I attended my first meeting of the Sports and Entertainment Task Force last Thursday, and which was its second meeting. It appears that we're on track to produce a document by the April deadline, and I don't write this because I'm on the task force. I do want this thing to work, and by that I mean we have to create a set of recommendations for the Mayor that's workable and doable. But I must explain many of the task force members fear the "politicians" will not do anything. More on that in a bit.
This is where we are: the first meeting was used to explain what the task force is, and what the Mayor expects to see. We're a collection of concerned citizens who represent various concerns and backgrounds, from restaurant owners, to Internet business owners (me), to activists like Steve Lowe, and journalists like Chris De Benedetti, who's the chairman, to the Mayor's office, who has a staffer that records the action. What the Mayor expects to see is a set of recommendations to solve problems the task force has identified. To that end, we created a SWOT chart to frame our thinking.
SWOT is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It's not something that the task force is required to make; it was something I suggested and the task force agreed to do. Thus, I ended up doing the recording for the discussion. I'm not going to jump the gun and list them here, but we did talk about making a kind of wiki to place them online, so stay tuned. That process worked to stabilize a meeting where at first minutes went by with people "just talking" which is good, but we've got to make a workable document and now we're on the way to doing just that.
Now on the discussion. There's a real strong idea among task force members that Oakland elected officials will not take action. My view, expressed at the meeting, is we have to be the leaders and stop expecting someone else to lead. It's our job to cause change to happen. It's a scary thing I've found to throw that at people because when one realizes they bear some responsibility to act it makes them ask to what degree they believe in what they're doing. If you believe in a something you can cause others to believe it to. That's our job.
Even with all of the criticism, let's face it, if the Mayor didn't want to do anything, this task force would not have existed at all. We asked for it, its here, now we've got to make it work. We will.
The next order of business is to make a SWOT chart for entertainment -- the first one was for Sports -- and take our SWOT results, put them in document form, and use that as the basis for forming recommendations. But once that's done, we've got to sell the results.
And to that I think we really need to use the Internet to open up the process and let the public weigh in on what we're doing. Given the Oakland A's attempts and failures to leave Oakland, we should establish a kind of solution shop online. But I will say that what the task force is creating will change the face of sports in Oakland.
This is where we are: the first meeting was used to explain what the task force is, and what the Mayor expects to see. We're a collection of concerned citizens who represent various concerns and backgrounds, from restaurant owners, to Internet business owners (me), to activists like Steve Lowe, and journalists like Chris De Benedetti, who's the chairman, to the Mayor's office, who has a staffer that records the action. What the Mayor expects to see is a set of recommendations to solve problems the task force has identified. To that end, we created a SWOT chart to frame our thinking.
SWOT is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It's not something that the task force is required to make; it was something I suggested and the task force agreed to do. Thus, I ended up doing the recording for the discussion. I'm not going to jump the gun and list them here, but we did talk about making a kind of wiki to place them online, so stay tuned. That process worked to stabilize a meeting where at first minutes went by with people "just talking" which is good, but we've got to make a workable document and now we're on the way to doing just that.
Now on the discussion. There's a real strong idea among task force members that Oakland elected officials will not take action. My view, expressed at the meeting, is we have to be the leaders and stop expecting someone else to lead. It's our job to cause change to happen. It's a scary thing I've found to throw that at people because when one realizes they bear some responsibility to act it makes them ask to what degree they believe in what they're doing. If you believe in a something you can cause others to believe it to. That's our job.
Even with all of the criticism, let's face it, if the Mayor didn't want to do anything, this task force would not have existed at all. We asked for it, its here, now we've got to make it work. We will.
The next order of business is to make a SWOT chart for entertainment -- the first one was for Sports -- and take our SWOT results, put them in document form, and use that as the basis for forming recommendations. But once that's done, we've got to sell the results.
And to that I think we really need to use the Internet to open up the process and let the public weigh in on what we're doing. Given the Oakland A's attempts and failures to leave Oakland, we should establish a kind of solution shop online. But I will say that what the task force is creating will change the face of sports in Oakland.
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