Maria Sipka's Column
Maria Sipka's column will be back in the next issue of the Starfish Report. In its place this time we are pleased to share one of the greatest starfish stories of modern times—the formation and accomplishments of Carolina for Kibera (CFK).
Carolina for Kibera
This story begins in 2000 when University of North Carolina third-year college student Rye Barcott spent part of his summer living in ten-by-ten-foot shacks in Kibera (Key-bear-ah)—the largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya. Barcott was attending college on a Marine Corps scholarship, and travelled there to conduct research on youth culture and ethnic violenc; it was something he thought he would face in his work as an officer in the Marines after completing his ROTC program at UNC.
Kibera is a microcosm of the world’s problems. More than two hundred thousand people live there in extreme poverty, in an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Kibera has a history of ethnic violence and has a very ethnically diverse population. With so many people living in such a relatively small area, Kibera has earned the reputation of being a dangerous “tinderbox.” According to a United Nations prediction, up to one fifth of the world’s population could end up living in “mega slums” like Kibera by 2020.
White people almost never enter the dangerous slum of Kibera, so Barcott acquired a local guide through a personal contact for his first visit. Here is his description of his first view of Kibera, before entering the slum:
“Kibera looked like a large brown salamander speckled with dots of silver and green. It dipped and rose, a sea of dirt and rust spotted by new roofs shimmering in the sun. Blue gum trees stood like flags above the frozen waves. The green-gold savanna of Nairobi National Park stretched far off in the distance. It was staggering to behold. The sheer size and density of Kibera was difficult to imagine even as I stood looking at it. Its population estimates ranged absurdly from two hundred thousand to more than one million. No one knew how many people lived in Kibera.”
The Nairobi government doesn’t provide any infrastructure or public services to Kibera. There is no sewer system or trash pickup service. Barcott’s senses were reeling soon after entering the slum. He describes his first impressions with these words:
“The smell of excrement and garbage made me gag. It was everywhere, as was the commotion. Every tin shack along the main alleyway sold something: haircuts, water, used clothes, machetes, traditional medicine, manual labor, cassette tapes, charcoal, sex, rotting fish heads, and vegetables. Vendors shouted like auctioneers. Rap music and Congolese Lingala clanked out of squeaky speakers. Women wrapped in colorful kangas sat quietly hawking vegetables. Babies cried.”
Considering that Kibera displayed poverty on a level he had never imagined, it’s a testament to his commitment towards his research project that Barcott actually spent most of his nights in Kenya in the ten-by-ten homes of people he met in Kibera. Perhaps it was this willingness to live life on their level that gained Barcott the minimal level of acceptance in the community he needed to achieve what transpired. During his stay in Kibera, Barcott developed friendships with a widowed nurse, Tabitha Atieno Festo, and a tough community organizer, Salim Mohamed. Together, they developed Carolina for Kibera, a non-governmental organization that is a pioneer in the movement called participatory development.
CFK has helped develop a new generation of leaders from within the community, earning recognition from Time magazine as a “Hero of Global Health” and attracting visits from such dignitaries as Melinda Gates and then Senator Barack Obama, who came to witness CFK’s best practices.
One of Barcott’s primary areas of research during his first visit to Kibera was to determine what organizations were serving youth, and whether any of them helped prevent ethnic violence. Here’s what Barcott had to say about what he discovered:
“I was dismayed at the level of waste and ineffectiveness I witnessed. Most large NGO’s were top-down and entered the slum with preconceived ideas of what was wrong and how to fix it. They didn’t seem to ask or involve the local population. The people these NGOs purported to serve needed to be included in more of the decision-making. One of the things that most impressed me about Kibera was the spirit of community and its strong identity. There was a defiant pride associated with being from the slum.”
Barcott returned to UNC for his senior year feeling much older than his fellow students, even though they were the same age. He had difficulty accepting the waste he saw all around him—lights left on in empty classrooms, rich kids in fancy cars, food left on cafeteria trays. He recalled how he felt while in Kibera:
“Kibera was unbelievable. It was if I was imagining it even though I was there in a tin shack with my back against a lumpy mattress. It was everything about the place—its magnitude; its deprivation; its raw pain. Kibera was wrong. In our world of plenty, people shouldn’t live like this. How was it possible that a father might die of a disease that could be treated for seven dollars? I paid more for my haircuts.”
