User:Alan
From New Orleans Wiki
Creator the New Orleans Wiki. Executive Director of Think New Orleans. Citizen's Public Safety Initiative
[edit] Alan Gutierrez
910 Esplanade Ave Apt 5, New Orleans, LA
504 717 1428
alan@thinknola.com
http://blogometer.com/
I live in New Orleans, LA and Ann Arbor, MI.
I am a computer programmer.
Languages: C, C++, Modern C++, Java, XSLT, Perl, SQL (Oracle, DB2, Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, Access), JavaScript, Bash, Pascal, Visual Basic, Ruby.
Platforms: Linux, Solaris, OS X, Win32, Win16, Palm OS.
Add resume, or create an example of resume here, including speaking engagements, and publications.
[edit] Junk Wiki Pages
[edit] Notes
- Harry Howards, Wikis, Blogs, and Social Media, Podcasting.
- Inviting people to use it.
[edit] Sub Pages
Read here to try to figure out what I'm doing.
- User:Alan/Software Development
- Notes on software under construction.
- User:Alan/Development Use Cases
- Use cases for applications in development.
- User:Alan/JavaScript
- A JavaScript reference.
- User:Alan/CSS
- A CSS reference.
- Web Publishing 101
- A lesson plan for web publishing.
- Think New Orleans Project
- Think New Orleans project description.
- Grants and Funding
- A Wiki article about grants and funding.
Editing Workspace - Dev Blog - Pet Rescue Inbox - ThinkNOLA Developer - Development Use Cases
[edit] Communities
Community Guide for Xavier, American Can, Uptown, Metairie.
You can call me at 734 662 5787 with information about the communities I asist.
You can alan@engrm.com e-mail me with information about the communties I assist.
[edit] Projects
Katrina Villages a plan for mid-term (3 to 12 month) resettlement for displaced Hurricane survivors [1]
[edit] Incoming
- http://neworleansmusiciansclinic.org/
- http://www.wecandoittogether.org/
- The mission of Think New Orleans is to increase civic participation by teaching citizens how manage information and apply the best practices of knowledge work to civic engagement. Knowledge work means working with information, often times raw information that arrives with no tasks defined or clear outcomes requested. More than computer skills, we teach people to write effectively, prepare for meetings with agendas, and how to collaborate in ways that build consensus and resolve conflict.
- A resident who might have checked email on occasion before the storm, is now faced with a volume of information, that only seems to flow from the top down. Think New Orleans has taught people how to use the Internet to publish their own information, how to use it as a decision making network, how to publish their own information, how to organize meetings and arrive prepared, and how to contribute to their neighborhood when their schedule allows.
- http://www.stdominiccyo.org/forum/default.asp
- http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/033457.html
- http://www.katrinaartists.com/relief.html
- Friends of New Orleans.
- Festival of Neighborhoods.
- http://www.angelfire.com/gundam/reservoir/media.htm
[edit] Research
- Broadband coverage, where is Broadband back up?
- Neighborhood planning in other cities.
[edit] Blog Entries
[edit] Where the Wiki Came From
Before the storm, I was sitting in my sister's living room, in Ann Arbor, watching CNN. They showed the intrepid reporter standing outside as stuff blew about. Then the levees broke and I turned off CNN, forever.
I went to my computer and pointed my browser at WDSU and, of course, " NOLA.com. Their I found real reporting on the evacuation.
While I was waiting for the journalists to file their stories, I checked out the NOLA.com forums. It was ordered chaos. People were giving eye-witeness accounts on a block by block basis. People were reading CNN news articles for the picutres, and guessing at flood levels in their neighborhood by the proximity of the flooded nieghborhood in the photos. (Of course, none of the news agencies would report street or cross roads of the photgraphs the took, we all had to guess.)
The NOLA.com forums were never meant to handle that sort of traffic. Information would scroll right off the page, and into the archives. Many posts had valuable information. I wanted to capture that information before it got lost in the archives, where it would be hard to find.
