Cole W. Camplese

2017 Bloomsburg University Commencement

I have so much I want to say about the experience of being the commencement speaker at Bloomsburg University this past weekend. I want to take some time to reflect on the whole weekend before leaving it here. For now I wanted to just share the video of the event and the transcript of the speech. What I will say is that this was a privilege and an honor. One I hope to never forget.

Transcript

Welcome

Good afternoon, President Soltz, distinguished guests, faculty, staff, parents, families and friends, my own Mom and Dad who are here today, and to you, the 2017 graduating class of Bloomsburg University.

Thank you all for allowing me to be a part of your day. It is an honor and a privilege to come back to my hometown, speak to my fellow Huskies, and maybe even grab a Steph’s sub. Look, here’s the reality. I’m not famous. So, when you looked at the program and asked, “who is this guy?” there really isn’t a terrific answer. I’m just a guy from Bloomsburg who got a degree from this fantastic university who the administration thought should speak to you today.

With that said I promise to do my best to share with you some brief thoughts from the perspective of someone who has sat in those chairs, who has studied in these rooms, and who is helping to shape the future as an education and technology leader.

So let’s just hang out while I share five stories about a theme that doesn’t always go hand in hand with science and technology: people.

Story One: Learning

My Father recently hit a hole in one at the age of 82. Pretty remarkable if you ask me. It is his second hole in one, the first coming some 15 years ago. I’ve never hit one, even though I try nearly 18 times a round. My Mother has hit six holes in one. Yeah, six. Her most recent was about a week after my Dad’s second one. She proudly posted it to Facebook, not to one up my Dad or anything. In my most loving and snarkiest way, I commented on her post, “Did you hit yours with one arm like Dad?”

You see, my Dad has been battling bone cancer. He has a titanium rod that holds his left arm somewhat securely into a titanium shoulder socket. Now he can’t raise that left arm above his mid-section, so we thought his golfing days were done until he did what he always does: he decided otherwise.

One day he went out and just started putting one-handed. Then he started chipping one-handed and before long he developed a one-armed golfing technique. It’s with this one-armed swing that my father hit his hole in one. And it is with that hole in one that he taught me the lesson of a lifetime: if the only way you can do something you love is one-armed, you figure out how to do it.

You will face challenges like this all the time and you probably won't hit a hole in one while doing it. But if you want to succeed, you will have to push yourself. You will have to challenge yourself. You will have to re-learn the things you thought you knew.

You have been exercising that capability while here at Bloomsburg. Just remember, you will have to accept that you are never done learning and to be as successful as the vision you have for yourself -- and you need to develop a vision for your future self -- you will have to do it your whole life. Life won’t care that you knew how to golf two-armed. Life won’t care that your situation is unfair. You must persevere and learn and re-learn again and again.

Story Two: Discovery

I grew up at Bloomsburg University. Twice. The first was as a little kid, the son of a Psychology Professor and an Administrator. Both of my parents worked here and I spent countless hours exploring nearly every nook and cranny of this place. I’ve probably been on every rooftop of every building built before 1990 or so. For that I want to apologize to any members of the University Police force. But Bloomsburg University was, at that time, my physical playground.

My love for scientific discovery and technology began when I was young and I would visit my Dad in his office at Old Science Hall. His colleagues had an experimental rat lab that they would take me into and describe how they could get the rats to press levers for food to demonstrate theory. In the back room of that lab there were a couple of Apple II computers. I was only allowed to play the games if I proved that I could do something useful with the machines. So, a couple of my Dad’s colleagues taught me some BASIC programming. That gave me the keys to play the games and, more importantly, to spark an interest that would lead to a career.

I never had a single programming class until grad school, but that little exposure carried me for over 15 years. It is important to recognize that your passions can lay dormant for many years before you discover them. And that is the thing you need to consider critical — always keep discovering. Not just discovery in the world, but discovery in yourself. You never know where it will take you.

Story Three: Empathy

My mother was the director of the counseling center in Ben Franklin Hall. I would visit her and get to know the students she was working with. Our phone would ring in the middle of the night so she could help many of them with incredibly difficult conversations and decisions. She always found time to help them. My mother taught me the most important thing that I still try to utilize in every single engagement I have: empathy.

