January
by Jon Garfunkel
What should people be doing on the Internet-- particularly on all those community websites? What do you want them to do? We have an idea. We call it constructive media.
by Jon Garfunkel
What do you call a website which features a community of people writing to each other? A BBS? A Forum? Virtual Community? We're calling it a Civ.
by Jon Garfunkel
You'd think, with financial fraud costing society about $35 billion last year (that's over $100 per person), the credit institutions would do more to fix this. While they talk mightily about the fantastic biometric technologies on the horizon, they keep a lot of people employed handling all of this identity fraud and pitching "Identify Theft Solutions". But they don't have to. Here's a breathtakingly simple solution: start having the major credit card companies, as well as the major credit bureaus, register people's email and SMS addresses.
by Jon Garfunkel
I'm holding out from joining what is perhaps the fastest growing political movement in the modern world-- which, in 3 days attracted 10 million adherents, and 3 months attracted 40 million more-- the national "DO NOT CALL" registry.
by Jon Garfunkel
They're vulgar, increasing in frequency, and containing shameless displays that shouldn't be shown to impressionable young children. No, I'm not talking about the variations on profane words which Congress wishes to ban on broadcast television. I'm talking about celebrities making impromptu speeches on televised award shows.
by Jon Garfunkel
The handle, the nickname, the nom du guerre, these are used by CB radio users, hip-hop performers, professional wrestlers, and participants in Internet forums. If you're like most world citizens, it's probably the latter group that you're most likely to find yourself to join. But how welcoming is a community where you see posts by names like CmdrTaco, MegaZone, Zealot X, mydogiscoolerthanyourdog*?
by Jon Garfunkel
On NBC's Meet The Press on 1/11, I learned that Dean's campaign had picked up an cost-effective way of calling potential voters: leveraging unused minutes in cellphone plans. This sounded exciting enough to participate in: I wouldn't even have to leave my home to volunteer, and, stumped with a tough caller, I'd have the benefit of my library and Internet to help out. I'd even appreciate getting a call this way. But that didn't happen.
by Jon Garfunkel
Let's say you had a question for Howard Dean, leading contender for the Democratic nomination for President in 2004. Here's the most frequent contributors you may run into on the official Dean For America forums: practical-magic, BrionLutz, NJHack, Grizz, Jakey, Dean-Uber-Alles, Jakey, WVMicko, slam-the-neocons, Bush_Stopper, Zackpunk, Kire, IndieMind, Political Amazon.
A nice, welcoming bunch, right? For all the emphasis on the face-to-face, "Meetups" of the Dean campaign, the official forums look like a rogue's gallery of cyberspace...
by Jon Garfunkel
A curious comment by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press leads me to consider the difference between real rallies and virtual rallies.
by Jon Garfunkel
The term "k-log" is supposed to represent the next wave of knowledge management. But the term will have a tougher time flying then a lead Zeppelin.
by Jon Garfunkel
Web pages should fix their width to a size that the reader is used to; in printed publications, this is usually between 60 and 75 characters. Here we compare the paragraph widths of some popular media websites.
by Jon Garfunkel
I read in the Sunday Globe of Keith Hampton's E-Neighbors project tracking the use of community networks by several Boston communities. "He believes that sticking to smaller groups helps avoid nasty postings and personal attacks." I would also suggest that it may help that those members may know each others' names, and would be kept in line for fear of public shame. ( more on user names)
by Jon Garfunkel
A look at the visual growth of weblogs.
by Jon Garfunkel
Even though Iowa's wrapped up, there are still 49 primaries left to go, and the contest is wide open. Let me take a few moments to clarify my political position.
by Jon Garfunkel
If the "State of the Union" was "strong", then the Democratic response was: long... wrong... and could have been delivered better... in song.
by Jon Garfunkel
I heard on MPR's MarketPlace this Thursday that the USA Network has been promoting the new "Traffic" series by re-introducing into circulation 50,000 dollar bills with a promotional sticker on them.
