Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Cuba, the Internet and Social Media

Last week I attended the Cuba, IT & Social Media Summit in New York City.  The summit brought together leaders in the field to discuss the use of these technologies and capabilities in Cuba,  today and in the future.  Many, but not all, of the participants were of Cuban heritage, either directly born on the island like me or whose parents were.

The meeting was not political in nature.  I suspect that most attendees hold views similar to mine regarding Cuba, bemoaning both the repressive nature of the Cuban regime as well as the ineffectual, anachronistic US embargo.  But I don’t really know, because politics was not the primary focus of our discussions.

The key overarching goal of the meeting was “to empower Cubans on the island through technology, helping them to communicate with each other more freely on the island and with the outside world, to access information more freely, and to share information with the rest of the world.”  A second major goal was to start thinking about the future and specifically what is needed to bring Cuba into the 21st century technologically “once laws have been passed that allow the US and Cuba to trade more freely in technology, both in public and private enterprise, and by industry sector.”

A very good summary of the Cuba, IT and Social Media Summit, and in particular of its key conclusions and outcomes can be found in this entry of the blog El Yuma by Ted Henken, a faculty member in the departments of Sociology and Black and Hispanic Studies at CUNY's Baruch College.  (Yuma is a slang name often used in Cuba to refer to Americans.)  

The summit was sponsored by the Cuba Study Group, an organization founded ten years ago “to facilitate a peaceful reunification of the Cuban nation leading to a free and open society with respect for human rights, the rule of law and a market-based economy.”  Its key objectives include “respect for human and political rights and individual freedoms in Cuba, and denounce the violation of those rights and freedoms”; “substantive economic changes that improve the lives of Cubans”; and “discussion and critical analysis of ideas and formulate policy recommendations that facilitate peaceful change in Cuba.”

JumpStart NYC: Talent in Transition

As we well know, many talented people have lost their jobs as a result of our ongoing Great Recession, - the worst financial crisis we have lived through since the 1930s.  The US unemployment rate has doubled from 5% in December of 2007 to 10% in December of 2009.  The number is significantly higher, about one out of every six workers, when taking into account underemployed and discouraged workers who have had no success in finding a full time position.

Hopefully, the economy will soon improve and unemployment rates will start to come down.  But in the meantime, it is very important to offer those who got laid off as a result of the deteriorating economy as much help as possible in exploring and finding job opportunities.

In New York City, the crisis hit hardest in the financial services sector.  There are now over four hundred thousand unemployed city residents, many of them as a result of layoffs on Wall Street.  About a year ago, the Bloomberg administration launched a number of programs to help recently unemployed city residents.  JumpStart NYC is one such program.

The JumpStart program was initiated by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC).  Its key objective was to help people who lost their jobs on Wall street to apply their skills and abilities in opportunities beyond financial services.  Most of these people had previously worked for large firms.  A primary goal of JumpStart was to help them explore new career paths and opportunities in small and entrepreneurial firms in the New York area.

Economic Performance and Social Progress

I continue to be very interested in the study of highly complex organizational systems, that is, systems involving communities of people and the services they perform for each other in pursuit of collective goals.  Enterprises, healthcare systems and cities are prime examples of such highly complex organizational systems.

Advances in information and communications technologies are enabling us to better understand the characteristics of these systems.  We now have the ability to gather huge amounts of information about their behavior, which we can then analyze and model with powerful supercomputers.  This will enable us to better design and manage them, and in general, to make better informed, more intelligent and smarter decisions.

But, in order to properly deal with these highly complex systems, we must have a pretty good idea of the kind of information we need, the values we are optimizing around and the objectives we want to achieve.  While thinking about these matters, an article in the New York Times caught my attention a few months ago.

The article covered the release of a report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress.  The Commission was chartered by French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008, and was chaired by Joseph Stiglitz with Amartya Sen as his chief advisor, both Nobel-prize winning economists at Columbia and Harvard respectively. 

The Commission was created to address the increasing concerns raised by leaders around the world about the adequacy of current measures of economic performance, which are mostly based on GDP figures.   The GDP is a basic measure of a country’s overall economic output based on the market value of all the goods and services the country produces.  If GDP is the primary measure available to government officials, they will make economic decisions based on optimizing or growing GDP, while paying little attention to other critical societal factors.

Blogging as an Exercise of the Brain

Every six months or so, I turn to blogging itself as the topic for that week’s post.  Perhaps, as someone wrote in a comment to a previous post on blogging several years ago:  “You know that someone has run out of things to say when they start blogging about blogging.”  It is quite possible that when all else fails in coming up with a topic, a self-referential blog will do the trick, as long as you don’t do it too often.

In reality, blogging continues to play a pretty central role in my life.  I have been blogging now, week-in, week-out, since May of 2005.  Writing and editing each post consumes quite a number of hours each week, let alone the time it takes to think what to write about and how to best frame the subject.  Much to my surprise, despite the time and effort it takes to produce each blog, I have not missed a week yet since I started doing them.  Several times I have come close to finally skipping a week when I am very busy.  Other times, especially when I am having a particularly tough time with a subject, I wonder why I am subjecting myself to such seemingly unnecessary anguish.

The truth is that few will care or even notice if I miss a week now and then.  So, why then am I so disciplined about my blogs?  Is this perhaps a manifestation of a somewhat obsessive-compulsive personality?  Is it a way of bringing a certain order to my life?  A weekly blog certainly adds structure to my life, especially now that I am no longer working full time for one company and live a somewhat distributed life, working with several different private sector and academic institutions.

Is there any other kind of activity that, like blogging, I engage in with near-religious regularity even though no one else cares that I do so?  Yes, there is one other such activity in my life - physical exercise.