Whenever someone did something to hurt me and I was mad, she would ask me, “I wonder what is going on in that young man’s life that would make him act that way toward you?” It would infuriate me to no end. Can’t I just be mad at someone? But that repeated question eventually changed the lens I was using to look at the world.

If you take the time to see behavior from a reflective point of view, I guarantee you will be more successful in work, play, and love. It is sometimes a very hard thing to do, but I implore you to do it. You may know everything about your field, but you will not become a leader who can motivate teams of people and lead successful projects without being an empathetic colleague or boss.

Story Four: Mentorship

I said I grew up twice at Bloomsburg University. The second time is what leads me to speak to you today. I completed my Masters degree here in 1996 in Instructional Technology. As a matter of fact, I completed it right over there in the McCormick Center. Incidentally I was here the day they put the first shovel in the ground to build what would ultimately become my dad’s new office and the place that would change my life.

I had completed my undergraduate psychology degree from West Virginia University, but at the time there weren’t many jobs for an undergrad in psychology. After moving to Raleigh, North Carolina in a failed attempt to get a Ph.D. at NC State and a stint selling mobile homes, I came home to Bloomsburg. I put my degree to use by cutting lawns, painting houses, and doing odd jobs for landlords. Not exactly the vision I had for myself.

When I saw an old friend one afternoon, he told me he was in the MSIT program at Bloomsburg. My friend, Keith, was the son of the Director of the Institute for Interactive Technologies, Dr. Hank Bailey. He told me that I needed to go see his dad and maybe he could help.

The next day I came up here and talked to Dr. Bailey in his office and he asked me a bunch of questions, spun around at his desk, typed some stuff into his computer, printed out a piece of paper, spun back around, and told me I had class that evening at 6 PM. Bloomsburg University was now my intellectual playground.

Dr. Bailey’s kindness, I soon discovered, set me on a path that pushed me to do the hardest work of my life to that point. It taught me that a kid from Bloomsburg, with a degree from Bloomsburg, can do anything they want. I now live in Chicago and work at one of the finest institutions in the world, acting as the University of Chicago’s Chief Information Officer. I got that job 20 years after leaving Bloomsburg, but I really got it the day Dr. Bailey handed me my class schedule and said, “we will see you tonight.”

Don’t take what you’ve accomplished lightly. And look, I know that the hard work has been peppered with lots of fun and plenty of trips to Hess’s dance floor. But make sure you recall the work. That work ethic will need to become stronger if you are going to succeed. Lean on that as a foundation for the job you are going to get in 20 years that will blow your mind.

When I was working at Penn State University, I was lucky enough to be part of a secret project at Apple. The iPod had just been released and I was part of a small team that was helping Apple understand how the iPod could impact teaching and learning. Another member of this team was Dr. Carl Berger who was the Dean of the University of Michigan’s College of Education. Dr. Berger instantly began pushing me to find my voice in a room filled with my elders and idols.

He pushed me to take a new job at Penn State that I thought I had no business having. When I asked him if I should take it, he simply said, “Cole, when the elevator doors open and that up-arrow flashes, you get on. You’ll figure it out once you are there.”

What Dr. Berger was saying to me was that fear is an OK thing to feel, even if what you fear is your own potential for failure. He knew it would be hard for me, largely because he had spent a lifetime getting on elevators going to higher metaphorical floors, but also because he knew that I had to take risks and live with the fear. That simple piece of advice would not have come my way had I not asked him for his help and guidance. The hardest part is often in the moment we ask for help. But that is the lesson.

Seek out mentors in unlikely places and find ones who challenge you. Keep in mind that a mentor is not some mythical person in a position of absolute power over you. Sometimes you find them right next to you.

I am lucky that my wife has always pushed me to be better — to communicate more clearly, to have an argument based on knowledge, to be humble, and above all, value the journey. If she were here, she would surely tell me I did a good job, but that I could have hit that word harder or made that point more clearly. If you want a future where you get better every single day, find a partner, mentor, or a friend who will lovingly push you into that uncomfortable space. Trust me, it is much better to be wrong and critiqued at home with someone who cares about you.