During his Christmas break from UNC after the summer in Kibera, Barcott worked on his thesis, focusing on the chapters about NGOs in Kibera. The more he wrote the more frustrated he became with the way they brought in foreign experts with solutions to problems they didn’t really understand. His contacts in Kibera stayed in touch sporadically, but seemed eager for his return. Barcott realized this about his Kibera contacts:
“They had captivating stories, big visions, and a lot of talent. An idea finally took shape…I could do something in partnership with these Kenyans that would be larger than raising money. Together, we could develop young leaders and make change in Kibera. I could start an organization, raise a small amount of money, and invest it in community leaders.”
This realization became the seed that grew into CFK. Barcott chose that name because he started his fund-raising efforts by appealing to University of Carolina alumni. Although the way was not smooth, CFK eventually achieved some important starfish-style accomplishments with decentralized networks and catalyst-style leadership.
In addition to Tabitha Festo’s medical clinic, staffed and supported by the Kibera community, CFK also organized youth leadership projects around soccer tournaments, a “War on Trash” that involved a community cleanup effort, the Binti Pamoja Girls Center, and local mothers self-help groups, among many other things such as HIV/AIDS prevention education.
After graduation from UNC, Barcott served five years in the Marines, and then went on to Harvard University where he earned master’s degrees in business and public administration. He is a TED Fellow and now works in the Duke Energy sustainability office. ABC World News named Barcott “Person of the Year” in 2006 for his dual service to Kibera and the Marine Corps.
Barcott is the author of “It happened on the way to war; A Marine’s Path to Peace.” To learn more about Barcott’s compelling story, visit http://ithappenedonthewaytowar.com. For more information on Carolina for Kibera, go to CFK and CFK at UNC.
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Share Your Starfish Story
Heather Blanchard, co-founder of CrisisCamp, shares her starfish story in the following
interview:
Starfish Report: The work you’re doing with CrisisCamp makes you a great example of a real starfish networker. Can you tell us about that?
Blanchard: Well, you know, it's hard not to be in today's world. I think a lot of organizations could really benefit from a more decentralized approach and from the innovative thinking that comes from all kinds of places, not just the top.
Starfish Report: Speaking of the decentralized approach, can you describe the leadership style in your organizations? You work with both CrisisCommons and CrisisCamp, right?
Blanchard: Right. I can give you some background about our community and discuss some of the things we've done.
CrisisCamp is a free and open event. The purpose is to bring together the technology community and emergency services, such as your local emergency management or your fire department, to talk about the ways that technology, such as open data and geolocation, can help local communities prepare ahead of time for disasters. Another purpose is to help people learn how they can assist first responders if there is some kind of crisis in their local community.
We see a really big opportunity in bringing those folks together. We see people sharing what they see and know during a crisis. But if that information isn't connected to the local response system, even though it’s in the public space, it doesn’t help the people who really need access to the information. So I think that CrisisCamp is a great forum.
We held our first CrisisCamp here in Washington, D.C. in 2009. It brought in about 200 people. Afterwards, people wanted to hold CrisisCamps in their own local towns. Philadelphia had the second one, and then New York City and Silicon Valley planned events for the spring of 2010.
So it didn’t take too long to energize our network beyond the first CrisisCamp. There are many technology volunteer communities all across the world, and during the Haiti earthquake, we all asked ourselves, "What could we do? How can we help?" Our answer was to create two CrisisCamps: one in Washington, D.C., and one in Silicon Valley. It started as an open forum for sharing best practices and being able to build relationships and trust between communities that really don't talk to each other that much.
But during the Haiti earthquake we became a response community. That really transformed us from a seed idea to actually building a community. By the Saturday after the earthquake, there were five other cities that wanted to participate, and then within the first 15 weeks after the Haiti earthquake, there were 65 events in eight countries, with more than 2,500 people participating. It just really took off then and became a movement.
Since then, people all around the world have used the CrisisCamp model to bring together the technology community to support humanitarian relief and crisis response, both at the local and global level.
For example, in Thailand when they had severe flooding last year, a group of technology volunteers got together and created CrisisCamp Thailand. They saw our model, and even though it wasn't even transcribed into their local language, they adopted it, and they were helping their local response authorities.
We've seen this happen here in the United States with the Alabama tornadoes, and most recently with Hurricane Irene. So the idea of holding a CrisisCamp-type of event has really spawned the development of connections between people in different types of communities all over the world. So we're really excited about that.
CrisisCommons was developed to function during the times when emergency managers and first responders aren't in the middle of a crisis. During peaceful times they can talk about how to change business processes, discuss data standards, and explore what their needs are. The worst time to try and network and exchange business cards is during a disaster. It’s important to build relationships before the event happens.
So this is where CrisisCommons comes into play. At this point we are very much in the infancy of creating what that looks like. It started as a concept, and we're still trying to figure it out. But we know that there definitely needs to be some kind of shared support for people who may not be able to provide it themselves.
