Monthly Archives: October 2019

From Program Director and Southern Songs and Stories Producer Joe Kendrick:

"Hiss Golden Messenger founder MC Taylor and longtime band mate Phil Cook started working together within a day of meeting each other, and while Phil frequently leads his own band, he is also regularly on tour and on records with Hiss Golden Messenger, the band that Taylor founded in 2007. Youll hear conversations with both of them along with new music from Phil Cook and from Hiss Golden Messenger, including a live version of a track from the new album Terms Of Surrender in this episode of Southern Songs and Stories"

Hiss Golden Messenger With WNCW Program Director Joe Kendrick

Songs heard in this episode:

My Wing by Hiss Golden Messenger - excerpt, from Terms Of Surrender

Happy Birthday Baby" by Hiss Golden Messenger - excerpt, from Terms Of Surrender

Hungry Mother Blues - Live At The Cave by Phil Cook from As Far As I Can See

Cats Eye Blue - live 8-24-19 by Hiss Golden Messenger

Southern Grammar (live 8-22-19) by Hiss Golden Messenger

Thanks to Hiss Golden Messenger tour manager Luc Sur for his invaluable help in coordinating my interview with MC Taylor and for sending the bands live songs heard in this episode!

Southern Songs and Stories is produced in partnership with public radio station WNCW and the Osiris podcast network, and is available on podcast platforms everywhere. Would you like to help spread awareness of the artists featured here on Southern Songs and Stories, their music, and this series? Simply subscribe to the podcast and give it a good rating and a comment where you get your podcasts.

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Beautiful Intentional Communities With Hiss Golden Messenger on Southern Songs and Stories - WNCW

In the wake of catastrophic wildfires like the one in 2018 that burned the California city of Paradise, wildfire management has become a pressing topic, to say the least. Especially under scrutiny is the US Forest Services hundred-year policy of suppressing fireon the surface it makes sense. Fire burns houses and kills people. Its a terrible, uncontrollable enemy. Right?

Not necessarily. The native communities across California have been practicing traditional, controlled forest burning techniques for 13,000 years. From the great grasslands of central California to the salmon runs of the Klamath River, the Miwok, Yurok, Hupa, Karuk, and other nations have tended and provided for those plant and animal species that were useful to them. To do this, they created a patchwork of different ecological zones using low-intensity fire, creating niches that support Californias unbelievable biodiversity. Some of the California landscapes that look like pristine wilderness to the nonindigenous are actually human-modified ecosystems.

And many species have come to depend on low-intensity fire at a genetic level. We have fire-dependent species that coevolved with fire-dependent culture, says Frank Lake, a US Forest Service research ecologist and Yurok descendant. When we remove fire, we also take away the ecosystem services they produce.

To understand how indigenous cultural fire management works, I attended a Training Exchange, or TREX, a collaboration between the Yurok-led Cultural Fire Management Council and the Nature Conservancys Fire Learning Network. A couple of times a year, firefighters from around the world gather to learn from the best of the best, the Yurok traditional fire managers. We learned about the traditional uses of prescribed firesthey aid the acorn and huckleberry harvestsbut we also worked with modern tools like drip torches and atmospheric weather instruments. When everyone returns to manage their own homelands, they bring with them a deeper knowledge of how to use fire holistically to heal the land while preventing catastrophic and out-of-control wildfire.

For me, as a photographer used to working almost exclusively in the Arctic, I found this story to be challengingit was hot in Northern California in October! The first day I was on assignment, the mercury hit 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and I tried my best to keep making photographs with sweat dripping down my camera. Thankfully, within a day, the weather shifted and I learned to navigate this dry, beautiful landscape with the same sense of wonder as I do up North. Its hard to walk around inside a Yurok-burned forest without a sense of awe at the renewal of life and the ingenuity of its indigenous caretakers.

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The Quiet, Intentional Fires of Northern California - WIRED

A year after the introduction by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry of theWay of Love, Practices for a Jesus-Centered Life, The Episcopal Church continues to offer new resources for congregations interested in following the Way of Love as a way of life. New this fall are theFAQs for Small Group Ministryvideo, a social media infographic, as well as a postcard-sized infographic. These resources are availablehere.

The nine-sessionLiving the Way of Love in Communitycurriculum is designed for small groups organized for the purpose of exploring The Way of Love. Group members study and experience each of seven practices: turn, learn, pray, worship, bless, go, and rest. These intentional small groups may choose to meet weekly, every other week, or once a month. The facilitation guide offers leaders a process for guiding an intentional small group for nine, 90-minute sessions with an option for extending a session 30-minutes should a group choose to gather over a meal. Each session includes prayer, a check-in process, discussion, practice time, a check-out process, and worship. Suggested scripture readings and hymns are also included.

In theFAQs for Small Group Ministryvideo, Jerusalem Greer, staff officer for evangelism and an intentional small group leader in her own parish, speaks to some of the questions she is frequently asked related to small groups: What is an intentional small group? Do small groups replace Sunday morning worship? How does our tradition show up in a small group? To illustrate the impact of being a part of an intentional small group, Greer invited parishioners fromSaint Peters Episcopal Churchin Conway, Arkansas to share their experience.

