chachaville

Tips from Stamen :)

Thu, 02 May 2013 17:14:11 -0400

Tips from Stamen :)

What I've been up to (a.k.a Blogless in San Francisco)

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 21:08:03 -0400

I’ve not blogged at all in 6 weeks. So busy.

Here are some highlights of what I’ve been doing.

We got back to San Francisco. Sort of almost settled back in. Now I’m obsessed with #kitchensprinting.

I went to Drupalcon. Talked to lots of Drupal for Government People. Thinking about Civic Apps/Open Public.

We did an “Inception Event” and planned our projects. Scoped our our city projects in one day.

I’m organizing Drupal for Cities month.

Working with Travis Kriplean (@hotvig) on a Drupal module (reflect) for integrating crowd-sourced comment summarization on Drupal comment threads.

We are in the middle of making final reports for the projects that we will do for Seattle & Philadelphia (Which we call “Pheattle.”)

I made Government Sparkleforce Wallpaper

Did I mention the Datacamp? Check it out. It was awesome.
Started an Open Data Standard for Foodshed Data. I’m super excited about this.

Building Trust Online (notes from @mickipedia presentation at Web 2.0 conference)

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 20:58:40 -0400

I was able to attend the Web 2.0 conference for a little while today. Saw a really awesome presentation by Micki Krimmel. Seriously, it was so awesome.
Building Trust Online
Micki Krimmel @mickipedia
presentation at Web 2.0 conference, San Francisco 3/30/2011

http://neighborgoods.net

avg power drill used for 12 minutes in its entire lifetime then ends up in landfill
do you need power drill or the hole in the wall?
safe community for sharing
ladders, bikes, books, video games
collaborative consumption, sharing of physical goods
technology making it easier for us to connect
shelby relayrides

household goods & infrequently used items
things you may not use every day

game

we play a game of
5 & 5
they triple it
and
measuring trust
give it back or keep it
[I volunteered to go on stage and participate in the game]

[I get $10. It is still in my pocket and now I have to think of something equally awesome to do with it. Maybe playing the same game @codeforamerica, or trying to get $100 back to neighborgoods by getting them more neighborhoods…or something. Going to think about it.]

effects of oxytocin/ trust hormone

98% sent something back -
Paul Zak
(http://www.neuroeconomicstudies.org/)

showing trust levels of oxytocin elevated

innate
oxytocin produced in orgasm & breastfeeding

levels of trust & economic stability & economic performance
more trust better economically overall
communities know each other better

decline in trust

not knowing neighbors anymore
Bowling Alone Robert Putnam (http://www.bowlingalone.com/)
people being civicly engaged
increase in television
instead of being out - sitting alone on couch watching TV - TV is ad supported

tv teaches us to be hyper competitive - we want to be alone and continue that

houses look more like barbed wire houses
fences to protect things from neighbors

social media is social
time online - anti social behavior
oxytocin sharing on FB - social reward interacting online (Paul Zak) brain not noticing the difference

“The New Sharing Economy” - http://shareable.net
sharing online more apt to share offline
offline sharing will start in the next few years

emerging market & huge opportunity

Trust
* vulnerability
* confidence
* risk
* lack of control

How to build successful sharing communities?
trust that if you lend lawnmover it will come back?
if you meet people they will turn into longterm relationships?

trust requires risk - if there wasn’t risk to lose money, don’t have opprountiy to show real trust

risk that creates trusted relationship
once it goes well - you have real trust
people to watch your house when you go out of town

zimride
airbnb
relayrides

what is most important in building trust in a sharing community?

i need a ride, i have car, this is where i go everyday

neighborhoods borrow household goods

airbnb - couch, home to complete strangers

shelby - founder relay rides - peer to peer car rental
unused resources

5 key ideas common in all these collaborative consumption projects.

1. The belief that people are inherently trustworthy
2. Importance of social profiles
3. Peer Reviews
4. Tribes/groups
5. Reduce friction (make the hard stuff easy)

1. The belief that people are inherently trustworthy.
People are fundamentally good & trusting.
Christopher Likezik
core to the business model & the design

tool for people who are good & trusting vs. people who think they are going to rip each other off
trust that they already know how to share
build a simpler tool instead of over-designing

transaction on neighborhood
permalink
private conversation between 2 people
launched thought it would be marketplace and less of a community
list item - i want $12 a day for this
i want from fri to money - like booking a plane

realized that tools were getting in the way
fundamental in transaction is conversation between two people

as owner - have tools on the right
pickup reminder
return reminder
part of the transaction
something you are working out with the person instead of what you need to do ahead of time

2. Importance of social profiles
photo, information, FB - feel like you are sharing with a real person
ppl so familier w/ social profiles, it does most of the job - great social profile is key

People who use RelayRides love that the car belongs to a real person.
http://relayrides.com/

money supports another person in neighborhood as opposed to renting from a company
bob’s toyota prius - not just a car - belongs to Bob - note from Bob in the car
video profiles - get to know people

Shelby Clark

3. Peer Reviews
Air BnB & neighborgoods on the right
http://www.airbnb.com/

Ebay - ppl know how these work
user profile - 25 items on the network - here is history and ratings and shares
transparency in information, peer to peer

complete transaction - rate item & the person
building social profiles for the entire network

Threadup
http://www.thredup.com/

“Kids grow, clothes don’t.”
send box of clothing, get box of clothing
how fast you ship & how stylish
rating on things that matter for the network

4. Tribes/groups
“People are tribal, we are working with smaller networks so we can leverage trust that already exists” - John Zimmer, founder/COO

“Would you carpool?”
“No.”
“Would you share ride w/ coworker to work?”
“Yeah, sure”

affinity group
sharing platforms in networks that already exist

Atwater village
http://neighborgoods.net/groups/atwater-village

working with organization
to sponsor neighborhood - like adopt a street
enterprise groups in organization (talk w/ her about this)

5. Reduce friction - make the hard stuff easy
Micki Krimmel

making the transaction go well
smoother the process - less doubt in their mind just guide them right through

airbnb is the master at this
payment system - paid before you show up
messy stuff handled already

relayrides - users don’t have to meet up - borrows have keyswipe - reduces friciotn in the process
gas/insurance covered

Neal Gorenflo
sharable.net
quote: “trust provide access wealth and freedom…..” [missed it]

“We’re already built for sharing.” - micki
rebuilding neighborhood where it is ok to build

micki at neighborgoods dot net

verify code to house (sent mail to house)
high value -
create organization for $10
sponsors to bring neighborhoods to neighborhood
city sponsors neighbor groups

additional features
statistic features
reporting tools with

hyperlocal blogs - not yet working with
ex. patch

putting content on different sites

Q: How did you get started?
(my question)
She started in 2009, launched last year on 2010
now people understand and say ‘oh yeah that is collaborative consumption’

no tools that actually let us help and connect
a huge need for that - biologically even.

