Author Archives: Ruth Ann

About Ruth Ann

Founder and Curator of EarthSayers.tv, voices of Sustainability, the only specialized search engine to curated video content in the service of Sustainability.

Seeing is Believing and Citizen Journalism

If you follow my posts you will know that I have been pointing out the sea change going on in the blogosphere in terms of video and moving beyond the role the traditional (I use the term advisedly) blogs play in mobilizing citizens as referenced in today’s NY Times report of the protests in Russia by Ellen Barry. She notes, “The blogosphere has played a central role in mobilizing young Russians.”  Ok.

The “beyond” is found in these two quotes from her report (is it a story?) and highlights what I wrote in an earlier blog post about  the shift that’s going on with user generated content, most particularly in the context of news to ONLINE VIDEO.  Two references one needs to note:

“Younger protesters — so digitally connected that they broadcast the event live by holding iPads over their heads — said this was a day when a group that had been silent made itself heard” and

‘During the parliamentary campaign, Russians using smartphones filmed authority figures cajoling or offering money to subordinates to get out the vote for United Russia. More video went online after Election Day, when many Russians in their 20s camped out in polling stations as amateur observers.” and

“We have a lot of evidence,” said Leonid Gigen, 26. “A lot was shot on video. And then Medvedev says these videos are fake. But people saw it themselves, because they voted.”

And what about our upcoming election for President?  Here’s one online publisher who is encouraging and supporting this sort of thing here in the U.S. the “Off the Bus” folks at the Huffington Post.

OfftheBus has been publishing the work of citizen journalists from Occupy Wall Street events for the past few months. If you happen to attend any of these Occupy the Ports events, please consider sending us your photos, videos or first-hand observations for publication on The Huffington Post.

What’s all this got to do with sustainability?  Increasing sustainability awareness requires the adoption of Web 2.0 practices as well as the technologies to shift the thinking and behavior of our citizens.

Forty Billion Videos but How Do I Find One I Want to Watch?

ThiFindings question headlines a blog post in MediaPost Publication, VIDblog by Daisy Whitney who hits hard noting “With Americans watching upwards of 40 billion videos online each month and rising, how do you even find anything anymore? Discovery is becoming a huge issue and is regularly cited by advertisers, agencies and programmers as one of the biggest challenges facing the online video business.”

Discovery is when you find something and is not to be equated with searching when it comes to the Web.  Four years ago when we founded EarthSayers.tv, a cause-related site which aggregates and curates videos highlighting the voices of sustainability, a search on Blinkx for the term, sustainaibility, netted 21,000 results.  Today it’s up to 386,000. And, we know from experience that a full 50% of them are duplicates as people upload one video to YouTube, Vimeo, and Blip.tv, sometimes with different titles.

One can understand why “advertisers, agencies and programmers” see discovery as one of the biggest challenges facing the online Screen shot 2011-11-09 at 11.29.56 AMvideo business, but what about cause marketers charged with a task to educate and motivate our citizens to solve complex problems? It’s a big, big problem, but is largely unrecognized by non-profits, large and small, who are barely getting their feet wet with Web 2.0 tools and techniques, let alone addressing the whole finding issue.

Screen shot 2011-11-09 at 11.29.32 AMThe over-commercialization of the Web continues largely unquestioned or challenged by those with an education agenda.  Our strategy in terms of sustainability and citizen education is to aggregate and curate content for interest-led social networks using our content management system and content library, but branded for a specific network or subscriber base.  Portion control based on a taxonomy allows for special collections and using other more traditional ways of organizing books and periodicals to appeal to browsers is basic, but under-utilized by Web publishers.  It works for categories of sustainability such as conservation, design and architecture, eco-economics or other causes involving citizen education.

