Amsterbeth

Why I Quit Facebook

When Facebook first really started to take shape as a company, several friends of mine from my former employer went to go work for them.  This is how I found out about the site: "Hey, I started a new job at this new site. Check it out and tell me what you think."   So because of this, I was a pretty early adopter.

I didn't really get what it was good for and I sort of ignored it for a while.  But then it started to reach critical mass and everyone I had ever met in my life started to show up and there was a mass flurry of mutual friending.  I got back in touch with people I really liked but had lost touch with over the years.   I accepted a few friend requests from people I only knew in grade school.   At this time people were lamenting the word "friend" and I thought getting annoyed over the semantics of the word was a bit pointless. 

So the next thing that happened, of course, is that my newsfeed became crammed with updates of people I didn't know anymore.  Or became crammed with updates of people I knew pretty well , but who updated too often, or became crammed with "likes" from people who again, I am sure were perfectly nice, but were otherwise not in my daily life at all and never were. I became annoyed seeing the constant repetition of " so and so likes your status update"  when otherwise so and so wasn't in my life at all. I didn't want so and so in my face all the time. 

I decided to preserve my network and didn't unfriend anyone who wasn't an actual friend. I kept everyone. But I did block a lot of people from my newsfeed. My goal was to reclaim quality control over what I was seeing in my feed.   My litmus test was simple: "Does seeing this person's updates make my happy or unhappy?"  Happy, they stayed. Unhappy, they were blocked.   My decision had nothing to do with how well I knew the person or not.  Did their updates make me happy or not happy?

Next I connected my twitter account to my facebook account so that my twitter updates would feed into my facebook updates. But I hardly used twitter simply because I had already friended everyone I wanted to be networked with and didn't want to go through the process again. I also didn't like twitter for all the people I didn't know who could follow me. That felt unsettling and spammy. 

Next I started "liking" the pages of news and other media in an attempt to make my newsfeed an actual newsfeed. That worked ok. 

And so I've been coasting along like this for quite some time, being a vocal fan of this incredible social networking site.  And still, despite my proactiveness in trying to derive happiness from Facebook, it doesn't make me happy. Not for the content, but for the fact that it has become a genuine habit--a bad habit. I check it compulsively, all day long like taking a breath or going for a quick mental stretch. But it doesn't refresh me. It just distracts me and robs me of my abilty to concentrate for more than 5 minutes in a row. But we've all been trained to become multitaskers right? Yeah, that's bullshit. 

I bought an i-pad and the problem became worse. I said a while ago that I want technology to be efficient enought help me spend more time looking up and out, not down and in. The i-pad is incredibly efficent at helping you look down and in all the time.  I want to live in a three dimensional world and I am having trouble getting back there. 

But Facebook's latest redesign has helped me break free. The updates and real time feed send my brain in overdrive.  And it is not that I don't want people seeing every little thing I do on the site. I'm not all that protective of my privacy. The problem is I don't care to see every little thing everyone  else is doing. I literally do not care .I do not want to see a constant feed of someone's playlist on spotify. I feel like I am being forced to invade someone else's privacy, whether they care or not.  I don't want to see it and I am not going to spend anymore time on Facebook trying to block out what it shows me that makes me unhappy. 

So I quit Facebook.  And after even just two days, it feels really, really good. And I'm not going to be a nazi about it. If someone wants to show me something of course I will go look. Maybe I will still upload my photos there, I'm not sure. But I quit. I've stopped using it.  The people from my past it brought back into my life that I want to keep I still get to keep.  But I won't see their updates unless they tweet them.

I quit. And now I'm going to go sit in my garden  and look up and out.  

 

(P.S. my twitter handle is @bethmassa)

 

The Life Aquatic

It has rained almost every day, all day, for the last two months.  We have had two days of cloudy-but-rainless sky out of the last 60. We used the first one to cut back the overgrown ivy, weeds, bushes and grass by hand.  We used the second to do the same thing again with the new electric lawn equipment we'd purchased that morning.  My house rocks when it is windy. It doesn't rock so much from wake when boaters pass by too fast. This surprises me.  

In the mornings the canal is overcome with algae and it looks neon green like the Chicago River on St. Patrick's Day. 

We have a familiy of swans, 7 babies and two parents, who come up to our house about once every two weeks. I can't help but feed them just a little. The babies are twice as big as your average duck and have gray beaks. The parents have orange beaks and always bookend the babies when they paddle up to our house. 

Around 3:00 the neighborhood ducks take naps, floating on the water with their bills tucked under their wings. 

Raafje, our little black shorthair cat, wants to be outside all day, every day. The two sets of french doors that open into the garden are considered the "danger zone."  She is perfectly happy to hang out with us outside or inside unless we are in the danger zone--which is an area where she may potentially be scooped up and placed inside against her will. You cannot catch Raafje in the danger zone.  She's fast, sleek, nimble and stealth.  The only time we can get her to come in is usually in the middle of the night. We must purposefully abandon her out there for several hours so the fear of her NEVER BEING LET INSIDE EVER AGAIN WHERE THE FOOD IS, momentarily outweighs her residual panther-like inclinations.

Natalia, our Norwegian forest cat,  jumps from the top of the bookshelf or scales the wall from a cat condo and will hide in the crawl space above the kitchen for hours.  She's convinced she can't jump down so we have to assist her with a cat elevator.  She loves the outdoors too and is an expert dragonfly catcher. 

Regen, our shy girl, spends most of the day downstairs, but in the afternoon she comes outside and has her own secret spot where she scales the edge of the house and hangs out in the neighbor's yard. 

Two of our three cats have accidentally gone swimming. Both are fine. 

Someone stole our  hand-made garden table that came with two hand made chairs. 

We discovered the Twiske which is this rather fabulous nature preserve just 15 minutes' bike ride from our house. 

We discovered Mike's gym which is a 10 minute bike ride from our house. It's a boxing gym that allows full use of the cardio and weight machines for 1/4th the monthly rate I was being charged at David Lloyd. 

