It begins: Family of Mine research blog
Earlier this month I opened another blog channel here on my site. You can access it from the menu at the top of this page. It will focus solely on a new project I’m calling Family of Mine, and share pieces of that investigation.
I inherited a mystery. This is not a story that was passed down.
First post off my own site about this project, at LinkedIn.. Milestone! Anyway, I post it here too on my own blog because the fact of the matter is, something new is starting here, in a different blog on the same site.
The past few years I’ve been on a trail that started with some old family photos and interviews.
It grew into the research behind my new book-in-progress, Family of Mine, and led me into government archives, genealogy records, and parts of history I hadn’t expected to encounter.
If you enjoy family history or the research side of storytelling, you might like it.
What am I bringing to the civil service? All my experience and exposure.
My late-career stage brings a wealth of diverse experiences and perspectives that make me a unique and valuable candidate for civil service. My extensive background spans multiple decades and includes living and working in various American cities and three other countries, offering me deep insights into different cultural and social norms. Raised in a progressive Civil Rights hotbed, my early experiences shaped my commitment to social justice, inclusivity, and equity, while my upbringing in an integrated school district with BIPOC and AAPI teachers further enriched my understanding of diversity.
Throughout my career, I have consistently advocated for marginalized communities, from mentoring students of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and undocumented students to promoting gender equality and challenging workplace discrimination. My experience with transcendental meditation community has given me unique perspectives on spirituality. Additionally, growing up in a lower socio-economic environment taught me about systemic inequalities and the importance of creating opportunities for all.
My age also brings a level of resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving skills honed over decades of navigating diverse environments and challenging situations. This rich tapestry of experiences equips me with the maturity, empathy, and strategic vision necessary to contribute meaningfully to civil service, driving forward initiatives that promote equity and inclusion.
My international experience
I have lived and worked in numerous American cities and other countries, gaining firsthand insights into various cultural and social norms. As an expatriate in Muslim-majority countries in Southeast Asia and the Near East, I learned to read the fine print of each culture. My work included translating Turkish culture on live television for five million Americans and publishing a stereotype-busting book about Turkey. These international experiences enhanced my adaptability and cultural competence, allowing me to navigate diverse environments effectively. They also reinforced my understanding of global interconnectedness and the importance of cultural diplomacy.
TBT: I applied for a patent for social discovery on a short form mobile streaming platform
When I was a cofounder of a mobile streaming platform called Second Screen - later we called it “10 Block” to represent the blocks of 10 minute video it could stream to social viewers on our platform - our final chapter was an M&A journey. To document our novel idea, we applied to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in 2019.
As the chief operating officer of our early stage startup, I led the initiative to create our patent application with a patenting law firm. The project had unusual demands, as entrepreneurs so often face, and faced budget restrictions as well.
“I found a Vietnamese-speaking entrepreneur who could interview the tech team in Vietnam and produce a technical sketch of our system.”
My work on this initiative included producing technical sketches of the system. This particular challenge involved locating a technically-minded entrepreneur familiar with patenting who could speak Vietnamese to interface with the development team in Vietnam who built the platform long before I joined the company. The sketches never existed, and the team had never produced a sketch.
Thanks to Gigi Wang at UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering Sutardja Center, I was able to connect with a local founder of a technical company who just graduated Berkeley with a PhD. She’s a brilliant woman who is currently CEO of her own startup addressing cognitive impairments with light and sound. Mai Nguyen had the skills and experience to be able to capture an accurate first sketch after just a half an hour call with the development team.
I’m not a technical person but I’m creative who can learn from a model and replicate it so once I had the first technical drawing I was able to produce all the rest of the drawings needed to make our patent application.
Our provisional application was filed in January 2020 with fellow 10 Block inventors Marc Lopez and Jade Gabriel.
Conceiving of an Expat Harem inspired streaming series
Stealth project, defunct. Revolved a return to the cultural thread, in international streaming, if the time is right. (It wasn’t, 2022 and 2023 earthquakes and bombings changed the landscape, in a heated election year.)
