Last year I interviewed Richard (Dick) Howe, Lowell’s Registrar of Deeds about the impact of his participation in a Community Mapping class I taught at LTC in Spring, 2006.

The interview came about as a result a NTIA administrator asking the Transmission Project for evidence of a community training initiative that resulted in the creation of something of lasting economic or social value to a community, specifically a brief “ example in which tech training –> spurs creativity –> results in innovative outcome”.

This is what I submitted:

As a result of community technology training, the city of Lowell, Massachusetts better targeted public safety resources during the foreclosure crisis. After attending classes on online community mapping offered through the local Community Media Center, Lowell’s Registrar of Deeds created a series of maps of foreclosed properties in the city. These maps helped the city government see foreclosures not as isolated incidents but as patterns within specific neighborhoods. This analysis allowed the city to better target these areas in distress with police and public services, helping reduce the safety and community impact of foreclosed and abandoned properties. Speaking about the online community mapping class, Registrar of Deeds Richard Howe said “Beyond the nuts and bolts, it was inspirational and opened my eyes to that type of technology”.

Beyond that brief summary, my interview with Dick gave me a lot of insight into how he benefited from the online community mapping class—benefits I hope I and others are able to reproduce in all their technology trainings. Those benefits Dick explained fell into three broad categories: functional skills, a greater general appreciation of technology, and a sustained curiosity for the topic.

Function Skills: 1. As a result of Dick’s participation in my class, he gained the functional ability to create map mashups using tools like batch_geocode, Google Maps, MapBuilder.net, Platial, etc.

Dick used these skills to plot foreclosures in Lowell, extracting data from the registration of deeds and creating map mashups to show geographic distribution. These maps got some attention from the Lowell Sun newspaper and the Lowell City Council, alllowing them to “see” neighborhoods or sub-neighborhoods with significant foreclosures. These maps helped the city to allocate resources (police, public services) in a more rational manner and helped shift the perception of foreclosures from isolated events to more systematic patterns. That helped the city direct limited resources to issues caused by crisis (abandoned properties, crime, etc.). Without a visual depiction on a map, planners and public servants would have had to rely on their knowledge of the city.

On his personal blog, Dick mapped campaign contibutions for congressional and county seets. He took data from the campaign contributions and mapped where residents were contributing from.

An issue Dick identified though was that he never cracked through to a larger scale. He created the maps manually and because of geocoding limits, he would have to break the dataset down by neighborhood before recombining them. He further has had difficulty making the climb to more advanced tools like ArcGIS.

**Greater appreciation of technology: **For example, on his blog Dick takes pictures of olding building in Lowell. When he purchased a new digital camera, one of the big selling points was that the camera imbeds GIS data into the picture. Furthermore, Dick says he now is always on the lookout for websites and apps to use for communications:

“I was given imagination and vision on how it can be used,” he said. “If a project came along, I’d have the motivation to figure it out.”

Sustained curiousity: Dick says he is more likely to look behind the scenes of technology and do stuff. During the class I talked about the power of Drupal and its plugability and CMS features, which we were using for mapping. This led Dick to create a Wordpress blog and move off of Google’s free services. He’s now teaching himself PHP & MySQL.

“It got me interested to look under the hood” Dick says, and gave him confidence to to try things that he would otherwise have thought were too hard to use, but is more functional and tailorable to what he wants.

In his work as the Registrar of Deeds, Dick uses the knowledge and experience he gained in class. Working with different state agencies and contractors, like MassGIS and Applied Geographics, he is trying to better link deed and ownership information with maps, shapefiles and photography resources. Dick does though see difficulties in the bureaucracy as different priorities, such as access-limitation and security, results in pushback. He takes the long view: it’s a failure of imagination today but folks will catch up eventually.

Ultimately, Dick said the class “Raised my sights and capabilities to the stuff that can be done.”

I put this chart together after a friend told me my project productivity was unusually high. I picked out the major web projects I’ve done over the past several years and highlight how they’ve influenced subsequent (or previous) projects. Every one of these projects launched or shipped… except the DigitalBicycle, which is why it holds a special place in influencing all Project Design (we never did make those “defunct” t-shirts).