We discovered Landmarkt (landmarkt.nl) which is like Marqt in Amsterdam but even more local, and in many ways, way better. 

Our Albert Heijn is XL and has hand-held scanners for quick check out. It also does plastic recycling as well as paper and glass (this is not a common occurrence around here). 

We discovered the downside of having fruit trees in your yard. You end up with more fruits than you could ever eat or give away, and you get a lot of flies and fruitflies.

Spiders love flies and fruitflies. We watch our spiders get bigger every day.  I have a terrible fear of spiders that I had to get over immediately. 

I am covered in mosquito bites but I don't mind it. They remind me of my childhood summers. 

I saw a little bird with the most vibrant blue feathers with a yellow stripe. He looked like he came from the Amazon. I tried to take his picture but it didn't turn out very well. 

We came across a Newfoundland Rescue Dog competition while taking a walk in the Twiske. 

Boats and barges cruise by our window every day. The passengers wave and we wave back. Sometimes we wave and they wave back. 

We discovered we had a rose bush when suddenly about a week ago these incredible fuchsia blooms appeared out of nowhere along our walkway.

And people say we'd never see anything exciting when we moved outside of the center of Amsterdam...

_______________________________________

Two pretty profound events happened in short succession of each other almost two years ago that marked an angular turn in my life: My beloved stepfather, who was hugely influential to me and supportive of me, passed away unexpectedly, and I turned 40. 

The occurrence of these two events caused me to take stock: How do I want to live the back half of my life? What kind of person do I want to become? 

I realized that a huge part of who I want to become needs to be woven deeply into where I live. Everything was coming to a head. I have always gravitated toward cities; I love the excitement. I love the access. I love stepping outside my front door and feeling like I'm already somewhere that I'd want to be.  But getting older, my preference for absolute domestic serenity, is starting to scream at me. I guess this is what a maternal clock ticking must sound like to those who have one of those maternal clocky ticky things. 

So I started to write a list. What would my dream house of the future be? It would need to be a free-standing house with no shared walls. It would need to be close to the center of Amsterdam. It would need to be almost silent all of the time. It would need to be on the ground--I wanted more to care for and I wanted green space for my cats. It would need to be very close to water. 

Michael and I started taking little weekend trips to neighboring towns to see if we connected with anything. We didn't. Every little town we looked at sent us speeding back to Amsterdam.

But Amstelveen was nice. It was close enough. There were plenty of free standing houses. And it had a nice little vibe I could relate to. Every house in Amstelveen that met my requirements would laugh in the face of my budget.  So, I resolved myself to the fact that I couldn't afford what I wanted. Maybe weekends in a small farm house in France would be a nice option to ponder.

So we went to northwest France and looked at small farm houses.  Turns out small farm houses in France are WAY farther away from Amsterdam than, say, Purmerend.   There was no denying that ironically claustrophobic feeling that left me rather breathless wasn't going to go away if we moved anywhere out of the city.   

I woke up one day, as I often do, with a stream of fully formed thoughts presented like the morning newspaper on a doorstep: what would you be willing to give up to get everything else you wanted in this dream house?  

I decided size could be compromised. Even the quality of the house.  It had never occurred to me to look under my budget. And literally the minute that I did, I looked on funda.nl, the Dutch real estate web site that obsesses me, and there she was--the perfect house--there was Hexenketel the Houseboat looking back at me with soft doe eyes.  How could it not have occurred to me this whole time that a houseboat was a great opportunity to build the lifestyle I long for?

 Nope. No. No. No. Too good to be true. I may have been mesmerized by the images on that real estate listing for a second, but the savage housing market in Amsterdam had hardened me. There is no way that a house which was 30 square meters bigger than my current home  with all those hand made features, an atelier, a sauna, six fruit trees, and a separate office, was on the market for a lot less than what I paid for my city pad without something being catastrophically wrong with it. Still, we decided, just out of curiosity, to take a look. 

Michael and I drove out to the house, which lay just on the northwest corner of the A10, the main bypass around Amsterdam.  The current owners were out doing some painting touch ups on the atelier.

Oh dear...the house was 10 times better looking in real life than it was in the pictures on the website. And the owners were nice...so very nice. And the street has nothing on either side of it but water. And the street looks exactly like the street of houseboats just one block away from my home in Seattle. And my stepfather would have really loved this place. And this house is pretty much the culmination of everything that I am and want a be, or want to be again: a person who lives on water, who wants a house that brings the outside in, and has a place that will always need to be taken care of.  Amsterdam who? 

We went back to our house on the Overtoom. I love this house. I love its location. I love looking across the balcony into the neighbor's living rooms. I love the history of it.  I was overwhelmed by the idea of moving--the process, all the work.  But I couldn't stop thinking about Hexenketel. Here was a house that was offering everything I wanted and more. Now I had to ask myself, "Do you really want what you thought you wanted?"  I couldn't stop asking Michael what he thought, what he wanted.  

An interlude. People always ask me, "What about Michael? What does he want?"  The truth of it is, he a low maintenance guy, and I'm, well, not so low maintenance. Michael has this great ability to tune out minor annoyances, where I do just the opposite--I can do nothing by hyperfocus on them. I can only hope and trust that Michael is happy to go long for the ride as I cave in to my cyclical restlessness. He knows me well enough to know that each move gets us closer to my elusive contentment. Maybe I'll never totally get there, but we do have adventures along the way. 

After about our 5th visit to the houseboat I finally said to Michael, "We'd be stupid not to buy this place."  He said, stoically, "Well, then we must buy it." 

And that we did.   

 

Moby and Me

Life is jam-packed at the moment.  We're moving. We need to find renters for two houses. Work is a mad rush to complete projects before the end of the fiscal year.  The entire summer is planned out with business trips and travel to see family and friends. None of this anything to complain about. It all just feels very scheduled, controlled, and way too adult. 

Last night, we had very wonderful friends over to the house. It was Michael's birthday.  I poured them prosecco and served them little chocolates, strawberries, cheeses, cakes, and hummus on endive leaves. The sun visited upon us just long enough before we had to walk up the street to go see Moby. 

