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The Diary of Alan Gutierrez
April 18th, 2008Suddenly it occurred to me that with Brian’s Latest Comments, I don’t need a side blog. I can just create my own forum.
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Comments 
Welcome to my diary.
You are all more than welcome to participate in my diary. Just leave a comment here. It’s a place where I organize my narratives, start ideas, where I can offload thoughts, or get a new understanding of a topic started with some thinking out loud.
My blog has always been a place to put essays. It has been a place for creative writing and a place for recording as lessons, what I’ve learned about a particular software program. I don’t like the idea of asides in the middle of the content stream, and a sideblog has absolutely no context, a bunch of little bits and pieces with their own full blog page, each with their own comments, creating too many places to comment. No opportunity for conversation.
This is my diary, where I’m liable to write about anything. So if you subscribe, don’t get upset with me, just unsubscribe yourself.
Again, you are all more than welcome to participate. Until then, enjoy watching me talk to myself.
Dear Diary,
I’m attempting to get started on a narrative about narratives, but I’ve had an acute case of writers block this morning. It comes from task anxiety. Knowing that there are more pressing and immediate things to deal with, while attempting to write about something that is fuzzy and abstract.
Which is why I’m happy I now have this diary. The pressure is off now so I can write. I don’t have to carefully consider an audience again. There is no need to think of a brilliant title for this post. It begins with a Dear Diary.
I’m sure you want to know why this can’t be done by simply writing in your blog? Well, it could be done in my blog, but there are problems with the blog that I can’t articulate. If I were to create a bunch of these little posts, where would someone leave their comments?
I want to attract people to a general conversation about myself. If each of these little posts were a full blog page with it’s own comment section, that doesn’t create a community, it doesn’t invite people to comment.
Also, I generally think of my main entries as essays. Those are the product of a bout of creative writing. I don’t want to blur that content with a bunch of plaintiff bleats about my day to day. That belongs in a diary.
Which is what you are. You are my diary. It is so much easier to write now. Perhaps after a while, I’ll learn to write this way in the main content channel of my blog, but for now, I need a little hidey-hole where I can get my writing unstuck, where I can get my narratives going.
Dear Diary,
Another day went by without any billable hours. Spent the morning casting about with blogging and organizing my Backpacks around the narrative concept. But, I’ve lost touch with the strategies that I’ve developed. I fear that I’ve spent a day with a little simian part of my brain scheming. How do I keep myself on track long enough to get something meaningful accomplished?
How embarrassing to write this where anyone can see it. But, it’s true. It feels like scheming.
I’ve been thinking about blogging all day. In doing so, I thought about the big blogs that can cause ripples among the bloggers simply by reprinting an IT firms press release. Who is going to read my own little ramblings?
It makes me want to be very careful about blogging. Don’t post on a Friday. Make sure you have your ideas all put together before you press publish. Who is going to join me in my discussions of social networking? Am I simply going to be blogging to myself?
What I need to do is use you, diary, as a place to draft open letters. There are people on Twitter who I like to follow, but I don’t really know them. Maybe, I can write something and use you as a place to capture a response, or at least have one or two exchanges in a conversation. Something that will get a narrative rolling and get a conversation rolling at the same time.
Dear Diary,
Didn’t know where to post my last message regarding Brian Kerr’s insight into directions for sponsorship for Think New Orleans. Seemed like it belongs here, while I wrestle with the idea of revenue from Think New Orleans, from the website itself. But, I choose to post it in the editors forum, where Eli Ackerman is tuned in.
The better place to put it, but I’m so disappointed in the Think New Orleans theme. It’s so hard to read. I much prefer the look and feel of Blogometer now.
Dear Diary,
Good morning. Ordinarily, I might do this writing in a text file on my computer, but I’m going to do it here, see if what I write is really so personal that I want to keep it secret.
I don’t like keeping secrets. I do not like duplicity. There are things that I don’t talk about, but that is different from using a back channel to record my thoughts. Who is going to read a personal diary? It does help to write, but it doesn’t help to then throw that writing into abyss of my hard drive.
Today I’m going to have lunch with Doug Ahlers from the Kennedy School and the Broadmoor Project. I want to talk with him about my plans for marketing New Orleans using Think New Orleans and the speaking engagements that I’ve been offered.
This is part of the Jukebox strategy for Think New Orleans. The website is a jukebox. It tells stories. It tells the story of TCC or the story of Broadmoor, it goes into detail about the lessons learned.
