January Activity

Dear Colleagues

I have been relatively quiet in the blog space during January, mainly because of work that I am doing to rebuild a website to support the True Value Metrics (TVM) initiative.

In due course there will be a truevaluemetrics.org website and a truevaluemetrics.com website. One of these will have a focus on a database of TVM data, and the other will focus on the more personal aspects of a TVM network.

I have been saying for a long time that modern society needs equally modern metrics ... and while there are many initiatives to improve on the present metrics, none seem to have anything like the scope of the TVM initiative.

Many of the initiatives are aiming to improve the reporting that is done by corporate organizations ... but require the collaboration of the corporate organization. The hope, which almost certainly is unrealistic, is that important corporate organizations will cooperate ... but what happens if they do not?

Many of the new initiatives are issues centric ... which is interesting but not sufficient. TVM, in contrast is not issues centric, but community centric ... and people centric. People may or may not have an interest in an issue ... for good reason or perhaps for no reason. But quality of life is all about what is important for people ... and the measures should alert people that something that appears good today may have bad consequences in the future, and should make this easily visible.

As January closes the events in Tunisia and in Egypt have gained global attention ... and quite predictably the US media sees this largely in terms of politics, religion and impact on the USA. This is not the perspective of analysts from the region who seem to be saying that local economics are even more important, especially the demographics where a very large population of youth has education but virtually no meaningful economic opportunity. This is, of course, in line with the basic thesis of TVM that society needs to have meaningful metrics about the progress and the performance of the society ... something way more than mere corporate profit performance and GDP growth.

And of course as January closes Haiti remains in a terrible situation, with way too little progress. It is increasingly clear that there is little or no accounting for the funds that were mobilized to help Haiti ... and no intention on the part of anyone to address this matter in a substantive way. Be assured, however, that I intend to follow up on this as best I can.

And now to February! Stay tuned!

Peter Burgess