Alan Gutierrez

Lance Hill sent me a link to another article by Adam Nossiter in the New York Times. Nossiter is off drinking at the trough of Uptown’s conventional wisdom in his article Whites Take a Majority on New Orleans’s Council.

There is a post at Think New Orleans called Is Adam Nossiter a Tool? That question stands. I don’t want to write a new article about the matter, but rather have people continue to discuss the issue under the existing article. What I really want is a website that will allow me to feature this article once again, or rather bring this subject up in the context of the conversations that took place before. It is very important to preserve both the existing discussion and the timeline of events.

Which is something that is common to most of my civic writing. I do want to encourage participation in the conversation, so I want to resurrect the existing conversation, with the exisiting participants. Most people subscribe to email notifications of comments of a particular post. To notify them that Adam Nossiter is banging on about race and quoting Greg Rigamer, I need to continue the discussion under the previous post.

Although, I’m pleased that WordPress is now performing acceptably, both blogs and Wikis fail to make my efforts in New Orleans easier.

My expectations were frightfully low. At the outset, saying that if you talk about levees, you’ll have the mike yanked, doesn’t seem like he’d have us talk about anything that I’d really care about, because I care so much about those levees.

But then, I’d resigned myself. They are having a conference. A catered conference at the Pere Marquette Hotel. A conference on poverty. Fine. I’m here. It’s not so odd.

The outburst? We’re listening to people speak, one person after another. There are questions from the audience. Guess what? Jeane Nathan drew my applause. Go figure. There were a lot of great moments from New Orleanians.

I’m ready to say something nice about the format, so I ask to speak. Unfortunately, while I was waiting I had an impulse control failure.

Our master of ceremonies introduces a woman from the Allstate Foundation. She talks about her work alleviating poverty. At Allstate they are always exploring new ways to alleviate poverty.

Everyone around me is rolling their eyes and squirming in their seats. It had to be said.

Pay your claims!

The fellow standing next to me sits me down. I lost my chance to speak. You might as well thank me for having it end on time.

The townhall roadies were upset at my outburst. One woman, at the end, a young and professional woman who’d been working some sort of sound board, stares at me in deathly earnest, and asks, are you from ACORN?

She had something to say to me. I wouldn’t hear it. Allstate is bullshit. You gaffed letting that woman speak here. While State Farm in indicted for RICO in Mississippi in the same week, no less. Big mistake. You should have done your homework.

I’m not from ACORN. I’m from Mid-City.

• Another Legal Victory Against Allstate.
• Allstate Agent 007: Gene Harper.
• Shell Game of Allstate Adjusters.
• Allstate Denied Claim We Never Made.

Later, the fellow who sat me down turns out to be from the organization, and was not much flustered by the outburst. Nice fellow. Which makes me feel that, like any organization, there are some people within it that are more comfortable with the human aspect of humans than most of my contemporaries.

It took me a while to learn myself.

The chatter afterwards was very good, which indicates that material was very good. There is a lot to learn from that particular audience. They are not afraid to talk about race, they are not afraid to relate their own experiences, and most of all, they are all New Orleanians who have an intimate knowledge of government, city, state and federal, as well as the quasi-governments they’ve formed to fill the void, to get things done.

I’d like to follow the Road Home Unconfernece with a HOUSING, FULL STOP Unconference, that can address the one issue that makes us all feel like we’re living on the fringes, from Lakeview to Treme, from Carrollton to New Orleans East.

Ray Ramsey, you wanted to get people talking about poverty. Here I am making your conference a success. I hope the organizers can see that.

Spent the afternoon and evening at Sound Cafe. Tweeting on occasion. Developing a filter for Twitter and RSS. Not in code. An emotional filter. Something along the lines of, looknig Finally, created a forum for Civic Intelligence Camp, that is merely a blog post. Need to simmer on how to organize, but considering how web savvy the key organizers are, might as well practice what I preach. I’m going to go by Bacchanal and see if they’re doing the chef in the courtyard thing so I have something worth Tweeting. Didn’t get all that I wanted done done, but the day is ending. I cannot keep it from ending. Tomorrow, I start fund raising. Need my rest.

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.

The reason the Wiki doesn’t work for me is because of the concept of neutrality. I’m interested in using the Internet to further establish a goverment that is by the people. The concept of a Wiki as the democratization of information doesn’t sit right, because information is ideally passive. Democracy is about opinion, decisions, and comprmise. There is nothing neutral about it.

Web 2.0 is about arbitrary user bases that you can explore, as opposed to the specific user base that you may need to organize.

Is this that stuff they call stucco?

When people look at New Orleans online, they see festivals, St. Charles and the French Quarter. This is because, most of the photographs taken of New Orleans, and subsequently shared online, are taken by tourists. There are the adventurous and artistic sorts that live in the Marigny and Upper 9th Ward for sultry favors, but that is a neighborhood that is gentrifying, not recovering, per se.

It is a case study in the 20/80 rule.

The 20% of neighborhoods that was survived the flood are taking 80% of the photographs.

For those Americans that participate in social media, who search the web to see how things are doing, New Orleans looks fine. Everyone is wearing beads and watching parades.

Take pictures of your neighborhood, so that people can see the 80% that is suffering a slow and mismanaged recovery. I know that it is difficult to take pictures of people, but pictures of people are important. Folks can see that we do not spend our days in beads.

This is how it is done. I walk with the camera out. I take pictures conspicuously. When I walk past someone, I say “Hello. How are you?”. “Fine. How are you?” “I’m fine. Just out taking pictures.”

There is plenty to talk about with your neighbors. You talk about the Road Home Program, ask if part of their house was stolen and sold for scrap, talk about contractors, or ask what businesses have returned in the area. Ask them if they are active in their neighborhood organization, or if they even know that they have one.

If you have a neighborhood organization, hand out a card or flyer.

Oddly enough, I’m part of the problem. I live in the Sliver by the River, in a neighborhood that is and was high and dry. When I take pictures of the recovery, I have to travel to do so.

I left City Council Chambers yesterday to take a walk with my camera. I ended up in Mid City.

I get a lot of email messages that are public information. Easier than blogging them, would be to bounce them to an email database. The email database would keep the email in tact, keep the headers in tact, so that people could see that the message indeed came from an official of the city or the state. It might be necessary to obfuscate the sender’s email address, or hide recipient’s email addresses, but the email-ness of the message should be conveyed. Then you’d have something to which you can link.