That's when I installed the Wiki. I was sitting at my computer, doing nothing but rea
[edit] How to Write a Blog Post
This is not a good time to set out to do this, but, I'm going to write two new blog posts, five days a week, for the rest of the year. One at Think New Orleans and one at Blogometer. Kiloblog will be the place where all my programming writing hides.
First off, you need a photograph. The biggest problem is that I no longer have a decent working camera. This needs to be solved with the creative commons.
Secondly, you
Three ways in wich Web 2.0 has been a useless in practice.
[edit] How the Wiki Came Back
The crux is that the workshops have enlightened me to a new way of doing things, blindingly obvious, but basically, work with people, work closely with people, work in the same room with people, and it's much more effective than programming a system to organize people from afar.
We are in a holding pattern. There is a lot of information that we would like to organize. , they respond with an idea to implement.
As George "Loki" Williams is fond of saying, "many hands make light work".
A Wiki is a database of sorts.
Rather that two or three programmers writing a database of this or that, have dozens of people writing documents about this or that, and linking them together.
In my experience, when I tell someone that I am a programmer of sorts, everyone wants a database of something. Students, potholes, house bills, architects, neighborhood organizations, charter schools, parks and playgrounds, etc. Some are candidates for a real relational database, with forms and tables, but mostly, you can simply write it all down somewhere.
A realational database with forms and tables requires a database programmer. They are expensive. It also requires waiting around for the database programmer to get the database done, and very much done, before people will trust the database to hold data. It is a labor intensive and time consuming process.
At first blush, a Wiki sounds like a lot of work, but really, it can be a lot less labor intensive, or at the very least, it is much easier to divide the work among many different people. Volutneers, people who can take a few minutes at lunch time to fix links, or check spelling.
As more volutneers arrive, the easier it is to add information to the Wiki.
If we could add a new citizen Wiki contributer every week, we'd have incredible organizational power.
"Many hands make light work," said George "Loki" Williams.
"The simplest online database that could possibly work," according to Ward Cunningham, the inventor of Wiki.
It is also a tool for democratizing information, because people will disagree over Wiki entries, and the dispute resolution can help to find political compromise.
It is also a tool for collaborative writing, and might help wean people off of the Word Documents that get emailed about, that exclude people who don't have that particular $500.00 office suite.
It is also a way in which friends of New Orleans can help us, by chipping in on the formatting and technical details that a citizen might not have time to learn.
[edit] Learning Groovy
[edit] References
[edit] GroovyMarkup
Getting down to brass tacks, how do I create a read deal document in GroovyMarkup? Let's say that I want to create an XSLT stylesheet, that produces XHTML.
[edit] Grails
Zero to Grails. Starting at 11:46 am.
[edit] Wiki Articles
[edit] Blue Moon Fund
Think New Orleans teaches people how to use this information to organize across the traditional socio-economic, geographic, and cultural boundaries.
The contemporary Internet has created a generation of software applications that are based on the premise of social use of the software. An application like Fickr is in part, a photo album program. A person can upload their photographs, arrange them in sets, and share them through their own web site or through email. Flickr also allows people to leave comments on photographs, or to tag photographs with keywords, or create group photo albums. This social aspect of the program sets it apart from photo album software that runs on the desktop.
What makes a web site a social web site? The key feature is the ability for a person to create their own content, and to do so outside of the context of the web site itself, the ability to take the web site in a different direction, or to create a space in the web site that belongs to an individual or group of individuals.
Some web sites push the social aspect of the web site to the point of selflessness, as in the case of the Wikipedia, in which contributors aim to create articles that reflect a neutral point of view. Changes are attributed to sepcific users, but their bylines are not prominently displayed.
In the world of software collaboration, it is often the case that contributors to a software project will be scattered across national boundaries. They will host meetings with some regularity, to meet each other face to face. They will establish nonprofits or contribute their work to a nonprofit for it's safe keeping, and they will form private enterprises to market and sell the software or applications derived from the software. Thus, and online collaboration forms many offline collaborations and legal entities.
