Posts filed under 'To-Do List'
December 20th, 2006
I posted a version of this on my own blog, but I think the sentiment is important to some recent discussion here.
Today’s Huffington Post included an entry by David Russell, in what appears to be his first Huff: “When the National is Really Local.” Russell is the writer-director-producer who was responsible for a couple of favorites, Flirting With Disaster and I Heart Huckabees. He has a new film planned for 2008 (The H-Man Cometh) starring Vince Vaughn as a radio personality who identifies too much with his listeners.
Russell briefly rants about the disconnect between the jet-setter interest in hobnobbing with politicians and political issues and the actual issues as they affect their own neighborhood, such as a six-month construction project to widen a highway. As Russell writes:
This is exactly the type of ‘quality of life’ issue that the Clinton administration focused on to great effect, ways that government can make people’s day to day lives better –precisely the kinds of things most politicians (and Brentwood liberals) find too small or boring to get into.
This post resonates with me for two reasons.
First, I wholeheartedy agree with the observation. I’ve clicked my share of insta-faxes from organizations like MoveOn.org in my time, but all it does is prevent a personal critical mass from forming. It is passive activism. The effects are nice for those whose local neighborhood access involves Congress. For the rest of us, it has the unintended effect of allowing individuals to be less involved than they might otherwise be.
The second point, though, is the nature of Russell’s post itself. It has a bit of griping and astute observation, but offers no solution. He doesn’t suggest action readers could take, instead implying that the Hollywood movers-n-shakers should make an adjustment in some non-specific manner. As any good Informatician knows, knowledge itself doesn’t change behavior.
So here, as I gripe about what’s missing in the Russell entry, I’ll try to to avoid a follow-up self-critique here by offering some ideas for local engagement:
- Figure out who your City Council representatives are, and ask for a meeting with one you don’t know. Or, if you know them all, introduce a councilperson to one of your friends who doesn’t.
- Look at an agenda from your County Council meetings, and Google up on the issues involved with one of their items.
- Find a volunteer organization and invest some time to understand the nature of a local need.
These actions aren’t going to make the Huffington Post anytime soon, but imagine what would happen if more people did them.
December 4th, 2006
One bad thing about PHPBB, I’m discovering, is that it is very susceptible to spam. It seems like I prune about a dozen posts a day from the forum. Either they are blatantly so (links to viagra, PC software and Britany Spears nude), or they are honeypots for future spam (authentic posts scraped from other forums elsewhere on the web, hoping to be changed to blatant spam later). The RSS feed that shows the most recent changes on the front page has been a great help, as I can very easily check new posts for content before deleting the crap. I had to impose an inconvenient time limit on post frequency to discourage the massive submissions, and that has helped keep the problem from being worse.
There are two problems here. First, in a way the low use of this site by actual community members helps keep the deletions manageable. Frequent daily checking of the site coupled with infrequent contributions of value means I don’t have to go off the bookmarked home page to check for new stuff. If future changes pump up the site volume, the current method of spam patrol will get a little more inconvenient. Second, the site seems to be on some spammer list now as a free place to post crap. The variety and frequency has picked up, even if the effectiveness has not (the posts aren’t lasting long). Spammers automate and thus don’t worry much about checking for anything more than success of a post.
Among the to-do list items is a reworking of the submission process in PHPBB to give denials to more crap posts. The best solutions, though, would be a tool for PHPBB that works like Akismet does for WordPress blogs. That is, similar posts show up all over the web. Having all posts go through a central database check can flag them as spam if someone has encountered and rejected a post as spam previously, and then quarantine them. Collective action works miracles for the blog, but wikis and forums need the same kind of protection.
July 17th, 2006
A forum topic has been created to discuss the goals for the current quarter. Please contribute with ideas to help us prioritize. Also, a reminder that we are looking for active members to post to our roll call by July 20 (in a few days). These are the people we will be counting on first and foremost to help us generate some momentum.
Building community and generating content are closely related. None of us should be expected to do everything, and none of us should try. Trying to interact with this site in a visible way on a daily to weekly basis will go a long way to helping stimulate interest in time for this election season.
July 12th, 2006
The technical upgrade may be wrapping up this migration phase, but our content needs are ongoing. In some ways, this move complicates things since we now need to make sense of of our new communication channels.
One of the first orders of business is to set up an online meeting time for organization members interested in helping shape 3rd Party in the near future. In the meantime, here is a top-o’-my-head list of needs for content on our new site:
- Bloggers — following and commenting on news of interest, and also on the platform development process
- Researchers — pose and help answer key political questions through primary and secondary research, posting results on PoliticWiki
- Position Statements — building on our growing political research, author position statements grounded in real-world need and experiences
- Link Managers — check our old list of political organizations and resources and help convert them into their new home (in this blog, as a page in the site)
- Essayists — our existing essays need to be migrated from our wiki spaces to the more permanent and protected blog pages, but we also are looking for writers to create 800-1000 word essays to stimulate conversation
- Template Designers — although we feel this current design is a major step up over the old circa-1998 web template we have been using, we are hoping to form a committee to help design another upgrade for this fall (major or minor)
- Topic Leaders — our forum, wiki, chat and blog needs some short-term focus to help stimulate the community into action. We are looking for some volunteers to suggest and spearhead discussions for a week at a time.
If interested, please contact Jeff or myself, or make use of the forums available here to make your presences known. Thanks.
