This year, I submitted a panel for the SXSW Interactive conference which will be held in Austin this coming March. SXSW allows people to vote on panels that they like, and the voting process influences the conference board’s choices. This year, SXSW Interactive received more than 2,000 entries for only 300 spots, so competition is tight.

My panel submission is below. If you think it would be interesting, please vote here. Thanks!

Taking Your Agency Digital: Stories from the Frontlines

Description:
For traditional agencies, “going digital” is a huge challenge affecting everything from operations to process to culture. In this panel, seasoned digerati who are now at traditional agencies will share struggles, secrets and tips for tackling the transition from analog to digital.

Questions we’ll answer:
1. What challenges do digital staffers face at traditional agencies?
2. Is the “big idea” still relevant in a digital process?
3. What does it mean to be creative in the digital space?
4. How can traditional creatives and user experience professionals interface in a productive way?
5. How does workflow and process need to be revised for digital work?
6. What cultural differences exist and how can they be overcome?
7. What criteria should digerati evaluate when considering a job opportunity at a traditional agency?
8. What are the drawbacks and benefits of being a digital minority in a traditional setting?
9. How can traditonal staffers transition to a digital world?
10. What does success look like?

[crossposted to Open Left]

The Summers-for-Treasury rumors are a good chance to draw attention to an incredible, but little-known story: how a gang of Harvard professors stole vast sums from Russia and escaped any form of punishment. The full, incredible story was published in Institutional Investor Magazine, but here’s the summary:

In 1991, Lawrence Summers was on leave from Harvard (where he was an economics professor) to be chief economist for the World Bank. As the Soviet Union collapsed, he had the US send his protegé, Andrei Shleifer, to teach Russia about privatization. And Shleifer did — US-style: he privatized Russia right into his pocket.

As Shleifer helped Russia sell off its telephone, oil, gas, and aluminum companies, he and his wife bought up the shares (concealing the transactions by putting them in the names of relatives). He appointed his students to run the organizations selling off the stock, where they instructed their staff to give Shleifer and his friends “the best service.”

It was a crazy time — Shleifer and his staffers used US government money to knock off work and play tennis, hire cars to drive their girlfriends around, and make documentaries about themselves. (When one of the people involved begun raising questions about such things, he was told he wasn’t “with the program” and was being “too Western and inflexible”. Shleifer fired him.)

Summers consulted with Shleifer and his wife throughout — they used to walk on the beach together outside their vacation homes in Cape Cod. Summers warned them to be careful: “People might want to make Andrei a problem some day. The world’s a shitty place.”

People did. The US government sued Harvard, Shleifer, and friends for $120 million. As the case wound its way through the courts, Shleifer and his wife campaigned to get Summers made Harvard’s president. They succeeded, and after Shleifer was convicted, Summers had Harvard pay $31 million to make the charges go away. Summers also made sure that Shleifer wasn’t punished by Harvard.

So that’s Lawrence Summers for you: letting his friends use US government money to loot Russia, then using Harvard money to make sure they aren’t punished for it.

Sign the petition.