Sustainability and Occupy Movements

John Friedman, CSR-P, in his Sustainable Life Media blog post asks the question, Is the Occupy Movement a Call for Sustainability? His response is  well thought out and makes for excellent reading.  The article spurred me on to express my thoughts on Why the Occupy Movement is a Call for Sustainability. This is a perspective gleaned from having reviewed hundreds of videos based on a Web-wide query for sustainability voices; being at the Occupy Portland event as a video documentarian, and writing several blog posts.

butterflyhill

Julia

As John points out “The initial media stories were somewhat dismissive; focusing on the lack of clarity and focus as the movement grew, perhaps forgetting that democracy is inherently a messy process…” reinforcing my belief that mainstream media folks are suffering from what activist Julia Butterly Hill calls “disconnected consciousness.”

From my perspective, the occupy movement reflects connection and consciousness, especially around issues, programs and actions that may be legal, but are immoral as well as those that are illegal and immoral.  It should come as no surprise that those in Abolish-Corporate-Personhoodseats of power and leadership who have chosen to see and profit from the world only through the green lens of consumerism (and also suffering form disconnected consciousness) are shaking their heads, mystified over what exactly it is that these folks are doing out there and where, for heavens sake, is the deal, the offer, the ROI, the plan for fixing every little thing.

It has taken sometime for our citizens to wrap their heads around the concepts that corporations are individuals, big money is to be made from caring for the sick and the dying, and mothers and children who are poor are the scammers out there we need to be protected from, especially if they come from Mexico to work in our fields and contribute to food production.  I hear the voices of sustainability in the signs and speeches at Occupy events and who now join hundreds of others in the sustainability movement such as Julia Butterfly Hill or Raj Patel who advises us generosity is the

Sharif

Sharif

antidote to greed or author Sharif Abdullah who explains economics in terms of criminality and morality or economist John Perkins who rightly points out we – producers and consumers – have “looked the other way” to social and economic costs in order to maximize profits and buy more and more cheap stuff or or any of the thousands of voices of sustainability out there who if they not on the street (yet) are at least online and in our libraries, accessible to all.

Sustainability Alerts and the Financial Times

FT Prepare for Natural DisasterI am signed up to receive news alerts on the term, sustainability, from the Financial Times.  This last week I received seven alerts, several in the same day. What caught my attention was not so much the quantity, it was not that unusual actually, but the range of subjects in such a short period as well as the emotional content of the headlines. Warnings, critical roles, calls to prepare, and, to get things started, the most sweeping topic, the price (as in costly) of civilization.

October 14 The Price of Civilization (Jeffrey Sachs)
October 14 Prepare for More Natural Disasters (e.g. Volcanoes)
October 14 Adjusting UK Energy and climate change Policy
October 13, Waster: Dislike of leftovers makes households worst offenders
October 13, Climate change: Countries plan for unpredictable weather (agriculture and food production)
October 13, Nutrition: Ways to enhance its quality (technology improving nutritional value)
October 12, Small farmers have a critical role

You can search Google on the headlines to access the articles.

Sustainability and the other inconvenient Truth

Jonathan Foley in TEDx speech on the “other inconvenient truth” at the intersection of land, food, nightviewand the environment and how much of our resources we use for agriculture.  The images presented in this video are extremely informative, worth a thousand words each.

river1950Colorado River Photos

Jonathan Foley is director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of the Minnesota and leader of  the IonE’s Global Landscapes Initiative. Foley’s work focuses on complex global environmental systems and their interactions with human societies.

rivernowWe typically think of climate change as the biggest environmental issue we face today. But maybe it’s not? In this presentation, Jonathan Foley shows how agriculture and land use are maybe a bigger culprit in the global environment, and could grow even larger as we look to feed over 9 billion people in the future.  We need to move towards the concept of Terra Culture.

Update on Strategy & Society: Abolish Corporate Personhood

Abolish Corporate PersonhoodIn my last post about Michael Porter’s article, Strategy & Society, The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility, I noted his view of corporations as individuals, a giant organism and their supposed self-interest.  I suggested this view was dysfunctional – a hazard to achieving a successful and sustainable strategy.  Little did I know that the same day I would be practicing citizen journalism with user generated content (the two blog posts right before the one about Strategy & Society) by covering the End Corporate Personhood 1Occupy Portland gathering.  As you will see in my video of the event, Signs and Voices, the issue of corporations as individuals was on the minds of many in the crowd. It’s a story stream that I am embedded in which actually began when I taped a Thom Hartman speech at the June 2010 Seattle Green Festival on this very subject. It’s posted to EarthSayers.tv, voices of sustainability.

