Cassandra Awards for our news and information mapmakers

“Our news & information landscape has changed. Our mapmakers have changed. ”

— Announcing The Cassandra Awards for civic participators/participatory media/Fifth Estate content creators, dot connectors, and sense makers in our networks

Image: Using AI voice generation for an audio script of numerous quotes from my curated KIP (“Knowledge is Power”) sources on Twitter/Xitter which begin to tell the larger story of this moment, all in 5 minutes. Read the whole transcript here.

Image: This is the conclusion. I announce The Cassandra Awards. You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.

LISTEN TO THE BIGGER PICTURE

You can listen here or read the transcript with credits here

“You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.”

— I invite you all to check their receipts.

With The Cassandra Awards and other information interfaces for you to engage with, my passion project KIP aims to re-educate the entire population in digital media literacy, information literacy, digital civic literacy, and help de-program those who have fallen victim to disinformation.

The impact of my work: I helped save an architectural gem in Southeast Asia

Remembering the time when I conceived, pitched, wrote, sold, published a three page story in a top newsweekly magazine out of Hong Kong that highlighted a historical building at risk from nearby development to 93,000 elite members of government, business and the arts.

The article had impact.

The year after the article was published, the building won a newly created UNESCO Heritage Award.

To promote the conservation of the greatest diversity of the region’s built heritage, in the year 2000 UNESCO inaugurated the annual Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, a program designed to respond to the question: “Within the realities of contemporary, fast-track development, what of the built heritage do Asians value and want to preserve from the past to inform the region’s place in the global future?”

• quoted from TheSiamSociety.org Lessons from the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation: International Best Practices in Thailand

  Richard Engelhardt, Montira Horayangura Unakul and Julia Davies

The September Issue: Drop is "the future of delivery"

“What does it look like when a pre-Series A startup is on newsstands in three national industry magazines at the same time? ”

— Like this!

Congrats to the young diverse team at Drop Delivery which Marijuana Venture calls in its cover story "The future of delivery".

Marijuana Venture writes: “After revolutionizing delivery tech in 2020, Drop Delivery is empowering businesses with even more customizable features to improve efficiency and increase sales.”

Women & Weed calls CEO Vanessa Gabriel “the delivery diva”.

Cannabis & Tech Today says Drop’s on a mission to help retailers optimize their day-to-day operations and delivery services with cutting-edge technology for a monthly subscription fee. That’s the SaaS model.

Why am I writing about Drop?

If you missed it, I’ve been pleased to be bringing my experience to Drop as their chief operating officer since last November!

The tech + cannabis industry space is having a particular moment, as legalization spreads to more states and during the pandemic “cannabis has become an essential household item.” California, which began adult-use sales in 2018, saw consumers rise to 45% of all adults in the first half of 2021 according to BDSA’s business intelligence and market share tracking. Consumption is on the rise across the nation.

“Cannabis has become an essential household item. Consumerism has exploded. Delivery is the future.”

…and the news does not stop.

Yesterday, Drop won the Poseidon Asset Management Green Shoots Pitch Forum, a special event that connects top-performing cannabis companies across all verticals (licensed and ancillary), with accredited investors. It’s organized by Poseidon, a first mover in the cannabis investment space named Top Hedge Fund Q3 2020 by Barclay Hedge. Winning sends Vanessa to pitch to investors on stage during MJUnpacked in Las Vegas in October, an industry conference for brands, retail executives, and investors.

Welcoming a babytech unicorn to the family

Mine is a household of entrepreneurs. My husband Burc and I have both been working in the tech venture and startup world for decades. We’ve done startups together too!

Today the Silicon Slopes Series-B IOT company he joined last year — Owlet Baby Care, which makes a smart sock to measure blood oxygen levels in infants, among other connected nursery products — announced their merger with a special acquisition corporation at a Wall Street valuation of more than $1 billion. That’s a unicorn in Silicon Valley parlance.

Among the new partners Owlet is gaining are some fashion world luminaries like Tommy Hilfiger and the chairman of Tom Ford, Domenico De Sole, who are sure to take Owlet from Utah to the world.

Congrats to everyone who made Owlet a success!

If I were writing the book on 2020, this would be the BLUF

“We are at war but most Americans don’t realize it and even fewer know the American president was installed to destroy us.” #fridaymorning #quoteoftheday #TrumpFailedAmerica #TRUMPDestroyedAMERICA #BookBoost #amwriting #Election2020 #VoteForOurLives pic.twitter.com/STOHuisOnF

— Trust is a license. Renew it. (@actuallyreal33) July 17, 2020

This is how a book written by the ‘generative journalism” account/“knowledge service in an infodemic” I contribute to would start. I believe that’s called BLUF: bottom line, up front.

What would the first sentence of YOUR book on 2020 be?

Making early sense of the pandemic

“I saw the coronavirus coming in January”

I saw the coronavirus coming in January and have been tracking the pandemic ever since. It’s been uniquely disturbing to see a mysterious wave of illness and death surging toward us, with far too many people refusing to face it.

~ Andrew M. Slavitt (former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)

“A wave of illness and death is surging toward us with far too many people refusing to face it”

I’d been looking to see which flus were coming out of China as my family members and business associates were heading to CES in Las Vegas in mid January. I wanted to know which bugs they might be dealing with at the massive consumer electronics trade show.

I’ve been highlighting points made on Twitter by various sources about the COVID-19 pandemic — and the antivax movement, which as it happens will be even more destructive a force in society with this true-blue no-vaccine killer virus on the loose.

So I found the pandemic in January. In February I found the general response we’d need to preserve our medical system and suppress the spread of the virus.

I'd discovered the below graph of Philadelphia vs. St. Louis deaths from the Spanish Flu, showing how social isolation helped depress the infections and deaths in one town while the other’s lax policy resulted in a spike of unnecessary deaths.

