Re-Bundling Protections and Benefits Around Our Work

May 27, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Not so long ago, jobs came with a bundle of economic advantages beyond a paycheck. Those advantages included health insurance for you and your family and a pension or post-retirement paycheck based on your years with your employer and how much you’d been paid.

While already a vestige of days past, my job at a municipally-owned utility a little over a decade ago came with family health benefits, a matching 401(k) plan, a pension that vested after 5 years of employment, and days off for a raft of holidays including Flag Day.

That job also included additional economic benefits that I didn’t appreciate enough at the time such as the creditworthiness of my regular salary, continuous training to bolster old skills and develop new ones, regular contributions to Social Security for additional retirement security, unemployment compensation if I ever lost my job, and the stability and continuing enrichment of that job for as long as I had it.

Today, in many of our full-time jobs and nearly all of our part-time ones, between some and all of this bundle of protections and benefits has disappeared.

It is hard to overstate the significance of this unbundling.

Jacob Hacker, a political science professor at Yale calls it a shift of economic risk in his new book The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. Hacker argues that the loss of this financial cushion around our work tests our economic resilience whenever unexpected burdens arise.

In the 50 years following the Great Depression, both employers and the government insulated workers from many of the economic risks they might confront when they weren’t working. By contrast, from the 1980s and continuing through today, there has been:

a massive transfer of risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as the government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families. This shift has fundamentally reshaped Americans’ relationships with their government, their employers and each other. And it has altered and sometimes dashed the most fundamental expectations associated with the American Dream: a stable middleclass income, an affordable place to live, a guaranteed pension, good health insurance coverage, greater economic security for one’s kids.

As a result of this sea change, the American worker is increasingly on his or her own when confronting whatever comes next, like sudden illness or loss of a job.

Writing this week in the New York Times, Hacker talked about how this “risk shift” is impacting the run-up to the next presidential election, particularly the fact that so many Americans feel insecure.

They may be doing well at the moment, but they fear that, however high they are on the economic ladder, a single bad step or bad event could cause them to slip. A booming economy hasn’t quieted these concerns, because insecurity remains a huge and growing problem in ways that voters and candidates instinctively get, but the sunny job numbers largely hide.

Of course, this insecurity affects not only workers but also the ability of their families, their communities and the country as a whole to flourish—an impact that I discussed a few weeks ago in the post “The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken.”

As more of us are “on our own” shouldering the economic risks that employers and the government once protected us from, it has become an increasingly important priority to re-bundle new versions of the benefits and protections that have been lost around working in America.

The leading edge of these rebundling efforts are perhaps most visible when it comes to the gig-economy workers who are striving to build a stable and dependable “living” out of a series of independent-contractor jobs both large and small.

As I argued last week, technological advances involving blockchain, digital currencies, on-line exchanges and markets are promising to make it possible for independent workers to preserve existing income streams while gaining new (and unexpected) ones. The needs of this growing number of gig-economy workers are stimulating efforts to re-bundle some of those traditional insulators around their work. Fortunately, these same innovations will also help to meet the needs of every insecure worker who is trying to get by in a job with few, if any, of the traditional benefits and protections.

1. Getting Paid for Jobs Both Big and Small

One of the most tantalizing possibilities of a future enabled by blockchain and digital currencies is that we could all get paid for time and effort we currently give away for free. Last week I mentioned a few of them, like providing traffic information to news outlets about roads we are already driving on at rush hour or being paid by a social media platform whenever we encourage the conversation there. I also mentioned the current backlash from the banking industry to the rise of on-line exchanges that will facilitate these payments. Part of it is an old guy-new guy turf war.

Over the past week, I’ve come upon some additional information about the hurdle that stands in the way of more seamless payments for a succession of small and big jobs. David Galbraith is a partner at Anthemis, a company seeking creative opportunities between the start-ups and financial institutions that are dedicated to reinventing financial services for the digital marketplace. In a recent interview, Galbraith remarked on the fundamental differences between on-line platforms that cater to consumers in America and their counterpart platforms in China.

In America, digital platforms like Google and Facebook are supported by advertising revenues while in China a platform’s revenue streams come directly from consumers when they buy something they’ve seen there. In other words, the payments process in China is simplified by removing advertising from the business model. Another difference is that Chinese consumers pay for consumer goods with their bank account balances, while American platforms interpose financial intermediaries like PayPal or bank-owned credit card companies that stand between the tech platforms and consumers. As Galbraith observes, the transactions costs are lower in China, “friction is taken out of the system,” and purchases are completed in a “fundamentally more fluid fashion” on the smartphones of Chinese consumers without prompting by a blizzard of ads.

When the inefficiencies imposed by banks and an advertising-based model are removed from the digital “payments system” in America, payments to gig economy workers for big and small increments of work will also be facilitated—making these new jobs more robust. At the most basic level, these changes in how we get paid will support the ways that many of us are working now and even more of us will be working tomorrow.

2. Anxiety About Retirement

When it comes to re-bundling benefits and protections around workers, none may be more significant than retirement security.

A recent article called “Why Work Has Failed Us: Because No One Can Afford to Retire Anymore” provides statistics that indicate how much the “shift in risk” from pensions to “figure out your own retirement” has impacted American workers:

66% of millennials have nothing saved for retirement. Among the working-age families that have retirement savings, the median balance is $5,000, according to the most recent data available from the Economic Policy Institute. For families approaching retirement, the median savings is $21,000–after taxes, on its own, enough to last a couple a little more than a year living at the federal poverty line.

At the same time, the enormity of these unfunded liabilities—how will all of these people with limited retirement savings support themselves?—presents a corresponding opportunity for entrepreneurs who want to help workers regain at least some of their retirement-related security. In the same interview where he discussed digital payment innovations, David Galbraith also considered the enormity of the opportunity for the new fin-tech companies that are trying to meet this need.

[R]etirement is the biggest [risk] shift anyone can possibly imagine. To put a number on it — the committed pension liability shortfalls in developing nations are 450 trillion dollars. That’s half a quadrillion dollars. So when people talk about billion dollar market opportunities — this is a half a quadrillion dollar shift in money.

Of course, no one has found a feasible way to fill the deficit for those who have nothing to retire on today, but there is opportunity in providing expertise to workers who have at least some retirement savings.