I've been to a lot of Moby concerts--everything from arena events to intimate DJ sets in small clubs.  I've even met him a few times and probably reviewed one or two of his albums.  Last night, my friends and I, pouring forth with conversation and good cheer, stepped into the Melkweg and as soon as Moby came on stage with a full band armed with electronic instruments (save for his bongos), I was washed over in emotion. Next is the [sentimentalit-]E indeed. 

Michael wore his "moby" hat. It's 20 years old. I think we got it through mail order after the first time we saw him--which happened to be in Indianapolis, Indiana in the middle of a food court in a mall after hours.  It was a showcase set with Vapour Space, the Aphex Twin, and Orbital (and who said the Midwest has no underground? :-).  On the front is a stitched rendition of the little cartoon character self-portrait Moby used to draw of himself. 

"Twenty years ago" seemed to be the theme of the night. Moby talked about how he wanted to move to Amsterdam the first time he ever visited it 20 years ago. My friends and I all toasted each other because we felt the same but actually DID move.  He said that New York would have been a better place if the Dutch had never sold it. And then he dedicated "In My Heart" to all the old-school ravers. I felt like he was talking just to our little tribe at that moment. I realized in that instant how I could mark large chapters of my life by his music, how good so much of his music is, and how I'd never really realized how prominent is was because I guess he only "belonged" to the ravers for such a short period of time before he started selling his music for TV commercials.  A guy's gotta eat.  Now he eats in a castle somewhere in California.  But I'm not cynical. Quite the opposite. I couldn't remove the dopey smile from my face. Michael and I held hands the entire concert. Pass me the insulin. 

So thanks, Moby. Thanks for the joy you brought us when dance music broke our world open 20 years ago. Thanks for the music I listen to at the gym. Thanks for the techno ballads, the ambient CD, and that famous punk rock misstep album.  You made us happy. You left us satisfied.  You've given us a lot.  And last night, we caught up to the whale. 

 

Spoon Fed: A Letter to the New Editor of Bon Appetit

Dear Bon Appetit,

 I'm so deeply disappointed with the redesign of this magazine, Bon Appetit, that I have had in my home my entire adult life. It's not really even a redesign, is it? It's just a lazy amalgamation of every other contemporary lifestyle magazine from Esquire to O.

I used to love bypassing the table of contents, letting the recipes and food photography capture my eye. Now all of that is lost in a wash of iconography, dumbing down, and desperately cute content ("Text After Marriage" --could this self-congratulatory quip be any less appetizing?).

 The former Bon Appetit had an obvious point of view and appealed to any slice or cross section of demographic who had a common interest in food. Now, you're trying to play all sides through content and advertising: cosmetics, cars, Botox. Looking through previous issues, all that was still there, but now I find in this recent issue no visual distinction among any of it. 

Mr. Rapoport explains in his editor's letter that "We don't want to just tell you what to cook--we want to tell you how to cook it, and why to cook it, now."   Isn't a recipe indeed instructions on how to cook something?  I don't recall at any time in the former magazine where there was just a blank page save for the words "Carbonara Sauce."   For your readers who are perfectly happy figuring out the "why" all on their own, you should have given them fair warning that your new lifestyle magazine was going to try impose lifestyle on those who already have it. 

 "How to Drink Like an Italian." Didn't I read that article in GQ last month? Oh wait, this GQ, just the food edition.

 You've betrayed your loyal readers with this redesign. You've put too much mass in this medium. The kitchen is supposed to be a retreat from the inescapable media bombardments of our daily lives. The former magazine was a door to that retreat. You've stripped the magazine of its distinction and elegance. We need more of these things now, not less.

 You've made the magazine completely indistinguishable. This new Bon Appetit is the New Coke. Change it back.

With respect and optimism,

Beth Massa

A former reader who will now use the future pages of your magazine as starter fuel for my barbeque. 

 

Chapter Eight: We're This Close

(I dedicate this blog entry to Michael, Paul, Janneke, Saskia, Theo and especially to Gonnie, who gave me the permission I always had all along. I thank the WorldReader.org Virtual Flash Mob participants for donating their energy, time, and money to our grand failed experiment).

I've been on some sort of mental hiatus regarding this story. I haven't been able to just sit down and write this blog entry. I feel vulnerable because once you put it out there, there is no going back. My ambition is nothing smaller than to totally change the world. My contribution will be no bigger than anyone else's, which is the core of the vision.

I've also waited to write this final chapter because it felt instinctively correct to do so. Yesterday, I saw a banner ad for the WWF where you can SMS-donate $1 and a list of sponsors would match the donation. It was easy. It was fast. It could be even better. And it gave me the indication it's time to return to this blog.

This is the final chapter that I can write by myself. The rest, I hope and I dream, we will write together.

There are a lot of charitable organizations that are using the web and social media to bring people together based on their common compassions. So why haven't these sites changed the world in a hugely significant way? I believe it is for the following reasons:

• The transactional moment needs to be easy and fast to replicate.
• There needs to be a powerful, impactful, and genuine feedback loop.
• There needs to be a way to bring people together through emotional investment in a permanent and real way through their common interests.
• The model needs to change. People need to donate through an organization, not to an organization so that they know exactly where their money is being spent and see, feel, and experience the benefits of that spend (i.e. donate to build a particular school in a particular community, rather than donating into an opaque and enormous pool of funding for education).

 

I'll recap the last couple of chapters.

I. A year ago, my husband and I took a trip to Thailand. It was my first trip to southeast Asia and the first time I had any real-life exposure to third-world living. I noticed how very little money it would require to make a huge difference in the lives of so many people, their animals, and their environment. I imagined the radiant and cascading benefit of helping one community or cause at a time.

II. Later in the year, I supported a friend of mine who was running a marathon. I became acutely aware of how many other events or activities occurred as a result of the marathon: first aid stations, band performances, food vendors, corporate sponsor booths, etc.

