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Checking In: Coronavirus Edition
One of my startup groups suggested doing a check-in last week and one of the things I noticed In everyone’s worries was speculation about how markets might behave and comparisons to earlier periods of economic turmoil. I’ve been through 1987, 9/11 and 2008, so weighed in with my perspective.
The full effect of the 87 crash hit in 1990 right after I graduated from Columbia. Most of the companies I “interviewed” with at the career center admitted they weren’t hiring any time in the future. So, I temped my way to my first job at a small investment bank that went under within six weeks. I temped some more through most of April before landing an entry-level job in Business and Real Estate Valuation at Price Waterhouse. 9/11 pretty much ended my time there.
What I learned from that experience is that changing up your environment and learning how people do things at different companies is a good thing.
I did weird little jobs like stuffing gift boxes of logo socks at Ziff-Davis, cataloging buttons or prepping trunk shows at Chanel and a lot of phone banks and accounting. I learned a lot of software, and got pretty good at them.
I learned about how relationships work in business and solving problems, from the Chanel Boca Raton store dealing with button theft to fulfilling sweepstakes prizes and basic time and expense tracking. Plus if I ever got cold at Chanel I could always “go grab a sweater.”
9/11 was a weird time and very similar to now. Air travel was shut down. Bridges and tunnels were closed to private vehicles. Manhattan at least was pretty much on lockdown for three months. If you lived below 14th Street you had to evacuate.
Stores were open and I don’t remember a lot of hoarding. (I could be misremembering. I had a running drugstore.com diaper order so was probably pretty well-stocked, regularly). I remember hearing figures like $20 billion in losses just in NYC.
We didn’t have social distancing. That would have been devastating. There was a lot of bonding with neighbors and coworkers I hadn’t really known that well.
I was at PwC then, working remotely for the global web team, mostly operations and reporting. Some of my coworkers who worked out of the Jersey City office saw the towers go down. I had been going in for biweekly Tuesday all hands meetings, but that day was the alternate Tuesday, so I was home with my kids, getting my oldest ready to go meet her first preschool teachers.
We could go outside. The weather was beautiful, and so quiet. I remember a conversation in Sheep’s Meadow with a coworker who was losing her faith. I’d like to think I helped her.
In 2001, were already downsizing our department at PwC, so when I learned we were giving sublease space back to Lehman Brothers, I figured correctly I’d get laid off. That happened in January 2002.
By 2008 I had two school age kids and a part time contract at a virtual association. I had freelance design and technology gigs, too. We had just bought an apartment at the top of the market, but had sold our old one at a near 300% gain over ten years. So we felt secure.
But 2008 meant layoffs and job changes for my husband, who was at Citibank, then Ziegler, then BMO. We are pretty frugal but it’s amazing how much you can spend to live in this city. He is now a full time professor at BMCC. I teach two design classes at CityTech and advise a lot of startups and nonprofits. We’ve cut back, but we have two kids in college now, so feeling very uncertain.
I expect we will probably hear a lot of comparisons to previous disasters. It feels like potentially very different this time.
9/11 was shocking. We were in mourning. Thousands of lives. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who died. It’s going to be the same for us, but it’s going to happen over a longer period of time, and we may not be able to predict who it will be or when.
That by itself is going to mean a lot of mental anguish and a lot of business lost. Hospitality may get its bailout, but how long before people are comfortable traveling again? We may all get our “two weeks pay” from the Feds. Then what?
We startup entrepreneurs and business owners need to brace for it. We need to brace for limited funding opportunities. We need to reach out to each other and partner, do in-kind swaps. We need to share info on grants and other opportunities.
We can’t hold hands or hug anyone anymore, but we can stay connected and check in with each other.
Here’s my check-in:
Going Well: Working on transitioning a three day, three track, all volunteer, live conference to virtual and it is actually going well! I also have my kids home from college, and Simone has been baking!
Excited about: The Information Architecture Conference. My grandnephew, born this past Friday. Moving my classes at CityTech online, and, somewhat ironically, how the fact that isolation breeds misinformation makes Mucktracker, the news literacy app I’m working with, much more prescient and needed.
Nervous about: The conference. My parents. How long this social distancing will last, wifi bandwidth, my IRA, running out of TP.
So that’s my check-in. How are you doing? I have been working from home since 1997, so can offer tips to anyone finding themselves out of the office or incubator spaces for the duration. Feel free to post your check-in and questions in the comments.
Please Drive Slowly on Neutral Ground
My son, Jay, is a sophomore at Loyola University in New Orleans, so the worrywart parent I am signed up for NOLA Ready alerts to track emergencies during hurricane season. The above flash flood alert caught my eye, particularly the reference to parking restrictions on sidewalks and neutral grounds. Flooding in New Orleans streets can get dangerous so the city allows residents to to park cars in neutral areas during heavy rainfall.
