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Twitter weekly updates for 2013-05-12 – 2013-05-18

Posted by Mike on May 19th, 2013 in Mike on Twitter

BarCamp NewsInnovation and TransparencyCamp

Posted by Mike on May 12th, 2013 in Personal, Politics 2012-2013

My presentation with Keya Dannenbaum at TransparencyCamp: "Civic engagement, local journalism, and open data"My presentation with Keya Dannenbaum at TransparencyCamp: "Civic engagement, local journalism, and open data"
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My presentation with Keya Dannenbaum at TransparencyCamp: "Civic engagement, local journalism, and open data"05-May-2013 08:54

After my WordCamp Nashville presentation, I transitioned from talking about how to write clean code, to talking about how the web is transforming the world of journalism, and what it means for civic engagement. This was the topic of the BarCamp NewsInnovation talk two weeks ago in Philadelphia given by Dave Zega and I (we work together at ElectNext). I also presented a longer, more in-depth version at TransparencyCamp in Washington, DC last week, with our CEO, Keya Dannenbaum.

Both conferences were “unconferences,” which means there’s an emphasis on discussion rather than long presentations, and the schedule is determined by the conference participants themselves, on the morning of the conference. However, both had some pre-scheduled talks, including ours.

The unconference board at #bcni13 - on the fly conference planning, with opportunities for anyone to presentThe unconference board at #bcni13 - on the fly conference planning, with opportunities for anyone to present
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The unconference board at #bcni13 - on the fly conference planning, with opportunities for anyone to present27-Apr-2013 23:19, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.033 sec, ISO 160
The virtual unconference board at TransparencyCampThe virtual unconference board at TransparencyCamp
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The virtual unconference board at TransparencyCamp05-May-2013 00:35, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.02 sec, ISO 125

The TransparencyCamp talk was titled “Civic engagement, local journalism, and open data.” Here’s the summary:

A fundamental purpose of journalism in the United States is to inform citizens, so that they can effectively engage in democratic self-governance. The ongoing disappearance of local newspapers in the digital era is well known, resulting in the decline of traditional watchdog journalism at the local and state levels. There are discussions of “news deserts” and unchecked malfeasance by elected officials. At the same time, we’re seeing the rise of citizen journalists, the growth of organizations that harvest, enhance, and distribute an ever-expanding range of data on government activities, and the creation of new opportunities to share, discuss, and analyze information vital to civic engagement.

For the goals of achieving government transparency and effective self-governance, what has been lost and what has been gained in all these transformations? Is the net effect positive or negative, and what lies ahead? In this talk we’ll lay out the different arguments in this debate, and we’ll engage the audience in the conversation.

I was really impressed by the quality of the audience questions at both conferences, and their engagement with Twitter. Our talk generated over 40 tweets at Transparency Camp. Here are samples from both talks:

‏@MobileTrevor Result of losing local news is fewer voters, lower civic participation, increased corruption, etc says @mtoppa #TCamp13

@zpez how can you maintain local engagement after an acute issue is resolved? build stronger networks; tap into the ppl w/ the data #TCamp13

@_anna_shaw The ‘digital political baseball cards’ from @ElectNext are pretty darn cool… Gonna be playing around with these later. #TCamp13

‏@ianfroude Local papers dying, so ‘ppl have gained access to the world (intl/natl papers) but lost access to their backyard’ #TCamp13

@jmikelyons: Politicians know everything about us, we know little about them. The Big Data Divide. Big civic problem #bcni13

@emmacarew #bcni13 impressive: folks at @electnext are working directly with the mayor’s office to makes data not just available but accessible

Transparency Camp was the larger of the two – over 600 people attended. Some traveled quite a distance to be there. In our talk we had questions from people involved in the media from as far away as Poland and Uganda.

Both conferences had a great sense of community. Many of the conversations I heard around me were similar to conversations we have at ElectNext, about how to bring greater transparency to government activities, and making open government data accessible and useful. I also had an unexpected but very welcome encounter: while passing through a crowd I heard a nearby voice say “hey Mike Toppa,” and turned to see a face I hadn’t seen in over 10 years. It was a former co-worker from my time at HighWire Press. He works at the Sunlight Foundation now. It was great to catch up and compare notes on our work. After the conference, I also got to catch up with my old friends Pat and Emma, from my days at Georgetown.

Here are the videos for both talks. If you only have time for one, I recommend the TransparencyCamp talk (the first one below). Below the videos are my summaries of the sessions I attended at Transparency Camp.

Transparency Camp Notes

These are my own brief summaries of the talks I attended. Most sessions had note takers, and their notes are at the TransparencyCamp site.