Most of us don’t know how to take what we have today and marshal it to cover uncertainties like how much income we’ll need to live after we retire, how long we’re likely to live, what Social Security elections we should make, and how much medical care we’ll need along the way. This is where a new company like Kindur comes in, according to Galbraith.

Kindur helps workers create retirement portfolios that minimize their tax burdens while ensuring that the money they do have for retirement lasts as long as possible. Unlike investment advisors who charge commissions to maximize your savings, Kindur utilizes its on-line platform and need assessment programming to help individuals design their future income. There has never been a web-based service like this before. As the company’s tagline says: “It’s like fuel efficiency for your retirement.”

Kindur isn’t the only fin-tech company that is aiming to provide more comfort (or bundling) around worker retirement. This article from the New York Times last December discusses some of the others.

For a rising gig-economy workforce and the traditional workers who are seeking supplemental income and greater autonomy in the gig economy, the empowerment of acting in more entrepreneurial ways is easily undermined by retirement anxieties. Today, both traditional advocates and new companies are finding other ways to calm those anxieties too.

3. Additional Protections and Benefits for Today’s Workforce

With the exception of supporting teachers in several high-profile confrontations with school districts and state funders recently, labor unions’ ability to protect workers in “union shops” seem to have lost much of their influence over economic decision-makers. They’ve also had a spotty record protecting their members’ bundled benefits and protections over the past 35 years. But while continuing to be the obvious champions for workers pitted against corporate profit taking, as the ways we work evolve, organized labor has other important roles to play in benefiting its changing membership.

Workers no longer stay in one locality with one employer for the course of their careers like they once did. Moreover, the average worker today takes on several different kinds of jobs. In this new world of work, services to meet these realities are desperately needed by the rank-and-file.

For example, unions could help their memberships “vote with their feet” when unbundled jobs no longer support them while providing assistance with “reskilling” when needed, help in finding new work, and housing in the new communities. Moreover, if unions were already providing these services in a tight labor market like we have today, their negotiating power with employers who are reluctant to lose workers would be enhanced significantly.

As Nicholas Colin writes in his thoughtful new book about the future of work called Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age:

[I]t’s time we imagine unions that support workers as they switch jobs, unions that would provide their members with all of the resources necessary to find inspiration (“What should I do?”), train (“How can I acquire new skills?”), find a new employer (“When do I start?”), relocate (“I need an affordable house close to my new workplace”).

Labor unions should be key contributors to a re-bundled workforce in traditional companies as well as in the new gig-economy as free-lancers, for example, unionize to protect themselves.

The tremendous need among workers that has been created by the unbundling of jobs has also spelled opportunity for new service providers beyond the need for a more secure retirement. Take a company like Portify that aims to help independent workers in the gig economy who are unable to obtain affordable credit without “a regular salary” and an employment contract.

Portify is currently in the beta-phase of providing financing to independent workers whose only source today is a payday loan charging an exorbitant interest rate. With access to information about its customers’ cash flows and bank accounts, Portify is able to understand what its customers can afford to borrow and to make loans at a substantially lower rate than payday lenders. By doing so, it will provide gig economy workers with the ability to finance growth opportunities so that a succession of smaller jobs can eventually add up to a sustainable and profitable business.

Another promising start-up is Dublin-based Trezeo, which is “an income-smoothing service” for self-employed people. The company calculates its clients’ average weekly income. If that income dips because a client takes a day off or someone doesn’t pay them for their work, Trezeo “tops them up to” their average income with the understanding that it will be paid back when the client is paid again. A service like Trezeo’s allows workers to maintain a steady quality of life–some of that bundling again–despite the ups and downs of gig-economy work.

Finally, Zego is a new company that provides gig economy workers with flexible insurance. For example, if you occasionally drive for Uber, you may not earn enough to afford the additional monthly or annual car insurance coverage that you should have.

To meet this problem, Zego sells insurance by the hour. For drivers, it utilizes an app to collect data about how often they are working and where they are driving that helps it to assess their insurance risks and issue coverage more affordably. Moreover, without a product like Zego’s, independent workers could be put out of business by a single workplace loss that they are unable to cover. A start-up company like this bundles these workers in greater risk protections than were available before.

+ + +

The upside of entrepreneurial, gig-economy jobs is that they promise greater autonomy, flexibility and self-fulfillment, but these work rewards can never be realized when the jobs themselves are laced with insecurity.

The bundling of benefits and protections around these new jobs (and their re-bundling around traditional jobs) promises to reduce more of that insecurity for millions of workers.

Instead of giving up in the face of growing income inequality and job-killing automation, there are thinkers, writers and entrepreneurs who are more hopeful about the future of work because they acknowledge their own and other people’s agency to build a future where workers, their families and communities can flourish again.

Slowly but surely, that hopeful future is being built by the re-bundlers of work today.

This post was adapted from my May 26, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

Blockchain Goes to Work

May 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

This week I’ve re-worked a post from last August in the first of a two-part consideration on the future of work. Today, it’s envisioning a workforce where more of us will be working for ourselves, selling increments of our time and talent in what amounts to a series of paying jobs. While it’s a response to the loss of “traditional jobs” to automation, it also holds the promise of greater autonomy, abundance and prosperity if we choose to value the right things by standing up for and safeguarding our human priorities along the way.

The future of work is being designed today. Perhaps the most exciting part is that each one of us has a role to play–is part of a broader negotiation–about how that future should unfold.

1 An Optimistic Vision

The future of work has never looked more abundant, although many don’t see it that way.

Some are busy projecting job losses from automation and brain-replacing artificial intelligence, telling us we’ll all be idled and that much poorer for it. Or they’re identifying the brainpower careers that will remain so we can point ourselves or our tuition payments in their direction. For these forecasters, the future of work is at best the pursuit of diminishing returns.

Some of the most pessimistic (or politically ambitious) among them have been formulating universal income plans to replace today’s more limited safety nets. They tell us that a stipend like this will liberate us to pursue our passions since new government checks will cover our basic necessities. This seems misguided to me. As George Orwell noted, some utopians simply cannot “imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain.”

An alternate vision focuses on innovations that could enable us to do more and better work while unlocking greater prosperity.

