The accessibility of online forums for public meetings

People often raise concerns about accessibility when the idea is raised to use internet technology for public meetings.
In my opinion, perceptions are lagging reality. In the latest 2006 large-scale internet study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 73% of US adults had internet access. The percent in the San Francisco Bay area was 83% back in 2003.
A decade ago, there were serious accessibility concerns. Today, internet access is mainstream. Physical attendance to a meeting poses greater accessibility barriers than online participation. Meetings in a building pose problems with people who have mobility impairments and sensory impairments, as well as people who have needs for child care or elder care.
Internet meetings surely need to be as broadly noticed as meetings in a physical building, and it would be important to accommodate people who have shared internet access for example at the library. Taking those considerations into account, I see internet forums as a way of broadening access, not limiting access.
I see local governments in this area doing a lot to try and stimulate civic participation. Local governments are also open to innovation in other areas such as green policy. So I would hope that some local governments would want to take the lead.

El Camino planning session lost in the weeds

On Thursday, I went to a meeting of the Menlo Park El Camino citizen advisory board. The consultancy hired by the city presented the material they were planning to use in the community feedback meeting this upcoming Thursday. It is supposed to be about defining a vision for Menlo Park. It skipped the vision stuff, and dived down into the details of implementing development plans. To the extent that there was any vision, it was concealed and coded. People were far to polite or politic to describe the visions that were implied by the plans.
There were two parts to the presentation. The first showed three different development scenario – minimal change, moderate change, and maximum change.
The “change” in the pictures, though, was new development and density. The first scenario showed a handful of new buildings, the second a few more, and the third showed more new, taller, bigger buildings, with a bunch of new parking lots too. There was nothing about the character and purpose of the buildings, the design of the buildings, and the way people at ground level will get around among the buildings.
And there was no supporting information to help people make these choices.There was no additional information about the impact on the number of residents, number of workers, how people would be travelling and getting around, impact on tax revenues, impact on schools.
The second part showed different plans for increasing sidewalk width, in three segments of El Camino. Should sidewalks be widened by taking space out of the building lot or the street?
What are the underlying assumptions in this presentation?
There are a bunch of empty and underutilized lots, and the open question is how much community approval there will be to build big buildings on them — not what sorts of buildings, and the character of community created by the buildings.
People want sidewalks. But sidewalks alone don’t make a neighborhood walkable! For a walkable neighborhood, you need a bunch of destinations that are close enough that people care to walk from place to place. And you need people who live and work close enough to walk, or to have a destination that is compelling enough that people will drive there and get out of their cars and walk around.
Community input is not being framed to solicit a vision for the city. Instead it is being framed to get citizen input on implementation details.
And even this input is missing a few important things. There was a Stanford representative on the panel. He said, “some of the lots are going to be occupied soon.” He didn’t say by whom and for what purpose. Ok, thanks.
What’s missing from this picture? The kinds of input we citizens can have on the process, other than being “pro-development” or “anti-development.”
Fortunately, several people on the panel raised the concern that the things that citizens we being asked to weigh in on were at the wrong level level of detail, and missing key information that will help people formulate opinion. I don’t know whether the consulting firm got the point, or if they did, have time to make the changes that would spark a more meangingful public conversation.
There were also some interesting clues about the points of view in the community. One man on the panel scoffed at the idea to add more sidewalks, since El Camino is noisy and nobody wants to walk anyway. A man in the audience talked about improving nightlife in Menlo Park, and creating more of a village.
There are at least three contrasting visions for Menlo Park:
* maximal suburbia. Minimal new development, maximal new parking lots, and expand the roads for faster traffic. Pay homage to the needs of pedestrians by adding flyover bridges and walkways, but don’t make anything anybody would walk to
* urban village. Add mixed use, transit oriented development that draws people to live, work, and play, and walk or bike when moving around town. Be a place that people want to come to.
* whatever developers can get away with. Build buildings, as big as possible, wherever they will fit, however you can get approval for them.
It would be interesting to have this conversation, but it’s pretty well hidden in the cross-section diagrams of sidewalks.

