sj's Longest Now [v.1]

From Deborah Elizabeth Finn, encyclopedic thoughts and a rec for a non-profit banner-ad generator.

Every city needs its own wiki; a single repository
for community information on its history, culture, landmarks and
ongoing events.  Arlington, for instance, needs its own
wiki.  The existing “Arlington Wiki” is dormant, part of a top-down Live from Arlington site.  On the other hand, the Arlington mailing list is active and the town is full of tech-savvy (and history-loving) people.

I brought up the idea tonight at the monthly meeting of a technical
advisory group.  I hope I didn’t offend anyone by suggesting that
a push-only website wasn’t the perfect model for an information
portal.  The “Citizen Needs” section of the seven-section Needs
Assessment the tech advisors carried out this past summer was voided,
rolled into the Town Website group… people decided that any citizen
needs would be covered by improved website design. 

Other citizen needs I can imagine :

• the need for a place to post important citizen-to-citizen town announcements,
• the need for a way to send public comments
  to the town (that others can see, add to, comment on) — this is being
  taken care of via the selection of a “customer response management:”
  tool (is that the acronym?),
• the need for a collaborative, up-to-date city calendar
• the need for better, more accessible archives of town data – property, legislative, judicial, executive
• the need for public schedules and timelines
  for important ongoing tasks.  Example : the Arlington cemetery
  plots are expected to fill up in 10 years.  A number of
  representatives from the cemetery came to the Selectmen’s meeting on
  Monday to mention this, and point out that we should start thinking now
  about how to proceed in 5 years so we don’t run up against a real
  crunch.  This had apparently been brought up previosly, perhaps 5
  years ago, with no progress since… It is not enough
  to see a three-line summary of this request in the meeting minutes —
  there should be a timeline and suggestion-repository, updated whenever
  the relevant groups make progress towards the goal of finding a place
  to expand, which can be followed this year, next year, and for the
  coming decade… keeping track of each revision of any public documents
  and proposals involved.
• the need for a good collaborative annotated map of the city — both at the present time and at key moments in history.  (For inspiration, see the Wikipedia project on geographical coordinates.)

Note that in each of these cases — as, indeed, in the case of the town
website itself — the services and information above could be provided
by third parties, asking for information independently and sharing it
with the world; not officially on government servers or part of a
government project.    But it makes a lot of sense for
the town government to directly provide,  facilitate, or cheerlead
such efforts, if for no other reason than that they are an important
part of a thriving community.  .

A few months after Yahoo! announced it was donating a passel of servers
to Wikimedia’s global network, along with rackspace and bandwidth in one of their Korean
server farms, the first of those machines have been set up and are
operating as squids. (see the network topology)

The yellow regions on the daily status graphs show traffic and requests being handled by the Korean cluster.

Michael Chertoff ‘thought the crisis had passed‘.  Mike Brown “thought it was a typical hurricane situation“.     The President… well, his mind was elsewhere, and the First Mother thought it was an excuse for a vacation. The United States,
in pretending to prepare for trouble while forgetting how, and
elevating leaders who never learned to accept blame and have no role
models to show them how, is
gearing up for a complete meltdown during the first truly unexpected
calamity.

Just as the leaders of New Orleans fled with their networks of friends
when disaster struck (when just those networks could have responded
smartly to an ornery Fate), I can see the leaders of an entire state or
coastline fleeing in the face of still greater trouble.  As
Douglas Adams predicted, the “Someone Else’s Problem” field will be one
of the strongest in the universe some day.  Let’s hope we are
still around to appreciate the irony.

A front-page article
in Le Monde (& carried by the Financial Times?) on Wikipedia
interviews some Wikimedia France members (Anthere, Ryo); and related articles
include a few questions put to the esteemed Mr. Wales, and a few more put to editors of Larousse and Robert.  If you
saw this syndicated elsewhere, drop a line.

I’d like to know where you turn for hurricane information; and where
you’ve gotten breaking tidbits from, at different points in the past
two weeks.

• Web : Wikipedia itself [cf. Mcall, et al], though not Wikinews
• Radio & Television :  Air America 
• [e-]Paper : The Australian surprised me with some of their coverage. 
• Overviews : BBC, Chronicle
• Other : Friends in Texas & LA, watching different local news sources

Thoughts
on the adequacy of the Katrina response, from around the world.  I
wish I were there with a relief group… from the USA Freedom Corps
site (needless to say, a federal program):

I’m all for professionalism and training.  Untrained volunteers
can make an awful mess.  But this is no way to build on current
sentiment.  Start training willing volunteers now; note that we’re
likely to have another killer storm like this within the next decade;
give people remote tasks like PR outreach, name collection, even
federal support for some of the grassroots communications efforts that
already exist.  Get a new server for the katrinahelp wiki, for
crying out loud. 

Without actually
listing “volunteer agenc[ies]” who might direct these energies towards alleviating the disaster, this
is an awful warning to hand out.  Rather like encouraging people to
support the responses to 9/11 and the last Gulf invasion by ‘going
about [their] normal business’ and shopping.  .

24-hour extreme prototyping jams. 
Regular ad-lib game development jams.
Tool-mediated jam platforms that change how people prototype.

Alright already.  I am slowly giving in to all you wild and crazy
people who love hip bands-of-the-moment, wagons, and their unholy
offspring.  Some reviews of links in the modern toolchain to
come.  I approach it from a position of expectant disappointment…

Working on the proceedings from Wikimania now.  If you haven’t sent in your final paper or slides, your days are numbered… there will be special icons for the proceedings entries indicating their freshness.