One of the enabling technologies that is already ushering in this future is blockchain. Like the protocols for transmitting data across digital networks led to the Internet, blockchain-based software applications could fundamentally change the ways that we work.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most commonly with no central monitor or regulator. The technology enables every block in the chain to record data that can be seen and reviewed by every other block, maintaining its accuracy through its security protections and transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in a digital ledger or transaction log. The need for and costs of a “middleman” (like a bank) and other impediments (like legal and financial gatekeepers) are avoided. Unlike traditional recordkeeping, there is no central database for meddlers to corrupt.

Blockchain technology supports the sale and use of digital currencies (like bitcoin) and just as importantly, “smart contracts” that enforce the rules about how value is exchanged by parties when they reach agreement. Ethereum utilizes its blockchain platform to host most of the projects that attract, manage and pay for time and talent in decentralized ways today. Tantalizing glimpses into this future are also available at the social network Steemit and on the payment platform Bitwage.

Steemit’s uses a digital currency called Steem that you can redeem for cash for your contributions to the social network’s “hivemind.” For example, users are paid for posts, for the number of people liking their posts, for how quickly you spot another post that becomes popular, that is, for the value of your contributions to the network. Users are funding jobs like travel blogging while they crisscross the world and, reportedly, one early adopter has already earned more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In more traditional buying-and-selling transactions, Bitwage’s payment application allows employees or freelancers to receive their wages in bitcoin without requiring either their employers or clients to use a digital currency exchange.

For work-based ecosystems built on blockchains to evolve further, they will need to become faster and more scalable without sacrificing the security and decentralization that are their hallmarks. In this pursuit, Ethereum and a raft of competitors are experimenting with a protocol called Lightening that can settle millions of digital currency transactions more quickly and cheaply but that needs “to go off the blockchain” in order to do so. These companies are also exploring structural changes to basic blockchain technology. The prize that drives them is an online platform that is durable enough to support a global marketplace where every kind of work can be bought and sold.

Let’s call it a work2benefit exchange.

Because your time and talent has value and is in limited supply, you could sell it in a market that’s vibrant enough to buy it. A blockchain-based exchange might easily handle transactions that involve very small as well as larger, project-oriented jobs. Because you have capabilities that you’ve sold before and others that you’ve given away because there was no way to be compensated, an exchange like this could help secure prior income streams while providing you with new ones. Such a marketplace would easily dwarf Walmart’s in size without the downsides of a company middleman taking his profits, making you keep his work schedule, commute to his place of business or contribute to his overhead.

Previously unrealized income streams—even small ones—will be particularly welcome.

Suppose you’re asked to provide 5 minutes of feedback on your recent doctor’s visit. Your scarce resources are the time and judgment that you might not provide if you weren’t being paid for them. Their one-time value might be modest, but as the demands for your input keep coming, payments for it will add up. A blockchain exchange could pay you for editing a resume in 20 minutes or designing a company’s logo in 2 hours; providing traffic-cam information on heavily traveled routes you are already taking; matchmaking acquaintances with service providers that have something they need; selling your personal data to marketers who want you to buy their products; maybe even a government incentive for completing your tax returns or voting in the next election. Similarly, when I need the benefit of someone else’s work, this marketplace could connect me to it, even if the time and talent is half a world away.

Work2benefit exchanges that can handle incremental transactions like these haven’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough buyers and sellers to make them viable—but they’re coming. You’ll still need your judgment, vision and hustle, but before long it will be possible to make a living in a marketplace where you (and maybe billions of others) will each be blocks in a global blockchain. Many people will continue to work in groups. Offices and factories won’t vanish. But traditional jobs that once came with pensions, health benefits and provable credit will become increasingly scarce. The stripped-down, “independent contractor” work that’s left will almost certainly be supplemented by new ways of getting paid for your human resources.

Blockchain and related technologies will unlock new categories of personal wealth and autonomy. They could fill the future of work with greater abundance for us to share with one another. Tomorrow’s challenge won’t be finding enough work to make a living but reimagining and re-bundling job securities like health care and creditworthiness around all the new jobs we’ll be doing. Next week, I’ll introduce you to some of the people and companies that are helping to build these protections around our increasingly autonomous workforce.

2. The Future Begins With a Vision

A vision should linger and inspire for long enough that it fixes in the minds eye where it becomes part of the imagination, a cause for hope, and fuel that’s needed to overcome the obstacles that will always stand in its way. Here, in brief, are some of the challenges that a bold-enough vision will need to see us through, starting with the inevitable turf wars and technology challenges:

-There is resistance from the mainstream banking community to digital currencies and the exchanges that convert them into cash for gig economy paychecks. For example, a story in today’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the banking controversy that has already embroiled one digital currency exchange. Some of the current banking industry will need to be disrupted so that new “fin-tech” mechanisms can take their place.

-There are technology challenges to making digital platforms large enough to handle the smart contracts that will bring all these new buyers and sellers of work together. The ecosystem of applications will need to be robust enough to attract, manage and compensate the sale of goods and talent in a global marketplace. To meet these challenges, new applications are being developed outside of blockchain’s architecture (with its attendant security risks and middleman costs) while some of the fundamentals behind blockchain technology itself are being reconsidered. If you’re interested in a deeper dive, more about blockchain’s “scalability” hurdles can be found here.

-Managing yourself to a stable, reliable income from many jobs in a way that meets your needs and your family’s needs requires its own expertise. The freedom to decide when to work and how often to work is liberating, but as the recent strikes by Uber drivers illustrate, it isn’t easy to cobble a patchwork of compensated time “into a living” while also selling your services at “a market price.” We’ll all have to learn more about how to put our livelihoods together while finding new ways to bargain effectively for what we need from each one of our work-based exchanges.

-Not everyone is naturally suited to be an entrepreneur, so we’ll have to learn how to embrace additional parts of our entrepreneurial spirit too. Working for yourself involves not only doing your paying jobs but also functioning as your back and front offices by doing your own marketing, accounting, taxes, establishing and monitoring your co-working relationships, maintaining your skill levels, and determining the prices for your goods and services. Most 9-5 jobs didn’t require you to do all these things, but as jobs like this disappear, you’ll be doing more of them yourself—with both the upsides and downsides that new opportunities for growth and mastery can bring.