90% transactions are free
smaller percent are borrowing

Ignite Seattle

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 17:44:25 -0500

This is the talk I did at Seattle Ignite - there should eventually be another video from the fancy Ignite cameras. http://bit.ly/efmYJz

Bear in mind that I am posting it without watching it myself because that is WAY too embarrassing. I hate hearing myself talk. Some people said that they liked it.

These are the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/chachasikes/chach-sikes-civic-slackers-ignite-seattle-is13

I have a feeling that I forgot to say the following things:

We are building an architecture of sharing.
Seattle is a pioneer in opening up data, but not all of the data/information on the slide with the list of data - not all of those are easily accessible in all cities.

Crash Course in Seattle.

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 18:55:17 -0500

We did lots of interviews - talked with at least 18 different people, and attended a number of city meetings. We traveled to various neighborhoods around Seattle.

Last night I finally got to sleep. This has been a massive amount of information - the landscape of a city, everything people are saying, observing crowds, and watching Anna as she does her journalism magic - zeroing in on interesting people to talk to, and then meeting them and listening to each of them talk for an hour. The giant puzzle is starting to come together.

This is exactly what I hoped this would be.

I’m interested in the theme of trust/mistrust as it relates to the city. A woman who was the lawyer speaking at a rowdy public forum about police accountability said that she thinks that the main issue is the issue of lack of trust between residents and the police. Someone else said that people want a peaceful city to live in - that’s the ultimate goal.

I have so many thoughts and haven’t even processed one tenth of the information I’ve received.

So many interviews

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 02:05:28 -0500

I don’t remember Project Runway enough to remember if there was someone down on the ground with the contestants, prepping them for their meetings with Tim Gunn… but I swear that was a role, and I am certain that Dan Melton is that character.

We had a “GroupMe” conference call with him today at noon, on our cell phones, in some sort of mini-mall in the middle of downtown Seattle. Dan told us that Team D.C. had already interviewed 4 people.

I wish we had a film crew, because I would totally tell the camera this: “Well, they have a time difference.”

We talked to a lot of people today. First the Seattle City Club - an organization that promotes civic dialogues. They are really cool, and have pushed through some amazing work - for example working on a Public Voters Guide. They told us about a lot of amazing organizations that interact in the civic space here in Seattle.

We then met up with Chris and Saf from Socrata. Socrata’s motto is “making data social.” They provide embeddable data sets of public data provided by cities, counties and federal. They showed us how their work was recently seen, in screenshot form, during Obama’s State of the Union address (video.)

We traveled …(our google map in our phones was our best friend today)… to the Phinney neighborhood and toured a really great community center. They have two big buildings, and have a lot of events and programming. We learned about how they send out mailings and keep in touch with the residents in their neighborhoods. They are a really amazing neighborhood hub.

I learned that I want to meet the people who organize Pea Patches (the name of community gardens.) I also learned, through Starbucks free-wifi that they have a program called Patch, which presents community news.

We went to the Neighborhood Council Community meeting. There were about 20 people in the room, representatives from all neighborhood districts, people from the Department of Transportation, and the Mayor’s office. This was really interesting, we heard about civic engagment and outreach efforts, and heard everyone tell stories about some of the staff who are retiring. I was very impressed with how much everyone was grateful and felt very lucky to be able to do the work that they do.

We rushed back home to chat over Skype with our team advisor, Wendy Owen, of GetSatisfaction fame. We are formalizing our interview process, and we have been making transcripts. This is a lot of data. We are using Google Docs, and we were very annoyed that Google changed the interface today right when we were in the middle of interviews. We were pretty good about downloading our folders, as internet connections were spotty.

I started highlighting the transcripts, and think I will add comments to the transcripts in places where I see themes emerging. Ultimately, we will create User Personas of civic leaders, city staff, and stakeholders… and I can tell that with the volume of our interviews that we will have so much data, and flagging themes now will make it a lot easier.

Wendy suggested that we put themes on some sort of surface where we can all see. I can’t wait to get to this point.

Props to Anna for driving us around all day. Seattle is HUGE. We’re traveling several miles in between meetings.

Overall, we met lots and lots of people, who have told us about people we should talk to.

Much more of this tomorrow!

Central District & Ballard

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 02:59:38 -0500

This morning we meet Anna’s friend who studies pediatric data in hospitals. We walked around our neighborhood a little bit, and had brunch in a bar.

We all worked on our interview process this afternoon.

Later in the day, Anna and I went to meet up with a woman who is involved with King County’s hazardous waste management. We learned about some of the communication issues that her community was having around data collection and a rain garden.

I love interviewing. This is going to be a fun month.

We went to the coop, got food, and then have been spending the evening emitting emails to new friends and colleagues in Seattle.

Working on our plans for a DataCamp for February 19.

Seattle is really really big. I did see the Space Needle at night. Did see some snow-capped mountains to the north.

This is a very short post because we get up early to go meet up with the CityClub - an organization that helps citizens come together around issues.

We *do* now have a Flickr group, so you can see just how much like a reality show our life is.

Seattle!

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 02:52:27 -0500

Made it to Seattle. Settled into the cute, furnished house that Code for America provided for us for this month while we are here to conduct interviews of civic leaders & city staff.

Not too much to report on Seattle just yet. It’s raining. It’s cold-ish. They drive a lot here, the neighborhoods are really big. In the downtown, the architecture feels a little bit like Gas Town in Vancouver. I’m definitely in the Pacific Northwest. Some of the greenery was really densely green. But overall, Seattle, so far, seems ruled by cars.

The tensions between cars and bikers here is supposedly quite strong. Worse than San Francisco. But I also heard that someone thanked the Mayor for the bike network - so obviously the City is trying.

The last few days of Code for America were pretty intense. We prepared some presentation materials, and wound up having ‘presentation class.’ I have a terrible memory for facts that other people find interesting. However, I have a nearly perfect memory for things that I find interesting. So I’ve been trying to internalize how ‘interesting’ efficiency might be.

But I might be stressing out about this prematurely. At the social hour on our last day, I got to talk to a member of the California Grand Jury. This was fascinating. I managed to remember the majority of the details of the stories he was telling. I learned that these people who preside over corruption actually can tell you a LOT about how data could be used. So I don’t feel that bad just yet. It’s easy to understand that data is valuable, but most of us don’t know how the government actually works, so it’s nearly impossible to imagine the bizarre corrupt behaviors people have. This is totally why most of the apps people build are for fun and happy things like biking. This is what we actually know about.

So I expect that within days I will suddenly ‘get’ the project at a deeper level.

We had a call with Vivek Kundra. He gave us advice. Mainly, that we have to focus & be disciplined. I am really inspired but also totally terrified (terrified in a good way.) So one of the things I need to do soon is define the goals for the month, and stick to them.

