Medium Short: Prepare and stay open
Words to work and get hacked and live by
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Welcome to the latest Medium Short, a weekly accountability practice highlighting what I’m up to along the unmarked — mostly functional, not completely hacked — trail to #IndustrialHealing. Reminder: all my Medium articles are linked for free here.
Among the mottos I aim to live by, “prepare and stay open” was the dominant one that served me this past week. This phrase pushes me to keep improving in preparation for what’s ahead, and to stay open to the unknown that inevitably shows up to test the prep in unexpected ways.
This motto came in handy in this week’s work, trouble, and play.
Work: mining for meaningful lobbying data
I have been in the salt mines on a hard-hitting piece about lobbying. I finally struck the vein of data I was looking for and have built a solid set of reference material from which to tell a (hopefully) useful story.
The main finding is how much *publicly* traded companies are paying *publicly* elected officials to *privately* override the interests of the public in the name of profit.
This comes as no surprise, yet it is surprisingly hard to find all this “public” data. And when the numbers are lined up neatly, it still shocks me. As the systems thinkers remind us, we need to see a system to change a system. This is me seeing the system.
This will all be laid bare over in the Matereal World next week.
Meanwhile in that very same Matereal World, the response to Global Mining Co seeks input on sustainability strategy has been diverse and encouraging.
Although funnily enough the company who sent me the survey that forms the base of this piece still hasn’t viewed it — I know because it’s behind a paywall and I can see who registers. This is funny…
