By Robert McGarvey

The US government now has announced a policy where applicants for US visas are asked to disclose their social media handles. Apparently about 15 million foreign visitors will be impacted annually.

Would you disclose your Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts to a foreign government?

My Twitter account is @rjmcgarvey, ditto on Facebook, and I have never posted on Instagram, Snapchat, et. al. I have nothing to hide. But I do have questions about this new US information grab.

Is the US overreaching in its paranoia? Should what you post on social media figure into your ability to travel the world? And remember that others will follow the US policy – that is, many nations will start asking for social media handles on visa applications.

So US citizens too will be impacted.

Which brings us to the question: why did the US make this change?

According to TIME, the US explained this thusly: “National security is our top priority when adjudicating visa applications, and every prospective traveler and immigrant to the United States undergoes extensive security screening. We are constantly working to find mechanisms to improve our screening processes to protect U.S. citizens, while supporting legitimate travel to the United States.”

The free speech advocate inside me recoils at yet another government act that may stifle speech.

Even so, I have assumed for some years that the big governments – especially the US, China, possibly Russia – routinely sift through all social media postings.  I would also assume that many who post inflammatory stuff do so under pseudonyms. So a visa applicant might have a humdrum account on Twitter in his/her real name – and another account full of hideous nonsense under a fake name.  Which account would you guess he’d disclose on his visa application?

Is there any point to this new government intrusion?  Will demanding social media handles deliver anything of value?

Then, too, many millions of foreigners enter the US under a visa waiver program that allows passport holders from countries such as Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom to enter without a visa.  

In FY 2015, about 22 million came in under the visa waiver program (Japan was the leader with 3.7 million).  That’s half again more than will come in with a visa but that makes sense because most developed countries are in the waiver program (and in most cases US citizens do not need visas to enter these countries).

As for the new US demands, civil liberties folks are up in arms.  Per the New York Times, “This seems to be part and parcel of the same effort to have an extraordinary broad surveillance of citizens and noncitizens,” Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, said of the latest development. “Given the scope of the surveillance efforts, it is hard to find a rational basis for the broad surveillance the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security have been doing for almost two years.”

Probably, too, this search won’t actually prevent any terrorism. A Washington Post story from a few years ago took up exactly this question and said, naw, it won’t work.  Why? The vast majority of posts are about the same old stuff – “Almost all were about traffic, celebrities or the weather. Discovering whether a visa applicant has ever voiced suspect opinions will require searching through acres of haystacks in the hopes of finding a few needles,” said the Post as it reviewed Ukrainian posts after Russia’s seizure of Crimea. Note that timing. Even tho war was breaking out, the overwhelming majority of social posts were about the same old trivialities of everyday life.

Then, too, added the Post, the Internet is awash with hate speech – vide Trump’s Twitter account.  There’s a lot of bluster, a lot of ranting, and a lot of plain hate. That means “identifying suspicious social media activity cannot be conclusive without additional labor. Whittling hundreds of thousands of flagged accounts down to a manageable watchlist will be an expensive and time-consuming human effort, not the work of algorithms.”

So probably this is actually just a Washington DC witch hunt not worth the time and effort.

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by Robert McGarvey

You want to know about community development financial institutions? Cliff Rosenthal is the man you want to talk to.  He literally wrote the book on CDFIs and also the longstanding credit union initiative to serve the unbanked: Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Financial Institutions Movement.

This podcast also posted to the CU2.0 Podcast series which I run.  That’s a professional credit union series but the Rosenthal podcast has wider appeal because – fundamentally – it’s about bringing financial services to the unbanked and underbanked and stimulating more economic activity in communities that may be ignored by mainstream banks and even many credit unions.

Credit unions of course are cooperatives. Not all credit union employees know that. But it is fact.

Have CDFIs lived up to their potential?

Have credit unions changed the shape of financial services in America?

Rosenthal has opinions and he shares them in this podcast.

Along the way he talks about his stint at the CFPB – and the ingrained credit union executive distrust of that institution. Which may not be entirely warranted.

Rosenthal pulls no punches. He said, “It dismays me that 100 years after the birth of credit unions we still have a significant problem of the underbanked and unbanked.” And, note, about 25% of households falls into the category.