III. An idea came to me: Wouldn't it be great to start a business where you could get the attention of large groups of people who are assembling for one reason (concerts, conventions, sporting events), and ask them to make donations for another particular cause. It would be done in real time. The cause would be specific (again, not donating to an organization but through an organization), the individual investment low, the collective impact high. The result would be immediate, affordable, momentous, unifying, gratifying. A real impact. A real and lasting connection.

IV. I was participating in a training at our office to facilitate creative thinking and brainstorming sessions. I shared my idea as I have just described with the group, and we used it to go through the creative facilitation exercise. Together we came up with the idea of a "Virtual Flash Mob."

What if we could rally a "flash mob" online--so that thousands of people would "gather" at a single "location" at a single instant to raise money for a single cause--like a library for one particular school in Ghana.

At its core, this vision is a social one. There is a flat $1 donation per donor. If you need more money, you cannot ask for more money, you must ask for more people. The donations all happen at a single instant at a designated time, rather than just being protracted indefinitely until a monetary goal is reached. This results in the following:

1. To prove the hypothesis that people who are donating only $1 at a time, over and over, will donate a higher percentage of their income in the long term.
   
   
2. The $1 donation flat cap makes it fun and exciting. This isn’t just about the recipient. This is a tool for people to feel good about themselves, to see the impact of their donation, and to realize on a deeply personal level how little money it requires to make an enormous difference. People will feel empowered in a world where the problems we face can be overwhelming.
   
   
3. It works on large and small scales. High school bands can use this method to raise funds for that trip to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Individuals can raise money if they need help building a playground in the neighborhood park or cleaning up a lake.
   
   
4. It inspires people to start a cause knowing how they can raise money for it. Let’s go save that colony of gorillas right now!
   
   
5. It results at a minimum in the democratization of charitable giving, and at a maximum, the total redistribution of wealth globally. This approach will result in visibility that reveals how much one dollar can buy in certain parts of the world and how little the dollar can buy in others. This is not intended to place judgment or say that one cause is more worthy than another. It’s intended to empower people, give them choices, and give them permission to care only about what they care about without feeling guilty or overwhelmed.
   
   
6. The personal satisfaction resulting from the immediate feedback loop will turn consumerism inside itself. Why do we buy what we don't need? We buy what we don't need because it bring us happiness, albeit fleeting. What if we collectively buy what other people, places, animals, or environments need? I predict that purchase will offer a much more sustained happiness.
   
   
7. If you have donated to an organization that has misappropriated the funds, you’ve only given them a dollar. If 10,000 people donated $1 to a negligent organization, 10,000 will voice their displeasure publically. Conversely, if a recipient with the best intentions just sort of screws up, you've only given them a dollar. It gives the recipients the permission to be transparent, to learn, to share, and to ask for more money so they can try again. And by extension, the most well-organized, most well-thought-out appeals for donations should naturally rise to the top. These organizations can be identified by donor reviews and ratings.
   
   
8. This approach will offer a public barometer to the causes that populations care about the most. This in turn will make these causes newsworthy, generate even more attention to the cause, and create a self-sustaining loop which in turn should increase contributions. The dollar gives voice and vote.
   
   
9. Provides a feedback loop. Some sites such as Causes are doing this to a certain extent with comments postings, donation-and-contributor counters. I believe we can make this feedback loop a much more rich experience and would result in an actual and genuine connection between contributors and recipients. They key is not to make people feel like they are competing or being rewarded for donating the most on an individual level. The key is to enable people to come together through a donation cap to achieve a common goal.

 

THE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT:

1. Create a mobile application that makes browse, flash alerts, and transactional moment really compelling, instant and easy. While joining a real-time event is fun (either virtually or in real life), not everyone can make the date. So, for example, using their $20 per month allotment, a user could scroll through a mobile app or go online and choose the donation events they want to participate in, in the near future. At the instant of the event, their $1 automatically is donated all at once. The immediacy of this approach also opens itself up for gaming principles such as unlocking badges. We could also create virtual rooms or worlds where people could "gather" and "meet" each other before the moment of donation, or in any event where large numbers of people are gathered for a single purpose—a sporting event, rock concert, or business convention. Imagine: A specific charitable organization would be selected by any variety of methods, and the audience, crowd, etc would rally at a single moment and donate their $1 to the event. The money would be flashed on a screen, maybe a video would be streamed in from the recipients… (honestly, wouldn’t that be so cool?? ).
2. Integrating banks, savings accounts, and interest rates. Through the platform, people could commit to donating, say, $20 per month. This money would be transferred out of a checking or savings account into a special account. Every month, the user clicks through to the charities of their choice, still donating only $1 to each. At any time, the user can withdraw or transfer their money for personal use. The $20 is just a pledge. However, whatever money is in the account draws interest. This interest must be used for donations. It also makes it much easier for people to report charitable giving to the IRS.
3. Internet and international banking. See above. The percentage of Europeans who have credit cards is low vs. the U.S. Most Europeans use debit and internet banking transactions. If we enable the automatic transfer of funds (per point #2), we’d be able to engage millions more people than a site that just accepted American credit cards. We could do this through SMS or 1-Click technology such as what Amazon.com offers.

 

CLOUD, the WEBSITE and MOBILE APPS

The cloud is in the perfect position to handle the “peak and trough” balance loads necessary for the "event" approach to charitble donations.

Mobile apps could be developed where people could donate anytime anywhere.

Maybe there could even be charitable events popping up through XBOX Live and Kinect. People could donate with their XBOX Points.

The website would need to incorporate and utilize the best of similarities technology that exists today. I see several sites such as Jumo that attempt to do this. I haven't seen any sites yet that do it excellently. I want to create discovery and community around common compassionate interests. The investment in what you care about exists over the long term. You discuss with other like-minded people who your recipients could better use the funds.

 

CHALLENGES:

Q. How does this site and mobile app pay for itself?
A. I have no idea.

Q. How are security measures taken into consideration? How do we prevent a terror group from disguising itself as an animal rescue organization?
A. I have no idea.

Q. How do people submit requests for donations and how exactly does that process work?
A. That still needs to be figured out.