  • Electoral districts API talk: this was an overview of different initiatives out there, and pros and cons of different approaches. If you use maps to determine districts, you can do things like determine a district from a geo-location. But you can’t disambugate things like apartment buildings that are split between districts, which is actually fairly common (often by odd/even apt numbers or by floor). This is called “packing” or “cracking”, depending on the goals of the gerrymandering (to either dilute or concentrate the voting power of a group of voters, and/or aid or hinder turnout efforts). District boundaries can also vary for state rep vs state senator, etc. At a technical level, using maps is easier. Addresses are harder because of the volume of data involved and you can’t rely on geo-location. Google is building up data based on addresses; most others are using maps.
  • A new project for city and state level engagement from opengovernment.org: they’re releasing a platform soon for facilitating citizen engagement with city councils, state reps, etc. It includes a petitioning system and lets elected officials register their own accounts, for direct online interaction with constituents. It also allows for entering info on legislation, etc, but isn’t a legislation management system.
  • “Municipal Open Gov efforts don’t scale down” – this was a discussion of the challenges of providing open gov in smaller cities, which don’t have the resources of big cities like Philly, Boston, etc. Short version: the only way to make this happen is to provide systems that help solve real city management problems (i.e. transparency for transpareny’s sake isn’t going to happen if it means creating more work for already overworked staff) and give those systems an open api, so openness requires no additional effort.
  • Tracking shadow campaign money: this was led by Robert Maguire from OpenSecrets. It was fascinating but depressing: after the Citizens United decision, it’s become almost impossible to track hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign money. He described a complex set of schemes involving phony non-profits and other front organizations where money is moved around repeatedly so it’s hard to track. The FEC and IRS requirements are so minimal now, it’s hard to tell where the money is coming from or how it is spent. But at Open Secrets they are able to give at least some top-level figures through IRS records, but often only a year after the fact. So they can get a rough sense of how much is being spent in total through this new shadow system, but they can’t get many specifics.

Twitter weekly updates for 2013-05-05 – 2013-05-11

Posted by Mike on May 12th, 2013 in Mike on Twitter

Twitter weekly updates for 2013-04-28 – 2013-05-04

Posted by Mike on May 5th, 2013 in Mike on Twitter

Twitter weekly updates for 2013-04-21 – 2013-04-27

Posted by Mike on April 28th, 2013 in Mike on Twitter

Twitter weekly updates for 2013-04-14 – 2013-04-20

Posted by Mike on April 21st, 2013 in Mike on Twitter

Knowledge Slam

Posted by Mike on April 17th, 2013 in Agile, Personal

I presented at the Philadelphia Knowledge Slam tonight on job satisfaction and Agile. It was a lot of fun! The hardest part was putting together a coherent presentation that fit within the strict 5 minute limit, with no slides allowed. There were 10 great presentations on a wide variety of topics: the songs of Robins, the latest innovations in genetic treatments for sickle cell disease, screenwriting, cultural myths and personal myths, baking, tips for networking, the mis-measuring of educational achievement, and more.

This was my first time going – Knowledge Slam is held the 3rd Wednesday of every month. Check out the Facebook page for more info.

Short clips of each presenter were recorded. Here’s mine, followed by my complete script.

About 4 years ago I read a book by Malcolm Gladwell called “Outliers: the Story of Success.” Buried in the middle of that book he wrote a few paragraphs that, for me, were the most important part of the story. He described the 3 things that make a job rewarding. The things that make you look forward to a day at work when you get up in the morning.

First is reward for effort – this means money of course, but it also means recognition. We want our boss and our co-workers to let us know we’re doing a good job.

Second is having challenging work – work that isn’t routine and boring, but isn’t so hard that it becomes frustrating. Work that’s in that sweet spot in between, where the work engages your skills and makes you feel that you are learning and growing.

So those first two are pretty straightforward. The third one is the most interesting to me: a rewarding job is one that gives you autonomy. You have a feeling of control over your work, and you feel that your actions and decisions are meaningful. You can make things happen without someone second-guessing you all the time. It’s the opposite of feeling like a cog in a machine.

This struck a chord with me because at the time I wasn’t really happy in my job. I create web sites and web applications for a living. I’ve been doing it since ancient times – the early 1990s – when the first web pages were painted on cave walls in bison blood. And I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. Job satisfaction surveys of Americans show that between half and three quarters of Americans are unhappy in their jobs. If you consider that we spend about half of our waking lives at work, that’s a depressing statistic.