This has been my journey in thinking about corporations as individuals and it has led me to one conclusion. Yours may be different, but I hope you tune into my story stream and give a listen.

Ruth Ann Barrett

The Missing Moral Compass of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Michael Porter weighs in on CSR with co-author, Mark Kramer in their Harvard Business Review article, Strategy & Society, The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility. The report is available for download here. A must read for both CSR and sustainability advocates.

Overall, I see throughout the article the view of corporations as individuals, a giant organism, positing these giant organisms have “self-interest.” And what’s missing?  According to Porter it’s metrics to keep the organism on track, understanding the organism is “not responsible for all the world’s problems,” deriving, as it does, from the goal of “contributing to a prosperous economy (and he adds) a truth governments and NGO’s often forget…”  I’m sorry but this is a view I cannot share based on my experience and knowledge.  For strategy to work your view individually and collectively has to be right on so read Mr. Porter with a critical eye.

MY CRITICAL EYE

Porter View One: Social responsibility is a subset of sustainability

my opinion smallAccepting a narrow view of sustainability reinforces a more  hardware, technological response to solving problems. The article correctly references the more environmental and community stewardship aspects of sustainability adopted by many corporations. Yet the authors cite, as supportive of these aspects, the 1980’s Brundtland Commission broad definition used by the World Business Council for Sustainability Development: “meeting the needs of the present without comprising their own needs.”  This goal doesn’t place an emphasis on environment and stewardship, but corporations do, and the effect is to sideline the economic, social and cultural aspects of sustainability. What’s sidelined? Social justice, externalizing risk and costs, and greenhouse gas emissions are three examples kept off many a corporate agenda and, even more importantly, off the CEOs agenda. One of the findings by the consulting firm, McKinsey (February 2010), is sustainability has to be on the CEO’s agenda – one of the top three priorities – placing the responsibility where it belongs and pointing up the role of personal responsibility, a different view.

Porter View Two: Sustainability is a subset of CSR, part of the THAT family.Screen shot 2011-10-06 at 10.53.26 AM

CSR and sustainability are mixed throughout the article, making sustainability a subset of CSR and then pointing to the fragmentation of CSR as being a “tremendous lost opportunity” reducing the ability of corporations to create social benefits.  Within the corporate organism, the two are rarely mixed up* being functionally distinct.  The best comparison of the two is provided by David Metcalfe, CEO of Verdantix and a refreshing alternative to Porter’s view two. Porter is right about loosing a competitive advantage, but it’s not because CSR is out of whack.

Here’s a quick look at part of the comparison. Click on best comparison to see the entire chart. A different view.

Why is the view so important?

It’s easy to loose not only your money,but your soul in the process of implementing a strategy with a dysfunctional view. “The moral calculus needed to weigh one social benefit against another, or against its financial costs, has yet to be developed.” I don’t think I need to add anything to this observation, but…the actor in this statemenScreen shot 2011-10-06 at 11.58.26 AMt (not fact) is again the corporation, the result indirectly being a blessing of the practice of externalizing morality and consciousness and giving credence to vapid statements such as  “moral principles do not tell a pharmaceutical company how to…” in the Harvard Business Review, no less.   This view is part of the free market paradigm, enriched with psuedo psychology, but not spiritually in books such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, “The incomparable novel about the men of the mind on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice.”


The conclusion of this view is that our society does need a moral compass, but it needs to be invented, then mounted on the corporate dashboard, freeing individuals from being held accountable for their actions, many of which may also be illegal.  Sharif Abdullah provides excellent direction in this regard as he discusses in his video, Criminality and Morality, the economics of it all and an alternative view that should be informing strategic thinking these days, a different view.

It reminded me of a recent article in the New Yorker where the author observed that women do calculus and the men arithmetic when it comes relationships and love.  Surely you’ve been in at least one meeting where the “metrics” just didn’t add up.