A good example is that if we can provide volunteers with EC2 (elastic compute cloud) servers they can use for their prototype projects, this would enable that kind of innovation. So that's the kind of thing we've been working on at CrisisCommons.
We also really support the development of communities of practice. For instance, we have a Missing Persons Community of Interest, composed of people that are interested in missing-persons data. A lot of times during disasters, there are a lot of different types of organizations that have missing-persons registries. And there are many lessons learned from the past ten years of development of these registries. It’s not just volunteers who develop these registries, but also institutions like the International Red Cross or Refugees United who are charged with managing missing-persons information.
So CrisisCommons provides a forum where our volunteers coordinate discussion and bring together a lot of different types of groups to see if we can establish new data standards and new policy practices. But really, the most important work we do is build relationships between groups that are not already connected, such as community members with information to share, first responders, other emergency services, local government officials, technology experts, and organizations such as missing person registries and disaster relief providers. I think that's really one of the great strengths of CrisisCommons. We're really excited about being able to support communities like that.
Starfish Report: So CrisisCamps are actual events that spring up during a disaster or crisis, whereas CrisisCommons is an ongoing support system to help communities develop preparedness in advance for potential future disasters and crises.
Blanchard: Yes.
Starfish Report: Does a CrisisCamp involve people coming together physically where they sit in a room with their computers, or can volunteers work from their own home computers and still participate in the camp?
Blanchard: Originally, CrisisCamps were very focused on people getting together physically. All of the 65 camps I mentioned during the Haiti disaster were actual events. A lot of those events were held at local universities or at companies. We held some of them at NPR headquarters. One was held at Carnegie Mellon. There are a lot of organizations that are very interested in hosting CrisisCamps as physical events. Here in Washington our CrisisCamps include over 250 people. It was really amazing during the first weeks of the Haiti event, seeing all these different types of people coming together.
But as time passed, we've seen the emergence of a virtual engagement. People who have already done some disaster response work created CrisisCamps in their hometowns. Many of them were part of the Haiti response, and now they want to continue this rewarding kind of work. Volunteers do this by connecting with other people in the network.
For example, the Japanese earthquake was a virtual effort. There were people all over the world coordinating via Skype to edit a wiki for the event. This type of response goes beyond languages, beyond borders, beyond organizational boundaries. So we're more of an adhocracy. We're an ad hoc network—we’re not a nonprofit. One of the great things about us is that we're able to move really quickly. We're agile, creating an environment where the best idea wins.
I think that what we're seeing is part of a new way people will be working together in the future. I see a new kind of workforce that will be location-agnostic. It's all going to be about your skills and what kind of skills you can bring to the table.
Maybe during your day job you might be a systems administrator, but you speak four different languages and you know a particular side of risk management. Although you don't use these things in your everyday job, they are still valuable skills. So I think that there is a growing trend where people will come together as international teams, working productively on projects.
Starfish Report: It sounds like someone who had previously participated in a CrisisCamp and learned how it works could plug in remotely and work with people who are running the physical CrisisCamp in a new crisis area.
Blanchard: Yes, it works a lot of different ways. If a crisis is happening in your town, even though a CrisisCamp is happening there you may be too preoccupied dealing with your own home and family emergencies to participate in the camp and assist your community. That's why mutual assistance is really critical, and that's something we really try to facilitate. We've seen that happen throughout the responses that we've done within communities.
A good example is that during the New Zealand earthquake in Christchurch, there was a network of folks who had created a CrisisCamp before. But some of them were actually part of the first-response system, so they had a job to do. This meant they could not be as available to the CrisisCamp as members of their surrounding networks in New Zealand could be, outside of the impacted region. But through the relationships established during the CrisisCongress last year, and by working on previous responses, cities like Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Toronto and Chicago were able to rally their resources to assist New Zealand.
In a way, that mirrors a lot of what happens in the traditional emergency response system. Think about your local power company. When there’s a big storm, the local power company will call on all of the other power companies to provide surge support to fix the power.
With CrisisCamp we do the same thing, in that there are a lot of people who have participated in either a physical or virtual event, and are able to share what they've learned. Mentorship is going to have a huge place in CrisisCommons—the whole concept of experiential learning, which is then shared to connect these networks. So maybe there will be an event that happens in Washington, D.C., and maybe London and Paris can help.
We've also discovered that time zones work in our favor, because we end up with people working around the clock, each in their own time zone. We have set up projects where someone starts them off in Europe and then we kind of work west, and people in the United States pick it up, and then someone in New Zealand picks it up, and then Europe picks it back up, so you can actually have 24/7 coverage.