Not necessarily stories about technology and social media. This is something that is hard to convey to New Orleanians, who still see me and think webmaster, because they really don’t participate in the read/write web. They consume blogs without knowing that they are blogs.
I want to tell the whole story. Not the technical story. Not how people are using blogs, because they are not, not in the case of Hollygrove and Broadmoor. The story of Hollygrove would start with talking about who stepped up. The AmeriCorps Vista volunteers, the AARP.
The Broadmoor story starts with the story of the green dot and the partnerships with Harvard, Bard College, MIT and Shell Oil.
These are fascinating studies in the how of the grass roots recovery. Oddly, one thing that I considered this morning was the long piece I wrote on that awful Wayne Andrews. In that piece, I brought it around to talking about people coming here looking to use New Orleans as a means to buttress their agenda, and those that come here to contribute, to truly contribute, to work side-by-side with us to rebuild our city.
The strategy for Think New Orleans, the writing calendar, could be divided into three, uh, hemispheres, although that’s not the right word.
First, there is the music in the Jukebox. The stories of the recovery from which other organizations can learn.
Yes, you can be a part of this hotbed of enterprise and innovation. There are many different models for collaboration, there are many organizational lessons to learn through this collaboration. The good people of your organization can hone their problem solving skills and your organization can come away with new institutional knowledge that will be your competitive advantage.
Listen to the stories. If you find a story that you like, and you want to hear more, drop a quarter into the slot.
No, this is not necessarily a PayPal link.
You might pick up the phone, call the people and keep that story going by partnering, providing consulting, fundraising, sending down a team of your executives to partner with a university and their students to draft strategy.
Second, there is the political aspect of Think New Orleans. This is one minor reason why Think New Orleans itself will not become a 501c3 itself.
Think New Orleans has access to people through it’s newsletter because it has written to a particular voice. The voice of the wet neighborhoods.
The politics of New Orleans is not like the politics of before the flood, nor is it like the politics of the rest of the nation. The politics of New Orleans are not black and white. The politics of New Orleans are not red and blue.
The politics of New Orleans are wet and dry.
There are times when people ask me about the diversity of my organization. First, I note that I do not have an organization, then I talk about the neighborhoods in which I work, the issues that I address. If they can’t connect the dots, I don’t sweat it. Only rarely do I talk about diversity, because I usually feel that the question is designed to expose me as an effete technologist.
Hmm, sensing some anger there. Remind me to come back to how I’ve developed my understanding of diversity, which I feel is attune to New Orleans and respectful of people who are foremost friends and much loved, not evidence to present when my credibility is questioned. Basically, if you don’t know who I am and where I’m at, you’re not really a player in this city.
Talk about the digital divide, too, is moot for this strategy. The digital divide does exist. My project is not about bringing computers to the unwired, it’s about marketing the opportunities to make peers of your fellow Americans, and collaborate to address these problems.
Most of my networking takes place at the meetings and on the phone.
A huge digression, but there is a political story here that needs to be told. There is a place for someone who will talk about the failure of government, the failure of market forces, the huge intractable problems of New Orleans and how they reflect on our society.
There is a political and societal lesson to learn.
Talking about these lessons is valuable and it draws the attention and participation of the New Orleanians who are rebuilding in defiance. These are the people that you want to meet. Not the river-front developers. There are no new lessons to learn there. Nepotism and opportunism are age old and well understood. The lessons to learn are all below the waterline and that is the language that I speak.
Which brings us to the third component, which is the evil that is at play. The evil of apathy.
The just world hypothesis, which states that somehow, we deserve to shrink and die as a city and a culture. Because if we did not deserve to shrink and die as a city and a culture, then the world is not just and that is unacceptable.
The amazing power of rationalization, the closing window of apathy, that is a powerful force, and New Orleans is a fascinating study in how people will actively quash the efforts of others to rebuild.
There is story after story of grave injustices, which are important stories to tell, because they motivate the people who seek to create justice.
When the desire to create justice is stirred, the same channel will have a Jukebox playing stories of collaboration and construction. Stories for you to chose from, where you can insert yourself to keep the jukebox playing.
Our civic leaders took the tragedy of the levee failures and used it as an opportunity to issue no-bid contracts to cronies. When a concerned society of fellow Americans came forward to ask how they could help rebuild this city, our civic leaders did not have answer for altruism. They are no longer able to understand the altruistic motive. They cannot broker these partnerships.
We must broker these partnerships ourselves. We need to route around the nepotism and reach out the national interests that are looking for an opportunity to engage with New Orleans.
