When it comes to parking a bike in Olympia and what the city council thinks about it, it gets all complicated.
Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 130 of 176)
Over a few days and about a dozen emails, I’ve put together a short piece on the three way race for chair of the Pierce County Democrats over at Washblog. I suspect a lot of subtext going on between the candidates, they seem to say the same things, but there are differences.
In the comments, there is a start to a great conversation on IRV.
Oly School Board member Rich Nafziger makes a great point about how perception and reality are different, and can cause real harm to the rest of us (I’m about two months late on this post, by the way):
Between a horribly managed school board meeting where the Seattle School Board President allowed activists to hurl racist ephitats as the Superintendent and a gutless decision to back down on a well thought out strategy to down size schools to meet enrollments declines, came a major blow to efforts to increase public funding for education in Washington State.
The next day, the board’s incompetence led to the resignation of Seattle’s highly regarded superintendent, Raj Manhas. The board made no effort to encourage him to stay.
Seattle School may only make up 5% of the state’s 1,000,000 school children, but it’s influence on public perception goes way beyond its numbers. Every board meeting gets covered by Seattle TV, Radio and newspapers which reach nearly every television set, radio and porch step in the entire state. While news of local school board meetings in Belleveue, Lake Washington or Federal Way may carry by word of mouth or from student to parent, Seattle Schools get the big and regular coverage on the dinner time TV. And we are all paying the price.
It is true, whatever happens in Seattle is covered with more intensity than any other place. Had the Mardi Gras fiasco of a few years ago happened in Yakima or Bremerton, it would have been forgotten in a few weeks. But, with live tape from downtown Seattle, it kept us going for the better part of a year.
Most school boards operate professionally, without fuss and take the education of students seriously. But, since they don’t meet within blocks of Fischer Plaza, they don’t merit the same attention. Granted, Seattle is one of the largest school districts, but not larger than all the districts in Pierce County I’d bet.
Anyway, its still great to have a local elected official blogging.
No one else had so far, so I wrote a little thing about how Will mistook some stats from the Pew Report on Bloggers in his column from last week.
The fatal flaw of the Democratic Party’s Party Builder social networking platform is that you can prevent people from finding you. On a list of people registered at Party Builder close to zip code 98501 only three people show up inside Thurston County.
On the Thurston County Democrats group that I manage, there are five members. Two don’t have names (just “Democrat in Olympia WA”) because they aren’t friends of mine and they have decided to let other people know who they are.
When you sign up for Party Builder you are given the option to remain unknown to anyone else on the system, aside from your friends. This will end up killing Party Builder.
If you can remained unsearchable, unbrowsable, uninvitable, and unseen in a social network, you simply don’t exist. And, if a lot of people choose not to be seen within a network, no actual social networking is going to happen. No one is going to message anyone else, no one is going to read anyone’s blog, no one is going to be invited to any groups or become friends who wouldn’t already be friends because of an offline relationship.
And, by the way, if you join a social network and just want to be left alone, then I have no idea what to tell you.
1. I’ve sustained five concussions. You may know this about me actually, since I usually mention it during the “my worst injury” discussions. But, why not start a “five” list with something that has happened to me five times?
2. I once wrote a book. Not a nanowrimo book, but a honest to goodness, from beginning to end book. I only know a handful of people who have actually read it, and no copies exist anymore. I was much younger then, its painful to even thing about it. I still love the title though.
3. Pat Lennon once handed me a baseball bat. That is something else I don’t have anymore. Of course, it was cracked at the handle.
4. On my first try fly fishing, I caught a sea run cutthroat trout. I haven’t caught anything fly fishing since.
5. My first position on any newspaper’s masthead was as the sports editor for the DSU Hornet. Note to college newspapers: Do Not name your paper after your school’s mascot. It is simply confusing.
I posted a couple of ideas (here and here) on some bylaw changes for the Thurston County Democrats. We’re supposed to have a meeting in early January to cover whatever changes we want in the bylaws.
The first is pretty substantive, it would give a vote to any paid member who participates at a certain level. Like an earned vote.
The second is more philosophical in nature.
Many times when a PCO suggests a particular course of action, another PCO will counter that it doesn’t mesh well enough with our major goal of “electing Democrats.” Usually the course of action is something nice, like sending a check to the food bank or something else equally nice. While it may make the world a better place, it doesn’t “elect Democrats” in the same manner that buying ad space or donating to campaigns does, so its out the door.
The sad thing is, local political parties used to be about more than “electing Democrats.” It used to be that local parties and Democratic clubs were “political organization one day in the year; … a charitable-benevolent fraternal organization three hundred and sixty five.”
I think we should get back to something more like that, an organization that is good by being good. Let the various campaign committees be campaign committees.
More on this kind of thinking at Blue Tiger Democrats.
Responses from my city to my email (kind of repeated in this post below). They seem pretty open to the idea, but of course tech questions abound.
Even if they don’t do it as the normal way of doing things, it would be great to supplement the paid movie postings with additional free ones.
Mayor Mark Foutch:
Emmett, those look like great suggestions to me and we’ll ask our staff look into them. As a 65-year-old perpetually three technology generations behind current apps, I’m continually amazed at the explosion of new options out there. I’m glad we have both a great professional City staff AND a citizenry expert in subjects from Art to Zoology, and willing to share their expertise with us.
Thanks a lot.
Mark Foutch
Mayor
Cathie Butler, the city’s communications manager:
Hi, Emmett – wanted to let you know I’ve passed your email along to
Shawn Ward who is the City’s IT Manager. This is way beyond my
knowledge of systems. FYI, the Granicus is more then video streaming;
it’s also the system we use to produce Council meeting minutes and post
both the minutes and Council agenda documents so they are connected with
the streaming video. Cathie
Councilmember Joe Hyer:
Emmett –
I think the tech folks got forwarded your email to respond … but I do know a couple of things that explain it better – it wasn’t just video streaming we got with grannicus, it also does the minutes in an easier way, which has cost us thousands in overtime for staff to do in the past … and links the minutes with the video.
We also have to have guaranteed level of service for citizens, and the free services can’t offer access and reliability…guaranteed.But I think the real kicker is the time savings in MINUTES preparation — the added bonus was the ability to video stream…
See ya soon,
Joe
Something like this I just sent to the city council:
This year the City of Olympia spent $20,000 (following a $45,000 set up fee) to stream videos of our city council meetings, along with some other videos, online. This seems to be a waste of money to me.
Google Video, or some other similar free service, seems like a better option.
Yesterday I cut out of one of the streamed videos and educational portion on the city’s budget (available here). Instead of wading through the streaming function on our city’s website, I decided it would be better that this portion of the movie available in a much simpler format.
TCTV actually posts many of its videos online at Google Video. The advantage, other than cost, to use such a service is that once the movies are up, they can be shared. Bloggers can embed them into their own sites and the links are much easier to email than the current service.
All of the video files the city produces could be available online in totally public and shareable format, rather than the expensive and proprietary fashion they are now. Even if the city keeps it contract with the firm it uses the stream the videos, they should also upload movies to places like Google Video.
They haven’t scheduled a date yet, but Radio Open Source is digging on my idea for a show. Baseball and Japan.
Originally miffed that the hated Red Sox were going to get their hands on the primo Japanese pitcher this year, I started reading The Meaning of Ichiro and became even more enthralled. Written by the same guy who wrote You Gotta Have Wa, it brings the idea of Being America, Being Japan and Being Baseball to entirely new places.
Emmett O'Connell
@emmettoconnell@olympiatime.com
1,759 posts
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