Mentors are extraordinary people and you should fight to have as many as you possibly can. The thing that I always tell anyone who will listen is that mentorship is a two-way street. Mentors don’t just come along, they are found and cultivated. It takes a lot of effort to get to the point where you can look back and recognize a mentor. If you don’t open yourself up to the love, the advice, and ultimately the help that a mentor offers, you won’t end up with a mentor. Be brave enough to be vulnerable and amazing things will come your way.

Story Five: Change

In 1984, I got the first ever Apple Macintosh computer. It was a gift for my 12th birthday from my parents. Now I want you to think back to those times and realize that computers only plugged into the wall. It was magical, but nothing fundamentally changed until the Internet happened a decade later.

I have two children and like all the parents here, I love them and care for them deeply. I smile when I see them succeed and it wounds me when I see them on the edge of failure. At the end of the day, I just like to see them. I talk with them over dinner and homework and check into their Snapchat stories every day to make sure I keep up.

The reason I bring them up is that as a technologist I have always been taken aback by their similarities and differences in their uses of technology. My daughter was born into the same era as you and I existed in — the standard desktop and laptop computer era. She grew up learning how to use these machines through a traditional keyboard, mouse, and trackpad.

My son, on the other hand, was born at the same time as the iPhone. His first exposure to technology was through interacting with a piece of glass held in his hand. This piece of technology that he held in that little hand was so incredibly new and engaging that we couldn’t have predicted it only four years earlier when my daughter was born.

And it is in that small four year window that everything changed. I lived for more than a decade without a significant technological event and here I see the biggest leap in the span of four years. That is the difference between a freshman walking into the dorms here at Bloomsburg University to all of you sitting in front of me now.

Paradigms like this used to take decades to change, but now they are happening at a pace that is both exhilarating and frankly terrifying. This is the world in which you are stepping into. A world where paradigms change regularly, a world where economies are constructed upon jobs that will never go back to the way things were, and you are prepared for it. That is why you are sitting here today.

Think about it, when many of you started this journey at Bloomsburg, the first job you will have may not have existed. My job didn’t exist when I was in college. When you started at Bloomsburg University, cars could not drive themselves, taxi cabs were the de-facto transportation when you needed a ride somewhere, and we certainly weren’t 3D printing homes in countries torn apart by natural disasters.

Are you ready for a lifetime of accelerated change and constant reinvention? If you are, then you have been born into the right era. This is the time for people like you.

But most of all it is a time for people. If you live your life knowing that it is people who power all of this invention, that people discover and create new science, that people are the ones writing the code, then you will have little trouble being part of it.

Practice being a good person and always focus on the people. It is odd to say this to a group of graduates from the College of Science and Technology, but under all the equations, code, and experiments, it still comes down to people. And in our time, people who embrace science and technology, those who possess a love for learning, and those who can communicate and inspire teams of people will be the leaders of this new economy.

Conclusion

And this is what I'll leave you with. Think of this place, this town, this community, this University, and the people you’ve known here. They've all left marks on your life and in turn you have added your name to a list of great people who have matriculated here. The marks that you've made here are indelible and are probably quite impressive, and your memories of this time will truly be some of the best of your lives.

As you make your way to what is next, know that there will surely be new marks — new friendships, graduate school, love, spouses, babies, the passing of people you care deeply about, new jobs or lost jobs -- and I’ve had a few! But I can guarantee if you walk back across this campus in thirty years, you will see something that will make you smile, a simple mark left upon your life.

Ask yourself, "what marks do you want to leave for those who follow?" Your graduation may seem like an end, but it is just a beginning. Make it part of your life’s work to make marks and to leave a positive impression upon the people who follow.

So again, thank you for letting me be a small mark on your journey and for letting me share a few thoughts with you. Just remember that life will throw you curve balls and you have to learn and re-learn how to hit them. You will find your passions in strange places and it will not be predictable. You will need mentors and if you want them in your life, you have to open yourself up to help and critique. You will not find success without them. Find them, embrace them, learn from them, and then be one for someone else. Finally, be prepared for the acceleration of change. I know it is daunting, but it is also exciting. Bloomsburg University has given you the tools to keep learning and I know you will go beyond just keeping up.