We believe that when parishes take the time to establish and members choose to participate in an intentional small group, they are better able to grow as communities following the loving, liberating, life-giving way of Jesus, says Greer, A way that has the power to change each of our lives. And to change the world.

Participation in an intentional, faith-based small group is an ideal way to follow the Way of Love. In these settings, participants are given the opportunity to build trusting and transformative relationships with God and one another through regular and authentic conversation, practice, and prayer. The community created within these groups can support and deepen commitments to live a Jesus-shaped life at home, at work, at play, and in the world.

Download the curriculum, video, infographic, and social media graphic free of chargehere.

On the Web:New Way of Love, Practices for a Jesus-Centered Life resources support Living the Way of Love in Community Small Group Facilitation Guide and Curriculum

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'Living the Way of Love in Community' features small group facilitation guide and curriculum - Episcopal News Service

School District 13 is a classic example of gentrification in Brooklyn, representative of the last decade and a half in the borough. As local schools learn to navigate the challenges that come with rapidly changing demographics of neighborhoods that surround them, the Academy of Arts and Letters in Clinton Hill, has lessons to share.

The district serves the neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, Prospect Heights, and parts of Bed-Stuy. Back in 2010, the districts student-body was 61% Black, 8% White, 15% Hispanic, and 16% Asian. These days, Black students are 43.6% of the population, while 15% are White, 21% Asian, and 16.3% are Hispanic.

Academy of Arts and Letters is located in Clinton Hill, just a few short blocks from Fort Greene Park. Established in 2006, the school started off as a middle school, serving grades 6 through 8. Its students were nearly all children of color. But quickly, a lot of parents who came to tour the school were not.

It was like, oh my gosh, what happened here? says Principal John OReilly. You could see it in their facial expressions. Black and Brown kids are like, whoa! If all these people come in, do I belong here? So, thats hard.

With the student population changing, the school was also losing its Title 1 Funding, which is federal funding that gives financial assistance to schools that have high numbers of low-income students, under the Every Student Succeeds Act.

We lost Title 1 in 2009 when we dipped below 60% free lunch, OReilly says. We lost a bit more than $250,000. We were going from having all kids of color to a vastly majority white school.

Around the same time, UCLA released a study showing New York City schools were the most segregated in the country.

OReilly decided it was time to take action. A native New Yorker who grew up in both Manhattan and Brooklyn, OReilly has been part of the Department of Education for 22 years, nearly 8 of those as the principal of this school. He exudes enthusiastic energy that makes his role as principal of a K 8 school, especially one focused on integration, possible.

Located at 225 Adelphi Street, the Academy of Arts and Letters shares space with P.S. 20, which had plenty of space to be utilized back in 2006, when Arts and Letters opened. It became a K 8 in 2010 when it began to add two classes for both Kindergarten and 1st grade, allowing the school to nurture its student body over a longer time period.

We were inspired by the learning culture of a number of K-8 schools. They were incredibly warm and smart, OReilly explains.

On its website, Arts and Letters, which currently has 525 pupils, explains its mission is based in the belief that the purpose of public education is to work in partnership with parents and communities to raise young people who are strong and flexible thinkers, and caring, responsible stewards and leaders of a vibrant, democratic society, where all students should find and share their voices.

This mission has enabled the Arts and Letters to tackle integration head-on.

We were very responsive to the UCLA study, OReilly says. I would say we certainly lead the charge, we were a part of that.

Arts and Letters became proactive. It was among the first schools to take part in the DOEs pilot program that was trying to promote diversity, in this case, through admissions. Arts and Letters is an unzoned District 13 school that uses a lottery system for admissions. Because, as Principal OReilly explains, the schools Kindergarten admissions pool is disproportionately white and affluent, they have a goal to have 40% of its student body to be free lunch. Its a goal that has remained elusive. These days about 25% of Arts and Letters students qualify for free lunch and OReilly believes the competition with charter schools plays a role in attracting students.

Even so, the changes to the admissions method have made an impact on the diversity of the student body. Though white students began to outnumber the black students as the district gentrified, OReilly maintains that his school has always had a student-body of color.

The percentage of Latinx and Asian students at Arts & Letters has increased over the past years, he explains.

According to the DOE, of the 2017-2018 school year, Arts and Letters population is 32% Black, 37% White, 16% Hispanic, and 7% Asian.

Though many of the schools community supported the effort to make it more diverse, there were some concerns and reluctance.

The main counterforce, the push against integration, were white families, OReilly says. Their worry was that their childs education was going to decline because of whatever the code words they were trying to use if they were trying to be slick, and not overtly racist.

OReilly says all students at his school have academically benefitted from integration, especially the children of color who may otherwise have been in more segregated schools, as he points to studies, such as Children of the Dream by Rucker C. Johnson of U.C. Berkeley, that have shown that integration helps all.