The phrase “neutral ground” caught my eye in particular. I am co-chairing the Information Architecture Conference this year, in charge of Experience, so I’m interested in spotting terms that might be unique to New Orleans.
One of Jay’s favorite places to hang out in the Uptown neighborhood is called Neutral Ground Coffeehouse. It’s a place where people of all ages can gather, sip coffee, listen to live music and generally enjoy themselves. Like Temple Sinai on Charles Street across from Loyola’s Jesuit campus, Neutral Ground is a place where a Jewish kid from New York City can find some familiar culture and feel at home, with nightly programming, a weekly poetry hour and open mic on Sundays.
The phrase “Neutral Ground” didn’t seem particularly unique as far as two word phrases go. Other than the clever play on coffee “grounds” it never occurred to me that “Neutral Ground” had a specific meaning in New Orleans history.
On the NOLA Ready alert, neutral ground refers to the grassy median space between the lanes of major streets. On lanes where the city’s iconic streetcars run there are expanses of neutral ground that accommodate the trains with additional buffers. The area may or not be elevated from the main street level, but with the sidewalks, they provide a place for cars to park during heavy storms. We found ourselves waiting in these areas for traffic to pass at several intersections where they do not have many traffic lights or pedestrian signals.
A 2017 Times-Picayune story describes the original Neutral Ground as the center of Canal Street, which represented the division between the historically French and Anglo-American sections of the city. The French Quarter is on the north side of the divide and represents the First Municipality which was settled by French Creoles in the early Eighteenth Century. The Second Municipality, on the south side where the Central Business District is today, was settled by English speaking people after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
Below is an 1798 map showing the French Quarter and fortifications. The diagonal line to the left of the quarter is the boundary of an adjacent plantation, owned by John Greamer and his brother.
Below is an 1816 plan for New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase was completed. The rectangular area at the peak curve of the Missisippi is the French Quarter. Canal Street is the leftmost street in the French Quarter area, one block to the right of the diagonal plantation boundary, now Common Street.
Canal Street’s center divide was officially declared “The Neutral Ground” by the Daily Picayune on March 11, 1837 and the term has since been the general phrase to describe what most other places call the median.
I’m sure I’ll keep learning more New Orleans lingo in preparation for our conference in April. Just yesterday in a marketing team call, Joe Sokohl, our Experience Director who has family ties there, used the term “lagniappe,” another distinctively New Orleans term, derived from Quechua, to describe swag or giveaways we might provide at the IA Conference. I guess we all need a dictionary, so here’s a couple to keep up (these sites also have information for visitors):
Experience New Orleans, Say What?
http://www.experienceneworleans.com/glossary.html
New Orleans.com, NOLA Speak
https://www.neworleans.com/things-to-do/multicultural/colorful-words/
Disaster Planning at Woodstock – 50 Years in Review
Article updated on the event’s 50th Anniversary with images from Woodstock then and in 2011 when this piece was first published.
August 30, 2011
This past weekend, while Irene was threatening the East Coast, my husband and I were in the Catskills for visiting day at our daughters’ summer camp. We decided to extend our stay through Monday to avoid the surge and inevitable traffic delays following the storm’s projected landfall in New York City on Sunday.
Rather than avoid trouble, we found ourselves in the middle of it, as the Catskills experienced some of the worst storm-surge damage in the country: downed trees, road blocks, raging forest streams. If fact, a large white pine at the inn where we were staying fell inches from our unit’s porch, bringing several smaller trees down with it.
When it was safe to venture out, a trip to the Bethel Woods Museum at Bethel Woods Performing Arts Center, site of the 1969 Woodstock festival, interestingly, provided some perspective on disaster planning in the area.
The Woodstock Music & Art Fair was held from August 15-18, 1969 at Max Yasgur‘s dairy farm in the hamlet of White Lake, Town of Bethel, Sullivan County, NY. We passed Yasgur’s farm several times while exploring the area’s restaurants and outdoor recreation facilities.
The area is marked by rolling pastures and clear lakes reflecting big white clouds in deep blue skies. Aside from a very visible lawn signs either declaring “No Fracking!” or “Friends of Natural Gas,” it seems little has changed in forty some years.
Museum artifacts on the planning of the Woodstock festival showcased the local debate regarding the chosen site of the concert. With over 200,000 tickets pre-sold, planning for traffic and security was a huge concern, as was local opinion on exactly what the festival was to be.
The festival organizers had mere days to move from Wallkill, NY where local opposition succeeded in preventing it from being held there to White Lake, where the Bethel Town Supervisor approved the plan despite some local protest. Newspaper articles and advertisements documented the debate.
Also on view were documents from the local Sheriff’s department outlining traffic and security plans and telegrams to other county departments requesting additional coverage. Handwritten notes and official telegrams from Allegheny County and other Sheriff departments indicated a shortage of officers. All stated that they could not spare any men.