[ ![](/uploads/2011-09/Home-Meet-AmeriCorps.png “Home

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/Home-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)

This month, the lights on Meet AmeriCorp—a directory and messaging service for AmeriCorps members that launched in 2006—has gone dark for the last time. With over 450 members and a long history of technical problems and blackouts, I’m relieved to pull the plug though a little sad that the 80,000+ AmeriCorps members who serve every year still have great difficulty connecting with eachother.

Meet AmeriCorps started as ServiceSpeak in 2005, which was my introduction to CivicSpace—Howard Dean’s presidential campaign-technology spinoff—and eventually led me to Drupal, the platform Meet AmeriCorps is built on (Drupal 4.7, to be exact). The design was minimal, but I spent many hours on enriching the experience for users—which still annoys me 5 years and 3 major Drupal releases later that Users are still 2nd class Drupal citizens when it comes to treating them like a fully-fledged content type. This meant repurposing a lot of specialty node fields and taxonomy code (like tag clouds) for users; and creating rich lists of users and fun stuff like geographic hierarchies (clicking through a weighted tag-cloud of States to see a weighted tag-cloud of Cities). Looking back, the code wasn’t pretty (and there were a few hacks to core [shudder]), but Meet AmeriCorps, for being 5 years old, still has more character and spunk than many modern Drupal-based websites.

[ ![](/uploads/2011-09/California-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “California

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/California-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)  [ ![](/uploads/2011-09/rebecca-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “rebecca

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/rebecca-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)  [ ![](/uploads/2011-09/Map-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “Map

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/Map-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)

[ ![](/uploads/2011-09/Interests-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “Interests

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/Interests-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)  [ ![](/uploads/2011-09/All-about-Meet-AmeriCorps-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “All about Meet AmeriCorps

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/All-about-Meet-AmeriCorps-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)  [ ![](/uploads/2011-09/So-you-need-help-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “So you need help

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/So-you-need-help-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)

[ ![](/uploads/2011-09/Service-Area-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “Service Area

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/Service-Area-Meet-AmeriCorps.png) [ ![](/uploads/2011-09/Alaska-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “Alaska

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/Alaska-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)  [ ![](/uploads/2011-09/user-account-Meet-AmeriCorps-150x150.png “user account

Meet AmeriCorps”) ](/uploads/2011-09/user-account-Meet-AmeriCorps.png)

Technology aside, Meet AmeriCorps scratched a lot of philosophical and ideological itches—from organizing to communication and technology—in a time when no one was sure if Facebook would stick (not to mention the advertising and personal data collection, either). Last year, when it was finally clear that Meet AmeriCorps should be sundowned, I penned this open letter about the project and the AmeriCorps ecosystem in general:

Since we launched this website, first as ServiceSpeak then Meet AmeriCorps, our goal has always been to connect AmeriCorps members and alumni. Networking members, within communities and across the country, enables them to learn from one another and bonds them in the shared experience of service. We believe this creates greater well-being in members, greater impact upon the communities they serve, and greater strength to national service as a whole.

5 years ago the technology needed to create a successful online community required both commitment and technical skills. Frustrated with the lack of investment by AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), we spent considerable time surveying, designing, building, launching, and incorporating feedback into Meet AmeriCorps. We were informed by our own experience as AmeriCorps members and motivated by our desire to better recognize the innate experience and ability of its corps members.

Today, anyone can create an online community without significant resources or technical skills. Online social media and social networking tools now require only passion and commitment to create thriving communities of practice. Many new communities have already been created by other AmeriCorps members who identified the same needs and opportunities we did so many years ago.

Unfortunately, AmeriCorps and CNCS still place little emphasis on connecting and networking their members. Official websites are created without community input, poorly designed, rarely communicated to members, unmoderated by knowledgeable staff, and frequently replaced with equivalently disengaged websites. Communication tools are designed for top-down announcements rather than bottom-up dialogue, and even then are used rarely to meaningfully inform members or recognize their abilities and impact.

We are glad that technology is now accessible enough for AmeriCorps members to connect themselves. We are disappointed that that AmeriCorps has not done more to lead, nurture, facilitate and inform these networks. With the energy of the Obama administration and its complementary focuses on both national service and empowering uses of technology, we hope that AmeriCorps and CNCS will better recognize the individual benefits and national impact a purposely and well-connected corps can have.