Q. Exactly what does this incredible, life-altering feedback loop look like? Do donors need to submit videos? Write a blog?
A. Sure, and probably other things as well. Any ideas?

So how do we pull this off? How can we afford it? What sort of United Nations of the Best in the Business do we need to make sure this site uses the best of what is already out there to change the world? What sort of financial models can we bring to the $1 donation cap (i.e. maybe it makes sense for more specialized, expensive charities where you can have a $5 donation that would require fewer people to achieve the financial goal).

There are a lot of questions to be answered, but we’re this close. A lot of innovation in order pipeline, transactional options, and UX to be applied. It needs to be informed, forewarned, and troubleshooted by experts in the business of charitable giving. It's requires some complex thinking from smart and passionate people to deliver something simple, delightful, and life altering. This idea needs to be championed, adopted, shared, thought about, discussed, challenged, tested, made better, and realized.

Go.

 

Chapter Seven: 10K: 10K: 10M

The Virtual Flash Mob Experiment

I knew David Risher when he was the vice president of marketing at Amazon in the mid-late '90s. I remember the last company all-hands meeting he attended. He stood up on stage while the company's CEO, Jeff Bezos, commented on his departure, his voice cracking with emotion.  If David knew me, it would only be because there is a folder reserved in his huge brain crammed with scraps of paper etched or scribbled with names and faces of hundreds or thousands of people he would have casually encountered through work. 

I emailed him to explain who I was, how I knew him, and what I wanted to do for his organization, Worldreader.org, which donates and delivers Kindle e-readers to areas in developing nations where children have scarce access to books.  I told him I was incredibly inspired by the organization and saw it as a perfect fit for the virtual flash mob concept.

He graciously wrote me back within a few hours and gave me the go-ahead to use Worldreader.org to try out this idea.  He put me in touch with Susan Moody, the organization's communications director. 

Worldreader.org was the perfect pilot organization because:

• It has an immediate impact. You know exactly how your money is being spent and who it is going to.
• It's a trusted organization set up by people I trusted and admired
• The organization was deep into the all-important feedback loop.  I would feel the impact of my donation through their efforts. They keep a great blog. 

I got my group at work together and we laid out the goals and  ground rules to set up our virtual flash mob:

Our Goal: To raise $10,000 in 10 minutes by recruiting 10,000 people to donate $1 each. 

• We could devote no extra resources or money to the project
• We could build nothing. Not even by ourselves. We could only use what was currently available, and available for free
• We were going to launch the project in six weeks. 

We spent a long time figuring out how we were going to disseminate the communication through free social-media efforts. It was really hard for us to restrain our thinking and not go off on some brainstorming tangent about building applications, paying for ads, etc.

To arrive at a simple idea often requires quite a lot of complex and disciplined thinking. 

STEP ONE:
We decided as a first step to set up a virtual flash mob Facebook group  page and recruit ambassadors. The ambassadors would be people who were close to each of us--people in our short-list circle who would participate because they supported us as individuals. In turn, these ambassadors would recruit more ambassadors in the same spirit of support.   We knew that the principles to this idea were no different than any other online communication: in order to be effective your message must be targeted, relevant, and come from a trustworthy source. 

We chose December 7 as the date for the virtual flash mob. On that date, all the ambassadors would be at their virtual posts using Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter to announce that the virtual flash mob was occurring and for everyone to go donate their dollar at that moment. 

STEP TWO:
I wrote an announcement message and sent it through email to five trusted friends who were pretty different from each other for any variety of reasons.  I let the email sit for a while and then emailed them again to ask them what their reaction was. Were they inspired by the idea? Did they trust it? Did they think it was a scam? Did it feel spammy?  All five of them gave me the exact same response: that they thought the idea was cool and they were excited to participate in it because it came from a trusted friend, it's a great idea, and it only costs $1. 

STEP THREE:
For a month, I pretty much spammed my social network on a daily basis promoting the event.  I wanted to see if broad distribution of the message would build momentum or dilute the whole idea. 

I sent out an invite through a Facebook private message to a large number of close friends and trusted colleagues asking them to be ambassadors. I was surprised by the response, or lack there of. I got quite a lot of enthusiastic response from friends and acquaintances in the UK and the east coast of the U.S.  I heard almost nothing from my network on the west coast. This was especially surprising since the majority of my contacts on the west coast are affiliated with Amazon.com in one way or another.  The Kindle e-reader is an Amazon.com product. 

I asked a few very trusted friends what their response was to the Facebook message. Some of them were confused by it. Others remarked that they hadn't read it yet but intended to, even though the message clearly had a time stamp on it.  These responses were totally opposite to the responses from people who received the message through email. 

Lesson #1: The email inbox still has tremendous value and perhaps is more valuable than social media outlets when relaying important information with a time stamp. Also, email addresses aren't as accessible as social media inboxes, and therefore messages sent to email inboxes may hold higher value to the recipient.

Lesson #2: It was really hard to write a brief message about an organization few had heard of, explain what the new donation concept was, and how it was to be conducted, while also trying to inspire people to get informed and excited about the cause in general. 

SET UP FOR FAILURE
So here's the thing: I knew we weren't going to get anywhere near 10,000 people to donate $1 to Worldreader. Sure, there was a "magical thinking" part of my brain whispering that this could be one of those crazy stories where it just takes off and changes the world over night.  The goal was hugely ambitious and the rational and realistic part of my brain (as pea-sized as it is) knew we were going to fail to reach it. But I wanted to see in what ways it would fail. I wanted to learn and I wanted to see if I would be surprised. 

 On the day of the flash mob, the donations started filing in. It was a steady stream, but hardly a flood.  I thought we would get a couple hundred donations. I think we got about a hundred. But the surprising thing was that all those people who remained silent on the west coast were the first to donate, and the majority of the donations came through them. The people in the UK and the east coast who were active in the message dissemination phase were not active at all when it came time for the moment of donation. Even some of those who were heavily involved in the ambassador recruiting didn't donate until 1-2 days after the flash mob was officially over. 