As OReilly and the schools staff aimed to confront race issues, they began to realize that there was more than just diversifying the population. There are students of color who dont do as well academically or participate as much as their white peers. Some parents and students of color told their principal that they didnt feel safe, visible or even heard at Arts and Letters.

It felt very racial, OReilly said. It is racial. And its something that we need to approach with open minds and open hearts, with like a quiet humbleness but with great determination that were going to keep going, despite making lots and lots of mistakes.

To fix those mistakes, OReilly and his staff which is currently half white, half educators of color began creating programs and opportunities to discuss race.

Although the DOE helped Arts and Letters with its initial diversity admissions program, there were no funds dedicated to supporting such programs. The school turned to the Neighborhood School Grants Program, funded by one of the largest Brooklyn real estate developers, the Walentas Family Foundation, to help get the programs going. Last year, and again for 2019, Arts and Letters were given $18,000 from the program to fund what they call Intentional Integration at Arts and Letters.

The grant money enabled Arts and Letters to truly focus on addressing race and white supremacy across its constituent groups the students, the faculty & staff, and parents. There has been professional staff development focused on this issue, workshops for parents, and a racial equity/anti-oppression working group led by faculty. Teachers are also focused on the racial gap in assessments and finding ways to create more equity to reduce it. Then theres a support team at the schools Student Life Center, where students, staff, and parents meet once a week to discuss race issues.

Seventh-grade science teacher Sasha Swift is part of the Racial Equity Team, which is dedicated to making sure that the school is integrated in all aspects. She leads staff advisory groups, which are smaller staff groups that gather to discuss classroom issues. During the last school year, the groups met about five times to do team building activities, talk about their own racial identities and what it meant to them.

In the beginning, it may have felt uncomfortable, Swift says. But I felt like at the end, the ideas to just build a space where people feel like they can say the things they need to say. Its a safe space, and you wont be judged. I think thats been really helpful. It also makes it clear to everyone in the school what our mission is and what the goal is.

Theres a similar group for the middle school students who also meet twice a week to discuss race 15 students sit in a circle with a teacher overseeing the meeting.

Theyre not afraid to talk about it, OReilly says. It can be playful, it can be fun. But it can be tense, too.

One thing that has been noticeable is that when it comes to identity, white students are far less likely to describe themselves according to their skin color compared to other students.

Kids of color label their cultural identity, their racial identity, OReilly snaps his fingers to indicate how quickly those students do so. Whereas white kids, their kind of ethnic connection is distant. And thats interesting, kids notice that.

There was one moment, OReilly remembers, where things got very tense when a 7th-gradegirl of West Indian heritage called out a white friend for not inviting her to her birthday party.

It didnt go so well, he says. But that was very courageous for her to say that. When she said that, she was tearful. They were tears of rage and hurt.

He also points out that such a discussion would not have happened in a segregated school.

Even in the classroom, there have been energetic discussions about race. When 8th grade humanities teacher, Liliana Richter, brought in a New York Times article about Brown v. Board of Education, which declared segregated schools as unconstitutional back in 1954, she asked her students what was more important: a good education or to be a diverse school?

It was a student-led discussion, Richter says with excitement. Kids really know you cant have a good education without diversity.

The staff is also conscientious to how the students interact with each other, from overnight school trips to being on the playground together.

Were constantly looking at how students play, Sasha Swift says. Are they self-segregating? What could we do about that? It is something we think of all the time.

As for the parents, there have been efforts in getting them to discuss race as well.

When it came to facilitating workshops at Arts and Letters for the parents, two mothers, Blanca Ruiz and Judith Jean-Bruce, volunteered. Both had been trained by the Center for Racial Justice in Education and are former teachers themselves. Starting two years ago, they began organizing monthly events where parents would meet in groups at each others houses. Over time, these events were solidified by the PTA as workshops.

Back in June, the two women explain, there was a popular workshop as part of a four-part series, where between 30 to 50 parents attended. It required self-examination in how racial trauma shows up and how to discuss racial messages in social media, ads and television.

It was a well-attended session, Jean-Bruce says. There was a desire to discuss race in an age-appropriate moment. People are triggered, and theres unpacking in front of everybody.

We named race as often as possible, Ruiz adds. Some missed the first three workshops and you could see the discomfort in their faces. People were saying, as a black man or as a white man.

There is a lot of work to be done, Ruiz points out. But, she says, the white parents are trying.

Im open to having conversations, she says. They ask, what can I do as a white parent? And they share their struggles with other white parents.

The two women also mention that Brooklyn itself is a deeply segregated borough, and schools are just a small portion of a bigger issue. They even bring up how gentrification makes the discussion of race uneasy.

Its pushing out a community, Ruiz says. Theres a lot to unpack there. Then theres the false white liberalism that say theyre all for integration until it impacts their child. So, are they all for achieving equity? Or just being cool? That is why we do work with parents.

Despite all the challenges, the Academy of Arts and Letters is determined to achieve full integration. That also means on an academic level. The school has no gifted and talented program, and there is no tracking of anyone. This is because, OReilly says, such classes are mostly white, and dont allow those white students to mingle with nonwhite students.

