MESSAGE
| DATE | 2016-10-05 |
| FROM | Rick Moen
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [Hangout-NYLXS] Hey, Ruben! Plastic bag initiatives!
|
Quoting Ruben Safir (mrbrklyn-at-panix.com):
> On 10/05/2016 03:51 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> > Not sure it's _that_ good.
>
>
> It is. And it take s a lot of work.
The trick was, to do that gradually.
If you look at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/vote.html's eight entries
from June 2008 to Nov. 2016, you can see it started out with a
pre-election e-mail to my family and a couple of friends -- grinding
through the ballot pamphlet, relevant local newspaper articles, and so
on, to arrive at my takes on upcoming ballot issues. _And_, over the
same years, I was fleshing out
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/household.html .
Latter page has three things: 1. Quick-reference of who to call for
problems near my house (gas leaks, etc.). 2. Local news outlets.
3. Elected and appointed local officials.
That last category emerged from the question 'Who are all these agencies
and special districts?', especially after I became owner of real
estate in 2011. Part of being a citizen is to know what's going on
with all these people. E.g., I follow what's up with the local school
district and community college district even though we don't have kids,
because that's the future of the country, so it matters.
Having traced out who all these agencies and political entities are,
what they're about, what their election cycles are, etc., I then tied
that in to my election analyses.
By the time I got to
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/election-2016-06-07.html, the first
non-plaintext analysis in the series, I had a _lot_ of data from my
'household' page's change history to base it on. All I really needed to
do was suss out a few more procedural details and find the candidates'
Web sites.
Anyhow, I sort of hope this sort of thing catches on, because IMO
everyone who's a citizen really _ought_ to at least have local knowledge
like what I have on http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/household.html -- and
why not put it on a Web page, if you do? And once you have that,
why not do election analyses and publish those?
I'm serious when I say on those pages that the Official Voter
Information Pamphlets suck. Why not publish our own guides and do
better? It's pretty much exactly the sort of thing that the Web is for.
(Well, and cat photos. And pron.)
--
Cheers, "We reject: kings, presidents and voting.
Rick Moen We believe in: rough consensus and running code."
rick-at-linuxmafia.com -- Dave Clark, IETF (unofficial motto)
McQ! (4x80)
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