 Rosenthal also said that in 1990 there were around 13,500 banks and thrifts and a like number of credit unions.  There now are about 5500 of each.  “The number of credit unions falls by 200 to 300 each year.  Ten years from now there will be 3000, 3500 credit unions.”

That math is flawless. And it has to scare you.

In this podcast, you’ll hear a discussion of the successes of a Mississippi CDFI credit union executive Bill Bynum.  He told his own story in this podcast.

You’ll also hear about Jim Blaine, the charismatic, longtime CEO of State Employees’ Credit Union in North Carolina, one of the country’s biggest.

And you’ll also hear Rosental insist that many credit unions that focus on serving the underserved do better financially than those that focus on fighting with banks for more affluent consumers.

If you enjoy this podcast, listen in to the podcast with Cathie Mahon, CEO of Inclusive, a trade group for institutions that focus on community development.

 Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.

By Robert McGarvey

By now it’s cliche: meeting attendees are ever younger (think Millennials – born 1981 through 1996 – and a sprinkling of still younger Gen Z) and, therefore, meetings have to evolve to satisfy new expectations.

But have they evolved? Really?

Are they that much different from what they were in 2009, 1999, or even 1989?

Reading an interview in Meetings Today with Mark Cooper, CEO of IACC (International Association of Conference Centers), I was struck by how often I agreed with him – but also how often it seemed to me that meetings I attend fall very short of what Cooper put out as necessities of a well run 2019 meeting.

For instance: Cooper said, “Today’s delegate seeks an enriching and memorable experience from all aspects of the venue, from design to features.”

He then ticked off some essential features and he started with WiFi. I am so with Cooper on this – good WiFi is a sine qua non for me at a meeting.

But often we are talking non because the WiFi isn’t there.

Question: when was the last time you had adequate WiFi at a large meeting?  I cannot think of any time which is why, typically, I create my own hotspot and connect via my phone. Partly I do that because I am wary of public WiFi – remember the fake free WiFi network erected at the 2016 Republican National Convention.  

But I started doing it because in most hotels and meetings facilities I have used, the WiFi sucks.  It’s slow, the signal sometimes drops, sometimes I cannot connect at all (a problem that seems chronic with an iPad Air 2 I commonly bring to meetings).

For years I have whined about inadequate hotel wifi and, sure, they keep upping their capabilities – but we keep connecting more devices. And the hotels never really get ahead because they do not want to spend the money it would take to offer truly adequate WiFi. They are pinchpennies when it comes to broadband and we pay the price in woeful connections.

Next on Cooper’s must list is: “Inspiring and healthy food and beverages (including interesting alcohol-free options).”

Agreed at my end.  

But I cannot say I typically see that at the meetings I attend.  The food is neither healthy nor inspiring. It is same old. A blah chicken breast with a few roasted potatoes and a handful of carrots and green beans or maybe it’s a blah salmon fillet on a bed of rice with some peas.

Hotels have talked about upping their meetings food game for as long as I can remember and that’s a commendable goal.  But this is aspiration. Not reality at most venues.

There are exceptions. I recall a lovely Beard House dinner or two with chefs from Benchmark’s conference centers.

But for most meeting venues tasty, smart food is all talk, no action.  

Cooper’s next point leapfrogs off the food grumbles because he said attendees “will also be watching the waste that comes from their event and will not tolerate full buffet tables of spent food being swept into the trash bag.”

Except, very typically, that’s precisely what happens to food waste at meetings: it goes to the dumpster and from there into the landfill.  

Two years ago I wrote a column headlined: “It’s up to you to stop food waste at conferences.”

It still is.

If you know you won’t be eating the meeting lunch – and there often is good conversation at those lunch tables but good food not so often – tell the meeting planner and ask that your lunch be donated to an organization that serves the needy. In many big cities such groups exist and they will accept the donation.  Most won’t take food that has been plated and put on a table – but if it has stayed in the kitchen they will be glad to have it and it will help fill a hungry belly.

A last point made by Cooper that interested me regards wellness at meetings. He said: “Personally, I think more can be done for delegates during break-out sessions and refreshment breaks, whether that’s hosting food demonstrations, yoga sessions or giving delegates the chance to enjoy a group meditation session to re-energize ahead of the afternoon agenda. I’d also like to see more events promoting walking meetings to help attendees get in their 10,000 steps a day.”

I definitely agree with him but I also agree that most venues are more talk, not much action, when it comes to building wellness into meetings.  And attendees know this.