In order to have integration, OReilly explains. Every kid, family and staff member must feel like they belong. Our school model allows itself integration. Were committed to inclusion.

The school even communicates with other schools in Brooklyn about integration and how to do it. The staff also has strong beliefs about Brooklynites who are reluctant, or even against, any form of integration.

Why wouldnt you want all kids to have access to a great education? Sasha Swift would ask those people. What is the fear? Wouldnt you want to raise people who are sensitive to other races and also knowledgeable about other races? Its hard for me to understand. Why in 2019? In Brooklyn? And in New York?

Swift wants school districts who are hesitant to be considerate of what integration means, how it is beneficial to them, as well as to go in deep with it.

If the start of that initiative is just reserving a certain amount of seats, Swift says, thats not enough; it cant just be the seats. There has to be a commitment, not only to what the population looks like, but what the day to day feels at the school. It has to be an agenda.

Richter has this encouragement for other schools: Be prepared to lean into discomfort. Celebrate victories, and dont be afraid to go slow.

Its good for everyone, she adds. No one is hurt by integration. The Brown v. Board ruling shows segregation is bad for individuals and society.

As for Principal OReilly, his determination is as strong as ever for the coming school year.

We want to shrink the racial gap in assessments, he says. We want to develop a more trusting and positive relationship with our families. And work on more bridges than walls.

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Intentional Integration: This School Has Lessons To Share In Navigating The Race Inequity Issues - BKLYNER

Professionals in psychology, business, entertainment, entrepreneurship and law from Georgia will share their expertise at Texas A&M this weekend, discussing issues facing the black community.

The Carter G. Woodson Black Awareness Committee, with marketing assistance from the Black Graduate Students Association, will be hosting a seminar titled Educate to Elevate: A Seminar on How to Rebuild the Black Community on Saturday. The seminar will be held in the MSC Gates Ballroom from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., including free admission and food, with the purpose of exposing and exploring issues that affect the African diaspora around campus. The seminar will feature five presenters from Let Us Make Man, a mentoring organization from Atlanta. The event is open to the Bryan-College Station community, and registration is available through the QR code provided in flyers, email, social media and at the event as well.

Psychology senior and Chair of WBAC Kayla Hood said the organization was created in 1969 through the MSC and creates programs that pertain to the awareness of issues for the black community, such as the annual Martin Luther King Jr. breakfast and Afro-Latinx Festival. She said one of their biggest challenges has been promoting the Educate to Elevate event and motivating people to participate.

Everyone is welcome, but not everybody necessarily feels that way, Hood said. We stress the fact that everyone is welcome to come and share their perspectives, but it is a little tricky sometimes.

Hood said the event will allow people to interact with each other and with the speakers to discuss ways of rebuilding the black community. She said that the idea of featuring Let Us Make Man at the Educate to Elevate seminar came from a director at WBAC last year. The mentoring organization informed WBAC of the workshops that theyd be offering, of which students and the community members will have the opportunity to attend two, depending on which of the sessions that theyve registered for. These sessions deal with a different aspect of community building. She said the seminars put on by Let Us Make Man have received good reviews and have been put on successfully at other campuses, such as the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

We really look forward to everybody coming and we look forward to everybody experiencing this seminar, Hood said. We really think that it can help with our community building skills and help make a more inclusive conversation for everybody to be a part of.

Gerry L. White is one of the presenters at the seminar and has been with Let Us Make Man for the past 10 years. Gerry is a professor at Clark Atlanta University in the Whitney M. Young Jr. School of Social Work, and his research centers around American family units. Let Us Make Man aims at helping the community and tries to increase the number of young people that go to college and succeed, he said.

It's gonna create an opportunity for the students and guests who are in attendance to learn about some very interesting dynamics that particularly concern communities of color, Gerry said. Were excited by the conference and the experts that were bringing there too.

According to Gerry, the professionals from the mentoring organization are excited about hosting sessions at A&M because of the opportunities that they will be providing to the students and community, though Texas is unknown territory for them. The mentoring organization is strategic and intentional about expanding to D.C. and Chicago. He said that they want students to be aware of how to interact with law enforcement in a healthy and productive way, know the art and science of community organizing, understand the impact of mental health, the psychology of success and to understand the family.

We tell the students to get ready, we tell the community to get ready, Gerry said. Put your tennis shoes on. Get ready to interact, get ready to discuss, get ready to laugh, get ready to pose questions.

Community health senior Nia White, a member WBAC, is the daughter of presenter Gerry. According to her, no one has removed the veil to have open and honest conversations about issues facing the black community. The Educate to Elevate event is very relevant to the A&M campus, especially to give minorities a space to discuss problems in their communities, she said. Nia said the event is for the community at large even though they are targeted at the black community.

It is open to the Bryan-College Station community, so its not just for the A&M students, Nia said. We have a lot of faculty signed up. We want to be able to involve the entire community and not just A&M. We do feel like A&M can be improved by the entire community getting in on this.