So I decided it was time for a change, and I made a terrible, terrible decision – I went into management. I joined the ranks of the people who are ultimately responsible for all those unhappy workers. I figured, there must be a better way to do this. So I did my homework, and I started learning about this thing called Agile, with a capital A. It’s a way of managing work that originated in the software industry and has been spreading to other types of work. And it’s got a great name, who doesn’t want to be agile?

But I learned it’s more than just a buzzword. Learning and following Agile practices made me fall in love with my work all over again. I would need to talk for at least an hour to explain how it all works, but since I just have a few minutes, I’ll focus on the part that relates to this idea of autonomy. In a lot of workplaces, you have responsibility, and your boss has authority. You don’t have autonomy. Managers talk about being results-oriented, but most are really more focused on control. Since you don’t have autonomy, you may not be motivated to do great work, so you’re given more policies and procedures to follow. The end result is management gets work that meets a consistent but minimal level of quality, and you don’t get a whole lot of job satisfaction. The undercurrent here is a lack of trust.

So how does Agile fix this? First, it gets management’s focus where it should be: on results, not control. And it provides some new ways of measuring progress and results that don’t depend on micro-management. And second, it adjusts peoples’ roles, so you actually have authority over the things you are responsible for. It gives you autonomy. It’s really about training management to get out of the way for the day-to-day work, to foster a learning environment, and to step in only when help is needed. It means treating people like adults, and creating an environment of trust.

And when you have trust, great things can happen. People start working together and pooling their skills to solve problems. This happened recently at General Electric. They had a water heater that was made in China. Here in the US a team of engineers, factory line workers, even sales and marketing people, all got together and completely redesigned it. By pooling their skills and experience they came up with a new design that was so much less expensive to manufacture, GE moved the manufacturing for the water heater back to the US, creating jobs here, and lowered its retail price by $300.

At the end of the day, its not policies and procedures that get the credit for good work and great products, it’s enthusiastic and empowered people.

Twitter weekly updates for 2013-04-07 – 2013-04-13

Posted by Mike on April 14th, 2013 in Mike on Twitter

Twitter weekly updates for 2013-03-31 – 2013-04-06

Posted by Mike on April 7th, 2013 in Mike on Twitter

Gettysburg, 10 years later

Posted by Mike on April 1st, 2013 in Japan and Travel, Kai & Eidan: 2012

A portion of the Gettysburg CycloramaA portion of the Gettysburg Cyclorama
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A portion of the Gettysburg Cyclorama29-Mar-2013 04:18, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.05 sec, ISO 800
Eidan picking off tourists from Little Round TopEidan picking off tourists from Little Round Top
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Eidan picking off tourists from Little Round Top30-Mar-2013 02:35, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.002 sec, ISO 100
Press reactions to Lincoln's Gettysburg AddressPress reactions to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address
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Press reactions to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address29-Mar-2013 23:56, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.125 sec, ISO 1600
Eidan at the Gettysburg museumEidan at the Gettysburg museum
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Eidan at the Gettysburg museum29-Mar-2013 23:11, Canon Canon PowerShot ELPH 110 HS, 2.7, 4.3mm, 0.05 sec, ISO 1000

After living near Philadelphia for 10 years, we decided it was finally time to visit Gettysburg. The boys are on Spring break, so I decided to take some vacation time (for the first time since last summer). We took our time getting there and arrived in the late afternoon, which turned out to be great, as we didn’t have to fight any crowds to get into the Cyclorama. The next morning we went through the museum. My favorite part were the derisive press responses to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (see my picture) – greatness is often found only through a historical perspective.

Then we bought an audio tour CD for our drive through the battlefield. This is a 2-3 hour experience, and I was worried Eidan would be bored, so before heading out we bought him a toy musket rifle at the gift shop. This made the tour an exciting adventure for him, as he got out of the car to pick off the other tourists at each stop we made.

One thing that stood out for me was that the guidebooks and audio tour talked about the strategic importance of various ridges and other high ground. So I was expecting some impressive hills, but with the exception of the two “round tops” these locations were all just very mild slopes. I was amazed at what a difference it made to occupy even just slightly higher ground.

The highlight of the trip for Eidan was his many hours spent in the hotel pool. For me it was dinner with the family at La Bella Italia. The place looks like an Olive Garden from the outside, but – speaking as someone who grew up eating Italian food – I can say my shrimp diablo was excellent. Two bottles of Lancaster Brewery’s Strawberry Wheat beer didn’t hurt my disposition either ;-)

We passed the Harley-Davidson factory in York on the way there, and figured we’d stop for a factory tour on the way back, but we belatedly discovered they don’t have tours on the weekends. We’ll catch it next time!

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