Thinking through the hurdles hopefully reminds us of the promises. We’ll thrive with greater freedom, convenience and efficiency by working where, when and how we want to. We’ll be paid for increments of our time that we used to give away for free. We’ll increasingly stand both behind our work and out in front of it in ways that will make “what we do” an even more powerful demonstration of who we are and what is important to us.

This future of work is being written today.

We’re building it with our ideas and conversations as new ecosystems gradually evolve around it.

What comes next will be exciting and daunting, both creative and destructive, as the familiar is replaced by something that few of us have experienced before.

This future can have a human face, an opportunity for workers, families and communities to flourish, as long as we don’t leave the ideas and conversations about how that can happen to someone else.

This post was adapted from my May 19, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

March 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It is human priorities that should be driving Smart City initiatives, like the ones in Toronto profiled here last week.

Last week’s post also focused on a pioneering spirit in Toronto that many American cities and towns seem to have lost. While we entrench in the moral righteousness of our sides in the debate—including, for many, a distrust of collective governance, regulation and taxation—we drift towards an uncertain future instead of claiming one that can be built on values we actually share.

In its King Street and Quayside initiatives, Toronto is actively experimenting with the future it wants based on its residents’ commitment to sustaining their natural environment in the face of urban life’s often toxic impacts. They’re conducting these experiments in a relatively civil, collaborative and productive way—an urban role model for places that seem to have forgotten how to work together. Toronto’s bold experiments are also utilizing “smart” technologies in their on-going attempts to “optimize” living and working in new, experimental communities.

During a short trip this week, I got to see the leading edges of New York City’s new Hudson Yards community (spread over 28 acres with an estimated $25 billion price tag) and couldn’t help being struck by how much it catered to those seeking more luxury living, shopping and workspaces than Manhattan already affords. In other words, how much it could have been a bold experiment about new ways that all of its citizens might live and work in America’s first city for the next half-century, but how little it actually was. A hundred years ago, one of the largest immigrant migrations in history made New York City the envy of the world. With half of its current citizens being foreign-born, perhaps the next century, unfurling today, belongs to newer cities like Toronto.

Still, even with its laudable ambition, it will not be easy for Toronto and other future-facing communities to get their Smart City initiatives right, as several of you were also quick to remind me last week. Here is a complaint from a King Street merchant that one of you (thanks Josh!) found and forwarded that seems to cast what is happening in Toronto in a less favorable light than I had focused upon it:

What a wonderful story. But as with [all of] these wonderful plans some seem to be forgotten. As it appears are the actual merchants. Google certainly a big winner here. Below an excerpt written by one of the merchants:

‘The City of Toronto has chosen the worst time, in the worst way, in the worst season to implement the pilot project. Their goal is clearly to move people through King St., not to King St. For years King St. was a destination, now it is a thoroughfare.

‘The goal of the King St. Pilot project was said to be to balance three important principles: to move people more effectively on transit, to support business and economic prosperity and to improve public space. In its current form, the competing principles seem to be decidedly tilted away from the economic well-being of merchants and biases efficiency over convenience. The casual stickiness of pedestrians walking and stopping at stores, restaurants and other merchants is lost.

‘Additionally, the [transit authority] TTC has eliminated a number of stops along King St., forcing passengers to walk further to enter and disembark streetcars, further reducing pedestrian traffic and affecting areas businesses. The TTC appears to believe that if they didn’t have to pick up and drop off people, they could run their system more effectively.

‘The dubious benefits of faster street car traffic on King St. notwithstanding, the collateral damage of the increased traffic of the more than 20,000 cars the TTC alleges are displaced from King St to adjoining streets has turned Adelaide, Queen, Wellington and Front Sts. into a gridlock standstill. Anyone who has tried to navigate the area can attest that much of the time, no matter how close you are you can’t get there from here.

‘Along with the other merchants of King St. and the Toronto Entertainment District we ask that Mayor Tory and Toronto council to consider a simple, reasonable and cost-effective alternative. Put lights on King St. that restrict vehicle traffic during rush hours, but return King St. to its former vibrant self after 7 p.m., on weekends and statutory holidays. It’s smart, fair, reasonable and helps meet the goals of the King St. pilot project.

Two things about this complaint seemed noteworthy. The first is how civil and constructive this criticism is in a process that hopes to “iterate” as real time impacts are assessed. It’s a tribute that Toronto’s experiments not only invite but are also receiving feedback like this. Alas, the second take-away from Josh’s comment is far more nettlesome. “[However many losers there may be along the way:] Google certainly a big winner here.”

The tech giant’s partnership with Canada’s governments in Toronto raises a constellation of challenging issues, but it’s useful to recall that pioneers who dare to claim new frontiers always do so with the best technology that’s available. While the settling of the American West involved significant collateral damage (to Native Americans and Chinese migrants, to the buffalo and the land itself), it would not have been possible without existing innovations and new ones that these pioneers fashioned along the way. Think of the railroads, the telegraph poles, even something as low-tech as the barbed wire that was used to contain livestock.

The problem isn’t human and corporate greed or heartless technology—we know about them already—but failing to recognize and reduce their harmful impacts before it is too late. The objective for pioneers on new frontiers should always be maximizing the benefits while minimizing the harms that can be foreseen from the very beginning instead of looking back with anger after the damage is done.

We have that opportunity with Smart City initiatives today.

Because they concentrate many of the choices that will have to be made when we boldly dare to claim the future of America again, I’ve been looking for a roadmap through the moral thicket in the books and articles that are being written about these initiatives today. Here are some of the markers that I’ve discovered.

Human priorities, realized with the help of technology

1. Markers on the Road to Smarter and More Vibrant Communities

The following insights come almost entirely from a short article by Robert Kitchin, a professor at Maynooth University in Ireland. In my review of the on-going conversation about Smart Cities, I found him to be one of its most helpful observers.

In his article, Kitchin discusses the three principal ways that smart cities are understood, the key promises smart initiatives make to stakeholders, and the perils to be avoided around these promises.

Perhaps not surprisingly, people envision cities and other communities “getting smarter” in different ways. One constituency sees an opportunity to improve both “urban regulation and governance through instrumentation and data-driven systems”–essentially, a management tool. A bolder and more transformative vision sees information and communication technology “re-configur[ing] human capital, creativity, innovation, education, sustainability, and management,” thereby “produc[ing] smarter citizens, workers and public servants” who “can enact polic[ies], produce better products… foster indigenous entrepreneurship and attract inward investment.” The first makes the frontier operate more efficiently while the second improves nearly every corner of it.

