Genuinely a worrying image to see when you live in the Caribbean. For the best sources to follow and to learn about how these predictions are done, the NHC NOAA website is key, but my preference is for Tropical Tidbits. His nightly (during current storms) presentations on his YouTube channel are second to none. Easy to understand, easy to get the key messages and removed from drama to prevent panic, something the world’s TV channels would do well to emulate.

Today’s essay is a slightly longer one, it’ll take a couple more minutes to read than is custom for my essays. The subject is broad and couldn’t be condensed without losing some of the finer details. I hope you don’t mind.

This essay is based on a small presentation I did to talk about COVID-19 and how we could kickstart after the worst of the pandemic is over. This essay expands on the first part of that presentation exploring the themes in more detail. Look out for the second part in the near future.

As many of you will know, I live in the Caribbean. And apart from its idyllic setting sometimes, we do have 3 major potential natural disasters to cope with; Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Hurricanes.

The 1st of June debuts the Atlantic Hurricane Season, which lasts until the end of November. The early part of the season is relatively quiet for us in the Caribbean as most storm-potential depressions tend to form in the Gulf of Mexico, way past our islands. Their movement tends to be NE, threatening Cuba, and Florida mostly. That’s not a perfect explanation, but you get the idea.

From Fast Company’s interview with Scott Galloway:

Fast Company: What do you think about Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with Donald Trump?

Scott Galloway: Everyone kind of figured out that Mark Zuckerberg is the biggest oligarch in the history of mankind, and that he is leveraging his proximity to power in corrupt ways just to increase his wealth. And I think the Trump-Zuckerberg story is going to have a big impact on the way political speech happens on social networks.

I wrote in one of my recent newsletters that I had started to form a bigger picture of the events that are happening around the world currently. I thought I’d have a crack at trying to articulate this feeling. It’s not very positive as I don’t feel the future is that positive in the short-to-medium term. Long-term, I think things will right themselves after a wave of unrest and a reset as we all collectively wake up. Then the cycle will start over again.

Hello from a severe Saharan-dust-cloud-covered-Caribbean. A once-in-a-50-year event according to The Guardian.

COVID-19 has accelerated the use of digital throughout the world, the question is, is the Caribbean ready for the change and made the recent difficulties at Digicel a cause for concern?

Before getting into this week’s essay, I wanted to let you know that I got some pushback from my last article dealing with online and virtual conferences. I thoroughly appreciated the discussion I had, and I got some more exposure to other solutions to some of the problems I highlighted. Taking that a little further, I did some more in-depth research and found this graphic that highlights all the solutions surrounding digital conferencing. There’s a lot there, wow! The main point of the feedback was that I said that there weren’t solutions to the problems I mentioned. I was —sort of— wrong. There are lots of solutions as the graphic shows. But one thing that they all fail on is massive scale. I should have been more explicit in my essay, explaining that I was targetting large-scale conferences, conferences that typically have tens of thousands of visitors over a few days. None of these solutions scale to that level sadly. Let me know if I’m wrong again, I’d love to hear from you. 😀

I look into the conference bundle and how the digital twins stack up

I’ve had a tough time being productive over the last few days. The events around the world currently are a lot to process, and as I’ve said before, I’m not the type to react instantly with hollow missives. I need time to think about it, reflect upon it and do some research to know more about it. I’ve struggled over the last few days to come up with a response here for this newsletter, to try to fully come to terms with what some are only just waking up to acknowledge. I’m fifty years old now, and have lived through a few life shocks —I don’t need to bore you with the details. Suffice to say, what is currently happening is deeply troubling to me and I’m starting to form a bigger picture of where the world might go in the future, and I’m not comfortable with it.

I don’t know about you, but it has been a particularly difficult couple of months to think clearly about things.

First, the pandemic was “over there” and not a risk for us. We quickly found out that that was complete rubbish and were thrust into a strict lockdown with little to no preparation. The governments were clearly caught off guard despite repeated warnings for years, despite the early warning signs in January and despite a hot of countries that had earned experience offering their help that was, in what I can only describe as a biased denial. No, I’ll call it for what it is. Racism.

This is the belated narrated version. I also fixed a few typos on the original article.

Evening all. Today I’ll dive a little into the forced change that is taking place in the Caribbean and show how we still have a long way to go, and I start an analysis on digital conferencing, firstly by looking at what exactly conferences are for and why they exist using a model I’ve developed to help explain this. In another newsletter, I’ll get into the discussion about what digital conferences can and can’t offer and what the future might hold.

It’s a start, but there’s plenty more to be done

Evening all. Today I’ll dive a little into the forced change that is taking place in the Caribbean and show how we still have a long way to go, and I start an analysis on digital conferencing, firstly by looking at what exactly conferences are for and why they exist using a model I’ve developed to help explain this. In another newsletter, I’ll get into the discussion about what digital conferences can and can’t offer and what the future might hold.