Decibel reading from inside the house w windows closed.

Several Southern California Surfrider chapters came together to reexamine the ecological realities of water as they exist today, which looks quite different from when we were in grade school.

Take a look…

The Cycle of Insanity: The Real Story of Water – TRAILER 1 from Surfrider Foundation San Diego C on Vimeo.

Google released its software package “Google Wave” late in 2009, and while it has a wide range of useful features, Wave still hasn’t quite exploded in use. It will.

This video looks back on some of the main events of 2009 — it’s essentially your average “year in review” video piece (though too thin in content for my taste). Still, I like it. I like it as a video piece, and I like it as a creative use of Google Wave. Plus, I like it as a very resourceful way to make a video; telling two stories at once… a story of the year 2009, and a story of Wave’s capabilities.

“Compete with beauty”

Today’s post is a question… What’s your reaction to this phrase? Click on the “comment” link on the left here (or at the bottom of this post) and air your thoughts.

Compete with beauty…

What’s Different About Advertising since the Internet?

With all its strengths, the Internet certainly presents great challenges to advertisers. One of the more promising capabilities of the Internet is to deliver personalized, individual messages to a large number of people, combining reach and targeting — a notion that to older ways of thinking may seem like an oxymoron… you know, like “act natural.”

To combine the best practices from the traditions of direct marketing with the most effective marketing automation tools available today and the most promising methods driving us into the future — this is the marketing challenge presented by the Internet. And, like with most inspiring challenges in this world, the best solutions are not always the most obvious.

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Here’s a video slideshow of the Dana Point Historical Society’s 2009 Endless Summer Event at Doheny State Beach. This was the main fund-raising event for the year and included a home tour, a Hawaiian BBQ luau, a boat tour and a silent auction. A portion of the proceeds went toward rebuilding the original 1930’s adobe wall and entrance to the park.

As a board member of the Dana Point Historical Society, I’m proud to have been able to help make this experimental event a success. The Historical Society is a cornerstone to the Dana Point community, civic life and philanthropic efforts, and everyone — from ticket buyers to sponsors to volunteers — made this year’s event such a warm and supportive day.

My social network got significantly more social this week. (That’s a good thing, by the way.)

A few days ago, a Tweet shimmered in the raging river of the Now Web’s constant flow and caught my eye.

Mozilla Service Week.

Mozilla, in case you aren’t familiar, is the open-source software foundation which grew out of Netscape and produces the most popular open-source software on the planet, FireFox, an Internet browser. Here’s the “big idea” from Mozilla’s website, http://mozillaservice.org:

What Is Mozilla Service Week?

This week – September 14-21, 2009 – we’ve asked individuals to step up and make a difference by using the Web to better their community. We’ve looked for people who want to share, give, engage, create, and collaborate by offering their time and talent to local organizations and people who need their help, and its not too late to get involved.

Mozilla believes everyone should know how to use the Internet, have easy access to it, and have a good experience when they’re online. By utilizing our community’s talents for writing, designing, programming, developing, and all-around technical know-how, we believe we can make the Web a better place for everyone.

There’s a good idea, I thought, and was moved to action; so I tossed out this tweet and an invitation:

Well, the online community here in Orange County responded big time! We came together and drummed up an idea to provide volunteer technology and related services to local nonprofits who are struggling with this world of social media, Internet 23.0, the Now Web, or whatever you want to call the Internet today.

OCGood.org is Born

Over one lunch and one coffee-klatch, we decided that as our service during “service week,” we would volunteer our time and effort to mid-wife this group, OCGood, which will in turn be of much greater service to local nonprofits than we could be individually.

So, here it is: OCGood is a group of energetic, committed, service-minded professionals in Orange County California who volunteer services to struggling non-profits in our communities.

There are two parts to the effort: I WANT TO HELP and I NEED HELP. This is the essence of the whole good idea: connect those willing to help with those who need it, right here in our local community.

Next Step?

Let’s get together in a relaxed atmosphere, talk a little more about how to go about this mission, and spread the word about what we’re doing.

We’re meeting Thursday, Sept. 17, from 7pm – 10pm at
Salt Creek Grille in Dana Point.

We have some cabanas reserved on the patio. Salt Creek Grille has great $3 appetizer specials and $3 grey goose & bacardi drinks, plus free valet parking.