In community,
The Meet AmeriCorps Team

This afternoon I have been following the mis-framing of Chicago’s newly announced plan to release 10 years of… not crime statistics as has been reported, but… police incident reports. From the Boston Globe:

Chicago to publish crime stats online

CHICAGO—Long a city with a reputation for withholding information, Chicago now wants to make public every crime over the past 10 years – a highly unusual move among the nation’s major police departments.

Starting Wednesday, millions of crime statistics dating to 2001 will be posted online in a searchable database. It will be updated daily, providing fodder for residents to evaluate their own neighborhoods, academics to study crime and techie types to create websites or apps.

I’ll harp on that last sentence in which the “techie type’s” activities are described so rudderlessly: this data will fuel a hundred red and green heatmaps, but probably provide little opportunity for reflection on the true nature of this data—police incident reports—let alone the politics, policies and policing that generated this data in the first place. Just as an example, this is from a WBEZ story entitled “ The downside of hiring more cops in Chicago”:

But there are also costs with increasing the number of police on the street and those costs can be tough to measure. “The good intentions of actually creating the uniformed presence to lower the immediate problems of crime may have an unintended result when you’re looking further down the line,” according to George Gascon. He’s the district attorney for the city of San Francisco, and before that he was the chief of police. He says low-income, often minority communities, are flooded with police, and residents are over-criminalized. Lots of people are arrested, sometimes for small infractions.

Kids get criminal records, they’re cut off from educational and employment opportunities, and all of that ultimately makes the crime problems worse. “I’m not saying that we should look the other way to crime, to the contrary. What I’m saying is that the strategies that we used in the past have not worked well, and we need to evolve away from that. In many neighborhoods basically we have been at war with our people,” Gascon said.

An incident does not make an indictment, and an infraction need not be a crime, let alone a conviction; nor should we forget what goes unreported. And yet this dataset is being distributed and—this is the actual problem—represented by the media and (soon) a myriad of websites and apps as full-stop crime.

This is not a criticism of the police or the City of Chicago, who should be commended for being more transparent and making this information more readily available; this is a plea for the media and application makers to appropriately label this data and use it with an understanding of its limitations.

Ben Fry, on visualization future and data literacy looks toward the future:

“I think the real thing that’s going to change is that we’re going to start understanding that visualization isn’t this sort of monolithic thing… I like to look at it a lot like writing. You have novels and poetry and haikus. You know there’s lots of different types of writing and styles of writing — and I think the same thing happens in visualization… some things are tools for analysis and some things are purely for entertainment, and there’s not so much a spectrum that there is different ways of addressing it.

But this understanding and widespread “data literacy” is not here yet. It’s up to us so called techie types to exhibit “Data Leadership” and work to better interpret and explain the complexity and nuance of our analysis—the absence of which I’ve complained about before.

Data leadership is appropriately labeling data. Data leadership is presenting data with a recognition of its limitations. Data leadership is consideration for how your presentation of data may be interpreted and responsibility for the consequences.

Data leadership is ultimately a recognition of the broader context of human experience and how information is collected, analyzed and integrated into our lives and decision-making processes—both individually and socially. I realize that’s awfully heady for discussing glorified spreadsheets, but to riff off the old chestnut, you can’t manage what you misrepresented.

(Thanks Justin, Bec and David for drawing my attention to this.)

I seem to be quoting this all the time, so I may as well archive it here. From Malkia Cyril of the Center for Media Justice, authoring “Why GLAAD Doesn’t Represent Me”: a response to the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) coming out in support of an AT&T-T-Mobile merger:

Worldview. Why does AT&T have such power in civic organizations from the DC beltway to your hometown? Well it isn’t because these organizations are dumb, or simply because they are struggling for resources or ill-informed. No. These organizations are often run by brilliant leaders of integrity. Instead, I think it’s because many groups have internalized a worldview that prioritizes getting our piece of the American pie, rather than one that seeks to remake the pie into something we can not only eat, but create and control. In the context of decimated public and municipal infrastructure, and an economic environment where jobs are scarce- the promise of contracts, work, and money, coupled with the belief that wealth equals freedom, promises mean a lot. Even if history proves that when it comes to big industry, promises not guaranteed by regulation are made to be broken. As a movement for justice, part of our mandate is to shift beliefs and values about the role of corporations in our lives.

