Video retrospective of GlobalNiche, my remote skills edtech startup 2011-2013 and beyond...

“Her groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.”

— Tanya Monsef

I founded GlobalNiche in Istanbul with Tara Agacayak after evolving my 2006 cultural book to a 2010 global citizen blog to an online skill building business, and Tanya Monsef joined us when I moved to San Francisco. Here’s what Tanya, the Dean's Executive Professor of Management in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University for the past decade, says about GlobalNiche in 2024.

Watch a quick retrospective, excuse any missing media.

"Anastasia’s groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.

Tanya recalls how I took my knowledge and prior success using book publishing’s “author platform” concept to reach the public with content marketing, branding and community outreach (that’s Expat Harem!), and combined it with the heavily-online techniques a serial expat like me has relied on during my overseas experiences, and then how I created a way to teach it to others, and then to scale it.

"GlobalNiche was a forward-thinking leader in digital solutions and thought leader to a global cohort of founders and business women, as well as organizations serving female innovators.”

This reminds me that Tanya and I continued to deliver talks and workshops well into 2014 and later, working with the Women’s Startup Lab in Mountain View, Turkish Women’s International Network in Menlo Park, and a women executives group at Cisco in San Jose, and I’ve guest lectured to her business students at Santa Clara University for several years.

““Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing an ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity. ”

— Tanya Monsef

"Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing her ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity,” she says.

"GlobalNiche was awarded Top Instructor by Udemy in 2013 as the most enrolled course.” You’ll see in the quick video above that Udemy noted we enrolled students from 17 nations in 2013.

Tanya recalls our 2013 win of an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women by national and international gender equality foundations, global health nonprofits, and academic leadership centers.

The multi-year strategic change initiative of San Jose State University, Public Health Institute (PHI), World Pulse, the Global Women's Leadership Network, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and the Global Fund for Women recognized GlobalNiche's pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools for connecting and transforming communities world-wide.

“In 2013 GlobalNiche won an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women, recognition of a pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools.”

— Tanya Monsef

ON CONTRIBUTING TO THE FUTURE OF WORK MOVEMENT

In 2014, I looked back on the workforce pioneering I’d done during GlobalNiche, and noted how awareness and adoption was coming for people who hadn’t yet felt the need for this online survival method:

“I’m proud to have added definition to, contributed to & participated in the movement toward every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting and creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone, the incorporation of location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers, a new seriousness around digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking in general for personal and professional development, reinvisioning the future of work with online collaboration and cocreation, the adoption of global communication best practices, the absolute tidal wave of online content marketing, the rise of the transformational consumer.”

Academic review of my anthology highlights gender themes, the hamam stories put people on planes

Now you can listen to KIP's Emerging Narrative...thanks to AI voice generator

Consider this audio a companion to the Bigger Picture video of various quotes I’ve collected rather than a mirror image…there’s more to this multifaceted story.

“A unique curation of emergent voices describing this moment we find ourselves in.”

— KIP

This is my first experiment with AI voice generation using a script made from individual quotes from civic participators I’ve been tracking for last past 7 years, describing this moment we find ourselves in. Quote credits in the images below and a full list to come.

The bigger picture, in your words

With my KIP project to make sense in the social age and surface the best civic participators - or members of “the Fifth Estate”, - I’ve been collecting the contributions on Twitter.

For a couple years I made graphic images of quotes I spied. I put some of them together into a larger narrative of our time, and this moment. Take a look!

Below is a short version of the narrative in the video. See the video for quote credits or read the transcript with credits here.

“The Bigger Picture” In Snippets From Emergent News Contributors Curated By KIP

"Social media has held politics and media to account"

Journalism & Backsliding Democracy was a good journalism-democracy-disinformation panel with Jay Rosen at New York University School of Journalism for the Cambridge Disinformation Summit last week.

From my live notes: “Social media has held politics and media to account,” said former director of BBC News Richard Sambrook, hitting the nail on the head!

Social media is not just part of the #disinformation problem, it’s part of the solution as I’ve been contending with my Fifth Estate-holding-power-to-account project: KIP! (Read about it here.)

The hitch: knowing which are the good actors on social media and which are the bad actors.