Thus, we are not discussing online collaboration, but the creation of media, and in the creation of media a creation of knowledge and concensus. The online participation is...
Wow, I'm getting away from my roots. I might be spending too much time Uptown. There is the whole social networking hardware angle, and there I am loosing touch.
[edit] Create a New Article
| Type a title: and click "Create page" |
<inputbox> type=create width=45 </inputbox> |
Clicking the "Create page" button takes you to an edit page where you can enter the new text, so long as you have set up an account. The edit page also has a link for Editing help, in case you need it. Other helpful links include Help:Filling the page and Help:Editing. You do not have to always return to this page to create a new article. New pages can also be started by following a link to a non-existent page, which likewise leads to an edit page (see Starting a page through the URL, below). Users are encouraged to be bold when starting a new article.
[edit] Response to Business Card
It was nice to meet you at NPN.
Think New Orleans has three projects that are underway.
- Web Publishing Workshops - 90 Minute workshops to create community web sites for neighborhood publishing and information sharing, plus workshops on calendaring, collaborative writing, and project management software.
- Think New Orleans Wiki - A civic web site that anyone can edit.
- Audio Town Halls (pending) - 22 Minute conference calls with community leaders. Conferences that are quick and many. Conferences that are recorded and archived for public listening.
Please let me know if I can add you to the Weekly Think New Orleans newsletter.
[edit] Neighborhoods Planning Glossary
- CSF
- Community Support Foundation.
- GNOF
- Greater New Orleans Foudnation.
[edit] Google Calendar
[edit] Sharing Calendars
[edit] Sharing Calendars with Specific People
To share a calendar.
- Scroll to the end of the left sidebar.
- Click on the link that says "Manage Calendars".
- You will see a group of calendars under "My Calendars". These are the calendars you have created. You will have at least one calendar. That calendar will be named for you like "Joe Smith".
- Click on "Share this calendar".
- Under the group "Share with specific people" you will see a section called "ADD A NEW PERSON". Enter then email address of the person you want to share the calendar with. Click the button that says "Add Person".
- Click "Save" to save the changes. If the person you've chosen to share your calendar with does not have a Google Calendar, you will be asked to invite them. Click "Yes".
[edit] Marking an Event Private
If you mark an event private. No one will be able to see the description. If your calendar is public, or is shared with other people, that event will appear on your calendar as a block of time marked either "busy" or "available". To other people, the event title and details will not be visible.
- In the calendar view, click on the title of the event. A page displaying the details of the calendar will appear.
- You will see a section heading called "Options". Click on the section heading to display the options.
- In the "Privacy" section under the label "This event is:" click the "Private" option.
- Click on the "Save" button at the bottom of the page to save the changes you've made to the event.
[edit] Fredric Schwartz
Frederic Schwartz Architects have been selected to lead a neighborhood and district planning team for the City of New Orleans and to design affordable, sustainable, quality housing in the historic Lower Ninth Ward. Frederic Schwartz is currently a finalist in four international competitions -- the Global Green affordable, sustainable housing initiative in New Orleans; a new airport terminal in Madurai, India; the New Silk Road Project in Xi'an, China (with CED alumni and THINK team member William Morrish); and the Paterson New Jersey Master Plan. His winning designs (national competition entries selected unanimously by 9 / 11 family members) for two memorials are now being realized. The Westchester 9/11 Memorial will be dedicated on September 11th, 2006, and the New Jersey State 9/11 Memorial will be dedicated on September 11th, 2007. As the winner of a New York metro area architect/developer competition, the new 500,000 sf "Kalahari" -- the largest affordable, sustainable, quality housing project in Harlem -- is now under construction. After teaching a Fall 2005 design studio "Cities in Crisis: New Orleans" at Harvard Graduate School of Design, he was invited to chair an international conference in Basel, Switzerland, give five lectures in India and at Berkeley and Harvard on post-Katrina and post-9/11 planning initiatives.
This is a place where I can write about Think New Orleans, as a project, and not be so self conscious. Now I need to write two pages about Think New Orleans. Joy!