Bottomline: I strongly agree with IACC’s Cooper. Meeting attendees want better WiFi, better food (and more vegan options!), they want reduced waste, and they want more and more convenient wellness activities available at meetings..

I just am not seeing many facilities that are delivering on these priorities. Do you?

The McGarvey Credit Union Podcast: CU2.0 Podcast Episode 37 Cliff Rosenthal on CDFIs http://bit.ly/2Wd5vBw

You want to know about community development financial institutions? Cliff Rosenthal is the man you want to talk to.  He literally wrote the book on CDFIs and also the longstanding credit union initiative to serve the unbanked: Democratizing Finance: Origins of the Community Development Financial Institutions Movement.

Have CDFIs lived up to their potential?

Have credit unions changed the shape of financial services in America?

Rosenthal has opinions and he shares them in this podcast.

Along the way he talks about his stint at the CFPB – and the ingrained credit union executive distrust of that institution. Which may not be entirely warranted.

Rosenthal pulls no punches. He said, “It dismays me that 100 years after the birth of credit unions we still have a significant problem of the underbanked and unbanked.” And, note, about 25% of households falls into the category.

 Rosenthal also said that in 1990 there were around 13,500 banks and thrifts and a like number of credit unions.  There now are about 5500 of each.  “The number of credit unions falls by 200 to 300 each year.  Ten years from now there will be 3000, 3500 credit unions.”

That math is flawless. And it has to scare you.

In this podcast, you’ll hear a discussion of the successes of a Mississippi credit union executive Bill Bynum.  He told his own story in this podcast.

You’ll also hear about Jim Blaine, the charismatic, longtime CEO of State Employees’ Credit Union in North Carolina, one of the country’s biggest.

And you’ll also hear Rosental insist that many credit unions that focus on serving the underserved do better financially than those that focus on fighting with banks for more affluent consumers.

If you enjoy this podcast, listen in to the podcast with Cathie Mahon, CEO of Inclusive, a trade group for institutions that focus on community development.

Listen, too, to this podcast with Bill Bynum of Hope.

Like what you are hearing? Find out how you can help sponsor this podcast here. Very affordable sponsorship packages are available.

Find out more about CU2.0 and the digital transformation of credit unions here. It’s a journey every credit union needs to take. Pronto

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Bulk buying means lower costs. That’s a fact of life in the US and it also works to the detriment of smaller, community oriented institutions – think churches, charter schools, various non profits.

They are too small to win those discounts so they pay high prices for basic services and commodities.

The Community Purchasing Alliance was formed to solve exactly that inequity for non profits in the Washington DC area.

Right now about 75 non profits in the DC area are saving around $1 million annually on $17 million in purchases of electricity, trash hauling, security, copying, and other commodity services. That discount happens because they buy through CPA and its founder, Felipe Witchger, is the guest in this week’s podcast.

He tells how his organization formed – he tips his hat to Paul Hazen, a longtime Washington DC co-op heavyweight as suggesting it function as a co-op.

He also tells how CPA wins discounts for its members.

Felipe also observes that CPA now also operates in southern Connecticut and North Carolina. It also is scouting cities for an expansion later this year and as many as five may be targets. Listen up to find if your city is on the list – and if it isn’t, you’ll hear what Felipe is looking for in partners.

A couple housekeeping notes:

* He says CPA’s biggest member is Kipp DC. That’s a network of college prep schools with an annual budget over $100 million.

* There’s intermittent wind noise. Sorry about that. Some was deleted but some stubbornly persisted. The podcast can be heard and the content is valuable however, so persist.

Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.

By Robert McGarvey

An infographic via Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) gives us a quick, easy way to measure just how typical we are.  Granted, frequent flyers, as a tribe, have shared idiosyncrasies – a strong fondness for lots of accessible plugs in a hotel room and, always, a desk in the room – but then there are datapoints where I have to scratch my head and wonder who are these people?

CWT starts out with a softball – 9 of 10 travelers are willing to share travel preferences. You have to wonder about the 10% who decline. Too busy to bother? OK, that makes a kind of sense to me.  But if it’s just preferring to be private, nah, that seems dumb to me. Whenever I have the time I provide travel preferences just to get what I want on the record and I will do this free of charge. If you want to know my preferences in banking, in mobile payments, in computing, bring a checkbook or at least an Amazon gift card. That’s info I charge for but when it comes to travel and the pains I feel, ask and I’ll tell because I am hoping for more comfort as payback.