Open government geekery

So, is it legal to use a web forum or internet chat for official public discussion in California?
The plot thickens. I asked informally, through city council folk in two Bay Area cities, and got conflicting responses from city attorneys. One says it’s illegal. Another says it’s permitted but recommends that officials use the tools cautiously. And neither has provided citations in case law or administrative ruling.
Point to point email is explicitly prohibited under California’s Brown Act, which requires conversation among a quorum of public officials to occur only in public meetings. But web forums are different — unlike an email, which is visible only to the sender and recipients, tools like blogs, forums and wikis are visible to the public.
Teleconferences are permitted under the Bagley Keene act. What about web conference and chat, which are like teleconferences without a phone number, and with or without voice?
In search of some more solid legal grounding, I sent a question to these California open government watchdogs. If I don’t hear from them directly, I’ll network in.
The new tools are great ways to broaden public discourse. If they’re not legal, they should be. The first step is to find out where the law stands.
I discovered another opportunity for fixing, listening to Jon Udell’s interview of Carl Malamud on IT Conversations. Malamud’s activism was behind the publication of Edgar, and many other initiatives to make public data publicly available. In the interview, he mentioned that Congressional Committee meetings are webcast but not recorded and archived. Well, that’s wrong. Sounds like a lovely opportunity for some blog activism, sometime after election season.

Social software as a collaborative game

Ralph Koster gave an interesting talk at etech about lessons from game design for social software. There were several things that seemed right and useful.
* challenge. Overcoming challenges and learning are key to fun. Games are designed to provide a successive series of challenges. By contrast, the software design paradigm is focused on ease of use. This is right for an ecommerce site that a user uses once, but is wrong for applications that people use and learn over time.
* contextual interfaces. in a game world, the monster acts differently if you approach from the front or behind. Game designers create information architectures that present different behavior depending on context. By contrast, the software IA paradigm is about consistency.
The talk was also missing a few things, I think. His psychological model was individualistic. It was all about the individual player, and didn’t talk about the social factors – decoration, storytelling, came creation. And his social model was purely competitive. “Of course,”, he says, “people are playing the game to win. ” But people play games with a variety of motivations, and social software includes ways to play individually and collaboratively, in addition to competitively.
This topic is really interesting and needs some more fleshing out.

I liked sxsw anyway

SXSW interactive was big this year. Among the people I knew, several were dissatisfied with the atmosphere (the metaphor was flocks of grackles like the birds that make a racket in Austin) and the lack of content depth. SXSW is never the single best place for content — there are more in-depth conferences — but it is a good place to get an array of medium-level information that is of interest to web designers and developers.
Still, I enjoyed it and got a good amount out of it. I went to sessions on a few topics that I was interested in, but hadn’t been following in depth, and got some good substance plus great references. I had good conversations with several people I was happy to have met. And connected with my Austin friends.

Degreasing Social Network Portability

One of the liveliest topics at sxsw was social network portability. In a sesson on the topic, the panelists
panelists, including David Recordon, Chris Messina, and Joseph Smarr were unanimous that the value proposition of social network portability is to enable data to flow freely between services. The metaphor they used was “vaseline for the web.”
There are any number of situations where users may not want their social graphs and identities combined without friction (health support group, religious groups and other subcultures, political groups, etc). Brad Templeton, EFF board chair, got up and talked about privacy, but his message seemed to be falling on deaf ears.
After the session, Chris Messina wrote a post that may be helpful. He suggested stripping down relationships to rel=me and rel=contact. With that, finer-grained denominations of relationships, actions (notifications, publication, invitation, sharing), and permissions can be handled at the application level. This would be a very good thing.

What are the barriers to a connected transit system?

I talked to a board member of one of the Bay Area transit agencies who had some interesting insights into the situation. From his perspective, the path toward improved connectivity starts very small.
The technical reason for poor connectivity in his region is that the buses are not on the same schedule as the train. For example, trains run every 20 minutes and buses every 15 (it could be the other way around, I don’t remember) But in order to synch up, the bus agency would need to run more buses, and that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. They can only cost-justify that with additional ridership.
How to get additional ridership? They went to their marketing person and asked her to run a marketing campaign. She said, “what can I market, the buses are always late. The best thing you could do would be to improve on-time performance.” So they sent trouble-shooters to the branches, to understand the reasons buses run late and fix the problems.
So, from his perspective, the single biggest thing the agency can do to build constituency for better connectivity is to get the buses to start running on time.