As Alan Watts said, “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."

So, to the class of 2017, I say congratulations and let’s dance! Thank you.

In Bloomsburg

At Steph' Subs, a photo by colecamp on Flickr.

We spent the weekend with my parents and my sister's family in Bloomsburg. A year after my Dad got sick and 18 months removed from the flood that destroyed so much I feel very lucky to be able do it. Sure it is stressful with everyone in the house, but it is a real blessing. We got to exchange gifts, spend an evening together in the rebuilt downstairs, laugh, eat a vaunted Steph's Sub, cook another Christmas dinner, and just be together. Very lucky.

Press Enterprise and Openness?

I and others have been critical about the lack of open and available news in and around Bloomsburg, PA over the last several weeks. It has been widely documented that the Press Enterprise offered two or three days of free digital distribution following the flood -- primarily because they couldn't deliver the physical paper to residents in flooded areas. After those first three days, the Press went back to posting daily stories behind a paywall.

Since the flood that has so devastated Bloomsburg, PA there have been several Facebook pages started to try and organize help and information for the people in town -- many of whom have lost everything. Demands to the Press Enterprise to open their flood related information has been met with silence from them. Amazingly there have been so many people who have defended the approach by the Press, saying it is a business and we can't expect them to give away the paper. That has been a faulty and mismatched argument from the beginning as I haven't seen anyone demanding that all of the Press be opened, instead the focus has been on flood related images and news.

I haven't been shy about sharing the numbers of views I've received for the 373 photos I posted openly to Flickr in the days following the flood. As a matter of fact, in a presentation I gave at the PA Newspaper Association's Advertising Conference last week I shared that these photos were viewed 153,650 times from 9/11/2011 through 9/28/2011. What that tells me is that there is a market of need that wasn't being filled by traditional channels.

Today, my wife shared with me a new page that appears in google search results for an open archive of 30 pictures from the Press Enterprise. The photos are shared in a gallery outside the paywall and are openly available to view and download. Like we have hoped from the beginning, the photos are excellent in that they are taken in the moment by newspaper professionals. Is the Press Enterprise listening to the pleas and (in my opinion) appropriately toned criticism? Perhaps, but either way we now have access to at least 30 images linked from the official newspaper site of the greater Bloomsburg area. I call that progress by any measure.

Altering the Rhetoric in Bloomsburg

In Friday’s Press Enterprise is a letter to the editor that casts a very critical view on town and University leaders in the days following the Bloomsburg Flood. The letter, written by a Bloomsburg resident titled, “Town's attitude angers West Ender,” works to explain how it feels to live in the western part of town -- to be branded "west enders" perhaps.

"You think we are fools who only have ourselves to blame for getting flooded. We choose to live in the West End so we got exactly what we deserved, right? We are uneducated and obviously not as "intelligent" as you, or we wouldn't be in this situation…I live here because my home, like others in the flood zone, was passed down through generations of families."

When I first lived on the Bloomsburg side of the Susquehanna River, I lived at 245 East Street in a pre-civil war house that my Dad bought at a bank auction. It was in the middle of an ever-increasing press from student housing. I am sure at some point prior to moving there in 1977 (from Wonderview) the whole of East Street were families. I loved living there. There were young families along third and fourth streets where we rode our bikes late into the evening year around. I wasn't aware that I was living a different life than kids on Market Street. My friends weren't children of doctors, lawyers, or professors (although my parents were). They were children of the town, almost all Bloomsburg natives. It was the best place in the world to grow up. It made me tough, it made me incredulous, and it made me love Bloomsburg.

We moved to East 12th street when I started 10th grade, but I always look back on my days on East Street as the best of my youth. Socio-economics didn't matter to me and to this day they don't. When I was a child, I heard people talk about divides in town, but I was too young and oblivious to really understand. I see it now. I am now reading the wedge issues in the Press and it makes me sad. And the sadness deepens when I read this from that same letter:

"Sadly, we are the ones cast aside; they'll give us a token or two, but in their eyes we're just idiots who live too close to the water."

With that said, I now know the same pain those do in the western part of town -- that when the water comes, it takes everything with it as it leaves. And in this flood it leaves more questions to engage in for the longer term than any clean up effort ever will.