Here are the salient CWT datapoints:

66% of travelers prefer a window seat.  Do you?

I do not. I strongly prefer an aisle seat and will grumble, loudly, if put in a window seat. Why? I have written often about deep vein thrombosis and air travel and swear by the advice to walk every hour.  Climbing over two fellow travelers to exit from a window seat is rude and, well, who does it except in an emergency?  Sitting on the aisle, tho, I get up pretty much every hour and walk up and back, maybe a couple times.

Perhaps I am paranoid about DVT.  Perhaps. But this is a better safe than sorry choice and for me, the aisle seat is the ticket.  And it is very good news in my mind that most of you want the window seat. Take it, it’s yours.

Per CWT, btw, “Window proponents like control of the window shade, a fuselage on which to rest their sleeping head and ample opportunity to fill their Instagram feed with obligatory shots of the plane wing in the clouds.”

64% of travelers prefer ground transportation vs. public transport.  

I do not. In San Francisco I’m on the BART.  In Phoenix, I light rail home. At Newark Airport, I usually catch a train and I am joyous about the PATH extension that’s probably coming to the airport.  At CDG in Paris, I’m on the Metro. For my money, public transit usually is not only cheaper but faster when it comes to exiting an airport.

52% would rather miss a flight than lose luggage.

Not me.  But maybe I cheat here. I don’t check bags and therefore find the concept of lost luggage to be alien.  And I don’t recall ever missing a flight in decades of flying. Flights were cancelled, sometimes abruptly, but I never missed one on my own doing.

Baggage of mine has gone astray, and that indeed is annoying. But on the three or so occasions this happened, it always found its way to me within a day or so. I don’t fret much about baggage.

65% would rather fly international than domestic.

Not me.  I suppose I prefer domestic because the flights are shorter.  And, sure, the inflight service is better on international flights. But short still trumps better service.

CWT, incidentally, pointed out that there are regional differences in traveler preferences. In Asia, for instance, 71% want the window. In the Americas it’s just 59%.

Regional differences are especially sharp when the question is taxi vs rideshare. 54% in the CWT poll plunk down for taxis. But in the Americas that number plummets to 37%.

Don’t ask me about that one. You’ll find me in public transit.  

How typical are you regarding the CWT questions?

I’m an outlier but I knew that at the get go.

What about you?

Search Us, Says Google – MIT Technology Review http://bit.ly/2VWX1OO The McGarvey back pages.

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For many of us, our warmest, most intimate connection with a cooperative is our local grocer and at the National Co+Op Grocers the business of that co-operative is helping its 145 members, each a consumer facing co-op grocer, successfully compete against increasingly powerful national grocers.

The good news is that most co-op grocers are holding their own.

There had been tough times for co-op grocers, admitted this podcast’s interview, C. E. Pugh, CEO of the National Co+Op Grocers.  A big reason is that in the past decade the big national grocers, from WalMart on down, all discovered the consumer appeal of organic, of brown rice, of soy and almond milk, the kinds of products co-op grocers had long depended upon for successes.

And then they had a lot more competition.

But co-op grocers also have a trump card, said Pugh. They can and should double down on local goods, local farmers, the local community.  They are truly of the local community and to succeed, they need to accentuate that.

Many are doing just that.

Consider this podcast a guide to running a thriving food co-op.

Want to know still more about food co-ops?  Tune into The Cooperators Podcast Episode 9 with Stuart Reid of the Food Co-op Initiative. That discussion has a focus on starting new food co-ops, where the Pugh talk is more tilted towards succeeding at an operating co-op.

Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.

By Robert McGarvey

Finally TripAdvisor is back in the news for doing something that looks to be right. The Detroit Free Press, which had investigated TripAdvisor’s apparent burying of reviews that alleged sexual assaults – sometimes by resort and hotel employees – tells the story that TripAdvisor now vows it’s mapped a different course. The Freep headline shouts: TripAdvisor will now flag sexual assault warnings on travel reviews.

The promise: a simple click of a filter will bring up reviews that claim sexual assaults and other safety related complaints.