So, according to Porter here’s what we need to do:

Screen shot 2011-10-05 at 11.26.19 AMHow about a corporate agenda that address the planet, people, and prosperity elements of sustainability (Triple Bottom Line) with a view that puts responsibility on the officers and employees of a corporation for any harm done.

Ruth Ann

* There are VPs of CSR/Sustainability at companies such as Campbell Soup, but it would take more information to know who one reports to and what is the primary objective.

User Generated Content Fit to Publish – Part II

Screen shot 2011-10-04 at 4.31.17 PMIn Part I of this blog post,  I wrote about the shift that’s going on with user generated content, most particularly in the context of news and the recent publishing of said content (a photo) by the New York Times.

Today, it’s about a video made of a Fox News reporter interviewing a participant in Occupy Wall Street tmegaphonehat was published in the Huff Post the  “Internet Newspaper: News Blogs Video Community” as well as on YouTube.   The point I am making is traditional media are opening up their video channels to user generated content.  Here is the not-so-traditional Huff Post open invitation.

Screen shot 2011-10-04 at 2.35.56 PM

Citizens with video camera’s take note.

And here is the formal invitation:

Screen shot 2011-10-04 at 2.35.40 PMAs I said the landscape of citizen-powered video reporting is evolving and in the last few weeks it is blooming.  It’s twisting the meaning of video (TV) news in an environment already mostly entertainment and talking heads, reducing the “just breaking” to a scrolling headline.

The Web is more about your time, what’s new to you, making it a far more interesting channel than TV for documentaries, stories, and interviews that contribute to the new news flow.   While social media has focused on the immediate, the Web of video is also part now, but unlike posts using blogs, twitter and Facebook, it has a much longer shelf life, a longer tail.

The thing about user generated content that was rife especially before journalists turned to blogging was the quality issue, not just in style and good grammar, but being detached, checking facts, and being accurate. This brings me to the article from the Center for Media Research headlined “News Organizations Take It On the Chin” summarizing the Pew Research Center’s report. The bleak Screen shot 2011-10-04 at 5.11.02 PMfindings include “negative opinions about the performance of news organizations now equal or surpass all-time highs on nine of 12 core measures the Pew Research Center has been tracking since 1985.  More to the point, “Fully 66% say news stories often are inaccurate, 77% think that news organizations tend to favor one side, and 80% say news organizations are often influenced by powerful people and organizations.”  And, back to the Internet thing, “Among those younger than 30, the internet far surpasses television as the main source for national and international news.” Oh Boy.

Oh boy.

A perfect time for schools of journalism to sponsor public discussions, seminars and debates in partnership with the citizen-powered media folks such as Amy Goodman and Michael Moore.  Amy’s interview of Michael on Democracy Now is great as is her speech at the news conference she gave yesterday at Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, where hundreds are camped out with the Occupy Wall Street protest.  She announced the landmark settlement stemming from her arrest (over forty  journalists were arrested) in St. Paul during the Republican National Convention.

User Generated Content Fit to Publish – Part I

There’s the New York Times as content maker, the role we are all familiar with, and channel, the role we assume, but do not label, especially with the tv-like word, channel.

In the last week the New York Times demonstrates a shift that’s going on with user generated content from all bad to, well, interesting. Let’s take a look.

Front page New York Times – photography with cell phone. Video example is of pepper spraying police officer which was all over the news this last week.

New York Times Cellphone PhotoAnd then there was the “homemade” video that made it on to their video channel (page) for a series about love and relationships which while not political, is social and cultural and a good start to incorporating citizen-powered online video into a mainstream channel.

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And the video by the Times  (not clear if producer is on staff or not) that’s news about a performance art piece featuring naked performers has the look and feel of user generated content and addresses, er, transparency.

Screen shot 2011-10-02 at 6.31.19 PM

Hope the schools of journalism and communication are paying attention to this because writing it is not, fact checking it need not be, and when it comes to citizen-powered, video content it’s carpe diem or, well, get left behind.

We see the opportunity to pair a sustainability channel with sustainability-related social networks and subscriber bases for kick starting citizen-powered online video as part of the sustainability movement.   Cause marketing will never be the same. And journalism?