Blurry days!

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 02:22:20 -0500

It feels like a week since I blogged, but I think it was only like 2-3 days.

It’s all blurry, so I’ll try remembering in reverse:

Labs Friday was totally awesome today. I scraped the city wide events calendar for the City of Seattle into Scraper Wiki, then put it in Google Refine. It’s so awesome.
Talin was very awesome and showed me a bunch of Ruby commands for converting an RSS feed into an object. Jeremy & Joel were also very awesome data scrapers, and we were all part of the Scraper Wiki Support Group.
Alan made a scraper example for the recycling garbage schedule for some different addresses. Pretty awesome.
Today we had a slew of visitors & demonstrations.
There was giant party of CouchDB people, at least 1 node.js developer. Michael. I’m glad he explained node.js to me. It’s mainly for stuff in the cloud.
Lots of links to awesome CouchDB projects. The cool part of CouchDB is the data syncing. I like. I started to see what was the deal with Drupal and CouchDB.
Argh, I just realized I missed Anna & Scott’s video tutorial. Luckily, I get to hang out with the video journalist all year!
Alan & I are wondering about entities in Drupal. I gathered the link to the Entity API, must learn.
The creator of Google Refine gave us a presentation and showed us magic. I installed it and kind of got a sense of it. David Huynh was doing all kinds of magical splicing and transformations. Google Refine was designed for people to clean up data. It involves very little code. But I did use the partition function.
Eric Rodenbeck from Stamen Design visited us. I got to ask him about alternative interpretations and community building around crime data (the gentrification-enabling & fear-promoting (unintended) purposes - and he talked about CompStat. Stamen is still doing really cool stuff.
Funnily, he mentioned a project about the street markings. This is not entirely surprising to me, because Stamen worked in partnership with the Exploratorium to create Cabspotting. UrbanGlyphs was a project that my old boss, Ted Koterwas, was working on in 2006 - with those same street markings. (An early attempt at crowd-sourcing street markings.) I think all the Stamen work, which seems (to me) to have inspired lots more data viz, seems that seed money from the NSF was well spent, and coming back to the common good.
This morning we had our first meeting with Seattle. Really excited to go there.
We work in some sort of tower. They do not require suits. They were not super excited to host Labs Friday in their offices, but that’s OK. The whole point is to introduce some of the tactics that successful web companies use to be productive and innovative. It is often difficult for large organizations to shift people’s time around.
Fortunately, I spent all summer thinking about how we can bring up the level of play, innovation and technical knowledge in time-poor circumstances. The secret: neutral spaces. Neutral spaces (not at work) allow people to safely play and explore new concepts. But this also requires that the event be well structured and well-organized.
The magical, awesome & special part: once people go and see the value, they are quickly converted. The reason: the social learning reduces stress and increases support. It’s very simple & it works really well. And it pays off with more motivation, enjoyment, professional development and even useful work. All while socializing. It’s really amazing. I’m never, ever going back to the old way.
I woke up at 6 am.
Last night…well…I don’t remember. I remember getting home at 9:30 and thinking that was relatively early.
Oh wait, I remember: went to Open Show - and saw lots of awesome presentations by visual storyteller/photo&video journalists. Anna Bloom hosted it.
We had a day of preparation for our projects.

Our trip to the Long Now talk

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:27:17 -0500

Slideshow from "Organic Data" meetup.

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:12:09 -0500

OH at the Organic Data Meetup: "Farming is pretty nerdy."

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 04:11:28 -0500

On Martin Luther King Day, I organized a morning trip to the Hayes Valley Farm. Alissa, our Code for America Government Relations hero, connected me with Lawrence Grodeska, Internet Communications Coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment.

I have been learning about the process of opening up government data, and naturally I wanted to see what this would mean for an urban community farm initiative such as the Hayes Valley farm.

We spotted Ed Reiskin from the Department of Public Works. He was wearing sunglasses and farming clothes. He had come to talk to us about how they improved efficiency and saved money by tuning the street sweeping routes. Pretty awesome.

It was a totally gorgeous day. Lindsey led us on a tour of the farm. Lindsey does outreach and youth engagement at the farm. She showed us the mulch terracing, nitrogen fixing fava beans, told us the story about the bees, we saw the green house and then nerded out at the Solar Pump (solar station for charging cell phones, laptops and electric drills.) Janelle explained how we could volunteer that day - one of the ways was the “Organic Data” discussion.

So there were several Code for America fellows, Alissa, my drupal/open layers/garden friend Patrick, and Max’s friend Paige, who is organizing a fellowship program at Grey Area Labs.

I opened up the conversation talking about how Code for America was learning about sharing data, how the Hayes Valley Farm has a lot of opportunities (and need) to track and tell the story of the value of the farm, and how the City might have needs and problems they are trying to solve.

Lawrence talked about some of the challenges of getting “organic data.” He explained some of the statistical challenges of getting the kind of information people actually want (what I want, for example, compost data by neighborhood - so as to organize some local hubs around compost and reach out to the community about what’s in the neighborhood - digitally.) - He talked about the statistics of waste stream data and how that is tied to density and economics, and some of the privacy concerns involved in reporting energy emissions.

We got to share our connections about Patrick’s project “Sharing Backyards.” I was pleased to hear that Max had heard about stream temperature sensors. I explained growBot garden. And then we finally started talking about compost!!

I mentioned this trend I am noticing, that geeks love compost. It’s totally weird, but true. Paige said, ‘Of course, it’s infrastructure.’ And then we were talking about being green geeks. And then she said, “Farming is pretty nerdy.”

It’s true.

So, there will be more geekery at the farm this year. I think everyone was really happy to meet each other. Since the CFA fellows will be back in March - we can do a lot more on the farm. People at the farm are already working on a worm network. Patrick mentioned using FourSquare to do worm bin checkins. We talked about installing sensors on the farm - public workshop style. Max had made a temperature sensor for a compost pile once. The growbot garden folks had hacked an Easy Bloom to make a temperature/moisture sensor. There have been several plant tweeting projects (like Botanicalls.) San Francisco has no shortage of hacker/dev spaces. The farm has needs for documenting the value of the farm. Lots of possibilities.

Then we had a lovely lunch, and Tyler told us about the time that he got to see the crazy computer network of one of the giant farms.

Today I talked to Joel and Talin about how efficiency in farming is not necessarily what we are trying to re-engineer. We *already* engineered the most efficient farming systems for corn, soy, etc. Literally, to the genomic level. I think the trick is building in considerate inefficiencies, cause that’s what we like and that’s where we learn.

(Joel was telling me about Chicken Tractor, which is funny & also a good example of small-scale technology innovation for farms. I meant to tell him how some of my friends in Minneapolis and I were talking about tracking eggs when they leave a carton, and also just tracking chickens and finding their eggs.)