Here are more lessons:

Lesson #3: You are not the only one asking people for money. It is extremely difficult to rise above the din of proverbial bells and buckets, especially during December. 

Lesson #4. It is really hard to break out of your social circle, no matter how big it is.  This I think was the most critical lesson learned from this experiment. I could see the names of most of the people who donated (they were asked to donate directly to the Worldreader.org donation page and could choose whether or not to post their names publicly).  Most of the people who donated where in my closest inner circle of friends and colleagues. They were doing this to support me, rather than support the cause just for the sake of the cause.  

The biggest eye opener seems ridiculously self-evident now that I have seen it in play. But no matter how many people you have in your circle, we really only meet each other through a pretty fixed set of means: through family, school, work, hobbies/sports, and friends.  

Lesson #5:  "It's all about 'the me.'" During the time we were promoting and announcing the impending flash mob, there was another campaign going around where people were changing their Facebook pictures to a cartoon in remembrance of child abuse awareness. We were asking people to donate just $1, which would create an immediate impact on  kids you could see through Worldreader, but I wasn't able to catch the social media fire the way the child-abuse awareness campaign did.  

If you are asking people to buy into something that they otherwise would not contemplate in their every day lives, you must give them a way to express themselves.  The child abuse awareness gimmick  wasn't really about awareness on an individual level, it was about people getting excited to show off their favorite cartoon.   Maybe it is easier to raise awareness than it is to raise money.  Gaming, badging, and some sort of personal reward must be included if you want to get people invested in something they otherwise wouldn't-- save for pure altruism. 

Lesson #6: Know your technical challenges. We were asking people to donate $1 through the Causes facebook application, but it only accepted a minimum of $10 donations. So we had to send messages urgently rerouting people directly to the Worldreader.org donation page. There was only the option to pay through credit card, so a few people got calls from their credit card companies as a $1 purchase sets off a fraud alert. 

Lesson #7: Timing is everything. I received feedback from a number of people that they just wanted to "do it already."  Maybe you don't need a month to get the word out. Maybe all you need is a day. 

Lesson #8: All other lessons learned apply here.  Ease of use. Relevance. Personalization. Trust.  Convenience. Fascination. All of this comes into play in an instance like this. It is no different than any other online pursuit. 

Lesson #9: Pulling off a campaign like this is a lot of hard work. Even without building anything, setting this up was a full time job for a number of weeks. It wasn't a walk in the park. 

And how does this story end?  Everyone who participated in the flash mob participated in this: 

 

 Next Post: I'll explain the concept in detail of the virtual flash mob and how a dedicated site could revolutionize charitable donations in a way that I hope  would have a monumental impact. 

(If you would like to join the journey toward democratizing charitable donations, please go to my Facebook page and "like" it. Thanks!)

I Was the Groupie that Got Lucky

 

When people ask how my husband, Michael, and I met, I always explain he was in a cover band in college and I was the groupie that got lucky.  He doesn't approve of this explanation, but he's too slow on the draw to intercept my response.

Great music was exploding in the early '90s and Michael's band covered all of it.  It was an important moment for those of us who lived in Bloomington, Indiana, too far away from any of the major cities where the bands we loved were touring.  For that reason, Michael's band was loved and hated in our college town and its surroundings. For a few years, Situation Grey were really, really popular and/or notorious, depending on which camp you stood in. 

 

Well, enough with nostalgia, it's time to embarrass my beloved! It looks like one of their first audio engineers has uploaded some old performances from around 1991-92. I can tell this montage is spliced between two shows at the Vogue in Indianapolis because I recognize the different haircuts. 1991, Michael was sporting the "diagonal forward" and in 1992 his featured coif was "the Danzig."

Of course, being the bassist, Michael is not in the film that much, but around minute 3:30 you can start to see him. He is always on the left side of the stage from the viewer's perspective, rockin' that Peavey DynaBass like there's no tomorrow!

The sounds quality isn't that great because it's a board recording. But we're really here just to get a glimpse of our life exactly 20 years ago.

 You can see Michael pretty well on the left starting around 3:30 minutes.

 

Oh yes...the infamous "Anything Anything" video.

 

 

And it appears there is also this:

 

 

And for a grand finale:

 

Sealed off by Silence: A Long, Lost Weekend in Marrakesh

Marrakesh fascinates me.  For as much of a water baby as I am, I find this mystic city totally alluring.

Last weekend was my second trip. My first visit to Marrakesh was embarked upon with not a small amount of reservation.  I was scooped in with a pile of colleagues who were awarded a trip to the city having won some sort of sales incentive. I had no idea who most of these people were, and had even less of an idea as to what they had done to win what they won. The only thing I knew was that I did nothing to earn this trip, but my manager said the flights were already booked and to go on and enjoy myself. 

Enjoy myself in the ancient dust of northwest Africa. Should my nostrils not have anticipated the psychosomatic suffocation of third world desolation, they would have detected the strong scent of contradiction. 

Our group was guided through our weekend like pack mules in heaven. We arrived at our enormous riad outside the city center. We lounged by the pool. We lingered over olives and alcohol. We were escorted into the high desert mountains on four-wheelers and bikes. We went to night clubs.  I ate street food and bought a flowing floor-length skirt in the souk to cover the pink Cavalli mini skirt I'd stupidly worn for our night out in a Muslim nation. I might as well have glued pasties to my knees for the looks I deservedly received.

At dusk, we meandered around the Jemaa El Fna square which is the center of the chaotic web of souks. A soft, warm orange glow seemed to radiate from the ground. The food merchants fogged the air with heavy smoke from open grilled meats. The crowds paced around and through each other in a loose and synchronized choreography. It was completely enchanting and I remained enchanted with Marrakesh ever since.

Our guide gathered us and led us down a typical narrow and harrowing ally. I'll admit how apprehensive I was that our Belgian guide had been paid off to lead us down this dark and windowless concrete channel to our impending deaths or kidnappings. He instructed us all to walk through a curved, low door that anyone of average height needed to duck under to get through. The door opened up to our restaurant, Foundouk, which was a wonder of open space, relaxed cushioned seating, black glass chandeliers. This is the Marrakesh that Winston Churchill, Yves Saint Laurent, Keith Richards had fallen in love with.

