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
# define the URL where all the links are:
url = "http://www.detroitmi.gov/legislative/CityClerk/2009add_cal.htm"
base_url = "http://www.detroitmi.gov/legislative/CityClerk/"
html = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
# only select links with 'pdf' in the href
pdf_links = SoupStrainer('a', href=re.compile('pdf'))
soup = BeautifulSoup(html, parseOnlyThese = pdf_links)
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.
