the first four pieces from the first half. Do humans need to witness repetition in order to recognize the social pattern? Once the pattern is realized, the stage is set for the dramatic action of the ninth and final dance.

Un-Masking One Reality to Create Another

A huge benefit of watching the show three times was increasing respect for the quality of all the dancers. Although my attention was riveted by a few at first, each viewing brought more of everyone’s talent into view. My appreciation for these young performers has continued to grow as I’ve sought to find the right words to express their accomplishment. These UMass Dance Majors have embraced art’s highest calling: to use illusion in service of illumination. They have achieved this by disciplining their bodies to perform at the very edge of courage.

The closing dance, Lasciere Me Eliminato, is dense with detail. Most of the dancers begin with masks, only three without. But I don’t notice this until the third time I watch, my eyes rapt in amazement of the sophisticated synchrony of syncopated motion on display from every dancer. There is a struggle. Something prevents forward motion. They reach in yearning and are hauled back as if shackled. “Going nowhere” – this phrase from the soundtrack. One dancer’s mask is removed, re-tied around an arm. Randomly (it seems) the dancers align in precise configuration, there is a slight pause, then WHAM! Cassandra’s triggering move sends an instantaneous ripple coursing with precision through the line, masks come off and all that shit gets wiped away. Free! Free at last! I can almost hear the refrain as the mood turns to peace: quiet, solemn, and graceful.

That a brown person was cast to dance-kick this new gear into motion is likely not pure coincidence. There are white dancers throwing off their masks too, choosing to refuse the current state of affairs. Meanwhile, the three originally unmasked dancers were all white. Were they pulling the strings before? A small percentage controlling the rest? I would have to see the show again to assess that hypothesis.

In the end, one of those unmasked dancers finds herself masked. Alone on stage, there is barely time to adjust before she sees from her new vantage point – and gasps.

Alive with Dance 2011: A Catalyst for Movement

1st Half:

Trouver la Lumiere by Shirah Burgey
Inner Shadows by Sierra Boyea
Ready . . . Again by Sarah Goddard
Lateralization by Cassandra Jackman

2nd Half:

Sabra by Hannah Katz
Faded and Alive by Jonalyn Bradshaw
It’s All About Me, I Mean You, I Mean Me by Emily Jacobson
“Gimme Five” by Angela Bennett
Lasciere Me Eliminato by Kayla Skerry

Themes:

“It is appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

Six students use this famous quote by Albert Einstein, comparing their experience of today’s technology glut with nuclear disaster.” Why are they so afraid? Einstein is an interesting source of wisdom, especially combined with Kimdelehanty’s quote from another scientist, Carl Sagan:

“We live in a society

exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which

hardly anyone knows anything about

science and technology.”

What was the setting and context of Sagan’s quote? “Hardly anyone” implies a ratio – who are the people included in “everyone”? Whose society is encompassed by “we”?

MrChadb0urne argues that Change Isn’t All Bad: “Technology’s not that bad, if you use it in moderation.” In a soothing voice, he offers this advice: “If it’s too much, take a break. No one’s gonna judge you for it. If they are gonna judge you for it, they’re too involved in technology and they need to calm down.” BrittRoo agrees, offering individual, meditative-type solutions: Balance. Slow down. See. Breathe.  AlPal13 suggests immersion,  “First step… drown out the rest of the world [with music].”  Hannah Cohen asks, “…if you can’t beat them, join them?”

“We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.” Demifo14 hints at narrowcasting and plays with identity as a reflection. Her mirror imagery is partly explained by wbectler3: “Like all structures, [technologies] have been developed by humans and, subsequently, both enable and limit human action” (wbectler3 quoting from the course text).

“Better hope you’re not alone,” sings Jack Johnson-Hope to beccasiminoko’s lament for fifth grade. tashk013 poses the question about choice given the unrelenting advertising bombardment, and kalf917 brings in Karl Marx: “The production of too many useless things results in too many useless people.” But what if it is up to us? “We become what we behold, we shape our tools, and then our tools shape us,” jakehoffman4 quotes Marshall McLuhan. Ktrychon questions and celebrates simultaneously, arguing “You Get What You Give,”and  “Let’s Stay Connected,” while claiming: “We live in a society that lacks passion.” (Where does passion live?)