I returned to Marrakesh last week to meet up with a group of magical people who gather annually to celebrate the birthday of a magnanimous character I am humbled to call a friend.  This time, we stayed in the center of the souk area. 

The streets within the center of Marrakesh are too narrow and crowded to drive through. So you take a taxi from the airport and get as close as you can to the center, then someone meets you and walks you in to your residence. If you have too much luggage it might be carried in on a cart pulled by a little donkey.  Once again I found myself feeling apprehensive as this boy who was waiting for us carried our luggage through a maze of tiny streets, into a tunnel that could have led to a cave and finally to a small, unmarked door at the end of an ally that showed no way out other than to turn around. He knocked on the door and we were led into our riad.  The door was shut and SHWOOMP! All the noise and chaos of the souk was shut out. We were vacuum-packed in a world of sumptuous, minimalist Moroccan decor, comfort, and silence.

Inside the riad, called Tchaikana, we were led to our suite which invited us with space: huge ceilings, a four-poster king sized bed draped in mosquito netting, and a bathroom that felt like a grotto. Our Belgian host gave us some ground rules on how to navigate the souks, both geographically and socially. We listened as if our lives depended on it, because they might very well have been. Marrakesh is safe, but it doesn't feel like it.  One of the joys of visiting there is occasionally feeling the exhilaration of having survived. My four-wheeler didn't turn over. We found our way back to our riad. We don't have food poisoning. We live!

We join the other guests in the central courtyard for cocktail hour. There are so many riads to choose from, I got the feeling that with a small one like ours, the other guests would somehow naturally have something in common with you simply by the fact that they chose the same riad as you did. Whether or not that was the case, we had no trouble making conversation with the others.

The next morning, our host took us through the path from our riad to the main square. He instructed us to remember when to turn left or right or go straight by memorizing various landmarks ( go right at the blue door, right again at the brass lions, straight through at the vegetable stand, right toilets outside the mosque, go left and make an S around the mosque and when the souk dead ends into a covered passage way, go right). He was a master at giving us just enough information to help us, but not too much to overwhelm us. Immediately we were able to find our way back through many twists and turns and we felt souk savvy.  At night, when the souks are closed, the landmarks become more austere and at the last turn we lost our confidence and were convinced we had overshot our mark. Three times we had to walk by a grisly group of Moroccan men insisting in broken English that they could help us find our way.  It's common for locals to panhandle tourists in exchange for directional guidance. We tried to politely brush them off assuring them that we knew our way--we did this the three times we walked by them, totally lost.  Our rebuke was met with some hostility and with their insisting that they were not Egyptian and what were we afraid of? They should have paid us for the entertainment our cluelessness surely provided them.

Our first night with our group we drove out together in a common passenger van to the desert to have dinner under a tent. During the last leg of our drive, the driver turned off the road and starts driving through the desert. His ability to determine his course was miraculous, especially so because it was night. Go left at the big rock, go right at the slightly smaller rock, take the left fork in the road where there's that dead blade of grass.

We hiked up a hill where our evening under the clouds (the only unfortunate part of the night) was awaiting. We sat on pillows and rugs and ate tagine. We drank wine and the volume of our voices increased with our pleasure.

The next night we met for cocktails hand crafted from oranges purchased from the Jamaa  square and rum hand packed by our group.  We returned to Foundouk for dinner. This time, we did enlist the guidance of a local to escort us there. 

Marrakesh is one of those cities where order is not evident, but it exists unquestionably.  The owner of our riad explained how corruption works, how, for example, taxi drivers are always handing over their fares to the police with little complaint. Corruption in its most innocuous forms is a system in itself--a self-regulating unauthorized order that actually brings efficiency and even fairness where it would otherwise not exist.

The cobblestone streets of the souks are covered in wares and vegetables, trodden by donkeys, stray cats, carts, and people.  It's exactly the same scene day in and day out. At night, workers brush all the rubbish away with the same witches' broomsticks the street cleaners in Amsterdam use. There is no lack of wretchedness. The donkeys are muddy and long suffering, there are beggars huddled in the streets with their hands out beckoning to be filled with change. The stray cats are dirty from the dust and polluted air, but there's a bounty of fish and poultry scraps to feast on at night.  What's different is that these unfortunate creatures, human and animal, are so much more integrated into the chaos of life in Marrakesh. One might unwittingly step over a withered, toothless old woman crouched on the ground as easily as one might step over an overturned bucket of discarded orange peels.

It made me even more acutely aware of the homelessness and desperation that exists in wealthy countries. I wonder how the complexities, corruption, and indifference all sterilized on the tableaux of wealthy cities fails us in the exact same way in areas of the world where it seems so much more infinitely possible and affordable to prevent. I'll take a souk to a back ally in Seattle any day.  

I won't apologize for the socio-political interlude, but I will get back to the point. I was ready to leave Marrakesh by the end of our long weekend. The sumptuousness of its interiors is barricaded from the unavoidable and horrific air pollution caused by scooters running off the worst fuel possible. The locals don't like their children and animals breathing this stuff and it made me think how a bit of money and organization could quickly improve the air quality simply by swapping out gas scooters for electric or just by making better fuel more easily available. That's for another entry.   I was getting a little tired of the myopia caused by having to look down constantly as I walked one foot in front of the other edging the walls of the souks (the center is reserved for scooters and donkeys).  I’ve been back home for a few days with a cold and irritated lungs and  I'm already ready to go back.

Chapter Six: Arriving at an Idea by Way of Phuket, Rotterdam, and the Office

 

Last April, I took a trip to Thailand.  It was my first trip to southeast Asia and the first time I had any real-life exposure to third-world living.  I noticed how very little money it would require to make a huge difference in the lives of so many people, their animals, and their environment. I imagined the radiant  and cascading benefit of helping one community or  small and actionable cause at a time.  This trip is documented in earlier posts. Here they are if you find you might like to read them.

