If you’ve read BFD for any length of time (as little as a month), you know I subscribe to Otis White’s Civic Strategies newsletter. Guess what? This month, Cleveland completely escaped mentioned. On one hand, there was nothing bad to report which is a good thing. On the other, nothing good happened, which doesn’t make me very happy. Maybe next month…

Powerful stuff:

“When they write the account of the 2004 campaign, it will include at least one word that has never appeared in any presidential history: blog. Whether or not it elects the next president, the blog may be the first innovation from the Internet to make a real difference in election politics. But to see just why requires a bit of careful attention.

Politics has always been about engaging people to act. It is still that today. But for the past 50 years, the most efficient tool for engaging people to action (however lethargic) has been broadcast media. The key to victory has been mainlining a message through as many outlets of media as possible. Broadcasting is the drug; the bigger pusher usually wins.

Yet over time, we grow immune. Surrounded by images pushing every passion imaginable, the only sane response is to develop increasingly thick walls to block them out. One result: Broadcast has become increasingly weak. Still, candidates compete using the tools of broadcasters, since victory is always just relative. But the weakened power of broadcast politics creates a strong incentive to develop an alternative.

Enter the blog, a space where people gab. As implemented by most campaigns, it is a place where candidates gab down to the people.

But when done right, as the Howard Dean campaign apparently is doing, the blog is a tool for building community. The trick is to turn the audience into the speaker. A well-structured blog inspires both reading and writing. And by getting the audience to type, candidates get the audience committed. Engagement replaces reception, which in turn leads to real space action. The life of the Dean campaign on the Internet is not really life on the Internet. It’s the activity in real space that the Internet inspires.

None of this works unless the blog community is authentic. And that requires that members feel they own their gabbing space. A managed community works about as well as a managed economy. So the challenge is to find a way to build community without the community feeling built.”

“Nortel Networks is planning trials of a novel public WLAN architecture designed to drive down costs of transporting data between Wi-Fi hotspots and wired broadband networks. The trials are being jointly conducted by U.K. operator British Telecom and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Is anyone else wondering why British Telecom is working with MIT, and not an American country? Do you think is has something to do with the fact that American Telecoms aren’t getting into WiFi as quickly as their European counterparts?

I saw a PSA for Americans for the Arts today. You really should check out Chuck D asking if your kids get enough art. Chuck D says “Arts education is key”. Word.

From the NY Times today:

“Yukio Sakamoto, the president and chief executive in Tokyo, believes that using titles like ‘department chief’ impedes decision-making and innovation.

‘To call someone `president’ is to deify him,’ said Mr. Sakamoto, who was influenced by the 28 years he worked at Texas Instruments. ‘It’s part of Japan’s hierarchical society. Now that has no meaning. If you have ability, you can rise to the top and show your ability.’

Many Japanese companies, traditionally divided rigidly by age and seniority, have dropped the use of titles to create a more open � and, they hope, competitive � culture.

The long economic slump has forced companies to abandon seniority in favor of performance, upsetting the traditional order. This has led to confusion in the use of titles as well as honorific language, experts say.
The shift also mirrors profound changes in Japanese society, experts say. Equality-minded parents no longer emphasize honorific language to their children, and most schools no longer expect children to use honorific language to their teachers. As a result, young Japanese have a poor command of honorific language and do not feel compelled to use it.
‘There’s confusion and embarrassment,’ said Rika Oshima, the 43-year-old president of Speaking Essay, a school that instructs new employees on the use of honorific language. ‘Junior staffers aren’t strict about using respectful forms to their bosses, whereas bosses want their staffers to use respectful forms to them, but bosses cannot say that.’ “

Since I don’t have a Wiki Wednesday page, I’ll ask you to leave a comment. How do you think the language we use here in America impedes decision-making and innovation?

Bill Callahan writes:

“I had a long talk a couple of years ago with a young woman who worked as a housekeeper at the Ritz-Carlton, cleaning up after guests who paid up to $300 a night. She described a very demanding job where pay started at about $7 an hour and rose to $9 only at the top of a competitive ‘incentive’ scale. The workers were virtually all Black, Hispanic or recent immigrants; many did not speak English. She had family members and friends at the Marriott who were working in the same circumstances.

These two hotels were flagship projects of the ’80s, built with heavy tax abatements to ‘revitalize the hospitality industry’ and ‘create good jobs for residents’. What they created was dead-end jobs at $14-15,000 a year — less than the City’s definition of a Living Wage that’s acceptable for subsidized projects –with no prospect of improvement. (Of the 2,500 hotel rooms built downtown since 1980, a grand total of 140 are cleaned by workers with union representation.)

When we talk about preserving and creating ‘hospitality sector’ jobs for uneducated Cleveland residents, these hotels — and the restaurants around them — are what we’re talking about. That’s downtown poverty development. We’ve had lots of it in the past twenty years, during which the City has become — predictably — poorer.

If we’re going to spend a lot of public money to benefit uneducated Cleveland workers, as Dean Rosentraub argues, there is another possible strategy: We could spend it to help them get educated and qualified for all those better jobs in technology, finance and health care. “

Bill quips, “For some reason, nobody is calling for ‘leadership’ in that direction.”

I responded that he is. I know for a fact Tony Houston is too. Hopefully, others will hear the drumbeat.

From the Nimbus Blog:

“Oh yeah, and have we mentioned that Nimbis now offers free WIFI access. We are still running some tests, but over all the connections pretty stable. Stable enought that you can even wander over to our friendly neighbors at The Near West Tea and Coffee House, grab a cup of what-ever-suits-you and check our our site and this blog.”

Thanks, Colin. You adding it to the list, Steve?

I realized that I had snapped. I had crossed a line. I had soaked up so much honking and road rage that I had become the honking. I had become the rage. Though my righteous, egg-flinging fury felt sweet and just, my angry response escalated the cycle of frustration and honk-violence. It only made things worse. But I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to do something. So, a few weeks later, after another particularly rotten day of horn blasting, I sat down and came up with my first batch of honku — haiku poems about honking.