The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century

There is a fascinating book that I don’t think has been written yet, on the social history of statistics. This book isn’t it.
The Lady Tasting Tea by David Salsburg is entertaining for a geeky value of entertaining, but it doesn’t live up to its subtitle. The book is a set of biographical sketches of the people who pioneered statistical techniques such as analysis of variance, significance tests, sampling methods. It mentions a few sentences on the impact of stats on experimental design, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other scientific topics, but doesn’t go into any depth on the impact on scientific practices or discoveries.
The anecdotes about the careers of the pioneering statisticians raise interesting questions about the relationship between statistics and modern industry. The book’s heroes work in agriculture, measuring yield and pesticides; industrial process control, monitoring the production of beer and cotton. They also contributed to social policy, working out theory and politics of eugenics; measuring economic activity for the new deal.
It’s interesting reading these stories in the context of the debacle of modern industrial food production. Controlling the variations in batches of Guinness led to the bland hegemeny of Budweiser; the study of yields in England led to the pesticide and fertilizer treadmill, soil decline, and big dead zones in the ocean. Chester Bliss’ pesticide experiments showed that at any dose of pesticides, some bugs survived. In the short run, his calculations led to effective doses; in the long run, to pesticide-resistant bugs. Incremental progress and quality control that seemed so rational and positive turned out to have counterproductive results.
It’s interesting that the heroes of Salsburg’s book are so obscure compared to the scientists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers of the last two centuries. Statistics appears as the servant to science and politics and industry. In the 20th century there’s an aspect of Tom Lehrer’s apolitical rocket scientist Werner von Braun — “once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down.”
The story I’d really like to read would be a comprehensive social history of statistics — the relationship between statistics and the evolution of modern society and industry. There are some interesting-looking books about Eighteen Century public health and the emergence of statistical thinking in the 19th century. How did the trends continue into the 20th century? A number of Salsburg’s subjects created departments of statistics in the mid-20th century, presumably to meet a growing need. It would be interesting to see a graph of where those students went to work in industry and government. Was the answer just “everywhere”? Or is the adoption of statistical methods uneven, and does this tell any interesting stories?
Summary: Salsburg’s book adds some interesting biographical spice to names and terms that many people know only from menu items in math programs. But don’t expect in-depth history.

So what’s this peripheral canal thing, anyway?

The reason I read up on California water history was to understand the background of this past season’s political debate. Fine geeky recreation. Radio programs said that Governor Schwartzenagger’s proposal to restore the delta was a recap of the “peripheral canal” project which was politically defeated in the 1980s. Ok, so what was the peripheral canal. Why was it defeated. Was it good or bad then? Is it good or bad now? Would it restore the delta, and why is the delta in such terrible shape, anyway?
So, here’s my summary attempt to answer these questions. Bear in mind that I just got to California and read a few books. These opinions reflect that highly imperfect knowledge.
Why is the Delta in terrible shape? Largely because fresh water is being siphoned off in massive quantities. On an average year (using 1980 to 92 to calculate the average), about 26 million acre-feet of water flowed from the Delta’s sources, and 5 million of that gets diverted to farms and cities in central and southern california. Take that much fresh water out of an estuary evolved for a shifting mix of salt and fresh water, and the ecosystem declines. Other reasons include pollution from farm and city runoff, and the “flood prevention” system that keeps the area from being regularly recharged by spring floods, and keeps houses dry for the two million people who currently live in the region.
So, would the peripheral canal restore the delta? Well, the governor’s version did have funding for some environmental restoration, but in sum, it takes more water out of the delta. Taking more water out doesn’t seem like the right direction.
Why did the peripheral canal fail in the 80s? For the most part, Southern and Central Californians were in favor of it and Northern Californians were opposed. But the dynamics of the fateful 1982 election were more complicated. Some supporters stopped fighting for the canal, because the initiative also included protection for some wild rivers. The water lobby got greedy and opposed the wild river measure as a bad precedent.
Why are California water politics so stuck, and so environmentally destructive (This is my own inference based on spotty information and could be horribly wrong). Agriculture, which uses 80% of the state’s water, is a large, $30+ billion dollar industry with very large players, and seems to have the legislature well bought. Through a combination of federal and state programs, farms get subsidized water at 1/100th the the price paid in cities, and so agriculture has minimal incentive to conserve. There is a historical alliance between southern california’s cities and central california’s agricultural districts to take more water than the environment can bear.
So, why has Arnold’s plan failed so far? It is described as a partisan issue, with democrats opposing the plan to build a peripheral canal, plus dams and reservoirs. But how did the dynamics map to the North/South, urban/rural divides? Hard to say without doing some more looking into the issue.
Is there any way to get agriculture to waste less water? Much of the farm water subsidies are federal, and the structure of the Senate makes that equation politically tough. State incentives to transition from wasteful methods would be helpful, but not as much as needed. In California, would it be possible to break the historical alliance between Southern California cities, which have done a spectacular job of conservation in recent decades, and probably lean more blue and green, agriculture, which continues to waste? Has this happened already, and is this dynamic contributing to the woes of Arnold’s water plan? I have no idea.
pls. After I read a few long, juicy books, I found this cogent summary, which provides the big picture view of California water use and water troubles. If you’re curious and don’t want to read long books, start here.