Nia said Let Us Make Man holds annual conferences and various projects in Georgia with attendance ranging from 800 to 1,000 individuals. Originally from Atlanta, Nia has been attending these conferences for about 10 years and said they have impacted the person that she is today. Nia said anyone can take something away from the workshops because the topics discussed are broad and arent common knowledge.

These are professionals basically providing their services for free, Nia said. Every conference I've gone to, I just walked away with something that I didn't come in with and I know for other people like people are always impacted whenever they go so I think it would be a very great experience.

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Georgia-based mentoring organization Let Us Make Man looks to impact Texas A&M community through Educate to Elevate seminar - Texas A&M The Battalion

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With live service games increasingly becoming the norm, the industry has entered a community-driven age. Whether that's fan communities on third-party sites, or communities baked into the fabric of the experience, developers are placing increased emphasis on their importance.

While questions around who is responsible for user safety online often don't have very neat answers, there is a growing consensus that platforms should be held accountable for hosting harmful content. Starting in September 2020, under the EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive, UK communication service regulator Ofcom will be authorised to fine social media companies and online platforms up to 5% of revenue, or suspend operations, for failure to protect vulnerable users from harmful content.

Earlier this year, the Department for Digital, Media, Culture, and Sport in the UK produced its Online Harms White Paper, which also suggested that social media platforms be held accountable for hosted content, and outlined plans for an independent regulator to manage compliance.

Although the tides have been slowly turning, this is a problem Canadian tech firm Two Hat Security has a long history of tackling. Following a recent partnership with image and video classification software firm Image Analyzer, the two companies will work together to facilitate automatic moderation of live streamed video content "at unprecedented levels."

From left to right: Cris Pikes (Image Analyzer), Chris Piebe (Two Hat), and Carlos Figuieredo (Two Hat)

Two Hat and Image Analyzer are automating the moderation process, allowing individual communities and platforms to set the parameters for acceptable behavior or content, and let the system do the rest. For example, the tech can apparently identify content such as the Christchurch mass shooting, which was streamed over Facebook Live in March this year, and shut it down within seconds.

Speaking with GamesIndustry.biz, Two Hat CEO Chris Priebe says his work tackling harmful online content is deeply personal.

"I was bullied in high school, because I wanted to be different and do my own thing, and I didn't want to fit into the whole crowd, so they bullied me quite extensively, to the point where I had death threats and I had to leave town," he says. "So that gave me a passion for stopping bullying on the internet. I think everyone should be free to share without any harassment or abuse, which is our mission for our company."

The pressure to respond to toxic online content has intensified, as earlier this month another shooting was streamed on Twitch, this time in Germany, which left two people dead. But online communities elsewhere are facing similar problems, as social media becomes infected with extreme content, and fringe elements of gaming communities spread vitriol and hate.

This frequently boils over into industry workers' personal lives, as developers find themselves the target of online abuse, or even cybermobbing. The human cost of online toxicity is immeasurable to both the communities where it proliferates, and individuals actively targeted by it.

"How many billions of dollars are being lost because people quit playing, because they didn't feel welcome?"

Cris Pikes, Image Analzyer

Moderating toxic content isn't casualty-free either; earlier this year an investigation into working conditions at Cognizant-operated Facebook content moderation sites in America revealed staff developing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after extended exposure to extreme graphic content, such as animal cruelty, violence, or child exploitation.

Even removing the human cost of it all, the cynical business case is reason enough to encourage healthy, positive communities. According to figures from Two Hat, people are 300% more likely to never return to games or platforms where they experienced toxic behaviour. Conversely, players are three times more likely to return after positive interactions.

"How many billions of dollars are being lost because people quit playing, because they didn't feel welcome?" says Image Analyzer CEO Cris Pikes. "The longer you stay, potentially the more you're going to pay because you're more invested in the game, so that long tail of building up your love for that game."

It's a position Priebe supports, saying that developers are "putting their time into the wrong thing" when there is a "giant looming sign" that points to problems with the community, rather than the game, limiting developers' potential.

"Stop tweaking your game. I hate your community, go fix your freaking community," says Priebe. "That's what [players] want. And that, I think, will move us from a $100 billion to a $200 billion industry."

"You can't assume that players and users know what is expected of them. So even in that sense, the industry needs to do a better job"

Carlos Figuieredo, Two Hat Security

Last week, Two Hat Security and Image Analyzer hosted a content moderation symposium in London to define and classify online harms, with the aim of tackling online toxicity. While it's a problem that won't be going away anytime soon, there are workable solutions, and plenty of things game developers can be doing in the meantime to help manage their communities.

Carlos Figuieredo is the Fair Play Alliance co-founder, and director of community trust and safety for Two Hat. He says one obvious thing that even large companies have failed to do is establish well-defined community guidelines.

"These serve as the baseline, the fundamental approach for everything else that you do in terms of player behaviour and understanding that player behaviour," he tells us. "So no kidding that we are completely, as an industry, unprepared to deal with threats coming from players on Twitter."