As I think about neighborhood hubs, I’ll be thinking about the stories that leave the farm as plant runners.

Press training & "Fixing Broken Government"

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 03:02:39 -0500

Yay, the weekend is over and we got to go back to work!

Today we worked on our projects (I’m doing communications work, Anna’s reaching out to the hundred+ people we will probably meet next month, and Alan is hooking us up with systems to manage our information.)

We were really lucky to have two guest speakers. We met Charles Blanchet from Granicus. Granicus is a really cool tool integrated public note-taking system “Streaming Media for Government.” He talked to us about what life is like for a government contractor. We learned about Sales.

This is a very good thing. My life in non-profits did not present me with any opportunities to learn about sales. I learned a new phrase “Beach Head.” These are a companies first clients. These are the people I consider guinea pigs. I also wikipedia’d “private equity” for the first time. There are 11 more months in this year. Maybe I will get a bit more business lingo.

We also met Sibel Sunar, who talked to us about talking to the press. This was really helpful. Basically, we learned about diplomatic honesty. We talked about representing CFA. I’m really excited to represent CFA. It’s so new right now, and this blank slate allows us the opportunity to be our very best.

It’s amazing how one hour of discussion about talking to the press can bring to light the nuances of speaking well & kindly. All those web content/usability skills (good design, don’t overload your reporter with tech jargon & too many thoughts) — they transfer. Awesome. I’m still nervous about video & audio recordings, but being really prepared will help a lot.

And I’m now reframing my blog for additional audiences. So far, my audience has been friends, fellow geeks, tech community builders, Code for America fellows. Now I am extending it to the Code for America audience, the City of Seattle, Mayors, and large organizations like Microsoft, ESRI and others. Welcome everyone. :)

I find that the theme of all of these learnings - which fit perfectly with what I’ve already learned about advocating for humanists among developer communities - being a role model is really huge.

Had a lively debate with Alan about designing sprints to be the most inclusive. (And later this evening, I was telling Patrick about Drupal’s “drama sprints” - which are basically what happens when social issues crop up. We spend a lot of time dealing with it. I think about how I’m having this code/technical hiatus (which is a good thing, right) and how I’m eager to be a community builder. Realized that with code sprints, I always, always feel like I’m running as fast as I can to catch up.

Time, or rather, the perception of lack of time, is an important element in making people feel they have a place in helping out. I’ve done nothing but research and learn as much about inclusion and open source participation. If I have a chance to do a technical sprint, I’m ten times more likely to work on educational materials. This makes me feel less geeky, but I realized today that I’ve taken on this community builder role for two reasons: 1. I want people to play with 2. I don’t want others to have as hard a time finding a way to connect & help out. Some structure helps. I told my friend “I’m working on bugs; they are community bugs.”

It’s late, so I’m not going into thoughts about inclusive sprint design, but I found a really cool overlap with democracy. We talked about having a weekend sprint at our CFA house. I realized that lots of our city partners might be people who organize locally - in houses - and inviting and getting folks from the community to help out..well, I see a potential exchange. More on that later. We have a lot to figure out in the next two weeks.

This evening we saw Philip K. Howard discuss the idea of “Fixing Broken Government.” There were about 15 CFA fellows there. Jen Pahlka and Tim O’Reilly snuck in. My friend Patrick Hayes was there (Drupal/Open Layers.)

Howard said “America needs a new Operating System.” We got very excited about: cause in fact, this is just what we’ve started doing.

On one of the first CFA days, we talked about the possibility of failure. Most startups fail. Arguably, most good businesses should be designed to eventually make themselves obsolete. David Eaves later talked about the idea of failing forward. But he put it even better than that. Ideas are like seedlings. They try to sprout up. But even if they die, they don’t go away. They fertilize what comes next.

Team togetherness, A more perfect union, and seattle's elevator pitch

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 19:07:18 -0500

Yesterday, Team Seattle ducked out of Friday Labs Git training to do our own group focus time on ‘What is Batchbook?’ We were all feeling concerned that we didn’t know how to organize all our information.

I liked that we all worked together to solve the problem. If we tried it alone, we wouldn’t have started to build a collective dialogue, or problem solve. I hope we do lots more of this. LOTS more of it. It’s awesome that we are all really good at what we do, and I think working as a group helps bring us together. I think more than anything, I want to be part of a team.

In the past, I’ve tried and tried to be in a team environment, but most of the personalities I have dealt with were pretty hard to feel team-like. I think this is all because of the assumption of specialization. This is why I detest specialization and I think I’m done with it and going to refuse to ever believe in it or support it. People aren’t machines. Some of us might like to do work, and sometimes we might want a break from extroversion - but! - we also like to be able to adjust and shift and grow.

Last night I watched Obama’s address for the Arizona shootings memorial. I like that our Code for America T-shirt is the binary version of “a more perfect union.” I think CFA staffer Abhi Nemani was right, Obama was totally on his game.

It’s pretty easy to assume that a society of heartless technocrats is architecting a borg-like universe for the sole purpose of extracting as much as possible from people. And that union could be a more perfect union with an efficient system…

BUT, that’s not really what most people are actually hoping for. I think Obama said it perfectly. In that version (his definition of “a perfect union”, progress is a perennial cycle of human life and growth towards being a better person, a better role model, and liberating people to be able to accomplish dreams - and help ourselves and those around us to be happy. Happy in the sense of satisfied and proud.

I often struggle that “progress” is seen as only material wealth. There’s not much point in worrying about that and trying to change others. It seems to me that working on your own stuff and behaving as you might expect others to behave - that’s pretty big. I think the rest follows.

This is my attempt at doing my homework:

(Seattle, if you are reading this, this isn’t a final version. We have meetings and will come to an agreement about what we’re doing. But we haven’t met yet. I’m just sharing for educational purposes.)

“I’m a Code for America fellow. Code for America is a new kind of public service. We’re partnering with the City of Seattle to improve how efficiently information can be conveyed between civic leaders and the City. We are spending a month in February, in Seattle, conducting interviews and learning as much as we can about the varied experiences of people who are already trying to communicate. This research will inform the technology solutions we make. February is really about meeting people and learning as much as we can about the problem. Ultimately, we will be suggesting and building technology tools to offer some sort of technology solution that addresses this problem.”

This pitch is a bit too long, and boring.

“I’m here in Seattle this month. We are interviewing people who work for the city and community organizers. We will be building a technology based solution to help improve communication.”

I usually like to try to write the 1 sentence version. I really only ever get to being able to rattle off the 1 sentence version if I talk to dozens of people. Just wait til February, I’ll totally have it down.