Can we climb out of our rage and frustration to build a new sense of empathy? One of the things I find interesting about the letter is that it feels like it has been published to further divide the town, instead of bind it. I can completely understand where the author is coming from and I know it is from a position of anger and frustration. I feel both of those. I've walked the devastation in Bloomsburg. I am outraged by much of what has gone on, but I would also urge us to work to feel a sense of change happening.

The free trash collection was ended early, but it was brought back with clear instructions on how it would proceed after residents voiced concerns. The Block Party is a disaster, but the way the University came to the aid of the town has been inspiring. This is a chance for positive and restorative messages, ones I would love to see published openly in the Press Enterprise and online so people in and outside of Bloomsburg can engage in a new form of conversation regarding a town that is about one community and not multiples. What will it take for us to alter the rhetoric that has dominated our community for so long? Engaging that question is critical to our relief effort.

Update: This was submitted to the Press Enterprise as a letter to the editor.

Catawissa, PA

I am really curious about what has happened in the towns around Bloomsburg, PA. Catawissa, PA comes to mind as a place that had to have been hit so hard and yet I've not heard or seen a thing. It simply blows my mind that the only real reason I know about what has happened in Bloomsburg is because I've visited there. Now that I have a subscription to The Press Enterprise, you know the newspaper whose slogan is, "Serving Bloomsburg, Berwick, and Danville, PA," I can easily keep up to date with those areas.

So now I begin to wonder who is serving a town as small as Catawissa, PA? And what about Orangeville, Benton, and Millville, PA? These are all towns with homes, churches, schools, businesses, and people. These are all towns I rode my bike to when I was growing up. Who is responsible for exposing their stories? Who is collecting them?

These are questions we should all be asking.

Abandonment

I woke this morning to a front page headline in the Press Enterprise titled, Don't abandon us, Bloom. It is a piece focusing attention on the town's decision to stop free trash pickup and the overall impact on the residents in town. When I first saw the headline I thought maybe I was reading an editorial, but the story signifies something deeper than that. To me it is another example of the type of narrative that is built to construct a wedge issue.

"We ripped it out so it wouldn't grow mold," Mr. Taylor said. "Now it's getting moldy out there." Dawn Taylor said no one on their block had a good idea when debris pickup would end. They heard through word of mouth about the Wednesday cutoff. "And a panic kind of set in," she said. "Like, 'What comes after that?'" The Taylors have flood insurance on their house, but not its contents. That means they'll be paying to replace their washer, dryer, stove and all the other appliances lost when just under 3 feet of muddy water rushed through their first floor. "We don't want to take advantage of the system," Taylor said. But they don't have much money to spare for a Dumpster rental.

In addition to the stories of my friends' needs, what I really wanted to see in the piece were some real details about what FEMA would and wouldn't do, but we've all seen in the last few days what has gone on with that argument in DC. We aren't at a place where we should be ready to blame our local government when these issues are so much more complex than a binary decision. All this is new territory to us locally, but we have to remember that regardless of the rhetoric we've historically entered into a social contract of sorts -- local communities can count on the Federal Government to help us not fail when disasters happen. And a disaster has happened -- locally. With that in mind, I think that in the wake of the flood we remember what real abandonment looks like to the people in and around Bloomsburg. It looks like this:

That is the image of total loss, of the need to abandon, and the need to be emotional. Keri and her family lost their house today. It is so easy to say she'll get relief, but I hope we can lean on some sort of empathy and feel for them in ways we aren't usually asked to. Each day this is happening in Bloomsburg. Each day this isn't being shared. Why? Here is another story from another Bloomsburg resident that has lost everything ... someone I can guarantee you won't see in the paper or on the nightly news. This is the new reality and this is yet another story that wouldn't otherwise get told. These are stories of real abandonment. This is a Flood of Silence.