[edit] Mission
Think New Orleans is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to explore and implement Internet based strategies for inclusive and widespread civic engagement. At Think New Orleans we develop solutions to increase the productivity of neighborhood and civic organizations, with the belief that civic productivity is driven by knowledge, participation and consensus.
[edit] Particpatory Media
Think New Orleans applies the tenets of participatory media to civic engagement. We promote the use of the Internet as a collaborative environment where citizens publsh vital information, share insights that create knowledge, and deliberate on issues in order to build consensus.
Think New Orleans focuses on the human element of pariciptory media, working to bring together people across the New Orleans' social-economic and geographic bondaries. Through the Internet, we help people find common interests and a alliances, and through workshops and other face-to-face meetings we help citizens address their concerns through civic action.
Thus, it is important to note that Think New Orleans uses the Internet itself as a means to the end goal of civic engagment.
[edit] Projects
Already, Think New Orleans has responded to the needs of New Orleans citizens in the aftermath of Katrina. We have envisioned and implemented a number of projects that have had very tangible results. These successes include:
- Developed a web publishing platform for neighborhood groups and nonprofit organizations by integrating a proven web publishing platform with extensions specific to the mission of civic engagement.
- Established two dozen neighborhood and nonprofit web sites and taught their authors to actively publish on the web.
- Created a volunteer maintained web site, the New Orleans Wiki, with over 200 articles about New Orleans, including neighborhood histories, school openings, and nonprofit organizations.
- Co-produced the Rising Tide Conference, a gathering of New Orleans participatory media mavens.
- Provided platforms for collaborative authoring and organization of the Mid-City Recovery Plan, Neighborhood Planning Network ByLaws, and The Rising Tide Conference.
- Created a volunteer maintained listing of local of local web resources using the New Orleans Wiki.
- Created a volunteer maintained listing of school openings on the New Orleans Wiki.
- Provided the Neighborhood's Planning Network with solutions for web publishing and document sharing, developed and executed an IT training program for their staff, and developed and hosted email outreach program.
- Engaged in civic research, producing research papers on the Unified New Orleans Planning Process and the New Orleans Neighborhoods Rebuilding Plan.
- Created a social network diagram for the City of New Orleans, to analyze the organizational and individual relationships involved in city's recovery process.
- Recorded French Quarter Town Hall and the Lower 9th Home Owner's meetings on site, produced audio recordings of the meetings, and hosted them online through Think New Orleans.
- Recorded Audio Town Hall interviews, recorded converence calls between neighborhood organizations and neighborhood planning firms, and hosted the recordings at Think New Orleans.
also, you could add "collaborative" to "transparent and inclusive" under "civic information systems" on the first page and stress that you are working with all these other groups to build their capacity and fufill your mission at once
[edit] New Orleans Wiki
The New Orleans Wiki is a volutneer maintained web site in a directory format. It serves as a knowledge base, where citizens can submit information they might have to an organized body of infomration. If a visitor is inclined, they can add information or make changes. If they are inclined but do not have the skills can attend an workshop on it's use.
The New Orleans Wiki has been used as a collaborative writing platform the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization, the Neighborhood's Planning Network, the Festival of Neighborhoods, and the The Rising Tide Conference organiziers. People regularly contribute new articles, or create pages for organizing events.
The New Orleans Wiki maintains a neutral point of view
This project has been organic. It began with a recognition that the forums that New Orleanians used during the evacuation to reconnect and communicate were outmoded and limited the effectiveness of communication. New Orleanians turned to the message boards of their newspaper and other media outlets. These message boards were at times overwhelmed, such that their servers would collapse.
[edit] Refereces
[edit] Biographies
[edit] Alan Gutierrez
Alan Gutierrez is a computer programmer working professionally with Internet technologies since 1996. He has developed software for research firms and with corporate IT departments. He pioneered the voter information web sites for Publius.org in 1998. He most has most rececntly co-authored the EAC guidelines for voter information web sites.