We really hope that these types of activities can show that, 1) this kind of engagement is needed; 2) that the network approach is really important; and 3) there are a lot of things that you really need to do to nurture that. Mentorship is a huge piece to us regarding access to resources, sharing resources, and sharing your experience. I believe that in the future you'll see a lot more of that.
Starfish Report: So back to the example you gave of the earthquake in Christchurch. Understandably, the people living there had to deal with their own emergencies, so it was the outlying CrisisCamp groups in other parts of New Zealand that could provide the most service. Did those groups come to the area where the crisis was happening?
Blanchard: No. Local CrisisCamps do not deploy to the site of a disaster in another area at all. When a disaster occurs in another area, you convene your local CrisisCamp network at a location in your own area, to be able to support that crisis. In this way, we're always working remotely. But being in the same physical space creates a clarification that is really helpful.
For Christchurch, in particular, and really pretty much every crisis event that we've ever been a part of, it's never just CrisisCommons. CrisisCommons and CrisisCamp participants are only a part of many organizations that are working on these responses. There are some really great organizations, like OpenStreetMap, the Standby Task Force, Geeks Without Bounds, and GISCorps.
There are a lot of technology volunteer communities out there. We don't define ourselves with labels. We hope that people participate, and we don't care who they're with. We just really want to encourage productive usage of volunteers' time, and we want to learn from what we do.
A lot of volunteers belong to more than one response organization, and I think that really speaks to this whole concept of decentralized networks. One person today can wear so many different hats. At the end of the day, it's really about applying your skill at the right time and place. That's really what we're interested in doing.
Starfish Report: Do you find that you're able to reduce some redundancy? If you have technical people working through a CrisisCamp, and then you've got the Geeks Without Bounds also helping, don’t they sometimes duplicate the same tasks?
Blanchard: No. The best thing about our community is that all of these organizations work together. We've set up a Google Group where the leadership shares what's going on. We have joint Skype chats so everyone can see what's happening. During Hurricane Irene, we all worked together on that event.
I think this is a testament to the leadership of these volunteer communities. They want to work together, and they're making it happen. Every time we do this, we're all learning something new each time, because in every disaster event, there's always a problem or challenge you couldn't foresee. We’re also able to spot problems that are persistent. This helps us refine the way the response is happening, not just for one community but across several of them.
The big issue is not the redundancy, but rather what needs to be done. And that's really where the interplay between starfish networks and the command-and-control structure of emergency response systems around the world comes in. You would expect that to be a bit of a culture clash, right?
What we're seeing is that emergency services communities are embracing this. They're very interested in how to augment their capability and capacity. There are always people who resist change, but then you see someone like W. Craig Fugate, who's the FEMA administrator. Not only does he understand technology and use it every day, but as a leader, he shows his community of emergency managers that it's okay to use these tools. He also engages in the larger disaster response community. He has participated in events like the Social Media and Emergency Management (SMEM) Camp—a community of emergency managers who want to use social media and connect with ad hoc networks that are represented by CrisisCommons, and other relevant groups.
We have tremendous volunteers. We also have really great relationships with a lot of crisis response organizations, like the United Nations, the World Bank, and FEMA. We’re very excited about the SMEM community, and we have strong hopes that those relationships build communications and partnerships that really help communities during the times they need it most.
Starfish Report: How is leadership established for a CrisisCamp?
Blanchard: Oftentimes, the leader is the one who acts first. Local CrisisCamps build local engagement, and often, those would be the folks that would lead it. Sometimes there are other communities that have created a project, and we rally our resources to support those projects.
It's different with every disaster. We may get a call from the Red Cross asking what people are doing, and we will connect them with other disaster response networks. We want our work to be like the tide that raises all boats, by sharing resources that we have, and connecting people who want to help. The development of mutual aid networks through CrisisCamps is the next step.
We're still in the beginning phase. Technology is changing so rapidly, and the adoption of technology is massive. People are using technology in new ways every day—especially open data—to help their communities. We want to help throughout all aspects of the disaster spectrum, from preparedness, to response, to the recovery process.
We also want to sustain work in places of ongoing crisis, such as the developing world. There are also a lot of people to learn from, and allowing people to take leadership and rally the existing networks can lead to increased productivity.
Starfish Report: The very first CrisisCamp you mentioned, in 2009, wasn't set up to deal with a crisis happening right at the time; it was to establish the concept, right?
Blanchard: That's right. The very first CrisisCamp was about building relationships, and about how creating an open forum in a local community can facilitate better connections to open data and technology skill resources that are in your local area, to be able to support the response process. Crisis Mappers Skyped in from Sudan, and Patrick Meier was there talking about the importance of geolocation and the open concept of mapping. OpenStreetMap was there, along with many other communities that were already established. So CrisisCamp is very much a newcomer, and we're really happy that there are so many great people to learn from and support.