The third Smart City vision is “a counter-weight or alternative” to each of them. It wants these technologies “to promote a citizen-centric model of development that fosters social innovation and social justice, civic engagement and hactivism, and transparent and accountable governance.” In this model, technology serves social objectives like greater equality and fairness. Kitchin reminds us that these three visions are not mutually exclusive. It seems to me that the priorities embedded in a community’s vision of a “smarter” future could include elements of each of them, functioning like checks and balances, in tension with one another.

Smart City initiatives promise to solve pressing urban problems, including poor economic performance; government dysfunction; constrained mobility; environmental degradation; a declining quality of life, including risks to safety and security; and a disengaged, unproductive citizen base. Writes Kitchin:

the smart city promises to solve a fundamental conundrum of cities – how to reduce costs and create economic growth and resilience at the same time as producing sustainability and improving services, participation and quality of life – and to do so in commonsensical, pragmatic, neutral and apolitical ways.

Once again, it’s a delicate balancing act with a range of countervailing interests and constituencies, as you can see in the chart from a related discussion above.

The perils of Smart Cities should never overwhelm their promise in my view, but urban pioneers should always have them in mind (from planning through implementation) because some perils only manifest themselves over time. According to Kitchin, the seven dangers in pursuing these initiatives include:

–taking “a ‘one size fits all’ approach, treating cities as generic markets and solutions [that are] straightforwardly scalable and movable”;

–assuming that initiatives are “objective and non-ideological, grounded in either science or commonsense.” You can aim for these ideals, but human and organizational preferences and biases will always be embedded within them.

–believing that the complex social problems in communities can be reduced to “neatly defined technical problems” that smart technology can also solve. The ways that citizens have always framed and resolved their community problems cannot be automated so easily. (This is also the thrust of Ben Green’s Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future, which will be published by MIT Press in April. In it he argues for “smart enough alternatives” that are attainable with the help of technology but never reducible to technology solutions alone.)

–engaging with corporations that are using smart city technologies “to capture government functions as new market opportunities.” One risk of a company like Google to communities like Toronto’s is that Google might lock Toronto in to its proprietary technologies and vendors over a long period of time or use Toronto’s citizen data to gain business opportunities in other cities.

–becoming straddled with “buggy, brittle and hackable” systems that are ever more “complicated, interconnected and dependent on software” while becoming more resistant to manual fixes.

–becoming victimized by “pervasive dataveillance that erodes privacy” through practices like “algorithmic social sorting (whether people get a loan, a tenancy, a job, etc), dynamic pricing (whereby different people pay varying prices depending on their perceived customer value) and anticipatory governance using predictive profiling (wherein data precedes how a person is policed and governed).” Earlier this month, my post on popular on-line games like Fortnite highlighted the additional risk that invasive technologies can use the data they are gathering to change peoples’ behavior.

-and lastly, reinforcing existing power structures and inequalities instead of eroding or reconfiguring them.

While acknowledging the promise of Smart Cities at their best, Kitchin closes his article with this cautionary note:

the realities of implementation are messier and more complex than the marketing hype of corporations or city managers portray and there are a number of social, political, ethical and legal concerns with respect to the kind of society smart city initiatives seek to create. As such, whilst networked urbanism has benefits, it also poses challenges and risks that are often little explored or legislated for ahead of implementation. Indeed, the pace of development and rollout of smart city technologies is proceeding well ahead of wider reflection, critique and regulation.

Putting the cart before a suitably-designed horse is a problem with all new and seductive technologies that get embraced before their harms are identified or can be addressed—a quandary that was also considered here in a post called “Looking Out for the Human Side of Technology.”

2. The Value of Our Data

A few additional considerations about the Smart City are also worth bearing in mind as debate about these initiatives intensifies.

In a March 8, 2019 post, Kurtis McBride wrote about two different ways “to value” the data that these initiatives will produce, and his distinction is an important one. It’s a discussion that citizens, government officials and tech companies should be having, but unfortunately are not having as much as they need to.

When Smart City data is free to everyone, there is the risk that the multinationals generating it will merely use it to increase their power and profits in the growing market for Smart City technologies and services. From the residents’ perspective, McBride argues that it’s “reasonable for citizens to expect to see benefit” from their data, while noting that these same citizens will also be paying dearly for smart upgrades to their communities. His proposal on valuing citizen data depends on how it will be used by tech companies like Google or local service providers. For example, if citizen data is used:

to map the safest and fastest routes for cyclists across the city and offers that information free to all citizens, [the tech company] is providing citizen benefit and should be able to access the needed smart city data free of charge.

But, if a courier company uses real-time traffic data to optimize their routes, improving their productivity and profit margins – there is no broad citizen benefit. In those cases, I think it’s fair to ask those organizations to pay to access the needed city data, providing a revenue stream cities can then use to improve city services for all.

Applying McBride’s reasoning, an impartial body in a city like Toronto would need to decide whether Google has to pay for data generated in its Quayside community by consulting a benefit-to-citizens standard. Clearly, if Google wanted to use Quayside data in a Smart City initiative in say Colorado or California, it would need to pay Toronto for the use of its citizens’ information.

Of course, addressing the imbalance between those (like us) who provide the data and the tech companies that use it to increase their profits and influence is not just a problem for Smart City initiatives, and changing the “value proposition” around our data is surely part of the solution. In her new book Age of Surveillance Capitalism: the Fight for a Human Future in the New Frontier of Power, Harvard Business School’s Shoshana Zuboff says that “you’re the product if these companies aren’t paying you for your data” does not state the case powerfully enough. She argues that the big tech platforms are like elephant poachers and our personal data like those elephants’ ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she writes. “You are the abandoned carcass.”

Smart City initiatives also provide a way to think about “the value of our data” in the context of our living and working and not merely as the gateway to more convenient shopping, more addictive gaming experiences or “free” search engines like Googles’.

This post is adapted from my March 24, 2019 newsletter. Subscribe today and receive an email copy of future posts in your inbox each week.

Whose Values Will Drive Our Future?

March 17, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When people decide what is most important to them—and bother to champion it in conversation, in voting, in how they act everyday—they are helping to build the future.

