Last week, Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archives showed a collection of home movies, newsreels, and other film clips of Detroit he has collected and digitized. The audience at MOCAD had a lot of fun shouting out the names of places and people as they went by.

He handed out copies of the DVD and the work is under a Creative Commons license, so I’ve put up a copy online as a torrent.

You’ll need a torrent client to download it; I’d recommend Transmission for Mac or uTorrent for Windows. I’m looking for a place to upload it for streaming online.

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.

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.

Still thinking about social energy / water meters after a conversation at Berkman last year.

Here’s one example from a greenwash / happy-marketing-speak site. (you know there’s not much to a company if they only post renderings)

Someone (Gruber?) linked to a description of how an iPhone app grabs images of Sudoku puzzles and digitizes them. Probably wouldn’t be too hard to do the same for different kinds of [water/energy] meters. But it requires discipline on par with a non-Bluetooth pedometer and Walker Tracker: you’ve got to snap the photo or enter the numbers every day.

The other option is to install your own flow meter after the official meter — here’s a McMaster-Carr page  for costing. Set up an X-10 for wireless capture?

How social do you need to be? Lots of levels. Your private dashboard. Some sparklines on your homepage. A weekly email telling you how you compare to the other folks you know on [insert social network].

Use some central site to contribute anonymized stats from users with addresses verified (postcard method)?  Then sell the ostensibly aggregated data to a utility lobbyist for large profit later. How private is your water usage?

Lentils with orzo; tomatoes chopped small, parsley

Cubed sweet potato, apple, sunflower seeds, mint, avocado — adapted from the Feb 2009 Vegetarian Times

Beets, plain, sliced

All cold