Photo from  awesome teacher @paulramsay who used PrintAndShare.org to  share his classroom’s DonorsChoose Project.

As a result of building PrintAndShare.org I am hyper-sensitive to the drawbacks of URLs—which is my service’s weakest link. I’m using bit.ly shortened URLs that unfortunately have an ambiguous mix of upper and lower-case letters; ambiguous both in terms of typeface (els and ones may look identical), but also that many people expect URLs to ignore case; for bit.ly that can be difference between reaching the specified DonorsChoose project page or… well… anything else on the internet which, statistically-speaking, I can say is something they definitely don’t wish to see.

Regardless, I’m disappointed that bit.ly doesn’t acknowledge the need for transcribable URLs. Below is a ticket, since closed, from their support forum (I’ve reformatted it):

From Chris Rabb’s Invisible Capital on business plan competitions.

As a former director of a nationally recognized urban business incubator, I know firsthand the opportunities they have to help their clients develop invisible capital as well as the challenges that incubators face. When I was the vice president of entrepreneurial programs at a nonprofit-based business assistance organization born out of an independent study conceived by Wharton MBA students, I was asked on occasion to be a judge for a business plan competition, a feature of the program mandated by its well-intentioned philanthropic funder.

The participants were all under twenty-five years old. Some were high school dropouts, while others had earned their GEDs. Some were attending or had received an associate’s degree fro the Community College of Philadelphia, and a few were students at the University of Pennsylvania or Drexel University.

Invariable, the winners of these business plan competitions were students from the more selective schools. Were they more entrepreneurially oriented than their counterparts? No. Were they harder working? No. Were they more business savvy? No. Were their ideas or business models more compelling than those of their less educated peers? Rarely. So why did students from elite schools always win these competitions? Two words: invisible capital.

The Penn and Drexel students were more adept at using technology. They could write better. They were better trained in conducting research. They were more confident speaking in front of audiences. Their projects were often connected to experiences they had working in other professional or educational environments, and their plans incorporated how they would secure funding, talent, or customers based on their various social networks. They had more human, cultural, and social capital, not to mention economic capital. It wasn’t even close.

The problem with these competitions, I soon realized, was they did not rate the viability of the business model but the ability of the contestant to advocate for her venture in clear, substantive, and compelling ways. While this is important, it was not supposed to be the purpose of the competition, which was to reward the person with the best business plan, one that (at least in theory) would be related to the most viable business model. However, the contests always turned into a virtual beauty contest, where beauty was defined by eloquence, clarity of thought, poise, presentation, and the use of language often associated with conventional intelligence (aka cultural capital). Eliza Doolittle [of “Pygmalion”, which Rabb references throughout this chapter] mimicked the patrician ladies, and in so doing, she was accepted as their peer regardless of her intellect, values, or skills. To them, Eliza’s most important tacit skill was her ability to assimilate.

The winners of these business competitions walked away with a nominal prize, big smiles, and their egos stroked. The losers left with serious mixed lessons. First, many undoubtedly thought that their business concepts and models were inferior to those of the winners, without any indication why that was the case (when in fact it rarely was). Second, they did not know how influential their lack of invisible capital was in diminishing their chances of excelling, largely because they didn’t even know that the were being judged (albeit unconsciously) on the amount of invisible capital they brought to the competition.

This August marks the completion of my 7th year in Boston, with the loose exceptions of the 1 month I commuted into Boston from Ashland, and the 1 year I commuted out of Boston to Lowell.