Figuieredo says that developers need to be intentional with how they develop communities. He mentions the recent A/B testing carried out by Twitch, which found that making people manually accept the community guidelines resulted in notable and positive change in general behaviour, just through the mere act of establishing expectations.

"You can't assume that players and users know what is expected of them," says Figuieredo. "So even in that sense, the industry needs to do a better job of really showing what is the expected behaviour, what is the unwanted behaviour, and they do need to enforce something."

With the rapid pace of technological advancement, basic steps like can be profoundly impactful. As Pikes says, it's "bit of an arms race," as companies like Facebook built mammoth platforms that quickly run out of their control.

"We haven't put the same effort into balancing the communities as we have balancing the games"

Chris Priebe, Two Hat Security

"They built this absolute machine," says Pikes, "and they had no idea how big it was going to be... They haven't thought about the securities or the educational pieces that should now be put back in as part of that design. So it's almost a retrospective thought... For us it's about enabling those tools and taking them to a market that has evolved too quickly."

There is a priority gap however, according to Figuieredo, who says there is a "lack of understanding" when it comes to the harm caused by toxic game communities.

"People don't necessarily have good stats or understanding that it affects their business, affects their employees as well," he continues. "How is it affecting their community? What is the user churn? There is a lack of understanding, a lack of white papers and good studies on this."

Priebe adds that companies are failing to adopt viable solutions to these challenges. Part of this he believes falls to an engineering backlog, as devs obsess over in-game balance while inadvertently de-prioritising the existential threat of a toxic community, and how that could significantly shorten a game's lifespan.

Community features like chat and audio are often ill-conceived, says Priebe, and the inclusion of poorly implemented communication tools effectively put a "powerful weapon" in the hands of bad actors.

"They can use it to drive everyone out of playing because they've made it miserable for everyone else," he says. "We haven't put the same effort into balancing the communities as we have balancing the games.... There is [the] technology that is actually available; let's participate in the solution, and let everyone get involved."

With the rise of extremist hate groups using gaming communities as recruitment grounds, there is a pressing need to address the threat, and ensure that vulnerable people in these spaces are protected. As Pikes says, it's about changing the community attitudes.

"Way back when, it was like people felt they had a safe haven where they could go and play a game, and that's what it was all about," he continues. "Whereas now all these far right groups, for example, have found this a potential grooming ground for radicalisation. But if we give [platforms the] tools and enable those companies to understand that the technology is available, those people will move on to another format, they will find another medium, but we've made this one safe and locked that one down."

As the largest entertainment sector in the world, and one which actively encourages online communities, the games industry is under an incredible amount of public scrutiny. The presence of toxic communities is one thing, but a failure to address the problem is arguably much, much worse.

Originally posted here:

Two Hat: Stop tweaking your game and start fixing your community - GamesIndustry.biz

The rumbling started last August when the Business Roundtable announced that a companys responsibility is more than just to its shareholders. Companies actually hold a responsibility to their respective communities as well, this group of corporate chieftains acknowledged.

The declaration elicited both praise and condemnation. Among the most cynical reactions was to call the statement yogababble, which is a snarky way of questioning purpose-driven terms and language. Others called it wuwu, or juju the common thread being skepticism when words such as journey, universe, and purpose anchor a companys reason for being and mission.

This is exactly what the Business Roundtable is now committingitself to or is it recommitting?

The history of the Business Roundtable makes clear that, in fact, it was created to ensure that businesses and their leaders contribute to the communities around them. A company and its leadership starts with the best of intentions and then, success arrives, profits are off the charts, shareholders are getting crazy rich, as are the top executives driving this performance. The companys focus shifts to winning at all costs, and heaven help you if you dont deliver. That truth was evident recently when the much-anticipated WeWork IPO tanked and its CEO was shown the door joining at least half-a-dozen other CEOs who had incorporated purpose-driven language into their companys DNA, but failed to produce the expected returns.

Read: Tie CEO pay to increases in stakeholder and shareholder value

More: This one document may have just changed Corporate America forever

The oversimplified equation of business is planet (resources) + people (customers, employees) = business (profit, jobs,community contribution). Two things to note: First, an economy is a thriving, dynamic organism. It is dependent and reflective of the parts that make up the whole. Second, humans make up a large segment of this system and its functionality. In other words, there are ample opportunities to muck up the works, and that we do.

As long as humans are in the mix, we need checks and balances to ensure that desired corporate behavior is practiced. Greed is seductive and a human foible. We all would like to think we would never succumb, but we do whether were shareholders, or board members, or the CEO.

Weve created a vicious cycle for companies and their leaders, one with lots of finger pointing, hand waving, and reveals of dastardly, less-than-purposeful behavior.But as a wise old woman shared with me, every time we have one finger pointing at someone, there are three pointing back at ourselves. We all play a role. Shareholders and their demands for high returns give company decision-makers the excuse to make expedient decisions, where profit is achieved at all costs. Business leaders can say, The shareholders made me do it.