Intro to CouchDB

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:28:00 -0500

What is CouchDB?
Compiled & edit-in-progress notes from presentation by Max Ogden at Code for America 1/14/2011

If you understand JSON objects, you might be interested to know that CouchDB is an open source flat-file database made of JSON objects. Its primary use is for allowing a dataset to be queried. It’s main advantage over MYSQL is that JSON is understood by web browsers (*what…?). CouchDB provides an API (example…?). Couch is similar to MYSQL, but gives you access to your data in different ways. (examples?)

CouchDB, according to the CouchDB website
“Apache CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.

Go from text file to “data”
To get started, you can convert information in JSON objects in a text file.

Example:

file name: bunny.json

{
name: “bunny”,
likes: “carrots”
}

So this is just data with a certain kind of encoding. (JSON) This is very commond standard.

Move your “data” into the CouchDB server

Get a free CouchOne account
* Sign up on couchone.com. You can create a cloud-hosted instance of a CouchDB database.
Or download and install locally.

CouchDB project
http://couchdb.apache.org/

Browse an open CouchDB dataset
http://data.pdxapi.com/_utils/

Then, you transfer this file to a CouchDB server. You can use a command called “curl,” which is a command line interface, typically available via the command line, that can transfer data to the web (without a graphical web browser.)

curl -X GET data.pdxapi.com

View available database
curl -X GET data.pdxapi.com/_utils/

Get all “databases”
curl -X GET data.pdxapi.com/_all_dbs

Get a “database” called bicycle_network
curl -X GET data.pdxapi.com/_all_dbs/bicycle_network

Function Reference Card
antepenultimatecouchdb.com

What happens when you move your data into the database

curl -X PUT flubber.coucheone.com/cats -d @bunny.json
* bunny.json is a file in your current directory
* -d means ‘data’

When your data goes to the CouchDB server, the CouchDB program is capable of adding more metadata to your entries. These are a unique ID (_id) - and then there is a revision number (_rev).

Common weird errors
Add this prefix
curl -X PUT databaselocation -H “Content-type: application/json”

Or you can put a header in your .curlrc file
—header : “Content-type: application/json”

That’s all for now
Essentially, CouchDB is an all-object database. So if you are already comfortable with working with objects in Javascript, much of what you already know can transfer to working with CouchDB.

There is a program called ‘couchapp’ which helps you to move object data from CouchDB server to another CouchDB server.

If you want to manipulate the CouchDB data with Javascript, you can pass a Couch object into your function.

[Note: I went from being really hazy about CouchDB to vaguely less hazy. I’m correcting this blog entry wiki-style.

Trying to get a really clear, concise & understandable explanation of what it is for an average audience of web developers. If you look at the Wikipedia pages for JSON & CouchDB…well, they leave a bit desired for the normal person of ‘What the heck is it?’ There is definitely an *art* to explaining technology. The art involves attempting to explain it to as many people as possible until you’re really sure the explanation makes sense.]

Options, firehoses & dossiers

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:44:00 -0500

The negotiation training was really big for me. I didn’t even know that most of negotiation is thinking of all the possible options and finding the best agreement between people. I’m totally obsessed with finding options. I’m going to ask David Eaves if anyone in the world actually has a job thinking of options. I don’t care so much about the part of facilitating groups.

But I’ve been very happy that at this moment in time, my actual job is to google stalk people - which is also known as ‘research.’ I’ve been given a problem in city I have barely visited, and have to understand basically the entire system from Mayor to citizen. I definitely have the outsider perspective.

I don’t know if this is a normal task - but I do know that I’ve been complaining about not being challenged for a good long while. All I can say is “Now we’re talkin’!”

Someone quoted Eisenhower today - something like - “If you can’t solve a complicated problem then try making it bigger.” I think some people have said I was ambitious - but I’m not. I just gravitate to this other scale. I think it’s the same exact level that a lot of people care about - you know, the big stuff. Things that are easy to like and agree to:

* do we want clean water? (yes)
* do we want to eat awesome & homey food (yes)
* do we want there to be nice parks and places with happy animals (yes)
* do we want to be healthy? (yes)

So it’s pretty easy to get there. Pick your goals, carefully, and stick to them.

Research Tactics

One of our top concerns right now is information management & overload… and we are all twitterholics. I’m certain that this information overload was not planned as a symbolic reference to what life must be like for people in positions of intense decision making - but I get it. If I didn’t have all my digital tools, holy crap. I totally wouldn’t be able to do it.

We’re experimenting with a bunch of tools. But really I can’t even begin to get to the point of connecting them to the giant pile of data that we got. (The pile is really not that big, but moving, meeting all these new people, learning so much…makes it pretty hard to take in all this information.)

But at the end of the day, I was talking with Alan about our wiki. I totally understand his orderly system of a hierarchical web of information. But I was still feeling like while I knew which information was supposed to eventually go where…that wasn’t my problem.

He let me whine about it and describe what was going on in my head.

What I’m trying to do sketch out a map and plan to meet up with as many different people in the city of Seattle. We’ll be doing interviews. But the online research is really important for understanding who everyone is.

I’m sure you are like me - you start reading one thing, then another, then another, then you have 20 windows open and have no idea what the first thing you started looking up was. This is my main problem.

However, the firehose of information was really getting me. But I eventually realized how to organize this information:

Person

Facts: Wikipedia style entry — who they are, what they do

My notes:

* Interests
* Concerns
* Questions
* Things to research

Once I realized that nearly *all* of my forays into google search result in a bunch of disorganized sticky notes…but that for the most part this is what I’m always doing online. It made new buckets.

Talking it out really helped wade through the confusion.

Negotiation training & how I see my role

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:53:00 -0500

Reposted from Facebook:

“CFA is still awesome, but i’ve not slept enough. lost the ability to be reflective, until i sleep again. we’re doing negotiation training, training in conducting ethnographic interviews - basically everything i’ve ever wanted. today we learned about how cities buy stuff & the politics involved.”

We’re definitely booked solid. Glad I told everyone I would be completely unavailable until late March.

But wow, amazing things can happen.

Negotiation Training

David Eaves is an amazing negotiation trainer. He helped foresters and environmentalists in the Boreal Forest in Canada come to an agreement. We played negotiation games.

We do more later today.

Challenges

information management

figuring out how to digest all this stuff - mainly i need to pick a strategy

Thoughts on my role in the team

In my role on my team I didn’t say “I’m a developer.” I said I see myself as a system architect/community researcher/planner. That user experience interview training we had the other day. This was what was missing from my college courses in anthropology. That was the whole reason I thought of going into anthropology… but we never got to try out field work. (Which irked me to no end.) It’s interesting how much has shifted as people understand that understanding people matters for designing. But right now I am thinking about designing platforms that can be built upon - and this requires a fuller understanding of the city system.

