Drilling with my battalion neighbors at NERT's Citywide Drill Spring 2025

The NERT Citywide Drill Spring 2025 was held at the Couny Fair building in Golden Gate Park this weekend for SF Fire Department neighborhood emergency response team (NERT) volunteers. I’ve been a certified NERT since 2018 and this is the fourth citywide drill I’ve now participated in.

Besides meeting up with NERTs I’m in touch with as the Cow Hollow and Marina District coordinator role I took on since 2024, there were some new opportunities I especially appreciated. Among them:

BATTALION DRILLS

NERT has shifted from small neighborhood teams to Battalion-based groups that encompass 5 or 6 neighborhoods. It’s how we will organize and stage response together in a disaster. We drilled with our Battalion 4 mates, so got to meet them and work with them for the first time. There were 10-12 of us when I joined them for the ALL HAZARD ROOM, a drill that combines a bunch of hazards: water leaks, gas leaks, downed electrical wiring, a victim trapped under heavy rubble, an uninjured neighbor in a wheelchair who wants to stay with the trapped victim, a sudden fire that needs to be suppressed, and earthquake aftershocks.

RADIO OPS, STAGING AREAs

Most of the day I was with the Hams (I got my Technician license last year and haven’t had much chance to use it yet). At this citywide event, radio operators had drills: there was an Auxiliary Communications System Field Team, with Planning and Walking radio groups for two disaster staging areas that mimicked the staging areas we’d set up for each Battalion group in the event of an emergency. I shadowed/scribed for a radio operator taking down incoming incident messages from our Walker and random people coming to the staging area to report their findings, like building collapses, fires, and injuries needing medical attention and rescue, and then communicating that to ACS Field Leader who interfaced with Battalion.

STOP THE BLEED & OPIOID OVERDOSES

There was a short class on naloxone and tourniquets, which I hadn’t taken before. Now we know how to identify an opioid overdose symptoms, and administer a naloxone dose, as well as apply a tourniquet and make a tourniquet in the field with a strip of fabric and a ballpoint pen. Wouldn’t you like to know how to do this? I think we could all learn it. I want to see this common sense public service instruction everywhere, like on bus stops!

DISASTER VICTIM TRAINING VOLUNTEERS

I didn’t do the FIELD TRIAGE drill this time but saw children victim-actors with simulated injuries: broken bones, lacerations. The kids were disaster victim training volunteers and they helped NERTs practice what we’d do to help them if we encountered them in our neighborhoods after a disaster struck and before emergency services could reach them.

Take a look at a video reel of NERT’s Citywide Drill Spring 2025 from the fire department.

TBT, my Global Niche journey in my TEDU talk pitch for TED GLOBAL 2010

Stumbled on this long ago pitch - to speak at a side event of TED Global conference in Oxford in 2010. To talk about our global self that can be found through online social networking.

I was having a great time with it, and early, as an expatriate! Those sure were golden days of wide open online life and exploration, glad I got to experience them. Nothing like today’s terrordome of trolls and info ops.

Posting this as a Throwback Thursday, to a time when I was thinking about our potential to connect globally (and yet refusing to use a common tongue to do it?! 😅), when in November 2024 my attention has been turning more and more to offline local community.

“We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation. ”

— Me in 2010

A MOST DIFFICULT NO-BRAINER: global citizens still need to find a place in the world

We’re born global citizens, even if that knowledge is trained out of us by family and culture and nation.

A global identity can seem nebulous and ungrounded, while something concrete and localized makes more sense. Problem with concrete though: it cracks over time, in quickly changing conditions, and sometimes even under its own weight.

There’s good news in this era of globalization. I believe we’re entering a permanent state of psychic limbo, a place where our concrete center won’t hold. Too many of us know the bittersweet liminality of living between multiple worlds, and the soul-sprung righteousness of refusing to settle on just one. 

This 600-word talk is synthesized from ~six months of my blogposts at Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation and includes revelations from my 13 years of identity struggle as an expatriate in 4 countries, the virtual community of cultural peers I created with the book Tales from the Expat Harem and the current online neoculture community expat+HAREM, and my work as a cultural producer and host of the hybrid identity discussion series Dialogue2010,  two years in-depth experience in social media with a focus on location independence and self actualization.