A response blueprint in February

I saw a German computer scientist share this Spanish Flu example of what we need to do as a society to flatten the curve of COVID

Correct public health policy saves lives

A French multinational biotech company shared this study of how public health decisions saved citizens and flattened the curve of the Spanish Flu

It was great to see a Bloomberg deep dive on the same example when it came out a few weeks later, and the term “flatten the curve” make its way into public health communications on COVID.

Collecting resources for all in March

Click through to reach my list.

I also follow these COVID lists, click on their names to see: Kim Mai-Cutler and Brian Koppelman.

I started a Twitter list of COVID-19 expert sources in early March.

It seemed especially important to gather my own science and public safety sources (and follow other lists compiled by early pandemic watchers) at a time when the president and far too many government leaders were ignoring or downplaying the disastrous and monumental impact of this virus on the planet’s human population. The disinformation campaign against early effective action will go down in history as a genocide.

“People said “I don’t need that leaflet - I don’t live here.”
That’s ok, viruses love to travel! ”

In early March I was activated by the Fire Department as an emergency response worker for disaster preparedness. SF had declared a health emergency the prior week. The activation meant passing out coronavirus health department leaflets downtown (wash your hands, don’t touch your face [impossible for humans I believe], elbow cough, make plans).

Handing out public health COVID preparation leaflets on that busy Financial District street corner was brutal. People didn’t want to hear it.

Some people laughed, some people said no!, some people said “I don’t need that - I don’t live here.” I thought, That’s ok, viruses love to travel! A handful were grateful and said “hey thanks for doing this.” They knew we’re all in it together and with 2 community transmission cases in SF that very day, the virus was already here, and also waiting in a cruise ship off the Golden Gate.

To be continued…

A knowledge service to cut the noise in today’s infodemic

“If you can’t follow what’s happening, you can’t adequately think or act in this crucial moment.”

Trump impeachment rally - San Francisco Federal Building 12/2019. Image by me.

Today’s info war sure is info hell, isn’t it? The United Nations is calling it an “infodemic”.

When I talk to people — intelligent people, educated people, media and news professionals, tuned in people, random people — pretty much when I talk to everyone, they don’t know at all what I know.

Or they know a lot less, or they admit they get their news from “CNN…and FoxNews, for balance”, or they simply aren’t trying to follow the firehose of info flying at us these days.

The enemy is noise, the goal is clarity.

~ Jon Stewart told the New York Times this week

Most people I talk to are clinging to an outdated and irrelevant opinion or worldview like it’s a life raft.

This is a problem.

An information diet that doesn’t serve you is COSTLY

• during a pandemic that requires us to reenvision how we live;

• in an Election Year;

• when Western Liberal Democracy is under attack both domestic and foreign, with a main weapon being military-grade psy op disinformation and propaganda directed at a civilian population.

If people can’t follow what’s happening or learn the historical basis of what’s happening or perceive the machinations of global alliances and systems including the largest law enforcement action against organized crime that the world has ever seen, they can’t adequately think and act in this moment.

It’s a costly problem that can be solved, as Jon Stewart points out, by clarity.

“For more than a decade I’ve been following sources & stories that are coming together now. I want you to see what I see.”

I’m an info hound as you know. I’ve been curating speciality lists of expert sources on Twitter for more than a decade, and relying on them almost exclusively for my news gathering needs through the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey. The list of 1,000 sources I mention in this post was meant to be my lens on American politics and current affairs for the 2016 Presidential Election.

I’ve been following stories that are all coming together now. And I’m working to share that with you. So you can see what I see.

Introducing a curated knowledge & awareness project for concerned citizens

See a few news stories a day…

Subscribe to a daily Trust Is A License Nuzzle newsletter with just a few of the top news stories shared from 1,000 curated sources

Knowledge Is Power (formerly referred to as Trust Is A License, a phrase from Shefaly Yogendra) is generative journalism, a community service to inform citizens

At its core the project is a Twitter account run by a small group of diverse centrists who see all sides of global and societal threats and want to ensure our fact-based perspective gets voice and distribution in this age of extreme disinformation campaigns.

We’re also exploring a variety of other ways to connect, present, and share this vital and contextual information that only become more relevant with each passing day. We all need to know this. It’s our history. More on that soon.

One of our readers has described us as civil service journalism. “What you’re doing is generative journalism. It’s a community service to inform citizens at a time when the Fourth Estate is dying and under attack, and news media has devolved into propaganda machines.”

“We vet content & sources, metabolize info & amplify points to help you understand this moment in time. ”

As the mainstream media failure became clear, citizen researchers and curators like me picked up the slack. At Knowledge Is Power, our focus has been on vetting the content and sources, metabolizing the information, and finding ways to underline and amplify clear points we believe are valuable to cutting through the noise and understanding this moment in time.

We hope to connect the dots for ourselves and others. We started doing this for OURSELVES. Yet, it’s for others. Without any marketing the account’s organic reach has grown 160x in its first year.

By vetting and amplifying the work of citizen researchers, whistleblowers, journalists, social justice workers, national security experts and more, we aim to strengthen democracy and stop the playing-the-extremes-so-nothing-gets-done horseshoe that divides us.

“Our mission is to help with what comes next: when we dig out from the damage, there will be a massive need to educate people about what just happened.
”

As people begin to dig out from the damage of the cyber war/information war/total kinetic war against Western Liberal Democracy (including Trump & transnational organized crime) that we are currently experiencing in America and throughout the world, there’s going be a need for a massive education of the American people about what just happened. Hollywood is already telling these stories. We want to help with that.

…or get everything we share

Follow the Trust Is A License Twitter feed to see who & what we’re highlighting & what discussions we’re a part of.

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