I love that Pete Fecteau called himself and “Experience Engineer” instead of a “User Interaction Designer.” #upgrade

Negotiation

I think of all the times I’ve felt powerless in organizations. The negotiation training we had helped shift my thinking. Basically, we got a framework for how to structure this and how to prepare. Realized that much of what I do in my life is really negotiation.

We also learned about coming into a situation with a good attitude & how and why having a good attitude really works. (He did not explain it like this. This is my take.)

More later….

(hanging in there, though very sleepy)

Heavenly Day of User Experience Design

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 03:00:00 -0500

After I got home, I was chatting with zzolo (Alan) on the phone. He observed that all day we listened to the interaction design user experience interview trainers from Cooper. They taught us how to conduct user interview for user research. :)

Doing the work you need to do in order to figure out how to create a User Persona. Which I have always wanted to try out.

Before I go on about why this was so dreamy & the best CFA day so far, zzolo’s point was that we spent a whole day learning about thoughtful research. BUT, in the middle, at lunch, we had the very incredible, super hero, co-founder of Flickr, Caterina Fake. (And, as Jen Pahlka said, “technology fashion icon.” Totally true.) I love her work. She said that she maintains community cohesion and movement momentum by modeling the behavior you want, setting the normal, amplifying good behavior, and giving positive reinforcement. <3 <3 <3

Her approach is, on the surface, totally opposite of user research. She said she is in the family of ‘just make lots of shit.’ Of course I am sure she’s used lots of different methods.

She talked about going from Flickr to being bought by Yahoo. Similar to what we’re doing, in the respect that we are outsiders from smaller settings into a very large institutional culture. We bring a risk-seeking culture into a traditionally (and often necessarily) risk-averse setting. Eep! :) She talked about forming a culture of leading with demos & examples - with the people who were most supportive - the people who get it & want it & want to work on it.

The difference in approaches of our two speakers: design on behalf; make stuff for yourself. What I realize today: Great designers become their user and then design for themselves. Otherwise, you need to be a typical user yourself and understand yourself and exactly what you want.

——

I love agile. I am addicted to sketches. I “get” the rapid prototype gestalt. Caterina is right about ‘just making shit.’ It can be a galvanizing force in an institution. Leading with examples is the only way to ‘show not tell’ and encourage change. (Incidentally, the tagline of startupweekend.org is now “No talk, all action.”

I’m right there in *hating* to waste time and energy in projects that will be “shelfware,” or building to a spec that won’t be tested in the real world, with real people as soon as humanly possible. I’m not alone. I think a lot of us are just done with making useless and pointless crap that no one will ever even use. Not when there are so many things that need real assistance. Cognitive Surplus #FTW.

I would even say that since I met my friend Zoey Kroll and attended her guerrilla user testing session at Drupalcon, that I have gone off the deep end of agile.

That’s what we did this summer with my garden project, we all totally lost our minds. I remember one of my friends asking if we really built anything. We actually did, though our primary focus was on teaching & scoping down, down, down.

Basically, we tried to research, be, do, participate, connect with ‘the user.’ I guess the only rule I really had this summer was that people had to really care about gardens or food & want to help. I didn’t care what anyone’s technology background was. I really wasn’t as interested in helping people who wanted to learn to code who weren’t willing to fully engage with the subject matter.

Zoey had the awesome idea of “agile content.” I’m obsessed with agile explanations (which will be the focus of what I do at Drupalcon with a visual explanation sprint as part of a docs sprint.) When I said “continuously integrated documentation” in a planning meeting the other day, Max nodded his head. He got it. :) (I often suffer from people not getting my ideas as they roll out of my head. Practicing explaining them helps a lot.)

I don’t even believe in design. I don’t believe in specialization. Now, this is a bit dramatic. I do really believe in design. And I love these processes and I know they work. I use them. I use them professionally to accomplish work and provide a stable reliable service that stands up to repeated use. I’m not sure how that would be accomplished without design or some sort of specialization.

BUT - I don’t believe in design. I don’t believe that a designer can design as themselves. It’s like an actor. Actors become someone else. (Well. some kinds of actors do.) When you *are* your user, well, then you are a designer. Applying design principles, that is not being a designer. That is an act of disengagement. Sure it works, reliably, and is a science. But you are not thinking like your user, and you are not, like your user, ultimately trying to substantially modify or destroy the world of your user, for the better.

This was why I organized my gardener + technologist mash up this summer: for ongoing understanding. Technologists *became* more gardeners. Gardeners became more technical. It’s not scientific at all, it’s active. Qualitative data as activism.

What happens in this transformation: becoming the people who ‘just make shit.’ Developers who continuously ‘scratch their itches’ are serving themselves. This is a problem when you are supposed to be offering your technology skills to a community that doesn’t have those technology skills. This is why I am so passionate about advocating to bring more humanists into the developer community. (I’m just learning and relearning dozens of way to say the same thing.) This is why community design matters.

I know people slag off participatory design as design by committee. True, perhaps. I guess I am imagining something totally different. And this might have nothing to do with Code for America’s projects. People need fluency in being able to manipulate their toolset. That’s all that we’re doing here. A designer is a professional who moves this process along in circumstances where the users cannot articulate their needs.

When I’m on my own, I tend to just make something. I get overly passionate about my invention. I tell a bunch of people, some people stick, some people get it. I run around like a chicken with my head cut off. This mainly happens in my home life, not my work life. I’m impatient.

The only thing I really fundamentally didn’t necessarily agree with the Cooper people about was that we should make our user interviews totally private. I think this is true for promoting candidness.

I wonder what Anna would say (my video journalist, documentary making teammate for Seattle.) I guess I’m more interested in the idea of making a documentary about the situation of government workers - and in making their use case super public. Maybe it’s their persona that is public. The ‘fake person’ that represents them.

I guess I haven’t decided what the difference, or relative values, between just amplifying awesome users and actually conducting research. I also like to figure out if and how we can do everything all at once. Or, if we can be totally transparent in our interviews.

Maybe I need to learn the face & voice distorter video filter? Maybe the situation in the cities won’t be that bad? I just don’t see how I can blog or be open and honest about my experiences if I can’t tell stories about the experiences. Mainly the positive ones, or the real ones but without using names or contextualizing information.

I will have to figure this out another day. Probably the same day when I say that I don’t believe in data the same way that I don’t believe in design. I don’t believe in either as specialized performative acts.

Gov as a platform, twilio & launching into our cities

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 02:28:00 -0500

Another full & busy day.

Bread Rant & Public Service Announcement

For some reason, the train decided to just sit in Montgomery Station for 5 whole minutes before opening the doors. It took 40 whole minutes to get to CFA. I got an unsatisfying chocolate croissant. Horrible flavor and a giant hard chunk of chocolate in the middle. I’m a snob now: I make them better.