Does cdanoff’s being “Caught Up In The Media” automatically preclude passion? Or is it only education that fails to inspire? “My teacher was having trouble figuring out the projector in class…but then finally figured it out.” It is unclear what csilv117 thinks about that struggle. Two students picked the same song by Citizen Cope, “Let The Drummer Kick,” to emphasize the war for consciousness. Two students (jakehoffman4 & mamciedupie503) also picked the same quote by Marshall McLuhan: “All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.”

Artificial and Arbitrary?

“How do you spend your time?” asks ddavies315, while hdanfort wonders “What were they thinking?” Both questions are posed literally, but can be extended to apply in wider fashion. Jamar points to rescue from hip hop artists Kid Cudi and Common, and gets a call out from the premier digital ethnographer and creator of the Visions of Students Today video documentation project, Dr Michael Wesch. Dr Wesch also commented on tashk03 and Ktrychon’s videos (previously linked). Air23JordanXXIII, please feel free to tell Ryan, no sweat – I got a spot for him in my next class, you bet. “Ducks!”

Who remembers the course prompt and our transmedia storytelling model? sbaez1440 pulled out a quote from The Matrix that omits a physical sense: “If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” Why might this be of interest?

The most challenging task as we move toward the two final projects will be deciding what articulations to emphasize (ideologically) and how much experimentation to conduct. What could we gain, for instance, by exploring the nationalism of natefoy’s “God Bless America” screenshot with Carlos123Mencia’s dormroom poster of Malcolm X?” Does it come down to a decision about whether or not we believe, as Hunte46 asks, if we can defeat the machine? Is competition the only frame possible? Is “the real danger … not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.” – Harris (quoted by smorlando3). Will we see/perceive differently enough if, as ckmetz suggests, we take the red pill? Sgershlak tells us we must adapt to succeed, but what adaptations are a) necessary, b) realistic, and c) ultimately functional? When simultaneity is the rule of the day, as when Csi describes seeing all three phases of water, “the vapor, the rain, and the ice” at the same time, how do you decide what truly guards you?

In the comments to follow, students will be responding with observations and identifications with various juxtapositions and articulations presented or hinted at in the preceding teacher’s analytical sampling. They’ll be working with the patterns and outliers evident in this collection of our class’s Visions of Students Today to produce two final videos.

Scenes:

Spaces (transportation):

• hallways (also stairs, elevator, doors)
• roads
• walking versus driving, skateboarding
• outdoor shots of campus, esp library
• indoor shots of library, dining hall, dorm rooms, classrooms (large lecture halls, smaller classrooms), dorm entrance (security), gymnasium, campus center, kitchens, Collegian staff office
• computer monitors, cell phones, television/videogame controllers
• music

Time (temporal dimension – where identities are made):

• statistics
• activities: FaceBook, UMail, Spark, Spire, Tumblr, Twitter, UMassWiki, Google, news, iTunes (and other music apps), basketball (viewing and playing), XBoxLive, classwork, eating, texting…

Content Themes

• control
• time
• the Matrix
• pros/cons of technology (some exaggerated claims & stereotypes)
• dread/hope (”key” – from Hymes’ rubric for analyzing an interpersonal situation communication situation; what equivalent analytic for video?)

Leticia Jáuregui described her experience starting up a business within the rapidly expanding field of social entrepreneurship to Pamela Hartigan, author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World.  I cite the whole title of Pamela’s book because I was thrilled to discover such a simple explanation for most of my biography:  I’m unreasonable!  The Global Summit reinvigorated hope that I can leverage this unreasonableness into new market creation which ripples out and contributes to positive changes for the world – especially we people living on earth now  and in the immediate next few generations. I realize this is a species-centric perspective, but there is tremendous potential when such selfishness is coupled within a matrix of relationships. Suddenly your health and well-being is recognizable as deeply intertwined with mine. By extension other living beings and the planet become relevant and valued, too.

The hybrid nature of innovative business

The Roundtable on Social Entrepreneurship with Leticia and Victoria Hale that Pamela facilitated was one of the many highlights of the conference (although it is impossible to generate a ranking because everything was of such high caliber).  “Real systems change is not just [the provision of] palliative goods and services,” Pamela explained. Systems change requires forging “partnerships […that…] leverage off each other in the positive sense to create synergies.” Learning how to accomplish this new balance between established modes of doing business (e.g., short-term, bottom line profitability for discrete individuals) with new sustainable modes of doing business (i.e., long-term, continuous resiliency with dispersed community benefits) was the main topic of this roundtable conversation.