It’s not just making noise, but that’s part of it. For years, when Emily was in grade school, the argument for an all-girl education was that the boys dominated the classroom with their antics and opinions while the girls were ignored or drowned out. Those making the most noise hog the attention, at least at first.

Later on, it’s about the quality of your opinions and the actions that back them up. Power and money in the commons of public life is not synonymous with good commitments or actions, but it does purchase a position with facts and experts and a platform to share it that can hold its own (if not prevail) in the wider debate over what the future will be like and what its trade-offs will cost. Not unlike the over-powered girls in grade school, it takes courage to stand up against what the best-organized, best-financed and most dominant corporate players want.

Part of the problem with these companies today is that many of them are nurturing, so that they can also cater to, lower-level priorities that we all have. For example, we all want convenience in our daily lives and to embrace a certain amount of distraction. The future that some companies want to deliver to us aims at catering to these (as opposed to other) priorities in the most efficient and profitable manner. For example:

-companies like Amazon profit by providing all the convenience you could ever want as a shopper, or

-when when your aim is relief from boredom or stress, social media, on-line games and search engines like Google provide wonderlands of distraction to lose yourself in.

Moreover, with the behavioral data these companies are harvesting from you whenever you’re on their platforms, they’ll hook you with even greater conveniences, forms of escapism and more stuff to buy in the future. Their priorities of efficiency and profit almost perfectly dovetail with ours for convenience and distraction.

This convenient and distracted future—along with a human yearning for something more—is captured with dazzling visuals and melancholy humor in Wall-E, a 10-year old movie from Pixar. (It’s worth every minute for a first or second view of a little trash robot named Wall-E’s bid to save the human race from itself.) In its futuristic world, the round-as-donuts humans who have fled the planet they’ve soiled spend their days on a We’ve-Thought-of-Everything cruise ship that’s floating through space. Except, as it turns out, the ship’s operators aren’t providing everything their passengers want and need, or want and need even more, like a thriving planet to call home.

Wall-E’s brilliance doesn’t come from an either/or future, but from a place where more important priorities are gradually acknowledged and acted upon too. It’s deciding to have more of some things and somewhat less of others. Back in the real world, that change in priorities might involve diverting some of our national resources away from economic efficiency and profit to support thriving families and communities (January 27, 2019 newsletter). Or, as in Wall-E’s case, using fewer of our shared resources for convenience and distraction and more for restoring an environment that can sustain our humanity in deeper ways.

On the other hand, as anyone who has tried it knows: it can be hard to find enough courage to stand up to those who are dominating (while they’re also subverting) the entire conversation about what we should want most. It’s our admiration for Wall-E’s kind of courage that makes Toronto’s citizens so inspiring today. Why these northern neighbors? Because they are trying through their actions to meet a primary shared objective—which is to build a sustainable urban environment that protects its natural resources—without losing sight of other priorities like efficiency, convenience and strengthening the bonds of family and community in their city.

And as if that weren’t enough, there is another wrinkle to the boldness that Torontonians are currently demonstrating. The City is partnering with tech giant Google on a key piece of data-driven redevelopment. As we admire them from afar, maybe we can also learn some lessons about how to test-drive a carbon-free future while helping that future to evolve with data we provide as we live and work. This fascinating and hopeful city is raising the kinds of questions that can only be asked when a place has the courage to stop talking about its convictions and start acting on them.

I was walking in lower Manhattan this week when I caught the sign above, encouraging me to bring my hand in for a palm reading.

I knew the fortuneteller wouldn’t find my future there, but she was probably right about one thing. Your prior experience is etched in the lines on your hands and your face. But as to where these lines will take you next, the story that Toronto is writing today is likely to provide better guidance than she will—and more information about the priorities to be weighed and measured along the way.

1. A Carbon-Free Future

Toronto has initiated two experiments, one is to gradually reduce its carbon footprint to nothing and the other is to build a community from the ground up with the help of data from its new residents. Both experiments are in the early stages, but they provide tantalizing glimpses into the places where we all might be living and working if we commit to the same priorities as Toronto.

When I’ve visited this City, it always seemed futuristic to me but not because of its built environment. Instead, it was its remarkably diverse population drawn in large numbers from every corner of the globe. Only later did I learn that over half of Toronto’s population is foreign-born, giving the place a remarkable sense of optimism and new beginnings.

Declaring its intention to radically reduce its use of fossil fuels, Toronto has taken a long stretch of King Street, one of the City’s busiest commercial and recreational boulevards, and implemented a multi-faceted plan that bans most private traffic, upgrades the existing streetcar system, concentrates new residential and commercial space along its corridor, and utilizes these densities and proximities to encourage both walking and public transportation for work, school, shopping and play.

In contrast to a suburban sprawl of large homes and distant amenities that require driving, Toronto’s urbanized alternative offers smaller living spaces, more contact with other members of the community, far less fuel consumption, and reclaimed spaces for public use that were once devoted to parking or driving. One hope is that people will feel less isolated and lonely as proximity has them bumping into one another more regularly. Another is that residents and workers visiting daily will become more engaged in public life because they’ll need to cooperate in order to share its more concentrated spaces.

Toronto’s King Street experiment envisions a time when all of its streets will be “pedestrianized.” There will still be cars, but fewer will be in private hands and those that remain will be rented as needed—anticipating the rise of on-call autonomous vehicles. Streets and roads will also remain, but they will increasingly be paid for by those who use them most, further reducing the need for underutilized roadways and freeing up space for other uses like parks and recreational corridors.

Toronto’s experiment in urban living also promotes a “sharing economy,” with prices for nearly everything reduced when the cost is shared with others. Academics like Daniel Hoornweg at the University of Ontario’s Institute of Technology have been particularly interested in using reduced prices to drive the necessary changes. It’s “sharing rides, sharing tools, sharing somebody to look after your dog when you’re not there,” says Hoornweg. Eventually, the sharing economy that started with Uber and Airbnb will become almost second nature as it becomes more affordable and residents exchange their needs to own big homes and cars for other priorities like a sustainable environment, greater access to nature within an urban area, and more engagement over shared pursuits with their neighbors.

For a spirited discussion about Toronto’s King Street experiment that includes some of its strongest boosters, you can listen here to an NPR-Morning Edition segment that was broadcast earlier this week.