(see the summary, hear the report). The reporter, Jeff Tyler, informed us that this was fully vetted by the company's lawyers, so I suppose it follows that this was legal. I suppose that the removeable stickers are not permanently defacing the bills.
by Jon Garfunkel
Often I've heard "blogs" and "meta-commentary" in the same breath. I have to find some real references on this. In the meantime, I wanted to just point out that they aren't exclusive to each other.
by Jon Garfunkel
This describes the story types (akin to departments in magazines) used by Civilities to drive the layout, and help the reader know what's what. This is in contrast to the all-content-is-blog-posts mentality pandemic through the blogosphere.
by Jon Garfunkel
This is a brief proposal to explain how I'd like to extend Drupal to support story types.
by Jon Garfunkel
An open letter to Eli and the MoveOn.org team...
by Jon Garfunkel
I ran into my lawyer Michael at the Summit Ave T-stop waiting for the trolley into work this morning. Well, he is not my lawyer, but he is brilliant at talking me into a corner, I'd certainly want him on my side. (As it turns out, just about everybody I run into on the trolley in the morning-- Eric, Sam, Julie, Jordan-- happen to be lawyers). If you were on a "Type 8" Breda trolley today, and saw two fellows in navy overcoats, one with a maroon cap (Michael) and one with a brown fedora, you saw us.
Michael is a great liberal, or so he prides himself.
He's so agreeable because he answers his own questions to me "I can tell you're a smart guy. You know why? I see you reading your New Yorker." "You studied Latin? Of course you did, I thought so."
by Jon Garfunkel
The casting call for the "electable Dean" went out: Wes Clark was drafted, but stumbled; John Kerry stepped up and has two primaries and momentum going into the primary season. And now the attempts have started to chip away at Kerry's granite image, starting with the notion of whether he is legitimate merely by being electable.
David Brooks, on Wednesday's All Things Considered with E.J. Dionne, remarked:
"Only 42 percent of people voted for him because they agreed with him on the issues. 46 percent said they voted for him because he's 'electable'. What they're doing when they're saying when he's electable is that one group is saying that he has certain qualities that appear to appeal to other groups of people. That's pretty suspect to go about voting, because people tend to be wrong."
"Multi-State Primaries Await Democrats"
by Jon Garfunkel
In more than one context, I've heard starting hearing to "the blogs" as the subject of a sentence, much as one would say, "the news." "The blogs were all talking about the Paul O'Neill book this weekend," a co-worker said. Also, the phrase "support among bloggers" has starting showing up as well: 8 hits in Google, all related to the political campaign. I think I've heard it from talking heads as well, but I can't place any right now.
But what does it mean? Are these people relying on hard data, or are they just picking generalizations from thin air?
February
by Jon Garfunkel
Thoughts on an otherwise exciting football game. Had I not watched the halftime show, I would have skipped writing this and been happily asleep with the Patriots win. And a party mostly cleaned up.
by Jon Garfunkel
The IRS has sent me a postcard in the mail informing me that 53 million taxpayers used electronic filing last year. I know: I was one of them. I induce that they sent postcards to the other 53 million taxpayers who e-filed. At 20 cents bulk rate for post cards, this would appear to burn a $10 million hole in the marketeting budget.
Sure, in the course of consumer choices, advertising exists so that consumers are reminded to stick with the product or service. Do they worry that taxpayers will somehow forget the whole convenience of getting their refunds withing 2 weeks, and go back to good ol' paper returns? Forget to file? Move to Canada?
by Jon Garfunkel
David Brooks devotes today's New York Times column to two points: 1, that we should take at face value the conclusions by David Kay, Richard Kerr, and senate Intelligence Committee, that there was no political pressure to slant the intelligence analysts*; and 2, that the very problem with the CIA is that it should be more politicized, and less "scientific". Just the sort of hack piece you'd expect from a guy who also writes a column for the Atlantic Monthly, edits the Weekly Standard, and is a regular campaign panelist on All Things Considered and The Newshour.
by Jon Garfunkel
I've picked some major themes in order to focus my writing, somewhat related to communications theory. This keeps my site rather constrained, and should give any potential contributors an idea of what sort of pieces I'd like to publish alongside mine.
by Jon Garfunkel
This is a brief introduction to the taxonomy, or classification systems on this site.
by Jon Garfunkel
Lew Perelman just sent me a link of a new graphic by Valdis Krebs of orgnet.com, which illustrates a social network of current bestselling political books. There are links between books which were most commonly bought (and presumably read) by the same person. Not surprisingly, you see a red cluster and a blue cluster. Only two books bridge the two: Bob Woodward's Bush At War and Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Devil (subtitled: "How Washington Sold our Soul For Saudi Crude", which I read and highly recommend).
by Jon Garfunkel
If Super Bowl commericals have passed their peak and jumped the proverbial shark, maybe they've lost their effect completely. And if we're lucky, political campaign commercials as well.
