On the phone to a friend in New York from the kitchen of what was my idyllic, Northern California, hilltop farmhouse I said, “I better go. I think I feel an earthquake”. Before I could walk the 3 steps to hang up the phone I was knocked to the floor. The refrigerator came bouncing across the floor towards me. When I tried to look out the window I saw floor, then ceiling, and then floor. The entire contents of the kitchen cabinets rained down in a roar. It felt like I was on a card table with a baseball bat for its only leg getting thrusting every which way 2 feet per second.

 

In 30 seconds it was over. I crawled outside. There was complete silence. No power, phone, radio, or TV. I was alone a few miles up a country road from the village of Soquel. I had no idea whether I was on top of the earthquake (and had felt the worst of it) or if the epicenter was in San Francisco. All I wanted to know was if a population center had been hit. I was thinking thousands would be dead if it was centered near San Francisco – 80 miles away. The Emergency Broadcast System was up shortly; I accessed it from my car radio. 

 

This was the earthquake that happened during the World Series game. There were fires in the San Francisco Marina District, a highway near Oakland collapsed, and a stretch of the Bay Bridge deck collapsed. 63 dead, 7.1 magnitude centered 3 miles away from me, 10 miles below me, and 85 miles from San Francisco. They called it the Loma Prieta Quake.

 

I helped a neighbor down the road trapped in her house. The tops of my redwood trees had snapped off from the earth’s whipping action. The motorcycles in my garage were in a heap. Of all the things going on in the first following hours (like ash raining on the house from the forest fire approaching because a high voltage tower had tipped over), hearing that they were evacuating the low-lying beach houses in Capitola really floored me. The rumor was that the tide had gone out rapidly after the quake; that meant that it was probably going to come way in very quickly as a tsunami. To be hit by earthquake and then have the ocean come swallow you up is unfathomable. That tsunami never did come. When I could finally get to a functioning phone, my first call was to the guy in New York who heard the first 10 seconds of the quake before the phone went dead.

 

My elevation was 6 feet higher after it. We slept outside for 10 days because of madness-inducing aftershocks. The rape rate in Santa Cruz County tripled through next year. Emergency responders got a lot more respect. People didn’t cheer at concerts for a year in Santa Cruz. I still don’t like the idea of taking the BART train under SF bay. When a big truck passing shakes a building; I still start to run for the door.

 

The psychic shock caused by the destruction and death in Haiti must be many magnitudes larger - even if the Richter magnitude was perhaps half the size of my quake. (The Richter Scale is logarithmic. A 9.0 earthquake is about a 500 times larger than a 7.1.) San Francisco was about the same distance from the epicenter as was Port-au-Prince from last week’s quake. Shock waves get bigger (but less sharp) as they travel from an epicenter just as waves caused by a pebble dropped in a pool do. Different types of similarly-sized quakes cause more destructions to buildings than others. (Some fault movement is vertical and some horizontal.)  Whether a building or city is built on rock or sand makes a big difference. The sandy sub-surface Downtown Santa Cruz and the Marina District are built on made those areas more vulnerable than others.

 

Given how comparatively similar the two quakes, the population totals, and distances from the epicenters were the contrast in deaths is huge: 63 deaths to possibly 200,000 deaths. Likely, the biggest differentiator in the number of people killed and buildings destroyed in Haiti contrasted to San Francisco was building standards. I’m thinking re-bar in cement walls, bolts strapping wood-frame houses to foundations, and steel cross-beams retrofitted into old brick building probably made for most of that difference in death rates.

 

If the Haitians re-build corrugated tin and cement shacks, we haven’t learned anything. That is why I think they should depopulate Port-au-Prince. Bus and boat as many people as possible to villages ASAP. Then, start over with a completely new infrastructure: new sewer plants, gas lines, electricity grid, etc. It was US-based development organizations’ policies that encouraged Haiti’s urbanization; our major role in cleaning it up makes sense to me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My constant theme when talking about the DC government is how people who work for the DC government (elected, appointed, and hired) too often act as if the status quo is acceptable. So I continue to repeat (and did to Mike Neibauer at the Examiner) that everyone needs to concentrate on the big picture problems rather than the multitude of small problems.

 

One of the things about working for and with small businesses is that you have to do almost everything yourself. This morning when I was trying to print out a contract to sign, the ink ran out in my printer right before it printed the signature page. Of course the client needed it signed and scanned back immediately.

I pulled the black ink cartridge out, went over to the sink, and blew into the air hole in the top of the little tank. Some ink squirted out. So, I put it back in the printer. It worked enough to print a few more docs. That’s an awesome entrepreneurial office supply hack if I do have to say so myself.

 

My consultant friends want to talk about what Elance could do to their career about as much as my single friends want to talk about who will be changing their diapers in 30 years. (No. Paying someone to change your diapers is no way to live or die.) As Elance, Guru, DoMyStuff, oDesk, Mechanical Turk, et al. get more well-known and improve, the pay rates of US-based urban service providers (lawyers, designers, writers, programmers, bookkeepers, and marketing people) is going to plunge.