2. Toronto’s Quayside Re-Development

Much like in Philadelphia where I’m writing this post, some of Toronto’s most desireable waterfront areas have been isolated from the rest of its urban center by a multi-lane highway. In response, Toronto has set aside a particularly lifeless area “of rock-strewn parking lots and heaps of construction materials” that’s spread over a dozen acres for the development of another urban experiment, this time in partnership with a “smart-cities” Google affiliate called Sidewalk Labs. In October, a coalition of the City, Ontario and Canadian governments contracted with Sidewalk to produce a $50 million design for a part of town that’s been renamed Quayside, or what Sidewalk calls “the world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up”—a sensor-enabled, highly wired environment that promises to run itself.

According to a recent article in Politico (that you can also listen to), Quayside will be “a feedback-rich” smart city “whose constant data flow [will] let it optimize services constantly” because it is “not only woven through with sensors and Wi-Fi, but [also] shaped around waves of innovation still to come, like self-driving cars.” For example, in keeping with Toronto’s other pay-as-you-go priorities, one of Quayside’s features will be “pay-as-you-throw” garbage chutes that automatically separate out recyclables and charge households for their waste output.

Here are a couple of views of the future development, including tags on some of the promised innovations.

The new Quayside neighborhood in Toronto

A truly smart city runs on data that is generated from its inhabitants and behaviorally informed algorithms instead of on decisions that are made by Sidewalk’s managers or public officials. Not surprisingly, this raises a series of legal and quality of life questions.

On the legal side, those questions include: who owns the data produced by Sidewalk’s sensors and WiFi monitors; who controls the use of that data after it’s been generated; and whose laws apply when conflicts arise? On the issue of data privacy (and other potential legal differences), the Politico article notes that there are:

few better places to have this conversation than Canada, a Western democracy that takes seriously debates over informational privacy and data ownership—and is known for managing to stay polite while discussing even hot-button civic issues.

Moreover, because Canadians view personal privacy as a fundamental human right instead of one that can be readily traded for a “free” Gmail account or access to Google’s search engine, Sidewalk has already stipulated that data collected in Quayside will never be used to sell targeted advertising.

Undesirable human impacts from machine decision-making have also been raised, and Sidewalk is hoping to minimize these impacts by asking the City’s residents in advance for their own visions and concerns about Quayside. A year of consultations is already informing the initial plan.

Longer term, urbanists like Arielle Arieff worry about “the gap between what data can and cannot do” when running a neighborhood. Part of the beauty of city living is the connections that develop “organically”–chance occurrences and random encounters that a database would never anticipate. Arieff says: “They really do believe in their heart and soul that it’s all algorithmically controllable, but it’s not.” As if to confirm her suspicions, Sidewalk’s lead manager seems equally convinced that today’s technology can “optimize everyone’s needs in a more rational way.”

Given the expertise and perspective Toronto will be gaining from its King Street experiment and its citizens’ sensitivity to human concerns (like privacy) over efficiency concerns (like convenience), there is room for optimism that the City will strike a livable balance with its high tech partner. Moreover, Sidewalk Labs has a significant incentive to get it right in Quayside. There is an adjacent and currently available 800-acre lot known as Port Lands, “a swath of problem space big enough to become home to a dozen new neighborhoods in a growing metropolis.”

To me, Toronto’s Quayside experiment seems to have little downside, with more serious issues arising in Sidewalk’s future smart city projects. Sidewalk may not be selling its Toronto data to advertisers, but it will be vastly more knowledgeable than other cities that lack either the rich pools of behavioral data it has accumulated in Toronto or the in-house expertise to interpret it. Among other things, this creates a power imbalance between a well-funded private contractor and underfunded cities that lack the knowledge to understand what they stand to gain or to forge a working partnership they can actually benefit from. Simone Brody, who runs the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ “What Works Cities” project, says: “When it comes to future negotiations, its frightening that Google will have the data and [other] cities won’t.”

But these are longer-range concerns, and there is reason today for cautious optimism that American regulators (for example) will eventually begin to treat powerful tech companies that are amassing and utilizing public data more like “utilities” that must serve the public as well as their own profit-driven interests. That kind of intervention could help to level the public-private playing field, but it’s also a discussion for another day.

In the meantime, Toronto’s boldness in experimenting its way to a future that champions its priorities through the latest innovations is truly inspiring. The cities and towns where the rest of us live and work have much to learn from Toronto’s willingness to claim the future it wants by the seat of its pants.

This post was adapted from my March 17, 2019 newsletter.

Problem Solving That Affects the Quality of Your Work

February 3, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

People complain that their working lives would be better and more satisfying if only they had at their disposal a ready-built way to solve some of the problems that they see on the job.

With noses closer to the ground, it may be a persistent problem with product or service reliability; with managers who never get back to others inside and outside the company; with the big supplier who always sends a couple fewer than you ordered. Or more broadly, it may be how one of the minerals we use in our technology leads to a hazardous waste problem for end users, how we’re always promising more service than we can deliver at the price quoted, or how our company is sucking all of the high-skill workers out of the broader community and the pipeline is running dry.

Each of these problems has wider implications. They speak to the quality of big and small relationships we have at work and the issues of responsiveness, honesty, over-selling, environmental impact, and local citizenship that affect them. Moreover, each imbalance in these work-based relationships decreases our satisfaction on the job and adds to its shortcomings as long as it festers.

Is there a way-in for us to help address these imbalances from wherever we sit in our organizations?

The problems we know best tend to be the ones we encounter every day and dream about solving, not because we’re visionaries but because we’d enjoy our jobs more if we could make some headway in solving them.

On the other hand, someone above us in the hierarchy may be failing to address them, creating a potentially awkward problem about how we’re viewed in the organization if we raise our voices. But there is a daily cost in our silence too.

We’re always more engaged in our jobs when we believe that our efforts are contributing not only to company objectives but also to personal goals that are important to us. Our goals most commonly overlap with our employers’ objectives when it comes to building stronger working relationships within the organization and outside of it with co-workers, clients, customers, suppliers, and the communities where we work,

Why is our finding ways to help re-balance these relationships so important?