Please RSVP at either of these links:

Here’s a link to to a Twitter Invite.

Or here on this Facebook Event page.

Please come chip in, and come ready both to help and to ask for help.

IMPORTANT: Please invite all your friends and colleagues who might be willing to help (even if you can’t make it to this event — there will be more opportunities to help), and tell everyone you know with ties to OC nonprofits who might benefit from the help.

Among other things, we’ll be planning an OC-based unconference for nonprofits.

So, please come on over and help brew up something good in OC.

Please RSVP at either of these links:

Here’s a link to to a Twitter Invite.

Or here on this Facebook Event page.

Workforce housing is a major problem in Orange County. It is essential to a sustainable, functional local economy. Just ask the Orange County Business Council.

Earlier this month, the community center in San Juan Capistrano served as the venue for a public community dialog about housing organized by The South Orange County Alliance for Housing Our Communities, with the woefully brutal acronym SOCAHOC, which, the emcee soon told the audience, was pronounced “Sok-a-whok.” Like I said: brutal. But that’s neither here nor there.

The point was to host a public discussion of “cities’ legal responsibilities to develop affordable homes in response to economic, environmental, transportation and social demand.” The format of the event started with a few minutes of open conversation at each of the 15 or so round tables in the room, with the objective of having each table write down questions for the panel. Then came some opening remarks, a moderator and a panel of four presenters.

The mayor of San Juan Capistrano, Mark Nielsen, gave opening remarks and offered some context for the day’s discussion. Some highlights:

• Orange County income threshold for affordable housing: $65k per year for a family of 4
• Housing isn’t just a policy “issue,” it is at the base of Maslow’s pyramid of needs: shelter
• There are inherent problems with in-lieu fees as an alternative to fulfulling regulatory housing requirements
• Renovating a neighborhood with fair housing covenants is an idea whose time has come because it can:

1. uplift existing neighborhoods
2. provide economic stimulus for local tradesmen
3. increase affordable workforce housing
4. meet regulatory and social responsibilities Read more

See this post for an overview of TransparencyCamp. What follows here is a report on one session within TransparencyCamp, aka #tcamp09.

Citability

Well, to be accurate, the session was called “Architecting Solutions for Archiving and Citing Government Data.”

Lead by Silona Bonewald and David Strauss, the idea here was to present and discuss what exactly is needed to create on-line citations of legislation that are reliable, authoritative and permanent. Think of it this way: we need a way to create hyperlinks directly to individual paragraphs within every piece of legislation which are as accurate as the citations used in legal documents for court proceedings.

Court documents are precise (if they aren’t a judge will toss the lawyer out of court), but are decidedly not convenient. To check the accuracy of a citation, or to read the text being referenced, one has to either go find the book (access can be time-consuming or expensive or both), or search online sources (often PDF files) which can be equally expensive.

The goal is to establish a standard method for creating paragraph-level citations of legislation, marked with date and time (because they sometimes change over time and we need to know what rule was in force at any point in time), that will be a permanent link (so your great-grandchildren can use the same link 30 years from now get the exact same material), and stable.

1. Paragraph level citation
2. Date and Time stamped
3. Permanent & Stable

Silona and David are part of an initiative called “The Citability Project,” or “Citability.org” which seeks to create open source standards to address these problems.

One of the problems with online legislation as it exists today is that “Government websites are ever changing and cannot be cited. Content changes without notice or accountability.” That last word, accountability, is the latch-key to why the goal of Citability.org is so worthy. Transparency in government is as yet an ill-defined term in general, but what isn’t lacking about the term is the basic idea that transparency in government attaches accountability to whomever is responsible for something within government.

Citability.org is working in an open, collaborative way to establish some principals of archiving for legislation, some functional technical solutions for paragraph level citing, some watchdog capabilities by using the Internet Archive, clonable server protocols and independent verification tools like digital signatures to verify sources and to establish full accountability.

Check out their work at: http://www.citability.org and their wiki at: http://citability.pbworks.com/

The non-profit organization Sunlight Foundation, together with Google, hosted “TransparencyCamp West 2009,” a two-day unconference on transparency in government, to convene…

“a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public.”

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants”
– Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis

What is “transparency in government,” anyway? Here’s an outline as applied to federal government, but the ideals are relevant to state and local government as well.

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