Alan Gutierrez

I’m in email triage. I am applying my new habit. My new habit for email triage is to tag. This is the processing step of my getting things done regimen. (Getting Things Done is an organizational principle for people who work in information and communications heavy fields.)

Today, I come across an email message from an academic and I take pause. Why don’t I care about helping academics with their social research on New Orleans, I wonder? They are kind enough students. They mean well.

Certainly, there are good friends in New Orleans who’s work I assist in any way I can, who work for or study at a university. I’m referring to the academics that rotate in and out of our crisis.

When someone writes me asking for help with the Road Home, housing, or for a connection into the neighborhood organizations when they are a neighbor, I take the time to answer, as best I can. This is my mission.

However, someone who doesn’t have connections and is turning to me for connections, for the purpose of a paper, doesn’t motivate. That’s an email that sits in my inbox. Now, finally, it triggers the business sense that I’m struggling to develop.

Perhaps it’s common sense of some kind. (I have common sense, I just don’t listen to it.)

Tim Ryan of NOVAC sent me an email yesterday looking for technical assistance on a grant. I called immediately. A successful local nonprofit needs technology input to raise money. Common sense says that this is perfectly aligned with my professional objectives. Common sense says pick up the phone and call.

Fortunately, I have emails that are just that actionable, that I can place in contrast to the request to do public relations work for a research paper. An inbox is one imperative after another. It helps you tackle that inbox if you know how to say no to a bulk of those calls to action.

Getting over it, and going pro, means that you must realize that helping is not question of equity. Not every request needs to be fulfilled. You can tell when a request should be fulfilled, because it tugs on your sense of decency. That is the mission oriented stuff.

Otherwise, it’s all business. (Ergh. Something about that sentiment makes me wince. I am an approval junkie.)

At second glance, the academic seeks interviewees. In return, I’m offered the research for any projects. That sounds like doing work and in return I get more work.

I don’t know that we have time for more interviews that do not lead directly to material help for our recovery.

How do you decide to help an academic with their research?

I was invited to a meet and greet with Dr. Ed Blakely last Saturday. I’ve not had time to write about it until now.

The meeting started with M.T. Sanyika and Shelia Danzy talking about how we are going to start to press for a recovery implementation. These were people who were part of the summer planning, so it was people from flooded neighborhoods, including Mid-City, Northwest Carrollton, the Historic 7th Ward, the Historic 9th Ward, and all over the East.

Talking about an implementation was heartening. We were told that primarily, recoveries need unity, and that we are all begining to display that unity. I can’t quite describe how they were hitting every cord, presenting funding matricies, where neighborhoods had detailed each park, school, commerical development, and how much each cost. It was recovery buffet. Just add political will.

For example, Steven Dominick said that plans for parks are not pie in the sky. If the park has been used as a FEMA trailer park, then the park will be remediated by the federal government to return it to a park, when the FEMA trailers are removed. This is where you start the funding the park, and use your political will to find other sources of federal and state funding.

Blakely started out talking about how he is spending a billion dollars of his own money to build a development in California. It was strange. It’s nice to be a player, but building a development in California is not the same thing as leading a recovery in New Orleans.

He talked about the 1991 Oakland fires, his recovery experience. It sounded good. Turn a Safeway into a reccovery center. Call your friend at Allstate to get people settled out when they walk in the door. That sounded reassuring.

He talked about basing the recovery around job creation, which resonnated with me. He spoke ill of the tourist industry, which really struck a cord. Spoke highly of medical and information technology. He made a case for New Orleans as a port city, gateway to Latin America, and a cultural center that uses the Internet to export that will begat the next Pixar with all this raw talent.

Then he said that we are not going to Washington, we are going to New York, which sucked the air out of the room. It was deflating. We need to take this to Washington this year.

Political will.

Cynthia Willard-Lewis spoke before Blakely. She was on message with recovery implementation, rather than planning, and afterwards, I told her that I for one, believe that Washington should be engaged.

“I’m like bad grass. Because it never dies. You gotta pull it up and even though you do, it still grows back. I don’t care how hard something looks, I’m still going to try.” from Recovery remains slow… via A City of Bad Grass at Da Po’ Blog.

I’ve been invited by Phil Gerbyshak to going the 100 bloggers project. I’m going to use that platform to draw attention to Think New Orleans.

Think New Orleans is on a mission to remove barriers that prevent civic information from getting out into the real deal web.

Civic groups in New Orleans have a bad habit of using chain e-mail messages. When they do use the web, a lot of information is posted to forums that are frame based and cannot be indexed by Google, or on static web sites where information is moved or deleted.

There are only a handful of forums that have syndicated feeds.

How does Think New Orleans address this? By setting folks up with blogs, or by posting their information to the Think New Orleans group blog.

The Think New Orleans blog itself hosts digitially recorded audio of community meetings. It’s a way to extend the civic discussion and to maintain a record of what’s been discussed.

In any medium, I’ll be banging on about this.

What is spatial annotation? It’s when you leave a marker in the real world that associates a place or thing with a resource on the Internet. The projects that pop to mind are Yellow Arrow and Grafedia. (The latter is icky because it involves grafiti.)

Through a blog called Elastic Space, I found this comprehensive list of existing spatial annotation projects. Far to many to survey at once, though the two that seem most applicable to the French Quarter appear to be the Blue Plaque Project and Talking Street. The former uses historical the historical markers that already adorn London, the latter includes spiffy content with celebrity voice talent.

This idea was hatched by John Gregory of the Quarter Crawl, by the way. He’s got a database of places and events that he built when he published his printed “What’s Open?” business directory. Now that everything is pretty much open, he’s thinking about new applications. We’ve been talking about how New Orleanians use technology, and the cell phone is the client of choice.

What would a person hear through their cell phone? How would they interact?

• Immediate recommendations on which venues to visit, where to eat, etc.
• Posting photographs of events or venues, creating a group photo blog for each venue.
• Tour material, information describing an annotated building or landmark.

As I’ve noted in the past. New Orleans really has no need for social networking software. They already have excellent social networking hardware. The meetings, restauraunts, cafes, bars, and corkboards do for New Orleans what blogging, Google and Craig’s List do for ex-urbia.

Effective social networking software for New Orleans would recognize the value that this hardware provides, and find a way to greate a digital parallel.

Any links or insights into using mobile technology for social networking are greatly appreciated.

Update: Phone Connected

It works. I’m going out to Cosomo’s to meet with John. He just gave me a number to call, and there was the Quarter Crawl, for the evening, in telephony. I’d share the number with you, but it doubles as John’s fax line. He’ll have a new line in the coming week.

We’re going to brainstorm on the menu design, and I’m hoping that I’ll get to hack out the gecoding and directions, a routing solution for walking. It appears as through some clever Postgres hacks can produce a routing solution, but I’m out the door now.

Update: Lat/Long Lookup

Now I need to figure out how to find a latitude and longitude using a telephone. The trick is to ask the person for one of four things. A business name, an intersection, or a street name and number. The remaining option is to ask if they’ve proceeded to the last place recommended, if they are following some sort of tour.

I’m going to try to knock this out with Postgres, as a REST based web service.

Update: Telephonizer

Here’s a Java class that turns an American English string into a string of digits that matches the pattern one would key into a US telephone to represent that string. Wha? It takes a word and matches it as best it can to a telephone keypad.

• Telephonizer.java
• TelephonizerTestCase.java

This links to source control, so you’ll always have the latest.