My live notes: Jay said we need smart practices to solve the hardest problems in news coverage, like if you had a “Category of bad actors” you could put a source in you’d be better prepared. 🤔

That sounds very much like the categorization I’ve been structuring with KIP.

Is your foot on the brake at the same time you're trying to accelerate? It’s your brain science

New read for Fogust...

I was fortunate to read an early manuscript of this new book release by ☀️ Jessica J.J. Lutz ☀️ and look forward to diving into the final version now making its way around the world!

I see Barbie gets a mention on p 110 - she was Jessica's favored doll because she wasn't a baby, she was a grown woman who knew what she wanted - Jessica and I were among the (how many, uncounted?) girls whose parents wouldn't allow us to play with the toy. Before Barbie director Greta Gerwig was even born, Barbie was a subversive force in our lives!

“A war correspondent facing burnout wonders why she suddenly feels fear when a bomb goes off at her Baghdad hotel: a clue comes when she realizes she is 4 months pregnant. To understand how her coping mechanisms no longer work, she applied her journalistic research skills to the inner conflict she experienced, and her upbringing. What comes out of it is a deep dive into the gender-based sociology, and the brain science, a review of the literature parsing it all, and a way forward, through simple exercises that anyone can do to start using our dual-sided human brain to succeed in life and work, and stay healthy and feel good about it too.”

— How I encapsulated the book on an early read.

Here’s where you can get the book in the USA: Amazon.

Selfies were Silvana's process of surviving disease

Remembering my dear friend and collaborator whose creativity found new outlet as she faced her altered states of beauty. A fierce and bountiful soul, Silvana is greatly missed.

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.

Amazon buys MGM, now itching for actual updates to the content vault

So many of us have envisioned this day, or at least where things are now surely headed for MGM's legendary library!

Once worked in Studio Business Affairs at MGM in the 90s, you may recall.

Then prepandemic had the pleasure of pitching 10 Block, my social and mobile streaming platform solution to MGM, Madhu and the studio's distribution leadership, and together envisioning the impact of connecting today's global audiences -- where and when and how they are watching -- with MGM's vaulted riches.

Still itching to see actual forward-looking viewing conventions applied to older content. Personally, want annotations, episodes, interactivity.

Can you imagine, for instance, viewing MGM’s library of Old Hollywood classics and Bond blockbusters broken down into short modern length episodes you can chat with your friends about, and discovering what to watch through reviews and what your network is liking? That looks like this?

A woman can dream!

Your performativity robs us all

Paying lip service is easy, that’s why people do it — to check a box that other people think is important, in the most efficient and expeditious way possible.

But lip service is also a waste of your resources, literally. You’ve wasted the opportunity to do something worthwhile for other people. Especially if you have a platform you can lend.

Washington Post has my opinion 8 months later

Washington Post says America needs civics and history to save democracy.

This is how the Post’s Editorial Board puts it today. “While the country spends about $50 federal dollars per student per year on science and math education, only five cents per year per student is allocated for civic education,” notes Lawrence Tribe whose tweet I first saw. “Democracy demands a population better educated in history and civics,” says the professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

I said as much 8 months ago when announcing my pro-democracy knowledge project: America needs a re-education.

Helping people requires what one of my readers called “a new civil service journalism to inform citizens at a time when the Fourth Estate is dying and under attack, and news media has devolved into propaganda machines.”

My 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.

Last June I wrote about my work on a curated knowledge & awareness project for concerned citizens.

View fullsize

A good moment for the right vanity press/publishing service

Publishing friends, authors, business women, entrepreneurs: what do you think of this new initiative from Worth Media?

• A new pipeline to publishing for their subject-matter expert members to help build and further their careers,

• an opportunity for people who traditionally have a harder time getting published or recognized,

• to be released through an imprint/house for an established publisher (Simon & Schuster),

• and author retains the rights.

My first thought? Vanity press. In a downmarket for publishing.

And then, well, okay. It's a good business opportunity to provide publishing services direct to an underserved information-rich community. And, then, hey maybe better than OK. For everyone involved, including the readers of these books. Read about it here.

I told you education of the citizenry is our next chapter

It could be this kind.

Or this kind.