Locating local resources is a key component of preparedness. Just the other day I heard that a city in California had to let its Geographic Information System (GIS) team go because of budget cuts. Well, now the city has equipment in the emergency operations center that none of the remaining staff know how to use. But there are probably ten people in that city who know how to use GIS equipment. And in fact, there's actually a computer science department that teaches GIS in the local area.
So it's imperative that local communities make those connections and embrace the concept of doing more with less. Every local community can reach out and find those who know how to use different types of tools and skills. Preparedness requires more than technology. Project management is huge; leadership and organizational skills are vital. There are also many private-sector and academic resources in the local area that can be tied into this.
So the first piece is getting the people together, and the second piece is taking inventory of what types of resources are available. For instance, the local university could host a CrisisCamp, and a satellite company in town might provide free imagery.
It's just a matter of introducing the emergency management community to people with resources and special skills and saying, "Here are the ways that your efforts and skills and resources could really be brought to bear to help our local community during a crisis."
A good example of this is how the CrisisCamps in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, California, supported the L.A. Sheriff's Department during Carmageddon, when they closed part of the freeway.
Everyone was worried that was going to be a big problem, but it wasn’t. Volunteers were constantly tweeting updates, and this helped the city understand how Twitter is an important part of the communication between the community and local government, and it also demonstrated how technology volunteers can do a task for the city.
Starfish Report: Your website at http://crisiscommons.org mentioned the contributions hackers make to CrisisCamp.
Blanchard: Yes, there are hacker communities all over the United States who do good things. CrisisCamps are a really great way for local emergency management to talk to the technology hacker community and say, "Hey, these are some of the needs we might have. Could you help?" We really want to foster the building of bridges between those two worlds.
This happened during a CrisisCamp that supported Haiti. Inveneo, a nonprofit that supports NetHope, came to the CrisisCamp that was happening in Washington, D.C., and brought some cheap Quadro routers. They said, "We want to create long-distance Wi-Fi to better connect the local NGOs that are operating down on the ground in Port-au-Prince, to provide greater connectivity to the Internet." So they asked the CrisisCamp participants in Washington, D.C., if there were any firmware hackers, and ten guys raised their hands. So they got a team together and created the solution in an afternoon. That evening, it was sent to California for testing, and 48 hours later it was connecting the SOS Children and the International Red Cross at distances of six kilometers and nine kilometers.
That's the kind of value you get when you define the problem accurately and the right project manager engages with the technology volunteer community to address a specific need. People can come together and get it done literally within an hour.
We love seeing examples like that. That’s why we’re working to inspire communities to build better relationships at the local level with their emergency managers. We want to create dialogs around "This is what I need," where the technology community can respond to those specific needs, instead of creating what they may think is needed. And we're really seeing the emergency management community begin to embrace these concepts, so we're really excited.
To learn more about CrisisCamp and how you can get involved, visit crisiscommons.org and join the CrisisCamp Facebook group
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Starfish Principles At Work
Roberta Baskin, Media Communications Director at the U.S. Office of Inspector General, Health & Human Services in Washington DC, shares this exciting news about how she and her colleagues are implementing Starfish principles in the following interview.
Baskin: In my work these days, we really advocate for starfish principles within an organization that has traditionally been very command-and-control oriented, and very conservative and hierarchical. I see my role as really empowering individuals to network wherever they are. We’re in more than ten regions, with a huge mandate. The Inspector General’s office for HHS is responsible for oversight—performing a watchdog role for over 300 programs.
People don’t realize there are so many programs. This includes programs within the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Cancer Institute, and Indian Health Services. The list just goes on. And we’ve discovered that the way this watchdog function can be most effective is in empowering individuals.
We’re using a network of starfish out there now, which works much better than previous protocols. It used to be that when somebody in Detroit or Chicago or San Francisco or Seattle or New Orleans – name a city – got a call from the news media, they would refer the media to Washington. But how much do we know in Washington about what’s going on in other areas? The local staff members know more about the issues occurring where they are, so it makes more sense for them to talk directly to the media and get the message out.
Our mission is about uncovering and eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse of healthcare programs. This is more effectively accomplished on a more local level in terms of talking about what’s going on in individual cities and communities. So it’s been a real change, a very dramatic shift culturally for the Inspector General’s office and everybody’s really embracing it.
Starfish Report: It’s interesting that you use “Power to the starfish” in your email signature line, and consider that your new mantra.