Read: Salesforce founder Marc Benioff says capitalism as we know it is dead

The situation now is reminiscent of the late 1990s dotcom era. Then, innovation was the name of the game. Forget having a business plan based on actual math; ideas were enough. Slap .com after any word of choice, and you were golden until reality revealed itself: You really did need a true business with a recurring revenue stream to survive.

Purpose alone is not enough, nor is shareholder return at the risk of the planet. Todays workforce is keeping us accountable with where they choose to work and what they buy. Thats why companies and their next-generation leadership are getting loftier in their purpose, vision and missions in the first place. They want to alert the talent pool to come work with them (horizontal managementis another purpose-driven practice) and change the world. We get it, leaders are saying, and we get you.

What leaders dont seem to be getting is the need to do more than just talk about purpose. They need to do the work. That means building inclusive and diverse cultures, so products are being created and managed by people who reflect a companys customer base. Leaders need to think about just how many zeroes they really need in a paycheck and seriously demonstrate walking the talk by putting a portion of their pay into communities where their employees live and work. Shareholders have an obligation to make sure that companies and their leaders are accountable to best practices around executive compensation, sustainability, employee benefit, and equity sharing.

Theres a phrase that yoga teachers use: Yoga practice, not yoga perfect. Maybe in time, working together with purpose-driven language and intentional business and shareholder practices, we can get closer to perfect.

Kate Byrne is the president of Intentional Media, whose brands SOCAP, Total Impact and Conscious Company Media are at the intersection of business, meaning, and money. She will be speaking on October 24 in San Francisco at the SOCAP19 conference.

Also read: Shareholders should welcome CEOs strong new goals for U.S. business and capitalism

Plus: Investors are the biggest losers when women and minority entrepreneurs dont get startup money

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CEOs need to skip the yogababble and back up their companys purpose with action - MarketWatch

GRAND RAPIDS, MI Theres a vision, held by Southtown leadership, of Grand Rapids South Side doubling down on its cultural roots and using a diverse array of food, entertainment and attractions to elevate the area long overlooked for investment, both public and private.

Its a vision of a secondary downtown, where patrons go to eat, shop and spend an evening out while avoiding some of the parking and transportation challenges associated with the citys downtown core.

Making that dream a reality will take a level of investment the South Side, and the Third Ward as a whole, hasnt seen in recent memory. The citys most diverse ward is also its least invested in, which has contributed to sections of the community missing out on the citys surge of economic prosperity.

In 2012-17, the Third Ward received less than 2 percent of the $19.4 billion of private investments made in the citys three wards using government tax incentives. More recent data hasnt been released, but Third Ward commissioners, current and former, believe the new data will be similar to those from previous years.

Our community cant be successful if were leaving behind a third of our population, said Danielle Williams, manager for the Southtown Corridor Improvement District and a third-generation Grand Rapids resident.

The first step is acknowledging theres a problem. Recognizing theres something amiss when the city is growing and developing the way it is and, still, youre stagnant in seeing economic growth for a whole segment of our population. Intentional or not, something is broken, and it has to be fixed.

Southtown is a collection of six business districts Alger Heights, Boston Square, Franklin and Eastern, Madison Square, Seymour Square and part of South Division. It has a high rate of homeownership (56 percent) and neighborhood stability, with a population density higher than the city of Grand Rapids overall, according to the Southtown Corridor Improvement Authority.

Additionally, Southtown is:

The Southtown district was created three years ago to rally the business corridors and create a culture of investment thats long been lacking in the area. By establishing a CID, the corridors can collect tax revenue and use it to prevent deterioration of businesses that already belong to the district and help to attract and promote new businesses.

Were not seeing the kind of investment thats needed and probably has been needed for a long time but being able to recognize that and put work in to change that, to me thats really all we can do, Williams said.

City officials project tax increment revenue of about $150,000 per fiscal year to balance out Southtown CIDs expenses, with about $5,000-$15,000 left over after each year. Through the first 11 months of FY 2019, the CID board spent about $100,000 of its budgeted $318,814.

The nine-member corridor improvement authority board is also in the process of getting its business-focused area specific plan (ASP) adopted by the city commission. Its the boards hope that the plan, which acts as a blueprint for future development, will help revitalize the business corridor, spark new development and create jobs for nearby residents without significant displacement or changes to the existing community character.

Southtowns potential is obvious. Of its 500,000 square feet of total retail space, about 21 percent is vacant. Additionally, about 15 percent of its 13,000 households are vacant, according to city data.

Looking at the economic challenges we have in Grand Rapids, with the underemployment and lack of economic mobility for black and brown communities in the city, theres this amazing opportunity in Southtown to find the solution and do it in a way that benefits the community thats been here, Williams said.

Third Ward Commissioner Senita Lenear points to the growth of the citys West Side from recent years as an example of how cities can use a variety of tools to create economic opportunity in areas that are lacking it. She believes that success can be duplicated on the South Side.

In 2014, the West Side established its own corridor improvement district, made up of West Leonard Street, Bridge Street, Fulton Street, Butterworth Street and Seward Avenue. A year later the city adopted its area specific plan. The First Wards West Side now features popular restaurants, breweries and even a grocery store, among other developments.

