Alan Gutierrez

I’m tempted to use Constant Contact to keep people informed of workshops, but I like the idea of posting at Think New Orleans and having messages go out in email. What I’m considering is creating a subscription based service that is tag based. It takes up the feed, and checks tags. Subscribers to the email list can choose to only receive messages that have a certian tag. The feed publisher chooses which tags to advertise.

It’s here. I’m posting from it. It’s here.

If you build it, they won’t come. They can’t. They are on the phone to contractors. They are out at the neighborhood fesitival or a neighborhood meeting. When your focus is the people that surrond you physically, going online to communicate with them is not only counterintitive, it’s counter-productive.

California can throw up a web site, and if, out of billion users you get a hundred thousand, you can make bank. Our objective in New Orleans is dissimilar.

Here we are drawing from a pool of a million, few of whom have ready Internet access, many have no computer at all. You cannot count on these people to self-orgainze. Social networking software is designed to organize people around interests or personal objectives, not around neighborhood and civic objectives.

We cannot count on people to self-organize online. It won’t work. I hasn’t worked. It is not working.

Do not delude yourself into thinking that a smattering of NOLA bloggers and LiveJournal comunities amounts to government oversight or neighborhood planning.

The goal it not to build an online community.

The goal to reconstruct a familiar form offline community more commonly known as a city.

A neighborhood web site is no more an online community, than a neighborhood newsletter is an onpaper community.

At Rose Nicaud yesterday, speaking with someone about Think New Orleans on the phone. I hang up. A fellow pops up and asks about my conversation. He sits across from me. I give a brief description of the Web Publishing Workshops. He asks, are you funded? I say, no.

I expand on the project, because he seems interested. Then he’s done. Goes off to sit by himself. I give him my card, but he doesn’t have one on him. He doesn’t appear to want to give out contact information.

It left me feeling like I’d been, as the say in sales parlance, stroked.

Are you funded? Talk to him about the funding situation. Then he backs off, as if to make me feel like I’d been asking him for money. He can’t be bothered.

The answer from now on is yes. Think New Orleans workshops have a suggested donation of $35.00. It will cover costs. It will stock up some money for printing and audio recording. Won’t have to subject myself to that test again. Are you funded? Yes, Mercy Corp punk, I am.

This is the second time that I ran into someone from Mercy Corp who rubbed me the wrong way.

Was describing the web publishing project to someone form Mercy Corp at one of the Neighborhods’ Planning Network meetings. I was sent a follow up that said, thank you, but we’re going to work with person x on project x.

Who was asking to work with you? What an obnoxious tone to take with someone.

Why does everyone at Mercy Corp behave like they are bestowing an audience upon you, even when you meet them in passing?

Do they treat people in developing nations with similar distain, or is it an order of magnitude worse?

Working backwords from Paul Baricos.

Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 13:36:22 -0500
From: “Paul Baricos” To: “Gerald W. Billes”
Subject: Re: Hollygrove Planning

Mr Billes:

I have been told many times before to go to hell, but never so thoroughly. First my personal response. I found your email insulting, divisive, and detrimental to the good of the neighborhood. We have been told in no uncertain terms and many times that we (neighborhoods) must plan if we are to survive. For months now we have been doing just that in Hollygrove and in scores of other neighborhoods. At the meeting last week at St. Joan of Arc we asked you, Lonnie Hewitt, and Shelia Danzig if planning efforts currently underway by local groups would be taken into consideration and you all responded emphatically yes. Now we are told not to get in the way, leave it to the so-called professionals. This is outrageous. We have worked very hard, have attempted to be as inclusive as possible, and have welcomed everyone in Hollygrove and surrounding areas to participate. We will not be excluded from this process.

I will pass along this email to our group at our Saturday meeting. We are not “confused” about what we have been doing “uninterruptedly” for over four months. I will recommend that we contact the Lambert group and/or the City Council to get an explanation on your role and ours in the “official” planning process.You are being paid with public money and we deserve such an explanation.

Paul Baricos

This is in response to this response.

On 5/26/06, Gerald W. Billes (gbilles@billesarchitecture.com) wrote:

Paul,

I appreciate the information you have sent to me. No one from our Neighborhood Planning team will be attending your volunteer group meeting on Saturday.