 Later in the year, I supported a friend of mine who was running a marathon in Rotterdam.  I became acutely aware of how many other events or activities occurred as a result of the marathon: first aid stations, band performances, food vendors, corporate sponsor booths, etc. 

 An idea came to me: Wouldn't it be great to start a business where you could get the attention of large groups of people who are assembling for one reason (concerts, conventions, sporting events), and ask them to make donations for another particular cause. It would be done in real time.  The cause would be specific (not donating to an organization but through an organization),  the individual investment low, the collective impact high. The result would be immediate, affordable, momentous, unifying, gratifying.  A real impact. A real and lasting connection, and a way to reporduce that feeling of people coming together to get something done, just like my colleagues and I felt during our work conference.

 But how does one actually achieve this: SMS'ing or some other device? I was stuck, but I knew that the solution would involve social media.

This past November, I was participating in a training  at our office to facilitate creative thinking and brainstorming sessions.  I shared my idea as I have just described with the group, and we used it to go through the creative facilitation exercise.   Together we came up with the idea of a "Virtual Flash Mob" on Facebook.

 What if we could  rally a "flash mob" on Facebook--so that thousands of people would "gather" at a single "location" at a single instant to raise money for a single cause--like a library for one particular school in Ghana.  

The group's ideas inspired me so much, I asked them if they would join me in trying it out for real.   And then I  came upon an interview on Youtube where the founder of Worldreader.org  explained on CNN how his organization brings Kindle e-readers to communities of children who have access to few or no books.  We had our cause and we decided to go for it.

(If you would like to join the journey toward democratizing charitable donations, please go to my Facebook page and "like" it. Thanks!)

 

Chapter Five: If You Are Getting This Message, Your Roommate is Not

"I'm back in the U.S., I know how it works here, and I'm going to make sure my colleagues have the best time possible."

I was lying atop my bed in a hotel room in Atlanta, Georgia with this thought as my sole companion. It was 2008 and many of my colleagues had travelled across the Atlantic to descend upon the city with over 10,000 other Microsoft employees for the company's annual MGX convention.   We were scattered across several hotels, not always conveniently located next to each other.

I hopped off my bed, took the elevator down to the lobby, and introduced myself to the hotel's concierge. I told him I wanted to organize a few nights out for my coworkers.  There were about a hundred of us, I think. Maybe the number was less or maybe it was much larger.  It could have been 50 or 5,000. It doesn’t really matter and I'll get to that in a minute.

My familiarity with the city didn't extend beyond what I was able to read online.  The concierge opened a binder, turned it toward me and pointed to some of his "favorite" restaurants, reading the text effortlessly even though it was upside down from his perspective. I explained to him this wasn't really what I had in mind. I wasn't interested in just making reservations; I wanted to create an entire experience for my coworkers.

He got on the phone and started making some calls.   We decided upon a sushi place outside of downtown that turns into a club at night.  I made the reservation, requested a guest list (no cover charge for the Dutchies!), and I started texting: "If you are getting this message, your roommate is not. Spread the word: Tonight at Restaurant X, address Y, sushi and DJs...8:00."   I made a list of all the colleagues I could think of and sent the message over and over.  I knew that the colleagues in my immediate team would be there. I didn't know anything else.

Throughout the day I started getting messages back from people I had not directly delivered the SMS to: "Hey, heard there was something going on tonight?"  I'd reply with a confirmation.

That night at this restaurant, everyone showed up--practically our entire subsidiary's roster of attendees.  We were seated against the back wall of the restaurant. When I walked to the tables to take my seat, my colleagues started singing a song...at me. I don't know what the song was. I think it is some Dutch version of "Hip, Hip Hooray."  I reflexively crouched down to eye level with the rest of them--an instinctive move borne out of immediate embarrassment.  I was so happy when the song was over.

We stuffed ourselves with sushi and then took to the dance floor.  Several hours in, the manager of the restaurant approached me: "There are people who say they are with your group, but they don't have any I.D. so I can't let them in."  I peeked outside and saw that some of our most senior managers were waiting at the door.  Their seniority manifested not only in title but in age  (how odd it must be for a European person well into his 40s to be denied admittance into an American establishment because he has on his person no documentation proving his is over the age of 21).

I vouched for their legality, and assured the restaurant manager there was zero chance any of us would be driving ourselves back to our hotels incapacitated.  They were allowed to enter.

I wish there was a better way of getting to the point of this entry without having to expend the first half with what I probably could have reduced to a single sentence: "The second night of a massive corporate convention, I made reservations at a nightclub for my colleagues and everyone showed up."   I'm using my blog as a way to document the journey that has led to the vision of democratizing charitable giving, so I'll ask for your forgiveness and patience.

The thing is, this night was more than just reservations for a corporate dinner.  Something else happened.  My part as initiator in the evening required the lion’s share of effort. I had to make the reservations and I did spend rather a lot of time sending out that initial round of messages. But we did this together. Everyone decided to step up and forward the message to others. It takes initiation and courage to do this as well.  There was a moment when everyone arrived, looked around at everyone else, and like the weather, we all started talking about it because we were all experiencing the exact same thing at the exact same time.  We pulled it off. 

Keep in mind this was the middle of 2008 (time on the internet is so compressed). Facebook was well a part of the mainstream, but at least in Europe, it wasn't quite sitting at the edge of our finger tips through laptop and phone app every second of the day.   Disseminating a message virally through SMS still felt rather new--it was right at the end of its newness, but new nonetheless.

One of the I.D.-less senior managers observed into the air, "Hm...viral marketing in action."  I don't think he quite felt the impact the rest of us did. For that night, something else rather remarkable happened: the leaders followed.  The leaders were the ones outside the door waiting for admittance. The rest of us had already long been inside.

The next night, and the night after that, we did it all over again.  And the following year, and the year after that.

That night changed our group dynamic. It bonded some of us, and forged genuine friendships that extended beyond the office.   People came back from the conference and many couldn't stop talking about how great the week was--for a year. It was a feeling we took back with us that had nothing to do with the reason we all had to be together in the first place.