Pitchbook for streaming series concept, 2022-2023
Expat Harem-related projects won't quit. The book is still for sale, and people are finding it like an actress in London who discovered it in a bookshop in London and sent it to a TV producer in Istanbul.
In 2022, at the request of that TV producer in Istanbul, I co-developed a streaming series concept inspired by the book "Tales from the Expat Harem" and its associated blog.
Collaborating with another writer, Katherine Belliel, whose Haze appeared in the book, and who coedited the sequel book Expat Sofra, we crafted a unique series that reflected the themes and stories from the original literary work.
This involved extensive research into the rights landscape, and entertainment legal agreements. We then pitched the concept to an international streaming service, leveraging our creative vision and strategic communication skills to present a compelling case for the globally accessible series.
The project demonstrated our ability to adapt literary content for a new digital medium while managing complex logistical and legal aspects.
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.
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.
Video retrospective of GlobalNiche, my remote skills edtech startup 2011-2013 and beyond...
“Her groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.”
I founded GlobalNiche in Istanbul with Tara Agacayak after evolving my 2006 cultural book to a 2010 global citizen blog to an online skill building business, and Tanya Monsef joined us when I moved to San Francisco. Here’s what Tanya, the Dean's Executive Professor of Management in the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University for the past decade, says about GlobalNiche in 2024.
Watch a quick retrospective, excuse any missing media.
"Anastasia’s groundbreaking concept of building an online professional presence as a way to advance business objectives for growth and sustainability… came long before companies understood the marketing potential of online social media, and began to hire social media managers in large numbers. And long before people understood why and how to use existing tools for effective remote work.
Tanya recalls how I took my knowledge and prior success using book publishing’s “author platform” concept to reach the public with content marketing, branding and community outreach (that’s Expat Harem!), and combined it with the heavily-online techniques a serial expat like me has relied on during my overseas experiences, and then how I created a way to teach it to others, and then to scale it.
"GlobalNiche was a forward-thinking leader in digital solutions and thought leader to a global cohort of founders and business women, as well as organizations serving female innovators.”
This reminds me that Tanya and I continued to deliver talks and workshops well into 2014 and later, working with the Women’s Startup Lab in Mountain View, Turkish Women’s International Network in Menlo Park, and a women executives group at Cisco in San Jose, and I’ve guest lectured to her business students at Santa Clara University for several years.
““Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing an ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity. ”
"Ten years before Zoom became mainstream, GlobalNiche were already conducting live web video group meetings (using chat, recordings, etc) showcasing her ability to foresee trends and implement innovative solutions to increase opportunity,” she says.
"GlobalNiche was awarded Top Instructor by Udemy in 2013 as the most enrolled course.” You’ll see in the quick video above that Udemy noted we enrolled students from 17 nations in 2013.
Tanya recalls our 2013 win of an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women by national and international gender equality foundations, global health nonprofits, and academic leadership centers.
The multi-year strategic change initiative of San Jose State University, Public Health Institute (PHI), World Pulse, the Global Women's Leadership Network, Monterey Institute of International Studies, and the Global Fund for Women recognized GlobalNiche's pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools for connecting and transforming communities world-wide.
“In 2013 GlobalNiche won an innovation challenge to connect 5 million women, recognition of a pragmatic, resourceful plan to use free web technology and collaboration tools.”
ON CONTRIBUTING TO THE FUTURE OF WORK MOVEMENT
In 2014, I looked back on the workforce pioneering I’d done during GlobalNiche, and noted how awareness and adoption was coming for people who hadn’t yet felt the need for this online survival method:
“I’m proud to have added definition to, contributed to & participated in the movement toward every-day entrepreneurial thinking and acting and creative entrepreneurship as a solution for everyone, the incorporation of location independence and lifestyle design in populations beyond expats, travelers and life hackers, a new seriousness around digital identity, personal branding, digital footprints and online social networking in general for personal and professional development, reinvisioning the future of work with online collaboration and cocreation, the adoption of global communication best practices, the absolute tidal wave of online content marketing, the rise of the transformational consumer.”