Baskin: Yes, among the communications team, you see that on emails on an almost daily basis. “Power to the starfish” has become a sign off. It’s almost like our high five that it’s working.
Starfish Report:Even though you work strictly within the Health and Human Services Department of the Inspector General system, you recently attended an event where inspector generals from other departments in the government gathered together.
Baskin: Yes, there are 73 offices of inspectors general, another fact most people don’t realize. It seems to be a common misconception that there’s just one inspector general. But each department has an inspector general and some of these departments are very small. The Department of Health and Human Services is the largest. We distribute the most grant money that requires oversight, among all those different healthcare organizations that I mentioned.
There is a relatively new network called the Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency, which is based on the starfish model. It’s a network we use for sharing information and best practices.
I recently attended one of those meetings because there was an executive from Twitter there. I’ve been really pushing for our office to utilize social media, which has been a very foreign concept for inspectors general, but now they’re embracing it. We’ve completely overhauled our website. I was told originally we would never get on Twitter because of all the security issues that come up with third-party platforms.
The thinking was that to integrate social media platforms into our website would be very dangerous in terms of security and privacy. The first person I wrote to about this was Rod Beckstrom. I asked, “Rod, when you were the cyber security czar for the country in the Department of Homeland Security, that sounds pretty security conscious. How in the world were you on Twitter?” And he said, “Oh, it’s pretty simple. You just stay separate from the network, be on a separate phone card and don’t mingle with your department’s – your agency’s emails.” That was one really huge hurdle we were able to overcome.
So now we do have a separate computer that we just use for Twitter and it’s been great. We already have more than 850 followers. We just started and we have a lot of news media following us that are interested in healthcare fraud, waste, and abuse.
Starfish Report: That’s a big issue right now.
Baskin: Yes, it is, and my issue is that people need to know more than just that there’s fraud, waste, and abuse. They need to know what’s being done about it and that they can also contribute if they have information. Again, if you think about the world of starfish out there, another thing we did is we just created a “most wanted fugitives” website. Over 170 fugitives of healthcare fraud have stolen hundreds of millions of our tax dollars, and we’re putting their pictures up so that people can help us find them. We’ve had more than 220,000 visitors to that website and we’ve captured some of those fugitives. So again, that goes back to the mantra of starfish communities—the idea that people have information and you can develop ways to connect with them.
Starfish Report: That’s an excellent point. Our readers will be glad to know that they can go to oig.hhs.gov/fraud/fugitives if they want to get involved, and help fight fraud. Aside from the Health and Human Services Department, are any of the other inspector general offices using social media?
Baskin: Actually, we’re in the middle of doing a survey about that to find out. It took us a year to get on Twitter, by the way. When Rod said, “Oh, you just divide from the network and it will be fine,” I thought, “Oh, this is easy. We’ll be on Twitter in a month.” Well, it didn’t turn out to happen that fast.
But I know that the Inspector General for the U.S. Post Office is on Twitter. There are very few out of the 73 but they’re kind of looking to us for some leadership on that front, so that will be growing. If Starfish Report readers want to follow us on Twitter our handle is OIGatHHS.
We’re tweeting every day about convictions. We recently released a big report about hospices. A lot of information is now being released that used to be, in my opinion, kept very secret. You had to do investigative reporting to find it and now we’re being much more transparent and accountable to the public, as we should be. We’re holding others accountable, so we should be accountable.
Starfish Report: No doubt this is part of the cultural shift you were speaking about that’s coming from the principles in Rod’s book.
Baskin: Right, exactly. I actually shared his book with one of my colleagues. He’s my deputy and he’s worked at the office for ten years. He’s very smart but had been following standard procedures all those years. The way that it worked in the past was we put out a report that people would have worked on for a year. These were very academic reports, in some cases, and God forbid, we would hear from a reporter. The response would be, “The report speaks for itself. No interviews. No quotes.”
But after my colleague read Rod’s book, The Starfish and the Spider, he came into my office. He was like a human nightlight. He was so excited. He said it was an epiphany for him. So he’s the one who started this line on his emails, “Power to the starfish.” He’s very excited every time now when one of our special agents, or special agents in charge in various communities, talk directly to the media.
Now we have agents creating their own relationships in their own communities, as it should be. It makes our jobs in Washington easier, too. We get to do other things.
Starfish Report: As you know, both Vice President Joe Biden and Army General Martin Dempsey, who has been nominated as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have read Rod’s book and list it among the top most influential books they have read.
Baskin: Isn’t that great?
Starfish Report: Definitely. As someone who works within the government and sees things that the general public doesn’t, have you noticed any changes in leadership style in the government in addition to yourself? You’re working as a catalyst-style leader in the Health and Human Services office, but do you see any other examples of this kind of leadership?