In decades of industrial work studies, one key indicator of job satisfaction has always been locus of control, or believing that you have enough latitude to influence the quality of your work experience on a regular basis. When that ability is stifled in key areas, it’s like putting blinders on the ways that you go to work, narrowing the range where you feel you can make any kind of positive difference. When that narrowing continues, it leads to resignation and disengagement. Instead of presenting opportunities to exercise your autonomy, going to work begins to seem like “going through the motions.”

There are several different responses to that kind of drift on the job, but I’d argue for one in particular: your sponsoring an invitation to a broader conversation that involves every constituency affected by a particular problem at work, both within your organization and outside of it.

It’s you taking the lead in bringing a particular problem into the open and offering everyone with a stake in its resolution an opportunity to find a better way forward. You’d:

-pick the problem whose solution would provide the greatest benefit to the organization, and make your best case for all of its stakeholders coming together to solve it.

-offer to help with outreach, with organizing the conversation, and with leading the eventual process.

This conversation may not solve the problem quickly but could be a fruitful way of bringing those with the most to gain and lose together while they explore longer-term solutions. In the meantime, your actions have declared that your job satisfaction is not something you take for granted or expect to be given to you. Instead, it’s a work reward that’s important enough to put your own stake in the ground by trying to improve the quality of key relationships that make you want to go to work everyday.

+ + +

At a time when more Americans are opting out of the blood-sport of national politics, it is no coincidence that there are increasing numbers of initiatives to gather input and solve common problems more locally. Many of us are fighting against feelings of disempowerment and resignation where reasonable discussion is still possible. That is often around an organization that is important to us as an employee, customer, supplier, or user.

For example, when tech companies like Facebook and Twitter (through their platforms) and Google (through YouTube) were challenging the ways that individuals like Alex Jones were using them to promote what they judged to be “detrimental messaging,” an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal recommended convening “a content congress… to shape content-moderation policies in a more transparent and consistent way” than these platforms making what seemed to be arbitrary decisions barring a user’s access. Because these are public platforms run by private companies, the authors argued that their users (and not just their internal content moderators) needed to “hash out best practices, air grievances, and offer rebuttals.”

Such a body should not be a legally binding authority but an arena for transparent coordination, public representation and human engagement in an industry dominated by algorithms and machines. Companies want feedback; government wants more insight into decision-making; and people want to be heard.

Working groups in such a “content congress” could consider how to deal with videos showing violence or death for example (should they be available when they show police brutality but not when they depict executions by extremist groups?) or the line that social media celebrities like Mr. Jones should be prevented from crossing when they’re egging on potentially violent followers.

In making their case for content moderation by all of the stakeholders, the op-ed’s authors highlight similar, broad-based problem-solving in other areas.

-Icann, the non-profit organization that administers the domain-name system for internet addresses, has always relied on multiple stakeholders (representing businesses, other nonprofits, activists and governments) to maintain fairness and transparency.

-The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority or FINRA increasingly addresses problems like the volatile, high-frequency trading that is automatically triggered by investment algorithms with stakeholder assistance. Instead of seeking new government regulations, FINRA has convened the groups that are most impacted to implement the necessary fixes.

Multi-stakeholder initiatives are rarely the quickest or most efficient ways to understand problems or try to solve them. But they are often preferable to “black box” solutions that seem arbitrary or government regulation from outside the industry groups that are most affected. Moreover, these cooperative attempts at problem-solving often have a positive impact on those who initiate them when they get to participate in the problem-solving itself.

An Invitation to Come In & Broaden the Conversation

I looked at some of the benefits of stakeholder problem-solving in a post eight months ago, but not as a proactive way to address issues that are important to engagement on the job or one’s satisfaction at work.

That post included a discussion about “cooperative work” that is not compensated with a paycheck. Some things that you do at work are within your job description and paid for accordingly, while other things like playing on the company’s softball team or contributing to potluck events are not, but you participate in them for their non-monetary rewards like improving affiliation and camaraderie.

I’d argue that sponsoring stakeholder problem-solving falls within this second, more voluntary category. It is not something you are supposed to do or expect to be paid for. Instead, you take the initiative because it’s important to your continued engagement with the job and to your overall work satisfaction. Your initial “compensation” is calculated in enhanced autonomy, improved engagement, and greater satisfaction as problems that affect the quality of your work begin to be addressed. Because the organization also stands to gain from the stakeholder process that you sponsored, your initiative may result in a raise or bonus, but that’s not why you initiated the discussion in the first place.

My May, 2018 post looked at “cooperative endeavors” like freely contributing to the base of general knowledge in Wikipedia and to the open-source programming of software like Linux, that provide additional unpaid compensations merely by being involved in them. According to an essay about Commons-based Peer Production (or CBPP), these contributions allow us to develop our capabilities to work together collaboratively “in ways that had previously been blocked… by chance or design.”

CBPP allows contributions based on all kinds of motivations such as the need to learn or to communicate. However, most importantly, a key incentive is the desire to create something mutually useful to those contributing. This also generally means that people contribute because they find it meaningful and useful, and they believe the resulting product worthwhile. Wikipedians and hackers primarily want to create something useful for themselves, and for other people, not for the market or for short-term profit. (the italics are mine)

This discussion highlights the independent rewards that come from bringing people together to solve common problems, like the joy of collaborating with others to do something that is mutually useful and beneficial.

It seems to me that “satisfaction from work” is not something that a job necessarily “gives us.” A paycheck covers our time and effort whether we were satisfied spending that time and effort or not. To at least some extent, that makes us is responsible for the satisfaction we derive from our jobs, and sometimes requires us to step outside of our job descriptions in order to secure it. We affirm our autonomy by taking control of our job satisfaction. When we sponsor a stakeholder conversation around a festering work-related problem, we stand to enhance our unpaid rewards from work even further, by collaborating on mutually beneficial solutions that can strengthen our key relationships on the job.

Our work isn’t merely our response to demands and responsibilities that have been put on us. It is also initiatives that we undertake without pay that benefit us as well as others who are impacted by the work that we do.

It’s acting like an owner of our work and not merely an employee. Sometimes that involves turning on the light on your front porch and inviting those in your community of work to sit around your table and help to make your shared experience better than it is today.

This post is adapted from my February 3, 2019 newsletter.

Blockchain Goes to Work

The Human Purpose Behind Smart Cities

Whose Values Will Drive Our Future?

Problem Solving That Affects the Quality of Your Work

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