_Also this is the [link to generate the Google Map](http://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=42.360129,-71.059227&zoom=15&size=800x1000&maptype=roadmap&sensor=false&style=style=feature:road.local

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visibility:off

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I was interviewed for NAMAC’s (National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture) Idea Exchange and the interview is now up on their website. The interview went great and I’m really appreciative of the opportunity to share our work at the Transmission Project with a wider audience. An excerpt:

NAMAC:_ August 2011 marks the end of The Transmission Project’s main initiative, The Digital Arts Service Corps. What do you think The Digital Arts Service Corps’s legacy will be?_

Sheldon: There are countless transformative projects and organizations that we’ve supported over the years, but I think the most enduring aspect of the Digital Arts Service Corps comes from maintaining a leadership pipeline into media arts and technology. For example, every conference I go to has at least one presenter who is an alumni of the Corps. And not just the number of people we’ve been able to bring into the field, but the diversity of individuals who might not otherwise have seen a role for themselves in the field. Many of our most successful members could never edit a video or build a web page, but they brought new perspectives and leadership qualities to organizations who could not have otherwise taken the risk to hire them. Unfortunately though, it’s this aspect of building a leadership pipeline that I see missing from other national service proposals – and yet I think the results of such a pipeline will have the most long-lasting benefits.

NAMAC: What’s next for The Transmission Project?

Sheldon: To be honest we’re still figuring that out. The past 18 months have taken all our energy to ensure that Corps members in the field were little impacted by the funding and oversight environment we’ve had at home: the non-renewal of our funding, a national fundraising tour, a federal audit (which was copacetic, BTW), and now our impending closure. Not to mention trying to get in front of the emerging foundation and governmental recommendations to create a corps just like ours…it’s been distracting, to say the least. We’re using our last month on the payroll to archive as much knowledge as possible to make sure we can play an active role should those foundation and governmental recommendations turn into action.

NAMAC: Do you have any advice for someone who wants to start a service corps to build capacity in the public media and technology field?

Sheldon: I’ve already touched on building a leadership pipeline – which means structuring roles and workplans to allow for leadership just as much as recruiting broadly in age, background, education and experience. In regards to outcomes, I’m really troubled by prescriptive “nonprofits need…” or “nonprofits suck at…” narratives that equate technical assistance with true capacity building. As if a dusting of “best practices” by volunteer trainers is all that stands between an organization and the realization of its mission. The Transmission Project takes a very active role in the RFP process: drawing upon our experience to help organizational applicants better define their projects and workplans over multiple feedback rounds – sometimes to the surprise of applicants not used to being Socratically engaged by a potential funder. We call the methodology “Honest Practice” and it means looking at project stakeholders, organizational structure, community context and the potential for overall success. One of the most interesting questions in the final evaluation we send to our grantees is “What was accomplished that wasn’t part of the original proposal?”. Because we’re granting something infinitely more valuable than money – a person – there is a wonderful opportunity to create unexpected, positive outcomes that just aren’t possible in a one-size-fits-all approach.

DonorsChoose announced the winners for their Hacking Education contest today and unfortunately Print & Share, the app I developed with my coworker Billy, didn’t win. The consolation prize is all of the positive feedback I’ve received from teachers who are using Print & Share:

Now this is probably just sour-grapes writing, but I am disappointed by the nature of the applications that won: most of them are based around automated referrals:

• a Wordpress plugin, and TwitterAPI app that use geographic location to suggest DonorsChoose projects,

• an email signature generator that suggests projects based on the projects’ funding needs

• a browser extension that suggests DonorsChoose projects when you search Amazon.com

The one winner I do like sends automated press-releases to local news outlets. The content of the release isn’t much to work with (though Print & Share shares that problem), but it could be an effective news peg for general school issues (not that “Local schools must turn to the internet because of waste/fraud/abuse” is the story I’d want to see run).

My criticism of those automated referral tools is that they all require an advocate to install the tool—but that advocate has little control over the projects they refer people to. In other words, these winners require someone to really care about DonorsChoose as a whole, not necessarily any specific project. Do those individuals exist, en masse? I’ve learned there is a big network of teachers who promote eachother’s DonorsChoose projects, but since they can’t specifically suggest a friend or colleague’s project, will they adopt the winning tools? It’s the sizzle of social networking without the (tofu-) steak .

The fact that these tools seem in search of an audience is what disappoints me most. As attributed to thinker Seth Godin by  Richard Millington: “Find products for your audience, not audiences for your products.” We built Print & Share as a tool for teachers to better promote their own projects—because teachers are the audience that cares most about their projects’ success– which is why the tweet I just received while writing this post cracks me up: