If You build It

"In the fall of 2008" as I'm usually saying these days to the point where, notice, I'm quoting myself, "if Barack had done one thing, just one, if he'd have tossed us one bone, I could maybe say, 'okay, I get how the system works. But he at least threw us a rope we can hang on to.'"

Back then I had the idea to take $70 billion out of the TARP and tell the banks, Look, assholes, we're not gonna just hand over $770 billion to you numbnuts and not give the people whose money you're robbing nothing. So write down this $70 bil and stfu! You're STILL getting $700 BILLION so, one more time, STFU!"

Then, take that $70 bil and start a campaign where startups can apply for seed money. They go to the "restartamerica.org" site and can view tutorials, go through a bootcamp, see examples of what works, find mentors, find co-founders, network with others... 

That leads to putting together a pitch package: exec summary, slide deck, maybe wireframes or diagrams if applicable, maybe a short video. Then it gets vetted. If it passes muster, it gets seeded, let's say up to $70k. That's a lot of startups.

Most will fail. That's ok. Because even the failures will be better off; they'll have acquired very valuable skills in how to prepare a professional presentation, how to meet and greet, learn what investors are looking for... and with the advent of crowd funding, now they even have a second chance. Maybe that'd even be their first choice.

But the successes... there'd be a few... would be so motivating, so positive a message for us that we'd almost forget the evil empire because, well, who wants to focus on them when we got this great stuff over here going?

Hell, take that money and lay fiber in America  everywhere. Massive project, huge job creation, big stimulus for supplier entrepreneurs ... and at the end of the day, something to show for it: a state of the art network that will boost productivity (hopefully).

I believe entrepreneurship is one of the keys to unlocking the unprecedented set of problems that EM08 presents. And though all but the uber-rich have been hit with the EM08 wrecking ball and at least its shrapnel, young people today are up the creek. Have we ever put an entire generation at risk like this? This is suicide in the making, and the EU is foreboding in ts massive unemployment among its young people.

Enter Studio H, its founder, Emily Pillotin, and filmmaker Patrick Creadon's brilliant film on Studio H's foray into the unknown, which in this case is tiny Bertie County, NC. Yee haw, time for a hoedown.

Not quite. Studio H -- Emily and her partner Matthew Miller --  having been recruited by the superintendent to bring their design approach to the local high school. There are, of course, many letters between that a and z, but, as with all good stories, the troubles mount.

What sticks is watching these country kids come alive in new ways -- there's a great line by one of them when he's being introduced to the audience, and he says something like, "I'm an old fashioned boy" -- ways that city kids could never imagine, even in private schools. One of my big buzzwords these days is "craftsmanship," and I believe it's a dead philosophy, certainly in our dead ass educational system. Studio H teaches design from a holistic perspective, from the community perspective, in thinking and doing as one integrated process.

Olvera Street is where the City of LA "officially" got started, and is all touristy now. When Ma would take me there as a kid to eat, I remember wanting to stop and watch the glassblower dude. For me, the fascinating part was not watching the corny animals and baubles "come to life" but how he'd prepare the tubes, how he'd heat them, blow a bit, form them... the technique, the deftness... There is, for me, great pleasure in watching someone who's adept at something.

But the genius of If You Build It is not the voila! of watching these kids as design whizzes, it's in the how they become adept at design. And that speaks to "the 10,000 hour principle," but presents a problem for the artist; how do you convey the sweat magnitude of the principle? For Studio H, it's getting down to brass tacks; design begins with approach, consideration, thinking, then planning, and last but not least, doing. It's a ton of hard work.

One of the observations about East LA's lowriders is this; many, if not most, of the kids then were languishing in school. The schools in my hometown were some of the worst, with ultra-high dropout rates, recidivism and all of the attendant ills that go with a socio-economically-challenged area. But those kids who were into lowriding... they'd ply endless hours at dead-end gigs and plow that revenue into their craft, working tirelessly on their cars. And when you think about what goes into car restoration and customization, the myriad considerations and details... it really is remarkable.

I think that same spirit and practice is on display with the kids of If You Build It. Their "character arc" is also remarkable, as you watch kids who have no inkling of design principles and aesthetics blossom with the water of creativity.

An old acquaintance once remarked his displeasure with the dating scene thus; "Any woman I meet from now on has to be into something." And he didn't mean "shopping". That, I think, is what's so great about watching the kids of If You Build It, that they really get into it. Currently, California is having a statewide debate on the so-called "Common Core," what students must know. But it begs the question: Will students get into it? And beyond, method, to borrow from McLuhan, is pedagogy.

If You Build It is not a panacea, nor is it "the solution." Our educational system is so broken here that saying that is beyond trite. But things that work are already known, and some I have written about here. Let me add design and the pedagogy, the admirable practice of Emily Pillotin and Studio H. If I had a young kid in school now, I'd kill to have her/him experience this program.

The farmers market: Student designed & built.

Studio H founder Emily Pillotin with students CJ Robertson & Stevie Mizelle

IYBI's director, Patrick Creadon

Time Will Give You Time

Since there's so much crap these days its easy to go around taking pot shots. But in fairness, before I began formally codifying my thinking about EM08, I've always championed those I felt who made sense as alternatives to the inequality of the American political economy. EF Schumacher, Muhammad Yunus & Grameen Bank,(1) Vinod Khosla, Kiva.org, co-op businesses, Michael Shuman, Balle....

Now, we add time banking. The concept is simplicity itself; trading your time at a given task for someone else's at a given task.

Before the meat, I just want to add something that's as basic to economics as the time value of money, and it's this: eliminating the middle man. From right to left, this is something that all give lip to, but in reality our present political economy is bloated with. Healthcare is just one example.

For a lot of goods and services, distribution is key. This is the way that media has historically locked up their oligarchy. Take film, something which I know a thing or two about. With digital production, a new generation of producers has emerged, but "the business" has remained relatively in control. Why? Because the Hollywood studio system controls distribution, with partners in retailing, rentals and exhibition. But with new media and far more powerful computers than even five years ago, the game has changed, and old Napster seeds are already bearing DIY fruit. New media is emitting evolutionary pressures like never before, and it is only a matter of time before truly high speeds deliver the promise of a new paradigm where distribution is in the hands of independents and ideally artists themselves.(2)

Here're some links:

Timebanks.org

Timebanks.org - philosophy

And here's an article about a community in Oakland. These everyday people are a perfect example of one of the ways the revolution should be fought; by taking as much control of your own life and community as you can, connecting and helping one another.

Truly inspiring.


Sweat Equity
In this East Oakland community, time really is money

Rob Baedeker, Special to SF Gate

Monday, February 16, 2009

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/02/16/moneytales021609.DTL#ixzz0hR6elzAY


In a small, backroom office at the Community Reformed Church in East Oakland's Sobrante Park district, a handful of local residents are running their own neighborhood bank. Instead of U.S. currency, though, the transactions are recorded in hours and minutes.

It's called a Time Bank, and to explain how it works, Paul Butler, a 50-year resident of Sobrante Park and co-administrator of the program, pulls up a Web page and scrolls through a list of headings like "ride to hospital," "pickup from Amtrak station," "translation" and "preparation of food."

Paul Butler, co-administrator of Sobrante Park Time Banking, says, "The whole concept of Time Banking is really designed to get people helping other people."
Photo: Rob Baedeker

"Here's an odd one," he says, pointing to the screen. "Somebody needed digital pictures downloaded from their camera." Butler, who recently retired as a network specialist with IBM, has more than enough tech savvy to handle the task. After helping out with the photos, he records the time it took to complete the task in an online database. From now on, whenever he wants to cash in his hours -- say he needs a ride to the Amtrak station -- he can trade for any service offered by the Bank's approximately 160 current members.

The Sobrante Park program is a member of TimeBanks USA, an international network of communities that use an alternative currency called "Time Dollars."

"The concept of Time Banking has to do with banking a person's time just as you would bank a person's money," Butler says. "Time is recorded for a service that is given and for a service received."

Those services can be anything that neighborhood residents have to offer. The skill level required can vary widely, from running errands to making hospital visits to repairing small appliances. And everyone's time is valued equally. Theoretically, an hour of brain surgery could be traded for an hour of yard work.

LaSonia Williams, a Time Bank member, has traded her time for services like lawn mowing and Spanish translation for a newsletter that she publishes; her neighbor had a water heater installed by a group of Time Bank members.

"I thought that was a really big thing for people to do," Williams says. "It seemed so technical."

There's something radical about an economic system that's outside the usual bounds of commerce, one where people are bartering hours rather than buying and selling goods, particularly when they're valuing everyone's time equally. Indeed, when you delve into the world of alternative currency schemes, the language sounds a little, well, revolutionary.

Here, for example, is an excerpt from an introduction to the "Ithaca HOURS" system, a local currency established in 1991 in Ithaca, N.Y.: "We printed our own money because we watched Federal dollars come to town, shake a few hands, then leave to buy rainforest lumber and fight wars," founder Paul Glover writes on the program's Web site. "HOURS, by contrast, stay in our region to help us hire each other. While dollars make us increasingly dependent on transnational corporations and bankers, HOURS reinforce community trading and expand commerce which is more accountable to our concerns for ecology and social justice."

Unlike the Time Bank system, which issues no paper scrip, the Ithaca HOUR is actual printed currency, linked to time but also to the U.S. dollar -- one Ithaca HOUR is worth $10, the average hourly wage in the area.

Ed Collum, a University of Southern Maine sociology professor who studies alternative currencies, says these two systems -- Time Banking and the local, paper-currency model (a la Ithaca's HOURS) -- are the dominant models of alternative currency that have taken hold in the U.S. His 2004 study of community currency systems using printed money counted 82, nationwide. The Time BanksUSA Web site lists 60 Time Banks in the U.S.

The Ithaca-type local currency systems tend to be more overtly political, with a progressive bent. "Often, their members see community currencies as alternatives to capitalism," Collum says. By contrast, Time Banks tend to stay out of the political fray and focus on promoting their local networks.

But Collum argues that, in another sense, the Time Bank system is much more radical and egalitarian given its premise that everyone's time is equal. "Some people run with that [principle] and really think about this in terms of Marxism and radical economics," he explains.

Indeed, it's easy to connect the dots Ð to see the Time Bank as an embodiment of that Marxist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Everyone is "paid" the same rate. And Time Bank accounts don't accrue interest. What's more, you can't sell your labor to the highest bidder as you would in a purely capitalist system.

These characteristics sound radical in one sense of Webster's definition of the word, as "a departure from the usual or traditional." But the really radical part of a program like the Sobrante Park Time Bank may lie in another, opposite meaning of the word -- that is, "proceeding from the root."

You could even call it conservative.

When I asked Phebia Richardson, the 76-year-old co-founder of the Time Bank program, whether the concept of time-based money was difficult for people to embrace in an age when we're so accustomed to paying dollars for goods and services, she argued that a Time Bank was really just a different name for an old practice: community service.

"We've always done things for each other," Richardson, who has lived in Sobrante Park for 50 years, says. "It's part of our heritage ... We're trying to make that more popular again.

"My father was a Methodist minister back in Louisiana," she adds. "He'd go around to (preach at) other churches, and they would give him meat to bring home to his family. We had our own garden, and we'd share with neighbors. That's the way I grew up."

Like Richardson, Butler believes Time Banking can strengthen community ties. Sobrante Park, which he describes as "50 percent Hispanic, 40 percent African-American and 10 percent a mixture of everybody else," has seen its share of crime and violence over the years. At the time the Time Bank was started in 2004, Butler says, "there was a murder like every other week."

"One of the concerns we had was that some of the violence and aggression was due to each of the groups being standoffish -- staying in their own groups and not really socializing and doing things together," he says, "The whole concept of Time Banking is really designed to get people helping other people."

The program currently has 160 members. And while Butler would like it to include a larger percentage of the 700 to 800 households that live in Sobrante Park, he says it's already begun to foster connections between residents who wouldn't otherwise have known each other.

Richardson adds, "No matter what your background, no matter how much money you have or don't have, you know that you've got people you can depend on to help you when you need help. That's the real foundation of Time Banking."

It's an old-fashioned idea that, these days, sounds kind of revolutionary.

Members of the Sobrante Park Time Banking team (L to R), Paul Butler, Julieth Molina, Phebia Richardson, Hellen Harvey and Ramona Preciado, coordinate community exchanges, from pet-sitting to computer repair.

Photo: Rob Baedeker

Do you have a person or topic you'd like to see covered in Money Tales? Let us know. E-mail Rob at rbaedeker@sfgate.com

Rob Baedeker is a writer living in Berkeley. He is the co-author, with the Kasper Hauser comedy group, of "SkyMaul," the catalog parody.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/02/16/moneytales021609.DTL#ixzz0hR6IByFp

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(1) Yunus launched a beta microlending venture in Queens a while back that I have yet to follow up on. Perhaps most notable about this is that his partner is Michael Milken. Yes, that Michael Milken.

(2) Interestingly, the studio system, as crazy as ever, recently got some pr for Fox Searchlight's recent picks (Slumdog Millionaire, Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Crazy Hearts), as well as Paramount seeing the light - sort of - with its pickup success of micro budgeted Paranormal Activity, which in turn has led to them committing to a microfinance program. (see article below)

Then there's "the big play" - 3D. With the mega success of Cameron's Avatar, the ante has been upped astronomically. Just yesterday we saw Tim Burton's Alice in 3D, and the previews had at least 4 3D films coming down the pike. This is of course, an arena that indies can never compete in, because the financial risks are so absurd.


After Paranormal Activity, Paramount Plans to Stay in the Micro-Budget Film Biz

Every time a really small film makes a really large amount of money, people start to get ideas. With Paranormal Activity still raking in dollars for Paramount, the studio is pushing the idea of spending a million bucks each year on ten to twenty small films. The budget of each of these films would be no more than $100k. Place your bets now as to whether we’ll ever see any of these little projects, and how long this will even continue to seem like a good idea to studio execs.

Variety’s report says that the money will come out of the studio’s overall production budget, and that both unknown and established filmmakers could take part. The trade further says that there’s no theatrical release plan in place at this point for this program, but that the small films could be remade with larger budgets. Granted, a lot of indie producers would argue that $100k is ‘micro-budget’. They’d kill to make a film for that much, instead of $10k. But when it’s an outfit like Paramount, used to working in the $40-200m range, that counts.

High and Low

A word of advice; if the owners of this country and their soldier minions don't want you to have something, you should probably want it. Socialized health care is a great example. Consider, if it's such a terrible thing for our supposed free market capitalist system, then why is it that everyone in congress, the judicial and executive branch has socialized healthcare - for life - but they refuse to give it to you?

In fact, the so-called public option had to be eliminated, because it was perceived to be the crack in the dam that could have led to - gasp - competition! UNFAIR competition, the insurance companies - and I'm sure the HMOs and pharmas behind them - cry, based upon the rationale that if a public option has goverment funding then it has an unfair advantage.

The biggest welfare mothers on Wall Street aside, let's talk about advantage then. Who has the advantage when it comes to millions spent in lobbying and campaign contributions which translates into their politics becoming policy as well as taking calls and office time? In other words, why is "advantage" only brought up in relation to when it potentially impacts their bottom line?

IF there were true free markets and real capitalism, we'd have any number of healthcare scenarios available in front of us. For instance, if the privatized healthcare industry is so confident about what they deliver, then let's stop all the talking and pontificating about pros and cons, of which there seems to be an endless supply of mouths on either side. Instead of wasting energy and resources endlessly chasing our tails on this debate, let's follow scientific method and do some testing, some trials.

Take California, the biggest state in both economy and population. Let's try a test run of a hybrid system - private vs. socialized. Like any good marketing professional, such as Frank Luntz, put out the call for focus groups. In Cali, there must be several hundred thousand uninsured to pool from. This recruiting, screening and administering process alone would create jobs that could be drawn down from the stimulus - you hear me Arnold?

Between LA and Frisco alone, you would have tremendous marketing data from a large subject pool and could draw across many demos. Even if a public option does not come out as a positive option, this marketing data on a very particular segment - the uninsured or near the brink - will be very valuable toward re-thinking other strategies. Why? For the simple fact that the onslaught of baby-boomers are soon going to be impacting the system like at no time in history, and many of them have fallen through the privatized healthcare cracks, or are teetering on the brink of disaster. Instead of going all in on a system that's past broken and a money pit - except for those who have a capital interest in it - we should be hedging our bets based upon RESEARCH, TESTING and DATA GATHERING, not endless chasing our tails through politicized debate and filibustering which only serves the status quo. In fact this latter point is one of the prime reasons why we have politicized debate and filibustering in the first place. Whether Democrat or Republican, if we look at the root word of "conservative" then we see what all of this intellectual clutter is for, or at least results in.

One important outcome; marketers are interested in what the market says, regardless of the "experts' opinions." Do you really think producers of any number of boy bands or teen girls who have been sexualized for music tv consumption really care about their anti-critics, so long as deals are made and profits roll in? The point is, once a focus group has finished testing, exit surveys, interviews and polling are culled, providing a basis for deciding whether or not a public option should be instituted at least on a hybrid basis.

One last go at the privatized healthcare industry constituents - again, insurers, HMOs and pharma - cry about unfair competition. If government is SOOOOOO incompetent as conservatives love to wail, then what are they afraid of? (and, more to the point, why do they continue to grow government???)

The post office is a perfect example of a government sponsored, socialized service. But the private sector in the form of UPS seems to have figured it out, DHL came online (and has left) and of course, FedEx took delivery and tweaked it to new heights - and profits. The po needless to say got hit hard. Libraries are another socialized service, but that hasn't stopped Borders and Barnes and Noble, let alone Amazon from competing. The issue is innovation and customer satisfaction. If the privatized industry is confident in their abilities insofar as those criteria, well then, let's run some trials. Let's give the public a voice outside of their bought off republic shills.

There's much more to be said, of course, than in this blog piece, but I think the germ is there for a platform to be thought out, a real plan that could at the very least yield us some very valuable data. For all of our mouthing off about free market capitalism in this country, we should at least allow a hybrid private/socialized system in a testing and research phase.

Last, think about the possibilities for hybrid systems in finance! Public banking....

The bottom line is: Let's get some data, then let's talk.