Radical Transparency

Our Real Change wiki has been recognized as a Top Ten Nominee for Innovation by Seattle NPower "for introducing radical transparency in how they do business" and I'm pretty tickled with that. This is one of those areas where being slightly OCD pays off in the end. When I created the thing, the idea was to simply build an on-line space where documents could be made available for our board. Then I just sort of got carried away. By the time I started writing our thirteen year history, I was down the rabbit hole for the next week or so. Anitra and Wes happily followed. After I was done, the majority of our internal documents were on line, and I was inviting anyone who cared to come take a look. Here's how NPower sees it:

Nominated Innovation: Real Change took a bold measure in revealing their most sensitive documents to the public, staff and board via their online wikispace. With financials, grant applications and circulation information completely open to public scrutiny and comment, Real Change has redefined transparency in a radical way.

The wiki came in handy during our blogospheric event last April when I was being accused of the poverty pimp thing over on Seattle Weekly's blog. All I had to do was send the guy to the wiki, and suddenly I was cleared of all charges.

It's funny how here in Seattle one can lose sight of what's innovative. When I raised the idea at our North American street paper conference last weekend as a possible best practice for others, ninety-percent of the people in the room didn't know what a wiki was. Thats OK. To me, the whole text messaging thing seems strange and bizarre, so I guess we're all Luddites in our own way.

Scenes From Lunch

I didn't take nearly as many pictures of the North American Street Newspaper Association conference as I should have, and all but three of them sucked. The guy above was at the Portland State University farmers market where we had lunch Saturday. He had his Rogue Creamery booth next to the artisan bread people that I bought my little olive roll from, and I asked him if I could just buy enough cheese for lunch. His smallest quantities were about twice what I wanted. He thought a minute, and poured some of his cubed jalepeno samples into a little plastic tub for me, and then refused to take any money for it. When I insisted, he motioned to my NASNA conference badge and said, "No, you do good work." It kind of made my day. The cheese was awesome.

The photo below is three guys from Vancouver, BC that I worked with over lunch to help them think through their relaunch of Street Corner, the paper there. Is it just me, or are Canadians way nicer than we are? Anyway, what's been a struggling and sleepy paper has received a huge injection of energy and support, and they're looking to take the thing up several notches to make it more like what we do here in Seattle. We had a great conversation that ended too soon, but I'd do anything for these guys. When I took their picture, I asked them for a hipster band pose and they pulled it off brilliantly. Look for a cool new paper in Vancouver soon. These guys rock.

Welcome to Portland

I drove to Portland today for the North American Street Newspaper Association conference. Cruise control at 78 MPH is a wonderful thing. Especially when you get to accelerate. In case anyone's curious, it takes three Leonard Cohen CDs to get from Seattle to Portland. Songs of Love and Hate, Ten New Songs, and The Future. Actually, I listened to Democracy (the video of this live posted above nearly brings me to tears every time; click link for lyrics) and Always twice, but that's just how that CD is supposed to be played.

There are around 50 people from 17 papers from around the US and Canada here. It's a pretty DIY affair. Most of the food is donated. We're in the University of Portland dorms. The whole conference is taking place in some classroom space on the 2nd floor. There's like 4 cheap places to eat across the street. I could go through the whole conference without spending more that twenty bucks or walking more than half a block. Street Roots organized the thing on about $8,000. They're amazing.

So I was more than a little disappointed to see how Willamette Week welcomes a poor people's conference to town. They ran an unbelievably snarky article painting this as some kind of a poverty pimp conference because we're not all homeless.

The Seattle Weekly has met their match. Reporter Rachel Schiff fastened on the fact that small, cash strapped, organizations prioritize sending staff people instead of homeless vendors to paint a picture of streetpapers gone corporate. Then she uses the recent growth and success of Street Roots to support her thesis. If they're succeeding, she implies, it must be because they've sold out.

I spent an hour with her on the phone over the course of three phone calls, gave in depth answers to her questions, and emailed her the NASNA strategic plan and the background document behind it that describes a severely under developed movement with a dire need for technical assistance. What does she print?

Street Roots' success contrasts with many street papers that are struggling or showing no growth. Former NASNA president and current board member Timothy Harris attributes that stagnation to failures to improve content or to operate as a small business.

"Novelty gets a paper off the ground," Harris says. "Then the product must evolve or die."

I'm quite sure I never said "the product." I heard one of our staff do that once and told him it bugged me. It's just not a phrase I would use. But it's a nice way to make me sound like some kind of a dick with an MBA hanging on my wall.

I do this work for fifteen years without ever seeing this sort of thing, and then in the space of four months, we see articles asking if street papers are too successful in the Seattle Weekly, Utne Reader, and Willamette Week.

What's up with that?

Instead of being effective and actually helping people, we're supposed to fulfill their romantic fantasies about the poor by being these little rags that homeless people put out on old typewriters as they're trying to keep warm on a steam grate somewhere. Fuck that. And Fuck the Willamette Weekly.