Being (perceived as) unreasonable means one necessarily attracts a lot of negative attention: critiques, people telling you you’re foolish, resistance of all sorts. This can wear you down if you’re not able to apply a productive frame.  “You know you’re on the right path when just about everyone says you’re nuts.”  Victoria matter-of-factly told us about the importance of setbacks, teaching us how to interpret them as a way to “appreciate that the universe is moving.” Rather than viewing resistance and the need to alter or modify plans as a setback, view them as “revelations.”  “You can’t be too much of a fighter, not too committed to ‘my way’,” she told us, otherwise you miss important information about the world that you need to be aware of and adapt to in order to succeed.

“Kill all the Negative People”

Pamela proposed this a bumpersticker, and she’s only half-teasing!  Analisa kept reminding us that leadership and invention do not have to be lonely (at least not persistently and characteristically so), and no one would argue against constructive criticism. But there is a difference between criticism that contributes to one’s understanding about issues relevant to success, and complaints from people whose outlook is systematically negative. “Spend time,” Victoria continued, “with people who get it.” Her work in medical research goes against the grain. “Strategically, we do what the world needs,” and “In R&D, things change.” In practical terms, this means “work[ing] with funders who are very hands-off” and, in Pamela’s words, focusing on “the issue as the unit of development.”

Drawing from history, Pamela reminds us, “Many people come together from many different areas to make social movements.”  The challenge, of course, is how to work with the complexity and hybridity of all the various ways difference can cut across contemporary social forms of interaction.  Pamela suggested applying The Three P’s: Passion, Patience, and being with Positive people as a way to assess whether one is “in the right place at the right time.” She distinguished between “entrepreneurs” who don’t stick with bureaucracies for very long, and “intrapreneurs” who chip away from the inside, coming at things from within an organization or institution.

Dismissing the label of “social entrepreneur” as a term that has served its time, Pamela argued that we must begin to distinguish between “value appropriation” and “value creation.” We need “visionary pragmatists” who “refuse to take no for an answer” and thus come up with “fascinating solutions to intractable problems.”

“People are poor, not stupid”

Molly Tschang made this point a bit later in the afternoon during the presentation of Case Studies of Impact of Corporate Investments & Innovations on Global and Local Problems. In a significant way, Molly was talking about the power of “no.” Sometimes, no is the answer which has to be respected! Pamela did not mean “no” is always to be disregarded, she meant “no” should not stop us from persisting – with wisdom and awareness of consequences – in search of the goal. Victoria’s openness was quite beautiful in this regard: “I didn’t know how to ask; I was told.” When we’re working with intercultural differences, we have to become sensitive to nuances along a continuum that spans when it is the difference and when it is our reaction to difference that provides the stimulus for powerful learning.

Victoria, Pamela, and Leticia provided us with living examples from the ground-up of Molly’s top-down challenge regarding, “how to engage the full diversity of resources and bring them to bear on solving issues.”   If the goal is “how to make things work in disadvantaged communities,” then you cannot rely only on top-down policies and institutional vision. Molly insisted “you must adapt” and embrace the fact that “people see where they are” and are able to articulate their daily realities in ways that people from a distance are simply unable to perceive.

Future markets, Peer partnering, and the Wrong Question

Molly told us about a TED Fellow who inquired, “What’s the one thing you want to tell the world?” This, she insisted, is the wrong question.  There is no one thing, “its everything!” We are not, as Pamela put it, “generating the next widget.” We are engaged in behavioral change, systems change, and political processes. Molly encouraged us that the only way forward is to “acknowledge the complexity [rather than] be daunted by it.”  In other words, you’ll know you’re in the right place at the right time when you are aware of multiple realities intersecting in complementary ways.

When you sense the future with a vertical slope of 90-degrees, you are facing the moment described by Pamela as the juncture when “complex problems become opportunities.” You will inevitably be engaged with people who are – in some fundamental way – essentially different than you, and you will consider them peers because the knowledge base they bring is equal and necessarily in proportion with your own experience and skill. Leticia captured the phenomenological experience perfectly: “We started as an idea, got funded as an idea. The reality on the ground? The learning curve is still a wall.”