Seriously though, I know Californians think their bread is all that. It’s not. It’s tough. By the time you get it, it’s stale. Maybe Acme bread is the most hopeful. I admit I’m a sourdough hater. It’s just that real French bread is soft and silky. Spanish sandwich baguettes have crisp outsides, and soft middles, and you don’t have to tug and pull to take a bite. You don’t destroy the sandwich trying to eat it. Really, California. Your baguettes are all stale. But bread is at least ubiquitous.

My goal for Wednesday night is to start the process of making croissants. I have to knead the dough by hand and strategize its cold rising in the fridge.

OK, I’m done with that rant. Back to your regularly schedule CFA blog entry…

Gabrielle Giffords

Our hearts all went out to Gabrielle Giffords. Andrew Greenhill, one of the CFA board members, worked with her - he is from Tucson. I think about how they were reaching out to the public at a Safeway. That’s the saddest part to me. Being hurt while tgey were reaching out and trying to help.

Sad too, as this last week I actually met real living public servants. They really are so genuinely interested in making the country better for everyone. Making the perception I had, literally up until the other day, of politics and boring local government media seem almost a distant memory. Makes this tragedy more horrifying as I have a little more context to empathize.

Government as a Platform

So, first thing this morning, Tim O’Reilly talked to us about Government as a Platform. Max Ogden recorded it.

Some highlights

The open web worked because barriers to entry were (relatively) low.
The open web had an architecture of participation.
UNIX philosophy: small tools with standard input/output - put together like legos, to build complex
MANPAGES existed in open projects like UNIX. We take these for granted now, but if Microsoft had documentation, it was really buried.
The 404 error made the internet possible: errors were not required to resolve, therefore, if a site hung, it did not bring down the whole system. This was a tolerance for failure.
Apache is an interesting open source project to study.
simple & atomic - provides enormous opportunities for evolution… “no complex system has ever worked”
web services evolved as hackers started overloading the url
commodification is a powerful force, but it leans towards standardification
data is becoming the locus of control
“architecture of small pieces loosely joined”
companies working to own the entire stack (ex. google/microsoft/facebook/apple) —> one ring to rule them all
we are trying to open up data and keep it in free public space as a counterweight
government has a huge amount of data
how do we make gov’t a participant in this internet operating system?
beauty of when you have a platform, is that people can help themselves
“I guarantee you that the people at the DoD never thought of FourSquare” (re: GPS satellites)
Data Sets & Data Services that will enable invention by people in the private sector invention of services people didn’t know they wanted
data driven businesses are metrics driven (attn: healthcare industry)
good platform lets other people innovate without having to consult you

Lesa Mitchell

Then Lesa Mitchell from the Kauffman foundation talked to us. The Kauffman foundation is the largest foundation that looks at entrepreneurial development. In her work with the healthcare system, they took a critical look at health care records. Turns out, those electronic medical records are designed for billing, not for tracking your health (this was kind of a surprise to me, I assumed they were keeping data.) And it isn’t designed for science. There are now some movements & companies trying to solve the problem of how you can keep your own medical information with you. :) (I like.)

She talked about turning not-for-profits into for-profits for sustainability. She talked about a project in India called Hole in the Wall - they increased literacy a lot in kids under the age of 15 by wiring the city and then having computer centers. (I’m guessing ‘the wall’ refers to what she described as a technology wall between the tech-enabled part of Hyderabad & the slums right outside a ‘wall’.)

She talked about Detroit & how there are 400,000 illiterate people. We diverged into a discussion about Grand Rapids and she said that cities with diversified economies, near the water are the most stable. Cities that manage their water & energy well are in the best situation.

She actually said this to us:

“It’s your job to figure out how to stop the financial crisis.” (She laughed but I don’t think they are kidding.)

She said part of our job is to ask the cities the hard questions, because we are in a position to learn the most. She said that the most entrepreneurial innovations happen in meltdowns, for example when companies are going bankrupt, or when they merge.

Seriously, though, I’m so into this ambition storm that’s brewing over our heads. I think it’s good to go for it and ask away of our generation. They need to transfer the hopes & ambitions to us at some point, and give us plenty to work on. I like it.

She mentioned this:

“facebook for patients
helicopter
small groups of doctors/patients taking themselves out of the system completely
focusing on preventative care”

and this

Sage Bionetworks, in Seattle — a totally open medical bioscience data company. I think that is pretty dang cool.

Danielle Morrill from Twilio

“The telephone most ubiquitous device in the world.”

We learned about the structure of Startup Weekend.

160 facilitators - 100 countries
20,000 attend per year
We talked about community building around an emerging product. And also event planning. Lots of good advice, I’m planning to implement some of this.

Cities

We finally got handed off the information from our cities

Uploaded with Skitch!

Yes. It begins!

So now begins the procedure of making sense of it all. We had a big dinner with the Philly team. There are 10 of us in total on similar projects. Seattle and Philadelphia will have some differences, which we don’t know just yet. But we can leverage the power of such an awesome group. We’re mainly the PHP & front-end developers & mappers. My group is just 3 of us (but we are all awesome.) The vibe with all 10 of us is really, really awesome. No one is obnoxious. Everyone is collaborative. I can tell it will be fun.
I’m reading the contract closely, but without as much severity as I might have years ago. As I’ve gotten older, and seen projects go by where I *could* have rocked it more than I thought I was allowed to, my only challenge was fear of succeeding/trying. This time there is really *no* excuse to limit the scope in the dream stage. Really. I literally cannot think of any situation where we could be any better set up for success.

This fellowship has been planned to thoughtfully, with a spectrum of the finest and most amazing advice. So it is possible to fulfill contracts and understand the use-case of the city BUT they’ve sent us out on this big challenge under the absolute best circumstances. Our job is of city disruptor & bringers of options. This is the job I plan to do. It will be perfectly possible to satisfy both. And we must.

SF Drupal User Group

Did also make it to the SF Drupal User Group. Mainly for beer as we got there late.

I only recognized 2 people.

I lectured someone who was complaining that all the modules he needed weren’t done yet.

1. Drupal 7 came out literally 5 days ago. You can’t finalize modules until the core codebase is released.

2. You do not need to be a developer to help make the module development go faster.

3. You can pick a module you care about, write to the maintainer saying what your skills are, and then offer to help test, document, or even read through the issue queue (like the new Views Bug Squad.)

4. There was an entire initiative of module developers who committed to upgrading their modules in tandem with Drupal 7 while it was not final. #d7cx. This is awesome.

I must say it felt great to not even hesitate for a second in telling someone exactly how they have no excuse to sit around and wait for the modules to get done. I’m sure he didn’t fully appreciate my -slight- crabbiness. However, I sure appreciated it! :)

I’ve seen just about every Drupaller I know get this way. Up til now I’ve mainly been nice, but today was the first day that I manifested the “do-cracy lecture.”