The Broadmoor story shows that a national interest is not concerned with the petty local politics. The national partners, the Kennedy School, Bard College, MIT, Shell Oil, will all listen quietly as the green dot story is recounted. They are not adverse to the controversy. They don’t really care.
They find common cause with the reconstruction of a neighborhood and they grow directly out of that experience. The stories are too good to not want to be a part. Only a sociopath or an urban planner is going to fault people for helping other people rebuild their homes. This is a digression again. The footprint argument was a specious argument to redirect development attention toward the riverfront, instead of to the neighborhoods where the current working class New Oleanians live, where the true damage occurred.
The model then is to tell these three stories. The stories of collaboration and construction, the internal political stories of corruption and the failure of government focusing on the perspective of the flooded neighborhoods, and the story of people coming into town to tack Katrina onto their CV, to push their hypothesis under the guise of assistance.
The dialog about the recovery is internal and our own. The stories of collaboration are celebrations of our own creativity and the generosity of the American spirit of our friends and partners. The stories of the charlatans and the facilitators are there to offer a stark contrast to the people who are truly engaged.
Think is a jukebox that tells pleasant stories. The stories continue when you feed the jukebox with your sincere effort to rebuild the city.
Think is also a place for expressing the frustrations of the recovery and exposing the failures and the empty promises. It is a place for sharpening our understanding of the political manipulations.
Think is a place for the 20% of the people who are the 80% of the driving force of this recovery. It is here to serve them and tell their story.
Dear Diary,
I imagined that by now, someone would have commented here. Now I’m concerned that if I continue posting and it is only me, no one will feel welcome.
The idea again, it is to have a space where I can write about myself and not feel the pressure of having to write an article. In essence, I’m stepping down from my soapbox to join the group, and to say what is on my mind as if I were speaking.
I’m thinking about realizations, what makes them realizations is that they run counter to what you currently believe, how you currently behave, or how you currently represent yourself to others.
Actually, I imagine that it is most often the latter that makes a realization stick. It’s that whatever you have come to realize runs counter to who you’ve been. You’re now going to change, possibly reverse yourself. Yet, well all know how much we prize consistency as a character trait. Realizations are often as socially uncomfortable as they are personally liberating.
One of my concerns of late, as I’ve had a flood of realizations lately, is that I’ll not be able to maintain my realizations. That I’ll slip back into structure the realization had hoped to disrupt.
How do you keep realizing until your realization is your reality?
Dear Diary,
Maybe the best design of a diary such as this would be like Backpack, to allow someone to insert their comment underneath the entry of their choosing.
A better design for this comments section might invite others to comment. Something to consider.
This morning I’m considering the great connections that I’m making through the BarCamp efforts of Chris Schultz. I learn a lot about real word web design from talking with people who work at the Houston Chronicle.
I’m struggling to get Netroots Nation ‘08 situated. I’m going to draw up a list of the suggested participants and circulate it among the neighborhood leaders. Hal Roark, Latoya Cantrell, Kevin Brown, Marshall Truehill, Saundra Reed, Jim Livingston, Patricia Jones and Keith Twitchell. That would be a good short list of people to consider who should be on this panel. There are already two very helpful comments in the comments section of the discussion post Can the Democrats Save New Orleans?
I’m heartened that WIll Hartung assured me that 4k writes are more or less atomic, which makes my object database project, Memento, more or less ACID. I’m eager to get back to work on that project, one that I’ve left sitting around for a while because of the uncertainty.
NetSquared is going well, with Francine Stock considering whether she could take the other travel slot available and join Andrew Turner and I to talk about the neogeography work she’s done at Tulane’s School of Architecture. If she is available, she’d be able to talk about the failure of notification, the hopelessness of seeing 1,400 structures listed in print in the Times-Picayune.
I’m feeling bad about the look of Think New Orleans. I’m eager to get the redesign complete. Since the redesign of blogometer.com, I’m far more likely to publish here, even in this little diary section, because it is so aesthetically pleasing.
Not able to think of what to write about today. There is a need to keep writing, even if it is not my best writing. To put a story out frequently. To drive up the visitors to Think New Orleans with fresh content. One important thing that I could do, is to use the words of the commentators in the body of the posts. Turn Think New Orleans in a place where, if you comment, you’ll be quoted and put out into the newsletter. This is a way to show people that I am reading the comments, that the comments are important to me. They are. They inform my understanding of New Orleans.