When I started Good Company Communications eight years ago I had a vision for what the web could do for social causes that came out of my previous  20 years of activism. It really started with Manufacturing Consent* -- the film that pulled me from my "separatist" world of no TV, no computer, and the attempt to exist without plastic, into the realization that we need to BE the media, it's too powerful to leave alone.

I was already working with Mark during the early days of The Corporation when I started all this, so as to have a way to not only promote the film's launch, but to work on sustaining the desire it produced in so many people -- to get involved, to shape change and to prevent profit over people from prevailing.

As we prepare to send out an e'Zine next week to all our HCW members, I am thinking about the projects we take on and how they interconnect. 

In those early years of Good Company I also started the HelloCoolWorld.com website. I always thought of it as the "brand' for GCC, encapsulating our mission.  A critical voice, but still a gesture of hope, wrapped up in just enough cheekiness to not be the kiss of death "PC" position  that just gathers converts and keeps us in our own caged thinking.

 Ironically in those early years of both HelloCoolWorld and The Corporation that Naomi Klein's "No Logo" came out. I bought it in a Chapters Bookstore, on new Years day 2001. Later I got a ride to with Joel Bakan to Mark's house where I helped set up the living room as studio as Joel and Mark interviewed Naomi for The Corporation. Somewhere I have my own scribbled notes from that day.

On the way Joel and I talked about No Logo, and while I agreed wholeheartedly with Naomi's critique of corporate logo-mongering -- there was an 'aha' moment , much like the affect that Manufacturing Consent had on me, when Naomi made one of her most profound points-- branding is production. But I immediately saw the potential to use those powers for good. Like "the media" they cannot be left to business as usual alone. That was the beginning of the branding project that is HelloCoolWorld and The Corporation. As our vision and mandate evolved it became encapsulated in the phrase: Ideas to audiences > audiences to action > action to outcome.

We've made a start but we are not quite there yet.

In these final weeks of 2008,  we are working on some very cool projects. I will be exploring them in these blogs as we work on and launch them.  Bet even more importantly, we have reached the point where it is critical to get to know our network -- who are all of you who have been supporting our work all these years? What can I do to build a network that helps us all get from idea to outcome? I can't do it alone.

 _{* it all actually started when I was 8 years old, I started a Kid's Liberation group in Yellowknife, and was banned from a few classmates homes for defending their inalienable rights to "talk back".}