I’ll cover our changing sense of peers, the exquisite pull of online social networking -- as opposed to the usual blunt force push of social circumstance -- and how that demands more value and relevance from our connections, and us, and how fashioning a hybrid lifestyle to honor all the worlds we live in taps into our own global being. I call it finding your global niche, a psychic solution to a global identity crisis. 

I end with a metaphor for this kind of fluid identity (bobbing buoy tied to a point deep below surface of changing options, existing in a wider orbit around the inner me so I can be more versions of myself) and extrapolate that to the issue of global citizenship. Putting distance between yourself and your global citizenship offers more fluid points of connection, as well as an anchor. I suggest creating ‘psychic location independence’ to truly be a citizen of the world. 

Cassandra Awards for our news and information mapmakers

“Our news & information landscape has changed. Our mapmakers have changed. ”

— Announcing The Cassandra Awards for civic participators/participatory media/Fifth Estate content creators, dot connectors, and sense makers in our networks

Image: Using AI voice generation for an audio script of numerous quotes from my curated KIP (“Knowledge is Power”) sources on Twitter/Xitter which begin to tell the larger story of this moment, all in 5 minutes. Read the whole transcript here.

Image: This is the conclusion. I announce The Cassandra Awards. You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.

LISTEN TO THE BIGGER PICTURE

You can listen here or read the transcript with credits here

“You’ve just heard words from some of my nominees.”

— I invite you all to check their receipts.

With The Cassandra Awards and other information interfaces for you to engage with, my passion project KIP aims to re-educate the entire population in digital media literacy, information literacy, digital civic literacy, and help de-program those who have fallen victim to disinformation.

Until we learn to be better information consumers, we'll keep falling for disinformation

The day after the 2024 US Election.

Related data points in my timeline:

A certain personality type is found to most readily fall for poor information.

Also, news- information- digital- and media-literacy are teachable and learnable.

We need to help people be better information citizens.

That fact has never been clearer. It’ll help people be better voters, better neighbors, and better able to collectively work on our biggest issues, all the way to the climate crisis. It’s why I keep looking for ways to bring KIP, my passion project of the past 9 years, to the world.

Click on any of the tags below to see my previous posts on these topics which millions are now waking up to today. Click on the headline of each post to open it and see continue clicking on the tags in each post to dive deeper.

Let's recap

I nominate Stephanie LB @LincolnsBible Black for a Cassandra Award.

Here’s the summer before. 2018.

“Treason is the reason for the season, someone said on Twitter.

I shared it on my Instagram along with contemporary Tweets from Louis Neufeld who was very early on many germane threads that drive our headlines today. Her 2017 threads deserve a receipts challenge. I nominate her for a Cassandra Award.

What should journalism do to reveal the state of our democracy?

Here come the CONTENT CREATORS - 400 million impressions at the Democratic National Convention

I feel quite vindicated this month. The central contention of KIP, my passion project of the past decade, is hitting the mainstream. Everybody sees it!

A journalism society talked about feeling insulted this week. Meanwhile, journalists in the mainstream media had their lunch eaten last week by 200 ‘social media influencers’ invited to the Democratic National Convention who reached 400 million impressions (4x what cable news generated) for a media value of $800 million.

What a masterclass in disinter-media-tion. The Democrats went straight to the people.

The mainstream ‘journalism’ hits keep coming, with Dana Bash of CNN recycling racist Trump taunts as if it’s legitimate journalistic work in the first cable news mainstream media interview of the HARRIS WALZ team. Don’t waste our time!

I cannot help but notice these are the very same social media contributors I've been talking about as the non-traditional bridge media we need to connect to traditional journalism, and I conceived a framework to do that with my passion project KIP.

Journalists, it’s long past time for you to stop feeling insulted and get to work connecting with the people who are bringing news to us. They could use your rigor and training and experience, and we will all benefit from it. Democracy demands it.

By the way, I have a plan for that. Take a look at the KIP framework to connect journalists with content creators (I call them the Fifth Estate) and trusted independent parties to vet, frame, and generate discussion, games, research, education and commerce using current events.