[edit] Sarah Elise Lewis
Sarah Elise Lewis is Operations Director of Think New Orleans, where she coordinates the New Orleans Social Network Map project. She is a PhD candidate and Urban Studies instructor at the University of New Orleans. Her research addresses heritage as a resource and source of conflict in disaster recovery.
[edit] Karen Gadbois
Karen Gadbois is The Outreach Coordinator for Think New Orleans. Before moving to New Orleans in 2003, she helped to create the "Retablo Project " working with indigenous women in rural Mexico to create embroidered narratives, as well as working in the Mexican Penal System with Artist/prisioners.
[edit] The Older One
In the wake of the Katrina disaister, several factors have emerged that push the boundaries of our current understanding of citizenship, community and democracy.
[edit] Questions About Democracy Crisis
Among the questions that immediately emerged:
- What constitutes the new fabric of New Orleans?
- How did technology, designed originally by the military to operate in a distributed de-centralized fashion in the event of catastrophe perform?
- What happen to the layers of social networking we've layered on the internet since it's inception?
- How did the efforts to reconnect citizens of New Orleans use the internet? How did those efforts connect with people on the other side of the digital divide?
- Are there lasting implications for the digital divide?
- Where is New Orleans today - In New Orleans proper? In the hearts of it's evacuees? In chatrooms and blogs? On FEMA resident databases?
- What happens next?
[edit] Questions About Internet Decmoracy in Recovery
As time passed, a second set of more intricate questions about democracy emerged:
- When should an election be held after a catastrophic situation?
- How can a candidate campaign to a population scattered across the country?
- Who controls the new addresses of the evacuees?
- How long can a "citizen" be away from their home town before they cannot reasonably be expected to know enough to complete the bottom of the ballot?
Because Publius stated mission is to explore the impact of the Internet on democracy and develop web-based tools to enhance the exchange of ideas and information, this new frontier of online community and democracy is a critical nexus of future research.
Publius has recognized evolving efforts on the ground in New Orleans to reconstruct and inform community as vital to the furure of Publius' mission. To that end, Publius, has partenered with Alan Gutierrez, a recognized leader in New Orleans online community to established a pilot a program called Think New Orleans, to be headed by Alan and based in New Orleans. Many of the questions listed above do not have answers, but some of them do, and many more will. The Goal of the Think New Orleans project for Publius is be in a position to answer the questions above while actually implementing solutions that can help on the ground.
This hybrid approach allows accademic research to be done as a byproduct of on-the-ground activity to assist New Orleans.
Publius is a non-partisan, non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996
Think New Orleans is a project to develop information systems and training for use in civic organization in the City of New Orleans.
[edit] Civic Information Systems
At the heart of the Think New Orleans Project is the design and implementation of Civic Information Systems.
Civic information systems are networked computer applications that share information within individual civic organizations, publish information for citizens, and coordinate the activities of civic organizations.
An example of a civic information are community newsletters distrubted via web, email and syndication. Other examples include collaborating writing software, distribution
- Transparent
- Civic information systems aim to make both information and decision making transparent, because they present information in a public forum and preserve a historic record of the information and how it has changed.
- Inclusive
- Civic information systems aim to include wide a range of citizens in the decision making process by making systems that are simple to use, low in cost to operate, by extending the reach of the information through traditional broadcast media, telephony and print.
[edit] Education
Civic information systems are ineffective if they are unable to collect information.
[edit] Demolitions
Imminent Health Threat Demolition Properties.