Traffic was beginning to get backed up days before the concert started so that it became impossible to get close to the festival site. People were leaving their cars on the highway and walking the rest of the way to the concert. Performers were flown in and out again by helicopter.
An estimated 400,000 people were in attendance at the concert’s peak.
Then there came the rain. Though not hurricane force, the rains that fell on the Woodstock festival and in the week leading into it created saturated conditions, muddy roads and an already difficult traffic situation.
Officials had called in 150 state troopers, and deputies from adjacent counties ultimately did pitch in to direct traffic away from the area. The Evening News of Newburgh, NY reported that by the last day of the festival, mainly due to a lack of food and unsanitary conditions, the crowd had dispersed to only 10,000 and no traffic jams were reported.
This weekend’s storm called for similar measures, but on a much smaller scale. As we left the area, we noted state troopers and national guardsmen directing traffic near the interchanges of Route 17, I-87 and Route 6. Southbound traffic on I-87 was closed above the Tappan Zee Bridge and it was an hour drive between Route 17 and our usual favorite route, the Palisades Parkway.
At the Route 6 traffic circle near Bear Mountain, the Sloatsburg exit was entirely washed away.
Could the traffic situation have been prevented? In 1969, the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department was working with an estimate of 50,000 concertgoers, a figure provided by the promoters that was 150,000 short of pre-sales figures.
From what I’ve seen from this weekend’s rains, emergency services would already have been taxed from heavy rains and flooding in the region. Had they known that attendance would approach half a million people, it is likely that the concert would have been called off. That said, I doubt it would have stopped the hundreds of thousands of people from coming.
Startup Business Development
Columbia Venture Community: Project Two.Eight
In 2022, I facilitated a workshop on Deriving Insights for Customer Development through effective user experience research for the inaugural cohort of Project Two.Eight, a startup incubator for female founders at Columbia University. I also serve as a design mentor on a continuing basis. Two.Eight, or 2.8%, is the share of venture capital funding that female founders receive relative to their male counterparts. At launch, that number had declined. We are working to change this.
Technology Transfer Days: Creating Cultures of Innovation
I have served as an advisor for the Technology Transfer Days since 2014. The program has been hosted by Microsoft and the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress and serves to connect local technology startups to members of the U.S. Army USCENTCOM and NORTHCOM Innovation Office, NASA, Department of Energy, Department of Homeland Security, National Defense University, and Navy Postgraduate School. We match companies to S&I officers for private, facilitated meetings and plan and promote a public program including presentations by U.S. Veteran Entrepreneurs and the Department of Defense’s National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTA). Several organizations who participated in the November Geodata CEO Breakfast described below have received funding through TTD.
Other partners of the Technology Transfer Days program include the Brooklyn Small Business Development Center, NYC ACRE @ Urban Future Lab, Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy Clinic (BLIP), Brooklyn CityTech, OWASP Brooklyn and GISMO.
Impact Hub NYC, 2018-2021
I have a long relationship with Impact Hub NYC, facilitating workshops for their various cohorts, including a service design workshop for Millennial financial wellness as part of their 100 Days of Impact program in 2017 and another financial wellness workshop in 2018 when Decision Fish was part of their United Nations SDG-themed 30for30 cohort. Most recently, I facilitated a customer development workshop for Impact Hub NYC’s Blueprint 2021 Impact Fellowship focusing on customer development and user experience design.
GISMO: Geographic Information Systems Mapping Organization
I have served on the board of GISMO, a NYC based geographic information systems community, since 2013 and have been an active member since 1992 when I was a real estate researcher at Price Waterhouse. GISMO has been the NYC chapter of the New York State GIS Association since 2013 but has existed as an open user group since 1990.
I have developed programs with GISMO and New York Geospatial Catalysts (NYGeoCATS) on a series of public and private meetings to introduce companies and individuals involved in the geodata community in New York City. These meetings are being facilitated with a goal to promote open access and availability of geospatial data from providers to users. Highlights include the GISMO 25th Anniversary gala, a CEO breakfast with the former U.S. National Geo-Intelligence Agency Director Robert Cardillo and facilitated meetings with Department of Defense innovation offices. We also curated a weekend map showcase at the Queens Museum.
We are currently working on a redesigned website that reflects more of the collaborative and advocacy work at GISMO. For more information about the work I am doing with GISMO and its GIS startup events, visit http://www.gismonyc.org/events/past-events/. Visit my GISMO portfolio page to read about these significant events where I co-led, co-curated or otherwise participated in committee leadership.
