Wearing my ‘serial founder exploring starting a company’ hat, I advanced my passion project KIP3.
KIP is a seven-year long passion project to tackle the disinformation problem on social media that makes us poor information citizens and polarized neighbors who cannot take collective action in the face of threats like the climate crisis.
It’s a Wikipedia + Wordle for Current Affairs to make better citizens and voters…A comprehensive project that aims to promote trust and transparency in democracy while combating disinformation and corruption.The deliverables can be used individually or collectively to empower citizens with the knowledge and tools needed to critically evaluate information and build a network of trustworthy sources.
A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.
The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!
I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.
By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.
Stealth project, defunct. Revolved a return to the cultural thread, in international streaming, if the time is right. (It wasn’t, 2022 and 2023 earthquakes and bombings changed the landscape, in a heated election year.)
Pitchbook for streaming series concept, 2022-2023
Expat Harem-related projects won't quit. The book is still for sale, and people are finding it like an actress in London who discovered it in a bookshop in London and sent it to a TV producer in Istanbul.
In 2022, at the request of that TV producer in Istanbul, I co-developed a streaming series concept inspired by the book "Tales from the Expat Harem" and its associated blog.
Collaborating with another writer, Katherine Belliel, whose Haze appeared in the book, and who coedited the sequel book Expat Sofra, we crafted a unique series that reflected the themes and stories from the original literary work.
This involved extensive research into the rights landscape, and entertainment legal agreements. We then pitched the concept to an international streaming service, leveraging our creative vision and strategic communication skills to present a compelling case for the globally accessible series.
The project demonstrated our ability to adapt literary content for a new digital medium while managing complex logistical and legal aspects.
I’ve enjoyed every minute connecting with the audience at entertainment and publishing industry conferences, universities, business accelerators, cultural organizations, and California’s oldest public affairs forum, The Commonwealth Club. I’ve talked about personal branding with social media, the worst entrepreneurship advice I’ve ever gotten, how to build community online and with content, foreign correspondence or writing from abroad, marketing for startups, the cultural exchange of the Expat Harem, among other specialty topics.
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?”