[edit] Louisiana Recovery Authority of Directors
| Sen Diana Bajoie | 225.342.0752 office | 225.342.2892 fax | P.O. Box 94183 ,Baton Rouge, LA 70804 |
| Rev Harry Blake | 318.227.9993main | 318.227.1411fax | 1666 Alston St.,Shreveport, LA 71101 |
| Boysie Bollinger | 985.532.2554 office | 985.532.7242 fax | P.O. Box 250 , Lockport, LA 70374 |
| Kim MBoyle | 504.566.1311 o | 504.568.9130 f | 365 Canal Street, Ste 2000 , New Orleans, LA 70130-6534 |
| Donna Brazile | 202.628.8081 office | 202.628.8085 fax | 1001 G Street, NW, Ste , 500E Washington, DC 20001 |
| John P Brewster | (225) 937.2447 | office (225) 618-4481 fax | 2724 Bocage Lake Drive, Baton Rouge, LA 70809 |
| Rene Cross | 504.393.9045 office | 504.393.2830 fax | Eva Bowers;P.O. Box 34 , Belle Chasse, LA 70737 |
| James Davison | 318.768.7859 office 318.255.3850 office | 318.242.5271 fax | P.O. Box 310 , Ruston, LA 71273 |
| Rep Yvonne Dorsey | 225.342.8385 office | 225.342.9070 fax | 1662 Thomas Delpit Drive , Baton Rouge, LA 70802 |
| Dr Norman Francis | 504. 520.7541-office | 504.520.7904-fax | 1 Drexel Drive , New Orleans, LA 70125 |
| Donna Fraiche | 504.566.5202 office 225.381.7023 office | 504.636.3901 fax 225.343.3612 fax | 201 St. Charles Ave, Ste 3600, NO 70170 ,301 N. Main St, Ste 830, BR, 70825 |
| Tom Henning | 337.436.9491 office | 337.493.7210 fax | 1 Lakeside Plaza, 4th Floor , Lake Charles, LA 70601 |
| Sen Don Hines | 225.342.4452 office | 225.342.0602 fax | P.O. Box 94183, Baton Rouge 70804 |
| Walter Isaacson | 202.736.5840 office | 202.466.4568 fax | Suite 700, One Dupont Circle, NW Washington, DC 20036 |
| Dr Alex Johnson | 504.361.6609 office | 504.361.6697 fax | 2703 General DeGaulle Drive, New Orleans, LA 70114 |
| John T Landry | 337.482.0922 office | 337.482.0932 fax | P.O. Drawer 43410 , Lafayette, 70504 |
| Walter Leger Jr | 504.588.9043office | 504.588.9980 fax | 600 Carondelet St, 9th Fl ,New Orleans, LA 70130 |
| Dr Calvin Mackie | 504.391.0730 office | 504.865.5345 fax 480.247.5386 fax | Channel Zero , PO Box 312 , Harvey, LA 70058 |
| Mary Matalin | 703.739.6006 office | 703.739.6171 fax | 424 S. Washington St., Alexandria, VA 22314 |
| Chet Morrison | 985.850.1206 office | 985.868.1940 fax | P.O. Box 3301 , Houma, LA 70361 |
| Sean Reilly | 225.926.1000 office | 225.926.0492 fax | 5551 Corporate Blvd , Baton Rouge, LA 70808 |
| David Richard | 337.433.1057 ext 10 | 337.439.2170 fax | 2417 Shell Beach Drive , Lake Charles, LA 70601 |
| Rep Joe Salter | 225.342.7263 office | 225.342.8336 fax | P.O. Box 94062 , Baton Rouge, LA 70804 |
| John E Smith | 985.646.0798 o | 985.646.4534 f | 1338 Gause Blvd, Suite 300 , Slidell, LA 70458 |
| Dennis Stine | 337.527.0121 ext 245 o | 337.527.2725 fax | 1509 South Hunnington, Sulphur, LA 70663 |
| Matt Stuller | 337.394.5432 office | 337.262.7713 fax | 1213 Terrace Hwy , Broussard, LA 70518 |
| Susan Taylor | 212.522.1788 office | 212.354.9068 fax | 1500 Broadway, 6th Floor ,New York, NY 10036 |
| David Voelker | 504.582.2244o | 504.582.2240f | P.O. Box 84859 , Baton Rouge, LA 70884 |
| Mike Woods | 318-798-2500o | 318.798.2503f | 460 Bob White Cove , Shreveport, LA 71106 |
[edit] Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s110-1668
[edit] Questions to Ask
- How will the new demolition contracts be awarded?
- How long did the City of New Orleans sit under water?
- How can New Orleans recoup the nation's caring?