The bigger picture, in your words
With my KIP project to make sense in the social age and surface the best civic participators - or members of “the Fifth Estate”, - I’ve been collecting the contributions on Twitter.
For a couple years I made graphic images of quotes I spied. I put some of them together into a larger narrative of our time, and this moment. Take a look!
Below is a short version of the narrative in the video. See the video for quote credits or read the transcript with credits here.
“The Bigger Picture” In Snippets From Emergent News Contributors Curated By KIP
"Social media has held politics and media to account"
Journalism & Backsliding Democracy was a good journalism-democracy-disinformation panel with Jay Rosen at New York University School of Journalism for the Cambridge Disinformation Summit last week.
From my live notes: “Social media has held politics and media to account,” said former director of BBC News Richard Sambrook, hitting the nail on the head!
Social media is not just part of the #disinformation problem, it’s part of the solution as I’ve been contending with my Fifth Estate-holding-power-to-account project: KIP! (Read about it here.)
The hitch: knowing which are the good actors on social media and which are the bad actors.
My live notes: Jay said we need smart practices to solve the hardest problems in news coverage, like if you had a “Category of bad actors” you could put a source in you’d be better prepared. 🤔
That sounds very much like the categorization I’ve been structuring with KIP.
UC Berkeley is #1 in the world for creating venture-funded startups
This week it was announced by Pitchbook 2023 University Rankings that University of California, Berkeley is #1 in the world for creating venture-funded startups.
In PitchBook's overall rankings in 2023, Berkeley is the top public university for producing startup founders for the sixth straight year.
I’ve loved being an entrepreneurship mentor to university students at both these institutions - the European Innovation Academy, the world’s largest extreme accelerator, and UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology - and their entrepreneur programs!
Special shout out to Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship program director Gigi Wang for bringing me to Cal as a mentor and a venture judge.
I’ve been consistently impressed with the problems UCB student entrepreneurs have chosen to address, and the fast work they achieve in these accelerated entrepreneurship environments. You can read about student ventures I worked with here and here and here and here.
Berkeley Method gets students thinking like entrepreneurs, click the image to read a 2018 article about it
Congrats to all!
The Future of Work 2023
We’re not “post pandemic” just because we want to be.
(And yes, it’s the same sad story from last January, and the year before. I have been early and sadly accurate on this pandemic.)
So - 3 years in- in our life-work environments how do we deal with this new hybrid state — this state of limbo — of being weary of the public health safety protocols and wary of the consequences at the same time?
“As we look at 2023, how do we deal with our new hybrid state: weary of pandemic protocols, wary of the consequences?”
As the new year starts, how do we, all of us, everyone really, but in this case businesses, and in particular company boards and the board directors deal with our not-even-new reality, and our insistent future?
“Would you rather have a hybrid or virtual meeting that is quorate and high attendance, or would you rather risk apologies from directors unable to attend meetings face to face if they are forced to commute?” asks my longtime board journey mentor Shefaly Yogendra in her year end wrap up.
Read it here: Boards and governance: Lessons from 2022
Meanwhile, a future of work inspiration of mine, Budd Caddell who credits Kevin Kelly for the term ‘Protopian Organization’ and offers this one prediction for 2023 from the wreckage of 2022: there is a vacuum for a new kind of organization that takes the future seriously, and creates real change with its people and communities.
With trust in institutions waning, employees disengaged, consumers looking for meaning, progress stalled both at the org- and systemic-level”, a new, more mature organization can emerge, Caddell says.
I immediately recognize this is an opportunity for businesses that take living with the pandemic seriously - to offer the people they work with a baseline of health and safety - by upgrading their ventilation systems, and allowing hybrid work and virtual meetings as Yogendra mentions above, but I see companies failing to do this more often than not. Even companies that pride themselves on futurism, like Google.
“It’s time for organizations that take the future seriously and work for mutual enrichment of their people and communities”
These new protopian organizations he describes, “they don't just paint an optimistic picture of tomorrow, they respect the problems that come with trying to make anything better. These orgs won't just slap "we make the world a better place" on their label and career site and ignore the unintended consequences of their business model and culture.”