 

This started with programmers but is moving into all sorts of service providers. 20 of the people in your accountant’s 40-person firm may already be being booked through Elance. Programmers who get $80/hour around here only get $15/hour on these sites. Very very few lawyers are getting $100/hour on Elance. To test this simply sort Elance “Professionals” by (your) skill, then by pay rate, and then try to find someone getting any work at anywhere near what you’d want to get paid.

 

With the idea of picking up projects on these sites looking unappealingly low-paying, posting projects on them seems a logical turn. Those who win contracts locally will do well by staffing them globally - or, even better, staffing them in rural America. Those who used to perform that skilled work locally will lose out. For now, some may be able to under-bid their local competitors for contracts and make higher profits marking up (for example) a programmer’s time from $15/hour to $65 rather than marking up from $80/hour to $125 that's typical today. One could pay $35 and mark up to $85 and still out-bid local-sourcers. Yes, working through such sites is a major change in methodology but learning how to manage remote staff sure seems like the way things are going.

 

And don’t think this is about offshoring (with all its unpatriotic connotations). A huge percentage of these people taking work on these sites are Americans who are willing to work for these lower rates. The electronic lowering of geographic boundaries is helping rural Americans take work from urban Americans. I imagine an Iowan 24-year-old who learned php on YouTube coding while in the cab of his auto-piloted combine. A lot of what is changing is not about Thomas Friedman's flattening of the world; it’s the flattening of the United States.  

 

Below is a piece I did for a newsletter. We did later complete the content management system phase mentioned at the end of the piece.

 

<<DCCA's Membership Management System

A citizen’s association’s core responsibility is to communicate with its members and community. Realizing the Dupont Circle Citizen Association’s (DCCA) membership management system (using Microsoft Access database, Excel Spreadsheets, and Outlook for mass emailing), was causing more headaches than it was solving, we recently undertook the task of finding a new cost-effective new solution. We found that the difficulty of using the database was causing our board members and committees to use spreadsheets and Outlook categories rather than our central data repository. We had a several frustrating limitations:

1)     Sending notifications to our membership was a painful time-sink for volunteers.

2)     No centralized storage – we were storing membership contact and payment information in different files and computers. Email-based file swapping just gave us too much room for duplicating effort, communication errors, and frustration.

3)     No Access – allowing members and administrators anytime, anywhere access to manage their membership information and make payments was not possible. This lead to delayed updates, lost information, and requiring substantial amounts of unnecessary effort.

4)     Many of our people use Mac’s and couldn’t even open the database.

As we got into our quest to improve our membership management operation we concluded, a web-based solution made the most sense. We drew up a requirements document and put out an RFP. We received a couple of proposals from web developers to build a system from scratch which were too expensive. We also considered several pre-packaged services of which none were going to offer us everything we needed. We accepted a bid from a local IT consulting and development firm, Benton Consulting. They recommended an open source software system (Drupal with CiviCRM) that was developed specifically for associations and campaigns. With this approach we gain the cost-benefit of a piggy-backing on an already made solution in addition to the ability customize the software as if we were building our own. We’re on our way to having:

1)     An automated system for accepting new memberships, member-managed contact updating, and accepting credit card payments from our website.

2)     The ability to send membership communications from our website from up-to-date membership listings.

3)     Reporting tools our leadership can use. We’ll know if membership up at this point in the year from last, which membership categories are growing, and which members who joined last year haven’t yet paid this year.

When we are comfortable with this new system and have the processes well-documented, we plan to proceed to integrate a website updating tool into the admin part of our website. Then, non-technical volunteers can update the web site. That and the other improvements will allow our volunteers to spend their limited time more productively.>>

 

 

Email Address/Logons - I changed my email address recently. A month after sending notification to the people in my address book, more than 95% of my email is coming to the new address. Given that most address books and CRM systems I look at are pretty messed-up looking,  I'm pleasantly surprised that such a large percentage of people are maintaining their address books that well. The labor-intensive part of the switch-over has been changing my registration contact with services. I counted 124 different logons or contact forms I've changed. Only about 10 of the services offered Open ID or Facebook Connect logons; maybe next time I switch logons en masse, I'll be able to use universal logons.  

 

Linux - When trying to get the data off a hard drive last week, I tried to boot it in Windows XP, Vista, and 7. After spending a couple frustrating hours on that I downloaded Ubuntu, burned it, and just ran it off a CD. From here forward when I'm in similar situations, I'll go straight to Linux. Although I'm used to and use Windows, I don't have issues with Mac or Linux. Linux dealt with this issue elegantly.

 

Weekend Research - I'm considering writing up and putting out a new business model for my consulting.

 

I'm not much for link-blogging but I can't get Clay Shirky's speech out of my mind.

 

 

Councilman Mendelson tells me the new crime law contains what I called the Nathan Johnson Provision in the lobbying I started years ago to keep repeat offenders off the streets longer. Read WP story: Fenty Signs Multipurpose Emergency Crime Bill. There is some coverage of my effort in the City Paper section of my Press page.

 

Thanks Phil.