Baskin: Everyone that I’ve shared the book with finds it very inspiring and enlightening. We did an offsite management kind of retreat and focused on the ideas from a book called It’s Your Ship.
The author is a naval commander whose ship was once ranked lowest in the Pacific, and turned it into the best ship in the Pacific. He accomplished this by moving away from a top-down leadership style, and started really listening, interviewing everybody on the ship. He asked them why they did things a certain way and was told, “That’s the way we’ve always done it.” He turned his ship around by not accepting that and asking, “How could we do it better?” It was very similar to the starfish catalyst leadership style. It’s interesting that both books have a connection to the sea.
I was thinking for next year, it would be very cool to use Rod’s book as a management resource in terms of inspiring management style for the new age that we’re in. I recently came back from the British Virgin Islands where I go for vacation. It’s like my spiritual home and I brought back a starfish which we put on the table when we have our weekly meetings. It’s our symbol of where we want to be.
I am very grateful to Rod for being such an inspiring catalyst and creating all of these other catalysts. I love the “Power to the starfish” mantra that we’ve embraced.
Before joining the Office of the Inspector General as Media Communications Director, Roberta Baskin worked as an investigative journalist. During her distinguished career, she served as the Executive Director of the Center for Public Integrity, the senior Washington correspondent for "NOW with Bill Moyers," senior investigative producer for the ABC News magazine 20/20, chief investigative correspondent for the CBS News magazine 48 Hours, and contributed special reports to the CBS Evening News. Roberta's won more than 75 journalism prizes, including 3 duPont-Columbia University Journalism Awards, 2 Peabody Awards, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the Radio-Television News Directors Edward R. Murrow Award, and numerous Emmys. Her proudest achievements are righting wrongs, changing laws, and transforming the way companies do business.
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Eco Corner - Rod has been on the Environmental Defense Fund Board since 1994
Is there hope for the future?
Rod has been on the Environmental Defense Fund Board of Trustees since 1994. In 2007, Rod interviewed Dan Dudek, Chief Economist of the Environmental Defense Fund, who was one of the co-authors of the Kyoto Protocol, and a world-leading expert on environmental markets and how to shape them, design them, put them into policies and make them work. As far as we know, this was the first time Dan granted such an interview, so we are very pleased to share another installment from this historic event in this edition of "The Beckstrom Starfish Report."
Rod: We’ve talked a bit about [former Vice President Al] Gore and his contribution in Kyoto. Let's talk now about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the work they did, and how it contributed to that initial success in Kyoto and the framework that came together.
Dan: The IPCC was in some sense also born out of experiences of the Montreal Protocol.
Rod: Was that the protocol on hydrofluoric carbons, or other fluorocarbons?
Dan: Basically on the chlorofluorocarbons, but they included the CFCs as well—a whole basket of gasses that deplete the stratosphere ozone layer. The Montreal protocol was the operational arm of the Vienna convention dealing with the same problem. What's important in the history of the Montreal protocol is that nations were again locked on the basis of different understandings about the underlying science.
So different nations backed their own national scientists, and it wasn't until the revelation of that big hole in the ozone layer that was detected by the NASA flights in the Antarctic that people said, "Whoa. It's not a theory. Something big is happening. Let's get our stuff together and figure out what we're going to do about it, because this is a real threat to the planet.”
So out of that lesson came the idea that we should have a panel composed of an international group of scientists focused on achieving consensus on the scientific understanding of the problem. They would document the situation in terms that were acceptable to all of them, and provide that to the negotiators as support and background for the ongoing negotiations.
Rod: How many scientists were part of the IPCC in the beginning and how did that grow?
Dan: I don't have the exact numbers, but they are literally in the hundreds. This was truly an international effort to mobilize the best talent, and their tasks are quite comprehensive. Scientists not only look at the problem in terms of earth science, they also examine what can be done with negotiations, technologies, costs, and the need for adaptation, to determine what can be done as changes occur.
In addition to atmospheric scientists there are also social scientists and others who look at responses to climate change in terms of agriculture. There are medical doctors looking at what happens in terms of changes in disease vectors and where they might occur around the world. This is really an attempt to understand as fully as possible what the forecast for climate change might actually mean—for ecosystems, the natural world, human societies, how world communities should be organizing themselves, and what it will mean for all of us in our daily lives.
Rod: Why do you think that the Nobel Prize group in Oslo chose to recognize Gore and the IPCC as opposed to Gore and the UNFCCC or any other body?
Dan: I think Gore and the IPCC share many things in common, but one in particular is their focus on understanding the underlying scientific nature of the problem, and then communicating that as effectively as possible.