Bloomsburg Flood Destroys More than 1,000 Homes

I am still waiting to see this news somewhere other than Facebook or behind the paywall at the Press Enterprise. Since I haven't, I think it is important to help get some of the facts being reported to the open web. The American Red Cross is now reporting that the flood destroyed more than 1,000 homes and did damage to another 2,300 in Columbia County alone. According to Peter Kendron, Press Enterprise writer, in an article published on September 16, 2001, "If those numbers hold up, it means more than 10 percent of the county's 29,500 households saw some sort of flooding last week."

What is crazy to me is that if this happened in a larger area and 10 percent of the homes were flooded, in say Philadelphia, don't you think it would be making news? Remember, percentages are percentages. In my mind part of the reason for this lack of broad awareness lies on what D'Arcy Norman called a "cone of silence" in a post he made this week. My friend and colleague, Ellysa Cahoy, built on that concept when she wrote an excellent post yesterday bringing to light the complexities associated with access to local newspapers. The cone of silence doesn't seem real to people at the local level because they are both living in the midst of the disaster and there is near pervasive access to the local paper via the little blue boxes selling the physical paper on every corner.

This poses two immediate problems. The first is that news doesn't move across the open web in a way that stories can be picked up and shared in ways that builds awareness to the intensity of the damage -- remember that 10 percent of the homes were flooded. When local news doesn't get picked up and shared it doesn't provide strong returns via google and other search engines so non-local news agencies can't report on the tragedy as widely as they should. When that happens everyone loses -- relief organizations are slower to respond, national media is under represented, and philanthropic organizations never get involved. The other issue is one that Ellysa identifies in her post -- access to long-term historical information is lost. That means the history of our town is limited to first hand reports and memories by citizens. The problem dramatically impacts historians, scholars, and future generations … according to Ellysa who is a Library Research faculty member at The Pennsylvania State Unviersity,

What this tells me is that a researcher studying the recent Bloomsburg flood (and wanting access to local news coverage) would have to travel to Bloomsburg to access the articles. It's a similar story for any other news events occurring in Bloomsburg, including the 1972 flood. We can't depend on local news institutions to look any farther than their print subscription proceeds … They've already proven that they are myopic and doomed to eventual obsolescence. It's just a matter of time for that.

Let me remind everyone that we aren't talking about free access to today's news. Reporting news costs money and if local papers want to sell that news on a daily basis, they should. We are talking about searchable, open, linkable archives of yesterday and back that are openly accessible online. For the sake of broad awareness and access to historical archives this should be happening. I pulled some more facts from the Press Enterprise article that I'd like to share from the Red Cross reporting. I certainly hope the Press allows me to share this more broadly:

• 976 single-family homes destroyed, along with 190 apartments
• 801 homes, including 676 single-family homes, 10 mobile homes and 115 apartments had major damage, which means they will not be habitable until they are repaired
• About 301 single-family homes had minor damage. Those homes are habitable, but need repair. They might have minor roof or structural damage, broken windows, some roofing or siding missing and up to 3 feet of water in the home.
• 1,012 single-family homes and 20 apartments were affected. Such homes have nuisance damage but are habitable without repair. Examples of damage to affected homes include shingles or siding missing, debris around the home, 6 inches to 1 foot of water in the home, and mobile home skirting damaged or missing.

I am a subscriber to the Online Edition of the Press Enterprise, and you can become one for $2.50 a week. If you would like to view or republish an archive of photos showing the damage from the flood, you can access my growing set of associated photos at Flickr.

Bloomsburg, PA Ends Free Public Trash Collection

In the aftermath of the most devastating flood in the history of Bloomsburg, PA I personally witnessed some extraordinary work by the community to help with clean up. Students from both Bloomsburg University and Bloomsburg High School showed up at dozens of homes to scoop the mud out, strip walls, carry destroyed items to the curb, and so much more. I witnessed people coming from higher ground in unaffected areas to do the same for people they've never met. And all that help ended up on the curb.

This morning I read in the Press Enterprise that the town has decided to stop collecting and disposing of the trash as a common good. I have mixed feelings about this as there is still so much to do, but I can understand the decision. Doing this costs money and now people seem to be taking advantage of the situation by placing an excessive amount of construction items in their curb-side piles. From the Press Enterprise article, Free flood pickups end, by Leon Bogdan,

"We wanted to help through the worst of it and get personal possessions that were ruined in the flood taken away quickly. But we started getting construction material now," Mayor Knorr added. "The last thing we want to do is make it harder for people, but we had to decide where that line is to stop providing public Dumpsters. We're still hopeful of getting some FEMA money. But if we find this is an undue hardship, we'll evaluate it and go from there," he said.

