Date: Tuesday, February 09, 1999 9:30 PM
Subject: SF Chronicle reports Oakland's Y2K gathering
Here is the account of our Y2K gathering, from the front page of the San
Francisco Chronicle Monday. They say: 'Most of the weekend was taken up
with experts lecturing on the Y2K problem,
followed by "breakout sessions'' with the same experts talking to people
sitting around them in a circle of chairs.' That was true in the mornings,
but the afternoons were filled with 'open space' sessions generated by the
conference attendees; everyone was an expert. Too bad the Chronicle didn't
cover that part. Although the article is a bit weird, it is better than
most mainstream coverage. -- Tom
'60s Meet the '90s on the Road to Y2K
`Movement' ambience at experts' gathering
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, February 8, 1999
)1999 San Francisco Chronicle
URL:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/02/08
/MN53163.DTL
With uplifting slogans taped to the walls and ``facilitators'' fussing with
microphones, it felt like an organizing meeting right out of the protest
days of the '60s and '70s.
But this time the enemy was not Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War.
Instead, the weekend session centered on a mundane set of double digits
found in most of the world's computers that, if the experts are right, will
put us all in a world of chaos when this year comes to an end.
The setting was a weekend symposium in Oakland -- billed as ``Y2K Around
the Bay'' -- and the point of this education-cum-self-help-
cum-community-organizing confab was to get local Bay Area Y2K groups
together so they could exchange information, talk about Y2K preparations
and get the word out about the Year 2000 computer problem.
And it also illuminated the notion that many historic movements, however
fleeting, start out slowly, with a small band of acolytes hanging on to the
words of a few genuine experts -- in this instance, all of them groping
through the thicket of Y2K and trying to get the rest of the world to
understand, as the Buffalo Springfield song said, that ``something's
happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear.''
``This is the largest grassroots organizing campaign since the Vietnam
War,'' said one of the experts, Jim Hickman, a 50-year-old businessman who
has spent the past quarter-century building enough nationwide telephone
systems for the Russians to allow him to live the
good life with his wife and two children in Santa Barbara. ``Back then, I
was out there, organizing. I was in Chicago.''
That would be 1968, when to be in Chicago meant to be in the world's
spotlight at the anti-war demonstrations during the Democratic National
Convention.
Last year, Hickman said, he went to a meeting in Boulder, Colo., which has
become one of the bastions of Y2K fervor.
``I walked into a room,'' he said, ``and it was like walking into an anti-
Vietnam War campaign. Everyone's a little older -- a little more weight, a
little less hair -- but it was the same kind of energy.''
That kind of energy seemed to be all over the third floor of the Masonic
Memorial Temple in Oakland, where an offshoot of Woodstock Nation was
enthusiastically meeting Y2K.
Most of the weekend was taken up with experts lecturing on the Y2K problem,
followed by ``breakout sessions'' with the same experts talking to people
sitting around them in a circle of chairs.
The result was a session chock full of give-and-take and packed with more
information than you might ever need about the Year 2000 computer glitch.
At the end of 1999, many computers with date- sensitive chips or software
may fail to continue working when the year rolls over to 2000 because many
computers recognize only two-digit years, such as 98 or 99. That means the
computer may think it is 1900 instead of 2000.
Across one wall in the auditorium at the temple, there was a huge paper
timeline leading up to Jan. 1, 2000, and a map of the Bay Area. Organizers
asked people in the audience to put Post-It notes with ideas, suggestions,
announcements and the like on the wall.
Some notes told people to check out the Y2K pages on various cities' Web
sites: ``Foster City has an exemplary Web site,'' one note said.
Others told of forthcoming meetings of neighborhood groups. One note
encompassed nearly every problem of the past 30 years, advertising ``a
gathering (February 25-28, in Los Gatos) of people looking at strategies to
transform the global economy, bringing together
monetary/land/energy/climate change/ Y2K activists with scientists,
socially responsible investors (and) visionaries.''
William Ulrich, who might be considered one of those visionaries, having
written two books on Y2K as part of his restless campaign to get the rest
of us to wake up, looked around the room and said, ``These are the people,
the lifelong activists who are mobilizing around this issue.''
``The reality,'' he cautioned, ``is that this network of individuals around
the U.S.'' -- the movement has grown from about 50 groups six months ago to
more than 350 today, some say -- ``is a singular type of old activist
culture. We're not reaching out to mainstream America.''
``This is an elite group of people,'' Hickman said. ``It's intellectual and
it's basically white and has a high degree of self-reliance.''
Borrowing a phrase from the Vietnam days, he said, ``I want to touch the
hearts and minds of the person who comes home, has dinner, sits in front of
his television set, then goes to bed.''
If that guy decides to click off his TV and listen up, here are some of the
lessons learned over the weekend. Some of it has been out there before, in
dribs and drabs, but it had a certain resonance, a kind of in- your-face
impact, when it was presented on slides all at once.
Take Bob Burnett's lecture, for example. Burnett, now 57, retired seven
years ago as the founding vice-president for engineering for Cisco Systems,
the big Internet networking and hardware manufacturer. In 1964, he helped
develop COBOL, an early programming language. Now he advises the city of
Berkeley on its Y2K problems -- free of charge.
``It is staggering to realize how large this problem is,'' Burnett said,
given that there is no ``silver bullet'' simple solution to the problem.
Among the difficulties Burnett predicts are glitches in older telephone
systems, in medical equipment with date-sensitive chips, and in equipment
that has embedded chips, which are sometimes encased deep inside systems.
Burnett's biggest target is the Pacific Gas and Electric Co., which he says
``won't guarantee Y2K compliance.'' (The big utility says on its Y2K Web
page, ``We are now repairing and testing mission-critical systems that are
affected by Year 2000 problems.'')
Burnett also says we should not only be worrying about the first day of
2000. There are several other dates this year that could begin a series of
glitches because they set certain programs a year ahead:
-- On April 1 (April Fool's Day for those with a sense of irony), the
fiscal year begins for Japan, Canada and New York, and five days later for
the United Kingdom.
-- July 1 starts the fiscal year for Australia and 46 American states.
-- And on August 22, the clock that controls the Global Positioning System
(GPS), a prime device for aircraft and naval navigation, rolls over and
starts all over again. Staying out of airplanes on August 22 got to be a
stale joke over the weekend.
But it could be worse.
Ulrich said that only 15 percent of companies in the United States and a
handful of European and Middle East nations are expected to suffer
``mission-critical failure.''
That's the good news. The bad news is that China, the world's most populous
nation, is at the bottom of the list of Y2K readiness, and Russia, which
just asked the United States for $3 billion to help fix its computers, is
down there near China.
Asked by conference organizer Kim Cranston to ``write a scenario'' for what
might happen, Ulrich, like most experts, said it is impossible to predict
precisely -- but he did say that the ``long-term ripple effect may last for
months or years. And the economy will be dragged down for over a year or
more.''
And what's he doing to prepare for this?
``Me personally? Generator. Food. Water filter.''
)1999 San Francisco Chronicle Page A1
-- Jean Wasp (jean@sonic.net), February 16, 1999