I think that in addition to politics, Gore has really devoted his life to understanding and mastering this particular set of problems. I think once he left office, he truly did throw himself into trying to find the most effective way, not only to communicate but to really mobilize people, to reach out and address what he saw to be, and I think very correctly, a sort of indifference in the world about the significance of the global experiment that we're conducting on the atmosphere and the climate.
I think that the Nobel committee recognized the personal commitment of his energy, his position, and his connections with world leaders. Gore kept global warming in the forefront at a time when the U.S. retreated from the process of developing a solution. Gore’s personal contributions, along with the individual efforts of scientists to further our understanding of global warming led to the December 2007 meeting in Bali in to work on a new international agreement on climate change.
Rod: You’ve certainly explained what a great contribution Gore has made to addressing and attempting to solve the global warming problem facing our planet. If he were sitting here right now with us, in 2007, 10 years after the historic formation of the Kyoto Protocol, what would you say to him?
Dan: I think I would say to him, "Mr. Gore, I have been working on this problem myself for more than 20 years and although I think I have made some small contribution to helping to solve it, it has been your personal commitment of energy, time, reputation and your unflagging devotion to getting people's serious attention to this problem, which has truly made a difference. So this is a much deserved and I think overdue recognition of your effort."
Rod: That's wonderful, and if you were speaking to the several hundred or thousand scientists of the IPCC who work so hard on all those scientific studies, what would you say to them in appreciation and congratulations?
Dan: I would certainly express an appreciation of their work. I think creating more understanding, a more tangible sense in the public's mind of how our planet will look if these climate changes continue, is really the most effective way to motivate an individual to make real changes and to get commitments from the governments. At the same time I really would exhort them to do more. Push more, push the envelope harder.
I would ask them to think some more about how we can bridge the gap between individuals and the global scale of the problem. How can we best answer the question people ask, "I'm just one person. What can I do?"
This problem involves billions of tons of carbon dioxide. How can one person solve a little slice of this problem? There's still a lot of scientific debate about this, isn't there? I need a clearer message, a clearer sense of what people need to do.
Why is it imperative to act now? Why do we need to actually have global emissions significantly reduced by no later than 2020 if we're to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change? Scientists need to tell negotiators we need an operational definition on what is the dangerous tipping point regarding our climate system.
Despite 15-plus years of work on this problem, we still don't have a practical definition of what that means. So how can governments and societies and individuals organize themselves to protect the planet if we don't know what it means to have effective interventions with the climate system? So I’d say to the scientists, “Congratulations, enjoy your champagne and your prize, but please get back to work.”
Rod: That's great. I have another question for you, Dan. You know this is a huge problem. Mother Earth is the biggest ship we've got and we're all on and it, sailing in a dangerous direction. It could take many years, even many decades to begin to turn this problem around. Do you still feel hopeful? Do you still feel we have a shot at turning this global warming phenomenon around?
Dan: Absolutely Rod. My hope and optimism is built on my own framing and understanding of human beings, which is that we are an enormously creative and inventive species. Just look at the way we evade taxes in countries around the world, how much energy is devoted to that.
Imagine if we took that intellectual energy and devoted it to solving global warming? I don't know if you'll see it in your lifetime, but it’s possible. The dramatic changes in the technologies we use in everyday life—everything from cell phones, to laptops, to the Internet—have radically transformed economies. These technologies were developed in a very short period of time. So if we harness that human creativity and ingenuity, I have no doubt it will solve this problem..
Rod: Creating these market frameworks did work for acid rain, right? The sulfur dioxide dropped by more than half, and is being cut another 70% or so from there. So it'll be down another 15% of the 1990 levels and it seems that the utility industry is still very healthy and profitable and has a much higher cap than it did.
Even though that's a smaller market than the overall problem, it was a very pressing and real problem, and we did solve it. So it does seem like there is some hope.
I just want to thank you so much for taking your time today Dan. I want to thank you personally for those 20 years you committed to developing such effective environmental markets with the clear policy frameworks you helped map regarding emissions for the Clean Air Act and in Kyoto. My personal hope is that we can get America, and then China and India, into some program so that we can indeed turn this ship around. Even if it does take us another 10, 20 or even 30 years, we can get the wheel turned now. So thank you so much for everything you've done, Dan, and for taking time with us today.
Dan: Thank you Rod, very much, and also I would also like to add my own personal note of thanks for the energetic and enthusiastic support and encouragement which you have provided me over all these years.
Rod: It's been my pleasure.
To read previous installments of this interview, go to www.Beckstrom.com/Newsletter.
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