Although your efforts may have been well intentioned prior to our assignment to the Neighborhood Planning project currently underway, we ask that you respect the residents of Hollygrove and the planning team assigned by allowing the process to flow uninterruptedly. At this time my presence may only serve to confuse citizens in Hollygrove who may get the false impression that there is an association between our funded professional effort and your volunteer splinter group who has no official capacity to produce a “plan” for Hollygrove. You are invited to continue to attend our meetings and participate as other citizens have in our official planning effort and appropriately present information you have gathered. The information will be treated as a single point of view, however, until a consensus of those living in the individual neighborhoods has been reached. Points of view by those living in the neighborhood and expressed in our meetings will be given more weight than those by non-residents. We have begun to gather our own information through in-field surveys and other research methods and through neighborhood meetings we have begun to have. We will put pertinent material into our report and make recommendations that we feel is most relevant to the recovery effort.

We would appreciate you explaining these facts and the ad-hoc and unofficial nature of your effort to anyone attending your meeting. Please explain that there will be duplication of effort in what you are attempting to achieve and our planning process since we may be going through similar steps to gain information and insight into the needs and desires of the neighborhoods for which we are attempting to plan. Thank you for the invitation, non-the-less.

Gerald W. Billes, AIA, NCARB

Which is in response to this inquiry.

Mr Billes:

I met you at the Dixon/Hollygrove/Leonidas planning meeting. For several months a group in Hollygrove has been meeting focusing on planning issues. In addition to many smaller meetings we had several large meetings facilitated by architects from City Works - Angela O’Byrne was our primary contact. H.V. Nagendra of Blitch Knevel, a Carrollton resident, has also helped out. Steve Villavaso also attended several meetings. The meetings were primarily about visioning. At our last meeting we tried to put the vision into an action plan and also focused in on recovery activities (attached). Next week volunteers will begin surveying the Hollygrove neighborhood - both people and structures. I’ve also attached the survey instruments although we plan to modify them somewhat.

At our next meeting scheduled for Saturday, May 27, 9:00 am, Carrollton United Methodist Church, 921 S. Carrollton Ave., we planned to break into small groups outlined in the planning summary document attached. These groups would then implement the action items. We also want to identify and recruit block captains to keep communication’s open.

The impetus behind this has been an organization called Trinity Christian Community (TCC) - a social service organization located in Holly grove for over 15 years or so. Kevin Brown heads it up. We also started a CDC associated with TCC - I work with it as a volunteer. I live on Cohn St. in Carrollton, near the cemeteries.

We’ve tried to be as inclusive and open as possible. We certainly want to work with you in any way possible and look forward to intergating our work with the overall planning of District 3. I hope that you can attend next Saturday (and help facilitate the process) and would appreciate any comments or suggestions on our work so far. Please let me know.

Thanks.

Paul Baricos

Paul Baricos hosted the Web Publishing Workshop at the New Orleans Housing Resource Center. A mere 24 hours ago, he earned my gratitide.

I’m not alone.

I know nothing of Billes Architecture.

Paul Baricos holds workshops to teach homeowners how to navigate the bureaucracy. He’s created a well appointed office space from which homeowners can work. His was an early response, and continues to be an effective one.

This outrage is circulating far and wide.

When we got back, those of us who could get ourselves in order stepped out into our yard and asked, where’s the city? Rather than wait, we organized to govern ourselves. It’s been difficult without any funding or government support.

Now that there are funds available, there are professionals to spend them.

Dave Coustan wrote to tell me that Earthlink has been given the go ahead to build the city wide Wifi network.

Spoke today about the possiblity of hosting a WordPress web site for the New Orleans African-American History Museum. At some point I said, this is really blogging software, of course. He replied, instantly, I don’t think we would be intreseted in blogging. I said, that is why I avoid the word blogging, and will continue to avoid it when presenting to the board. Thus clarified, the conversation continues. Blogging is such a dirty word. I’m learning to bring it up to knock it down.

How fortunate are we New Orleanians to have the crawfish boil. If we didn’t have the crawfish boil, we’d have to invent it. Pity those cultures that have to substitute highly-structured contrivances for civility.