[Cadre-politics] status: mission

[Joshua Bonnett]

   I actually think that you would be less effective at helping people
develop job skills and move into the job market if that was your
stated goal. Part of what some people need to learn is that the job
isn't about them (lord knows i did). Or that most tech work isn't
about the tech skills of the individual, but the workflow of the
group. Working for the csl was a very enlightening experience, even if
those lessons only really sunk in years later.

  I do, however, think that what the csl is capable of developing is
greater than just a directory service or hosting. I have a few ideas,
but I don't have the time or the manpower to execute on any of them.
The best I can do is to try to provoke other people to do them.

Ideas:

   A reporting/tracking system for social services. Currently, social
workers carry around reams of poorly organized papers. I personally
had documents lost repeatedly during my dealings with them,
appointments missed by them, etc. if the paper copies stayed home and
the workers carried a eee or the like, things could be better
organized and it would be easier to keep tabs on kids. Yes, you would
probably need to hire some more experienced folks, if only to do the
security for this, but this is big enough that a largish grant could
possibly be gotten. Also you would have to fight with them to provide
computers, and outfit said computers with enough encryption to protect
such sensitive data, but just the copies these people make in a year
would get you a eee, retail even.

   A town meeting system. Right now, in much of the country, young,
busy people are underrepresented in local governments because of the
town meeting system, which is set up such that only people who have
nothing to do at 2pm on a weekday can make their opinion heard. A
simple local governance tool kit with some sort of simplified polling
with a ip geo data lookups to verify location to some degree Also a
digg like article system with the same geo data lookup, to fill the
idealized role of the quickly deteriorating local news paper system.
Make it easy and cheap to roll out for a given town, like setting up a
meetup is, then set it up in Lowell and try to get other people to set
one up for their town.

  That's all I can think of right now, but the opportunities to make a
difference are out there for someone who is looking to write software
for the common good. If you think big and get proposals into the right
persons hands, then you might just get to build something great.



On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Dan MacNeil <dan at thecsl.org> wrote:
> Two status messages in a single year is a record for
> 2009. (yey me!) Next week, I'll write about our struggle against
> Goliath and how we're rooting for the big guy to win. The week
> after, I'll probably write about formal parameters in Perl or how
> people are reacting us ending our hosting service.
>
> La Presidenta KZ and I are just back from a
> http://JerichoRoadProject.org board training cleverly disguised
> as a focus group. I learned (duh!) of research that says that
> easy to recruit board members tend to do more and better work
> than hard to recruit board members.
>
> Another useful bit was that many non-profit board members don't
> know the mission statement of the organization they govern.
>
> It's a bit embarrassing to admit how true this last bit is. In the
> last two months, (2) CSL board members approached me and said
> approximately:
>
>   "I think we're doing great work, Here is a $150
>    check. What is it that we do again? I know
>    don't host websites any more."
>
> Part of the problem is that sensible people would rather eat a
> plate of live cockroaches dipped in rat poison than attend a
> retreat to develop a mission statement. See:
>
>        http://web.mit.edu/jcb/humor/scott-adams-mgmt-consultant
>
> My brief period of bitterness with http://Habitat.org started
> when I learned the official mission statement was **not**:
>
>   Eliminate poverty housing from the face of the
>   earth, by making simple decent housing a matter
>   of conscience.
>
> ...which was what founder Millard Fullar kept telling people. It was
> something a lot more complicated which I still can't remember.
>
> Anyway lately at conferences, bars and weddings, I've been
> telling people:
>
>   We write open source software to run
>   web directories of social services.
>
>   You search on food, you get the locations
>   of food pantries, food stamps and WIC.
>
> ...This seems to go over a smoother lot better than the previous
> mumbo jumbo about how Richard Stallman:
>
>        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman
>
> ... is the greatest prophet since the old testament.
>
> Still this lacks vision. I'm thinking our medium term mission: (new! I'm
> just making it up now!) is:
>
>   To exploit talent
>   that would otherwise
>   be ignored.
>
> We've had our share of privileged, white, male programmers, but
> most of them have been a little bit out of the mainstream.
> (College dropouts, jobless, juvie jail alumni, "at risk",
> medicated, vegetarians,etc)
>
> We've always been about 50/50 male/female which is way more PC
> than tech industry as a whole. In the last 2 years 4/5 of our
> programmers have been Indian women. --not a group
> traditionally known for their position of power and influence.
>
> The use of the word "exploit" is deliberate. The goal is to get stuff
> done. Most of the people with talent that isn't ignored want $50/hr. It
> sure is nice to build skills and help move on to market rate jobs, but
> that is a side effect not a goal.
>
> Longer term, our secret mission/ulterior motive is of course to bring
> about the post scarcity society:
>
>        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity
>
> ...by making the values of the hacker sub culture (transparency,
> meritocracy, generosity, etc) the values of the entire culture.
>
> I suppose this will do until we hire an expensive consultant to
> obfuscate it.
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