According to the Freep, TripAdvisor admitted that an internal investigation had found 1100 reviews that claimed sexual assault had been posted on the site in the past year. But it wasn’t always easy to find them

Indeed,a 2017 investigation by the Milwaukee Sentinel found that TipAdvisor had a pattern of deleting posts alleging rape or assault.  

Along the way I had personally declared TripAdvisor to no longer be trustworthy.  Once I had seen it as the go to site for hotel reviews but I stopped.

Now TripAdvisor screams: trust us, we’re changed, we’re different!

Color me skeptical.

Probably the real driver for TripAdvisor is that it had found itself playing catch up – and failing – in surveys of hotel review sites.  Google had in fact galloped into a huge lead over TripAdvisor and probably TripAdvisor saw only darkness at the end of its tunnel.  

Flashforward and now TripAdvisor says it has had an epiphany.  It told the Freep: “When your article hit, we started re-evaluating our policies,” said TripAdvisor spokesman Brian Hoyt, noting the 1,100 reviews citing sexual assault raised eyebrows. “One incident is horrible — 1,100 is horrific. Having read through many of these accounts, it really motivated us at TripAdvisor to make sure we do right by these survivors and help them find a way to share this information with others.”

Here’s what visitors to TripAdvisor will now find, per the Freep: “Rather than have to dig through tens of millions of hotel reviews in search of rape complaints, TripAdvisor users will now be able to click through a filter on each property to see if there are any reviews with safety warnings involving rapes, robberies or druggings.”

TripAdvisor pointed some media to the Palm Beach Hotel in Vietnam as a case in point of its get tough policies. In my clicking it indeed was easy to see there were safety concerns and it was also easy to pull up two very tough reviews.

TripAdvisor itself explains what changes it has made here.

There’s a lot to like about what TripAdvisor says it is doing.

The money question of course is do you now trust TripAdvisor?  With its history of burying and simply deleting reviews alleging crimes at hotels?

Remember, in 2017, Senator Tammy Baldwin asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate TripAdvisor. Per the NY Times, “This may be a case of putting profits over providing an open, honest forum for traveler reviews on TripAdvisor,” Ms. Baldwin said in a tweet on Nov. 26. “I called on the F.T.C. to look into this and they should get to the bottom of it.”

And yet the beat went on at TripAdvisor: there persisted an unwillingness to wrestle with the reality that some resorts, in some parts of the world, seem to have persistent issues involved a failure to provide for the safety of guests.

I absolutely understand the difficulties in accepting as true unproven allegations about a hotel employee and the hotel itself.

But, remember, TripAdvisor won fans because it published negative reviews about bad dinner service, clogged toilets, stained bedding, and other unpleasantries. It won our trust because it let travelers dish about the bad and the ugly at hotels and not just the good.

And then to find out that apparently many, many reviews that claimed rape were deleted because they weren’t “family friendly,” where are we to put our trust?

As recently as this year, the Guardian ran a piece that said some women still had loud complaints about the fairness of TripAdvisor’s handling of rape allegations.

So now we are supposed to believe TripAdvisor has gotten religion about helping travelers stay safer?

My advice is to remain skeptical of TripAdvisor. The NY Times too has reservations. I want to trust the site – I truly do – but the history tells me to go slow here. It has to re-earn our trust. I for one hope it does.

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Call this podcast a deep dive into platform cooperatives and more broadly the sharing economy. That’s what Neal Gorenflo, executive director of Shareable in San Francisco, spends his days noodling on. This is a wide ranging, largely unstructured conversation but there are headline moments strewn throughout, from Gorenflo’s Road to Damascus epiphany that prompted him to resign a corporate job and become a sharing guru through his bareful perspective on Uber – sizzling stuff – and musing about Emilia Romagna which he sees as something of a polar opposite of Silicon Valley because it’s a place where cooperatives really matter.

In many ways this is a challenge to what Gorenflo calls Silicon Valley orthodoxy where the true believers are convinced their way is the best way to build a business. Is it really? Gorenflo has real doubts.

Want some good news about cooperatives in the US? You’ll hear it here. We just may be on the cusp of a boom in cooperatives as more of us come to see that this is a flexible business format with lots of benefits for workers, communities, owners.

Like what you are hearing? The Cooperators Podcast seeks sponsors and supporters to help us spread the word about cooperatives and how they often are the better way. Contact Robert McGarvey to find out what you can do to sustain this podcast.