Alan Gutierrez

Alan Gutierrez formed Think New Orleans on September 1st, 2005. Working with evacuees, he worked to establish social networks among evacuees. He has be driven by the premise that once the levees broke, everyone in New Orleans became a knowledge worker. The deluge of information, and misinformation, has been a challenge underlying all the very immediate physical challanges of the flood and recovery.

The level of civic engagement in New Orleans is fantastic. Faced with the prospect of the destruction of entire neighborhoods at the hands of lofty urban planners and city officials, citizens rallyed around their neighborhoods, formed neighborhood groups, and set out to defend their homes against questions of viability and accusations of fragility.

Alan Gutierrez has worked to provide neighborhoods with the capacity and infrastructure for information sharing. He has leveraged the unity, to craft a wider call to service. The shared experience of the the flood and the crushing disappointments of our government in the recovery has served as a point of reference, one that unites New Orleans as easily ask asking, has anyone kept their promise to you?

Alan Gutierrez is a core member of the Citizens’ Road Home, a group that estblished the Road Home Bill of Rights for program applicants, that has been adopted as a set of guiding principles by the LRA. This group envisioned an “In-Flight” review of the Road Home Program, which will not be conducted by the RAND corporation.

Alan Gutierrez has conducted social media workshops, taught people about the power of social media, and launched projects like Squandered Heritage, a chronicle of the wholesale demolition of neighborhoods throughout city.

Alan Gutierrez worked with the local bloggers to create the 1st Annual Rising Tide Conference, worked with local nonprofit organizations to create the Festival of Neighborhoods where neighborhoods met to exchange intelligence on the recovery, and learn about the resources available for rebuilding. The Mid-City Bayou Boogaloo, a hybrid music and civic festival going into it’s third year.

Alan Gutierrez founded the New Orleans Wiki, which has served as a resource for issues like the New Orleans Public Schools and the Road Home Program, as well as acting as a collaborative authoring environment for the Mid-City Recovery Plan and the organization of various community events.

Alan Gutierrez leveraged his network in the organization of the 5,000 citizen march on City Hall to protest the wave of murders, and lack of criminal justice, in January of 2007.

Alan Gutierrez is currently working for the New Orleans Housing Resource Center in the Hollygrove neighborhood of New Orleans to establish a block captains program to disseminate and gather information through socialization and printed material. Additionally, to develop strategies for bring digital information into a neighborhood with limited access and familiarity with the Internet.

Alan Gutierrez is also convening the Road Home Unconference, the first in a series of participant driven conferences where citizens can collaborate to set the agenda for governance. In this environment, people are encouraged to explore any means available to them as law-abiding Americans to implement solutions and set the direction for their government.

From Instanley Great by Steve Levy, a story about the phrase coined by Steve Jobs, “Real Artists Ship”. The project mentioned in this article is the Macintosh.

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was Engelbart an artist? A prima donna — he didn’t ship. What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats — they didn’t ship. The final step of an artist — the single validating act — was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the twists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.

But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.

Real artists ship.

This is the definition of prudence for the knowledge worker.

I’ve created a sign up form for CHAT. This sign up form is based on software that I’ve developed, primarily Stencil, for those of you who want to look behind the sceens. For those of you who don’t, consider this a general purpose nonprofit or civic organization registration program. Please, help by suggesting features, and reporting programs in the comments of this post.

CHAT sent neighborhood representatives to testify before the U.S. Senate’s Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery. Listening to this intelligent and informed testimony on C-Span made me very proud. New Orleans resident Frank Silvestri addressed Senator Ted Stevens’ dismissive closing with fact and precision. I am proud to have the experience of working with these citizens who have become so savvy with information.