I learned this from the best. :P

Our awesome day with Gunner

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 01:40:00 -0500

First & more important:

Code for America is a combination of

the Peace Corps
a Silicon Valley Startup
Hogwarts
with a touch of Project Runway.

I’m serious about the Hogwarts. I was even thinking about how my new life is about preparing to interact with Muggles.

Yesterday we had an all-day meeting with CfA staff & the board members, facilitated by the world’s best facilitator, Gunner.

I enjoyed doing the Spectrogram activity. This is a social & interactive activity where a large group can share their opinions on a controversial statement. I had done this before at the Non-Profit Developer’s Summit. It was cool to do this for Code for America. Some of the questions we reacted to were (from memory, these are not exact wordings, the real wordings were much better):

* “WikiLeaks is a force for good in pushing government transparency forward.”
* “Corporate sponsorship corrupts Code for America.”
* “Code for America will only be a success if we produce a lot of products.”
* “Citizen participation is the only way to make governments more efficient.”
* “Code for America can be a success even if it fails.”

I love this activity because everyone is lined up in a spectrum of ‘strongly agree’ or ‘strongly disagree’ (or in between) and people with opinions explain them. It gives a good sense of the emotion and nuances of opinions - and also shows you exactly who opposes or supports you in your thinking.

What was relieving to me was that everyone is very passionate and dedicated to making a positive difference & doing good for others & helping our cities to be better.

The most surprising reaction to me: There were some people, mainly those who actually worked in government, who didn’t think citizen participation was necessary. My sense of this attitude is that they have had some clunky experiences already, and see so much room for improvement. We had some discussion about semantics of what a citizen is, technically we all are.

Interestingly, the some qualities of the Spectrogram activity can be found in Opinion Space. Anna Bloom showed me Opinion Space, it is a way to view relationships between people’s opinions.

We did “twinkle fingers” (American Sign Language clapping - where you wiggle your fingers in support.) I was very pleased that when I said, “If we still need corporate sponsorship then we haven’t enabled democracy.”, that Tim O’Reilly twinkled his fingers at me. I will probably never forget that (or the last few days, either.) I admit I was a little nervous standing on the side that corporate sponsorship isn’t necessary, so this made me feel a little more confident.

Later in the day we were doing a group mission statement hacking/elevator pitch activity. Andrew Greenhill (who works with the Mayor of Tucson) was in my group. We were wordsmithing our elevator pitches. I kept saying some of my very imprecise but ‘understandable’ generalizations of what CfA is. I said something like “We make Internet Stuff for Cities.” and he acknowledged that this is what people understand. I got to ask him about word-smithing in cities. He said that he does this a lot in his job. He might know what the Mayor needs to say, and help translate it for different audiences. I totally relate to this, as it is pretty hard to explain technology. This summer I intentionally worked with gardeners on a technology project and I learned really, really fast how to make what I said make sense. He said he learned this working on political campaigns. I learned some of the language-smoothing when I worked in Museums. I always think it is fascinating how you can try to express yourself, express the same ideas, in so many different vocabularies, simply because so many people come from such different social places. I just really appreciated getting to hear that word-smithing is so important when working in a City. I guess this made me feel more relieved, that my ability to translate tech-talk into human-ese could be valuable. (Though I am totally not perfect. The opportunity to practice and make it better is what I am kind of excited about.)

Other things we did: map our what we need to do in the next month.

We had a discussion about sharing what we learn. I *love* the idea that Leonard Lin had about making a stream of everything we are doing. We can have all our data be raw, and then synthesize/process/contextualize it for different audiences. Our cities, CfA, our teammates, interested engaged citizens. (I do keep having to remind people about citizen involvement. I realize I am very idealistic, but I also have a vision that I will just need to make into a reality so people see it themselves.)

There was a little bit of ‘caution’ around the area of sharing. The two areas of concern are 1. politically sensitive information 2. over-sharing and inundation/confusion

They did say that fellows should feel free to present what things are challenges. Personally, I am interested in generally blogging positively about things that shouldn’t embarrass anyone. Truly though, I except there will be some “politically-sensitive” issues that collide with “challenges of my fellowship.” I think we’ll have a discussion about this soon. I would imagine that most fellows, and most future fellows, will need some help in understanding ‘politically sensitive’ when everything is ‘new’ and, potentially, everything is ‘political.’ I’m sure there is plenty of stuff that is obvious, or candid.

When I was talking with my friend about this, I realized that some transparency can be actually *more* transparent if you are thoughtful about how you are transparent. Taking the time to synthesize what you say, and be really clear, is more open than just blathering on. However, blathering on and on (like, for example, I am doing here), is actually ultimately more precise in transparency because it is the whole picture.

I feel like this is the root of the issue that could lead to the degree of severity of opening up sensitive information. Most of us want to *understand* the drama between the world leaders. The real drama. Who is actually running the world? Who is actually architecting decisions that effect our lives very deeply? Is anyone running the world?

I do think I got an answer to that last question. No. No one is running the world. The world is a mess of people. Philosophically, I believe that most healthy people with access to their human rights are capable of acting in little ways to effective run the world that they actually live in. This is how and why most people don’t bother to care about the government.

Max did a little mini-session about how we can be prepared to get as much data from our experience in the city. This led to declaring that a Data Camp will happen. I am all about having a Data Camp in Seattle where we do some presentations about data. Of course, this means learning a lot more about Data this month. In the next 20 days! (See, this is the part of my life that is very Project Runway.)

Later on in the evening I had a really intense conversation about venture capital/startups/power/influence. Realized that I basically never bother thinking about this stuff. Part of me just doesn’t care; part of me knows that there are lots of other ways to make a difference, besides money. I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to meet people who know about that world. My gut instinct is to say “Ew, money.” But I realized that I have systematically avoided all humans who look at money with glossy eyes. And I mean large quantities of money. Above the ability to have a comfortable but not overly lavish life.

One of our reading materials is “Delivering Happiness” - by the founder of Zappos.com. I just started reading it this morning, and already it is an entertaining read. He is a businessman. He thought about business a lot, even from a young age. I understand the interest in business as a puzzle, where money is one component. But I do not understand the interest in being rich. I know some people view it as freedom & security. The freedom to have something most people want. I guess it’s that the place in the body where people react to money isn’t one that promises to make the world a better place. There’s a big difference between having some capital to make a living & having capital to make other do whatever you want. The thing is that ultimately, money is still just a contract between people. If you set out with the same intention to have the same relationships between people, you can eventually knock out a lot of the money involved.

So basically, I’m saying that I feel *really great* about my choice in siding with the next revolution of resource sharing. Money is so old-school.

One thing I learned yesterday is that I have to *show* my vision. I can explain it to people who don’t get it, and they won’t get it. Also, show it when it is ready. (Ready != perfect) - You can rush perfect, but you can’t rush ready.