Adding a link as a reference to a wiki page will automatically pull the organization that owns the link, the author, date published, etc.

So if you add: http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20090719/SUB01/907189993

The system will write:
THIS JUST IN: Land bank authority getting off the ground. Crain’s Detroit. 19 July 2009.

Or something similar. It will not make you type this:

<ref>R. Smith, "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 46 (April 1978): 44-6.</ref>

Like some other systems we might name.

Would you like a system that does that, and a lot else? Paypal a 1-year commitment of $45,000 to matthew.hampel@gmail.com.

Wayne County’s version of anti-Kelo (actually pre-Kelo)

Dumbbell tenements from a great Columbia University interactive page on apartment houses

Detroit Historic District Commission has a page about each historic building, including dates significance was recognized. (can I get these in a shapefile?)

Readings from The Power of Place.

You can transfer air rights.

I’m looking for a tool that will let the Semester in Detroit program easily accept and process applications from students and community partners online.

Here are the basic features I’m looking for:

• We can easily create an application with custom fields (Preferably with chunking. For example: personal information on one page, personal statement on the next, etc.)
• Applicants create an account and fill out the fields online
• Applicants can stop halfway through and finish the application later
• Applicants push a button to submit their application
• File uploads allowed
• We can get the data out

• Nice but not necessary: Some hidden fields for processing (like accepted/rejected/pending)

I wanted to download every agenda posted on the Detroit City Council website, but they were in different folders.

Happily, I there’s one page that lists all of them, so I wrote this short script:

import urllib2
import re
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup, SoupStrainer
import os
import time

for link in soup:
    link = base_url + link['href'] # build the full path to the PDF
    os.system("wget " + link)
    time.sleep(10) # wait a little while to be courteous

“Similarly, when a policy problem is divided in smaller parts, so that it can be distributed and worked on by collaborative teams, the drive toward openness and innovation begins.” (Wiki Government 33).

That’s a huge claim just sitting in the open. My first quibble is about the adjective collaborative – what does it mean to have a collaborative team? If it means that each team works with the others, how does this create “openness and innovation” instead of barter-style political compromise? (eg. pork barrel politics)

Second, distributing policy problems can lead to strife and division as much as centralized decisions. See, for example, the recent healthcare debate: everyone is “collaborating,” right? Someone still needs to make sense of all the noise.

Which leads to the question — who defines legitimacy and power for the distributed groups?

Openness and innovation are certainly not the necessary results of distributed work. There’s no reason why distributed policymaking will be more open. Even with a legal framework for sharing information, such as Freedom of Information or Open Meetings Acts, individual teams can still choose to go dark and not communicate with others.

Both terms are very vague — what is policy innovation, really? Can it not begin outside of distributed policy?

Having many pieces all over the place also makes it more difficult to see the big picture. In fact, it may be that it makes it harder, as interest group or individual experts stake their territory and claim issues/subtopics.

One of the things I’m looking at in my thesis is the Open Government movement & data culture, and I’m using some examples of published rhetoric to make sense of the field. As a member of the movement, the passages I come across generally seem straightforward, but this one stood out:

“Whenever we confront a problem, we have to ask ourselves: How do I parse and distribute the problem? How might we build feedback loops that incorporate more people?” (Harvey Anderson quoted in Noveck, Beth: Wiki Government, p. 32-3)

Yipes! It’s a deadly combination of political science loaded with managerial computer science jargon — parse, distribute, feedback loops. Perfectly intelligible to an insider, but not necessarily the best way to communicate a problem-solving method.

Lots of great courses in the Residential Courses for Winter ‘09. I’ll be in Detroit, so I won’t be able to take any of these, but here’s an abbreviated list:

Writing in the Real World: Best Practices of Journalism with Susan Rosegrant.

This intensive writing course is designed to give students a solid grounding in the tools and principles of journalism. Students will complete a variety of reporting assignments, ranging from short news pieces to in-depth articles to opinion pieces. Throughout, the emphasis will be on research- and interview-based writing that adheres to the journalistic principles of brevity, clarity, and objectivity. The course will also examine ethical issues, including the responsibilities inherent in being a rigorous reporter and writer.

Political Struggles in Mexico: Seminar and Field Study with Ian Robinson. Neoliberal transformations and popular responses to the same, including a field study in Chiapas or Oaxaca.

History of Computers and the Internet with Paul Edwards. Development, use, and impact of computers from the ancient world to the present.

3D Studio Course Exploring the Art of Burning Man with Jason Wright.