Exploring a 9/11 Geographic Archive
Oral history as a primary source is being revived through initiatives like Story Corps and World Pulse and through improved storage capacity to archive and exhibit personal stories, making it less expensive for even the smallest and least funded groups. We are moving toward an environment where alternative narratives can be both manipulative (alternative facts, post truth) and expositive, as more and more under-represented groups get access to telling their story. So the ways that we share and interpret of stories in the future will be pretty interesting.
The story of the creation of the maps for first responders and emergency managers is sweeping and personal. I am currently exploring the creation of a 9/11 geographic archive. The archive will serve as a repository of artifacts and a history of participation by geographers, programers and spatial data technologists during the response to the World Trade center attack on September 11, 2001. Funding for the project was provided by the Fund for the City of New York as part of a grant to develop a Center for Geospatial Innovation.
More information and thoughts to come!
Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World
Amy Jeu and I curated a weekend exhibit, Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, on October 29-30, 2016 at the Queens Museum celebrating the map-making community. The event featured talks and demonstrations as well as a hall dedicated to paper and digital maps submitted from the private collections of members of the GISMO community. These maps represent a wide range of themes including the diverse Queens neighborhood and demographics, urban planning, environmental studies, election analysis and more.
My Submissions
For my contribution to the exhibit, I created a cutout map of the 1964 World’s Fairgrounds to teach children how map layers work in GIS. This series of maps, printed on acrylic transparency sheeting can be stacked to show through various layers: Base Map, Parks, Buildings, Streets/Paths. We also provided additional paper and colored pencils for children to use. This activity helped younger visitors to understand the concept of map layers in GIS.
Because the event was held over Halloween weekend, I also contributed a set of themed maps with Halloween parade routes and a “Crime of the Century” story map retelling the activities from the 1934 Ice House Heist in Brooklyn and Upper West Side Manhattan. The piece included reproductions of aerial photographs from the time period.
Documentation
Each item in the exhibition included a placard indicating the name of the mapmaker, the materials used and a brief description of the subject. We used icons to indicate whether an interactive version was available at the computer stations or that the mapmaker is also a speaker in our forum.
Interactive Map
Speaker
Amy Jeu created the flyer and copy for the exhibit which was published on the Queens Museum website and the signage used for the exhibit and presentations. I created the placards and the online exhibit catalog.
Archive
The Map Mosaic event was privately curated. Queens Museum published an announcement and the exhibit catalog and list of interactive maps are available at GISMO’s Website. The acrylic manipulative work is located in the GISMO archive. All maps produced by the NYC Office of Emergency Management were donated to the Queens Museum and all other, individual artwork was returned to the artists.
Queens Museum Website Announcement
Exhibit Catalog
Interactive Maps
West 104th Street Block Association Moves Ahead with Student Design
The West 104th Street Block Association voted to adopt the website design and strategy developed by my team at Pratt Institute. The new web design will update the association’s site from the outdated world of frames and IE4 era optimization to a sleek, modern WordPress interface. Key improvements include an organized layout, legible fonts, searchable newsletter archive, updated content, livelier images, and the ability for board members to edit and add content without needing to understand HTML or php.
While the site is in production, here is a peek at the old and new sites:
Fall Projects: User Research
My Information Architecture class conducted a semester-long, group project to develop a website prototype for a small business or nonprofit group. My group, including Eleanor Meyer, Jan Diolola, Storey Radziunas and me, formed a group called Community Design and selected the West 104th Street Block Association as our client. Since I have a prior relationship with the block association as the caretaker of their digital newsletter repository, I had close access to members of the association board and the community and knew that their site was in desperate need of a facelift.
We each selected a different user population to study including senior citizens and older adults, families living in the neighborhood, young families considering a move to the neighborhood and couples without children. My group presented our design to the block association, who has agreed to adopt it for their next redesign. Next step is building the thing. Congrats, Team!
Read more about this project at my Pratt SILS E-Portfolio:
Summer School
My summer involved a full set of research courses, including Museums & Library Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Researching Local Histories and the Summer Map Institute at NYPL. The workload was a bit heavy due to the fact that the MetMuseum course was not actually a two week course, as noted in the bulletin, but two weeks of seminar followed by a month of intensive research. Ultimately it was a great experience, working in three very different kinds of research: museum artifacts, local landmarks and maps.
NYC Garden Maps, a WordPress site on community gardening in New York City
My map project on NYC Garden Maps is done. I am editing the final deliverables for presentation here, including a walking tour of the Bloomingdale neighborhood on the Upper West Side and a MetMuseum exhibition guide. Look for these shortly.
Also, I spent the summer with my linked data team refining our paper on “Linked Data for Cultural Institutions,” which has been accepted to ACM’s 2013 SIGDOC conference. This has been a challenging and extremely rewarding experience and I thank my teammates and co-authors, Julia Marden, Carolyn Li-Madeo and Jeff Edelstein of Pratt Institute. I celebrated the end of an intense summer with two weeks in the Massachusetts Berkshires.