It was a culmination of a bunch of things, which is what Im describing as solutions for the Third Ward, Lenear said. The investments came through work the commissioners were doing over there on the West Side to make sure investment happened. The outcome was it attracted people to invest in that area.

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Following the West Sides lead

For years, Leonard Street lacked new investment. However, in 2012, local entrepreneurs Chris Andrus and Max Trierweiler bought the old fire station at 527 Leonard St. NW and turned it into Mitten Brewing Co.

The brewery proved successful, as both a West Side business and catalyst for development. Within three years, Long Road Distillers and Two Scotts Barbecue opened their doors as neighbors of the brewery.

Mitten was the first people to really invest in that corridor, but we followed suit and sort of doubled-down on their initial bet on that neighborhood, said State Rep. David LaGrand, who was an initial investor in Long Road Distillers. We were looking for the next cool neighborhood in town.

Similar investment stories in areas like Bridge Street have helped in the rise of the West Side in recent years.

Jon OConnor, a co-founder of Long Road Distillers, said the area needed local ownership and investment from those who have roots in the area.

You dont just want people from the outside coming in, OConnor said. If you look at the West Side, those individuals knew they needed X in their neighborhood and did it. They needed a grocery store, so they got it. The Mitten guys said theres no brewery here and they did it.

The First Ward city commissioner said its important to be cognizant of potential displacement when a community is growing, but when its a choice between advancing or declining, hed prefer to see the community grow while remaining thoughtful.

With similar investments by locals on the South Side, OConnor said hes hopeful the Third Wards Southtown will follow the same path of improved economic opportunity.

For a long time, the West Side was just like Southtown, he said. Then we got some momentum, some energy and people making foundational investments in the business district that set the signal that we are open to projects, to an infusion of energy into the neighborhoods.

Sure, the Third Ward has different challenges than the First Ward. Geographically, it doesnt touch downtown, where a significant majority of investment occurs in the city. It doesnt have the highways the run through the other two wards, and it doesnt align with increasing desires to live in more dense areas like downtown.

Despite the differences, the Third Ward has potential for similar growth following a similar blueprint as the West Side, Lenear said.

Bakery proved concept

A section of the Third Ward the Wealthy Street corridor already is bustling with business, and it didnt take a massive development to spur it.

In 2002, four Grand Rapids residents bought a vacant meatpacking house in a dingy stretch of Wealthy Street SE that carried a leftover stigma of drug deal and gang violence.

There wasnt much investment being made along the Third Wards northern-most abandoned commercial street when co-founders Melissa and David LaGrand and Jim and Barb McClurg opened the Wealthy Street Bakery at 610 Wealthy Street SE.

David LaGrand, now a state representative and previously a city commissioner, said the ugly gang-related history of the Wealthy Street corridor left a residual fear and deterred development for some time. By opening the bakery, the LaGrands and McClurgs took one more blighted property off the map and proved the area was ripe for business.

The LaGrands bought the party store next door and sold it to Amy and Steve Ruis, who opened Art of the Table, a gourmet food and kitchen store. They bought an old plumbing store and sold it to David Lee, who opened the Winchester in 2009. Lee doubled down in 2013 with Donkey Taqueria across the street.

Once we sort of proved concept, that just meant a lot of people followed, LaGrand said. We succeeded and that was proof that others could succeed. And one thing you do is try to reinforce your investment with other peoples investments.

In addition to the citys role in providing tax incentives and improving public infrastructure, Grand Rapids leaders could help make the path to opening a business easier, according to LaGrand.

If business districts beyond the downtown core are going to continue to grow, LaGrand said the city will have to work to further reduce obstacles and restrictive zoning.

Hed like to see the city survey recently opened small businesses in the city to determine how the process of getting started could have been easier for them.

We really have to think thoughtfully about how to help someone who wants to invest $100,000 in a neighborhood, LaGrand said. That person isnt going to be able to hire a lawyer to help navigate through tax breaks and Brownfields. Removing barriers and really facilitating small investors will go a long way.

Whats next?

Southtowns area specific plan has been in the works since Dec. 2017 with the goal of improving commercial cores and public spaces in the area that support businesses, appeal to neighborhood residents and attract visitors.

The plans goals are to be a:

The proposed plan was released to the public for consideration last month. A public hearing is scheduled for Nov. 14 in front of the planning commission, with an expected city commission adoption vote set for Dec. 3.

What I love about the solution Ive become a part of is its a direct city investment as well as a community investment and business owner investment, Williams said. Its building up economic stability for the folks in our community who have been left behind, creating those on-ramps for entrepreneurship, supporting small businesses that have been here 20-30 years.

Southtown has created a business directory specific to its district to show potential developers whats already there and what the community could use. Theres also a faade improvement program that reimburses current eligible businesses up to $10,000 for upgrades or alterations to their building exteriors.

More:

Southtown aspires to be secondary downtown in Grand Rapids oft-ignored ward - MLive.com