I was amazed at the work they did helping everyone take care of the trash -- and remember, this flood happened on September 9, 2011 so the town has been at this for two weeks. If you could have seen the constant dumping of trash on the old tennis courts in the Bloomsburg Town Park you'd have a better idea of what the scale of all this is about.

That photo above is from the Sunday following the flood while the image below is ten days later.

I found the article from the PE's teaser post to go buy today's paper on Facebook this morning. Since I am a paid subscriber, I downloaded the PDF of today's paper to read the article. Relatively fair reporting, but what I find amazing are the number of negative comments amassing on the Facebook page demanding the Town continue to do this for free. One in particular struck a chord with me and the parallels to the imperative to provide free and open access to flood news that I've seen ...

God Forbid someone NOT profit from this flooding.....guess it was just a matter of time but let me tell you there are people out there who didn't work their jobs for almost 2 weeks due to clean up do you really think they have the money the trash haulers want for bulk pick up or better yet for dumpster use. These townships should be ashamed.

I'm not sure the town needs to continue to do this for free, but they provided a very costly service for free for two weeks. The PE closed down as soon as 12th street and the west end of town was suitable for standard delivery. Those of us who criticized the Press in the days following the flood for not providing free access to critical information got lambasted on the PE Facebook page for wanting a free hand out. People said that the Press was a business and news cost money to produce. In fact a PE representative actually told me the same thing on a Facebook posting. Last I checked running a town is a business as well -- with a real balance sheet that needs to be considered … I guess I just don't understand the context well enough.

What I appreciated most was an incredibly measured comment in the article by an old friend from our days at Bloomsburg High School,

Keri Gaito, whose home in the 900 block of West Main has foundation damage and had 4 feet of water on its first floor, was grateful for the town's help in hauling away four or five large loads of flood debris. "They did a real nice job. Took it out quickly. It was a big help. I can understand the town can't keep doing it forever," she said.

Providing critical services in the wake of a disaster like the Bloomsburg Flood is a critical link to restoring order to a devastated community. In my mind hauling trash for free, scooping mud because a neighbor needs it, or providing open access to critical pieces of news about the event are all part of a larger value chain leading towards recovery.

Talking About the Bloomsburg, PA Flood on DTLT Today

Last week I was lucky enough to catch the University of Mary Washington's DTLT crew getting set to broadcast episode 40 of their daily web show. I saw in a tweet that they were planning to talk about the stuff I had been doing with social media around the Bloomsburg, PA flood and the apparent lack of news converge. I happened to be home, working in my home office when I replied to the tweet and asked if I could be a part of it. We got hooked up with Skype and the results are below.

I really can't thank these guys enough for not only having me on, but for taking the time to really think about the things that are happening in Bloomsburg. The fact that they only know about this via the social web is astonishing to me and continues to point towards a need for a more open local news approach.

Bloomsburg: One Week Later

I have so much to say about what I continue to see in Bloomsburg, PA but I will leave that for tomorrow after I've had time to properly reflect. For now I wanted to share another set of photos I took while making a quick trip into to town to take supplies. I wish I could say it looks remarkably better, but I cannot. Progress has been made, but it is still a very difficult sight. I talked to several residents, especially in the west end of town, and people are very tired and weary of the thought of dealing with another flood like this. Still so much kindness everywhere I looked -- people helping each other in terribly filthy and dangerous conditions. I wish I could do more. I did do a few personal item drops and delivered a huge haul of cleaning supplies my wife, Kristin collected from friends in State College. From what I am hearing, AGAPE will put them to great use ... the help they are providing (along with so many others) is inspiring. Please consider giving more to our town if you can -- it is in need. And if you can't do that, please take a look at the pictures and help us spread the word of what is happening. My last set of photos had nearly 110,000 views last week ... I can't even tell you how many people have said to me that they wouldn't have know what was happening in town without those photos and the Facebook group that has been created. Have a look ...