Students will learn accessible methods of forming materials through a series of projects, culminating in the design and material development of a work of public art that responds to the principles and challenges of the annual arts festival known as Burning Man. This class will explore the following concepts and challenges: building sustainable communities, radical free expression, self-reliance, art as a public and non-commercial activity, and the concept of a gift economy.

Found Instruments-Building, Design and Performance with Mike Gould.

Found instruments are everyday objects that are utilized or repurposed as musical instruments. This class identifies not only these everyday objects with which to perform and reconstruct, but also seeks hybrid instruments that combine found objects with instruments of old. The semester will commence with an overview of instrument categories, tunings, and some of the guiding physics behind instruments. This includes important composers and artists from the early 20th century to current artists and emerging technologies (such as using the iPhone as an instrument). The class goes as a group (and individually) to seek materials for designing and building instruments. The class also covers the basics of musicianship, composition, form, improvisation and playing as an ensemble.

Quantitatively Speaking with David Burkam

We begin with a discussion of what is typically meant by “quantitative reasoning,” and then focus on how such reasoning is implemented (sometimes appropriately, sometimes not). One of the main goals of the course is to learn “basic survival skills” for today’s number-intensive world. Using Best’s Damned Lies and Statistics and Huff’s How To Lie With Statistics, we learn how to critique conclusions drawn from a survey, a graph, or a table of numbers. We explore how statistics can reveal underlying linguistic patterns in prose and poetry, explore some of the vast research literature on gender and race differences (including gender differences in attitudes toward love), and read books like Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics.

Pills, Politics and the Public Good and Research Seminar on Ethics, Politics, and the Pharmaceutical Industry with Hank Greenspan

Major topics include: A perceived “ethics problem” within the pharmaceutical industry, critiques of industry’s relationship with the FDA, post-Vioxx concerns about drug safety, statutes shielding drug companies from civil liability (lawsuits), direct-to consumer advertising, direct-to-physician advertising (e.g., “drug reps,” etc.), industry-funded research and medical journals, the role of consumer and patient advocacy as responses to perceived problems.

Food, Land, and Society with Catherine Badgley

The course is an introduction to the modern food system at a time when many of its major trends are in flux. Course topics include the ecology of agricultural ecosystems, the cultural and environmental history of food production, and the current ecological and economic crises in agriculture, especially as they affect native species and ecosystems, climate change, rural communities, and the interconnections between food and agriculture in rich countries and rural livelihoods in the global south. The course integrates scientific, economic, and historical dimensions of modern food production, consumption, and food policies.

The semesterly “classes I am taking” post:

Networked Cities (Architecture, Urban Planning) with Malcom McCullough, on digital urban infrastructure and the like. Asking how we interact with the city in a networked world.

EECS 281 – Data Structures and Algorithms. Basic sorting tools, heaps, parsing, so on. Lots of fun, but they’re not teaching us automated testing in C++, which makes the whole thing a bit more of an adventure than I’d like.

SI 648, InfoCulture, a theory & methods class with Steve Jackson. “Explores key theoretical and methodological concerns in the history and sociology of information technology.” Great readings across a wide range of disciplines.

A senior research seminar in the Residential College with Charlie Bright; meeting once a week for a couple hours with others working on senior projects for the Social Theory & Practice concentration. I’m looking at new technologies and changing conceptions of local democracy and participation; more on that later.

Working on new tools for Residential College admissions and admin. Trying to get the online ship squared away for the next person when I bail for Semester in Detroit in January.

Helping coordinate a set of student groups at the Residential College; if you’re interested in: health, sexuality, sustainability, books & libraries, urban issues, Detroit, film, or community art, do get in touch. Lots of other little projects, like feeding a2docs, continue.

The New York Times divides tags into several groups:

(Des) = Descriptive subject terms assigned by Times indexers (subject headings)
(Geo) = Geographic locations
(Org) = Organizations (includes companies)
(Per) = People (persons)

We can do the same thing using a civic wiki.

You’ll need four categories: Subject Headings, Locations, Organizations, and People (we’ve already got people on Arborwiki). Doesn’t look like adding more complexity will be helpful.

Use the MediaWiki API to export each category as a list in whatever format you need. CSV, JSON?

The modify your publishing software’s tagging system. It probably has an auto-suggest feature. Use the API as the data source for the auto-suggest instead of the built-in tag list.

There you have it — a central database of important things that can be publicly negoitated by everyone who uses it it.

You don’t have to have a turf war over whose tags are the best (Your newspapers? Mine?). This makes it easier to track subjects over time — the same phrases will describe roughly the same things across local websites.

You can also automatically pull in the B-Copy from the wiki using the tag.