An inspiring trend is the spontaneous guerilla marketing efforts forged by simply forwarding on emails. Now that the whole world over has gotten tired of forwarding along the chain emails which never really brough good luck, here's one that may just do that: a link to Dishonest Dubya, an interactive animation which allows everybody to hear the President in his own words.
by Jon Garfunkel
Timothy Noah, in this Thursday's Chatterbox column for Slate, alerted readers to the Ron Suskind's initial release of The Bush Files, an online archive of the source documents for his bestselling book, The Price of Loyalty. (This is the book about the Bush White House from Paul O'Neill's point of view, sourced in part on 19,000 documents which had been released to the O'Neill, while he was still Treasury Secretary).
by Jon Garfunkel
If only he be meeting the press more often. A linguistic foray into today's Presidential interview.
by Jon Garfunkel
There's an oft-quoted theory of Internet discussions that all rational discussion ceases when the Nazis are invoked. ("You wear socks? The Nazis wore socks!" as one standup comedian once riffed). The same might be said about the inevitable question "who made you the moderator?" But they're very different. While the first example is merely a logical fallacy, the second is just an outright rejection of procedure. Logical fallacies are well known, and intuitive. But deliberative process is vastly more complex and unknown to the unitiated; consider the procedures in judicial and parliamentary systems.
by Jon Garfunkel
My thoughts on the Dean campaign:
The social software and use of the Internet attracted the media, the media attracted attention, and Howard Dean rode the polls up. He peaked too early, and he was stung too many attacks; he criticized the "Washington establishment" of Democrats while soliciting endorsements from them. (In 1992, it was seemed ok for Jerry Brown, or even Ross Perot, to criticize the Washington Democrats for rolling over in the Reagan/Bush years. Now, when liberals think of this group, we like to think of them as the last people defending our nation from indulging into a dangerous cocktail of laissez-faire attitude and crony capitalism, and the preventing the extension of the state of paranoia). Dean just wasn't the best candidate. The only question left was, how did he spend $40M?
The DeanSpace team-- the ones driving the technology for the campaign-- have been asking whether anything went wrong. (I followed DeanSpace only in the last several weeks, so I have a marginal association at best). Mark Ratcliffe provides a summary of answers in his Meta-Analysis of the Dean Campaign. A few commentators, such as the pseudonymous Spengler of the Asia Times, have made an ill-informed comparison of DeanSpace developers to a "dotcom startup", and compare the "crash" to the Internet bubble. (It was roundly criticized by letters to the editor). The only thing I can add is some insight that the "social software" used by the Dean campaign wasn't always social, and sometimes it was anti-social.
But I'm thinking positively going forward:
- The software has to continue to be developed, especially along the lines of fostering truly effective deliberation. The emphasis on blogs will be subsumed into more comprehensive community systems. I call it constructive media. Whatever the technique is, it has to be more thorough-sounding than just "Internet-based".
- We'd have to start using the software for local, smaller efforts, and prove that they are effective complements to committee-meeting politics.
- We need candidates who really believe in this stuff and practice it, and make their way from the beginning of their political career using it.
Does Howard Dean remain the patron saint of the movement? Not to me, really. It is ultimately ironic that the politician most associated with the Internet, Al Gore, did not inspire this movement after losing the most contested election in the modern age. So maybe it would be prudent to evolve the software to DemSpace for now, that would certainly please the Democratic nominee. It also might call to attention that there's no comparable "GopSpace".
by Jon Garfunkel
How important is it to use headlines to organize a community/news website?
It's hard to think of a world without news headlines as we know them today, but that existed before 1889, when Joseph Pulitzer stretched headlines beyond a single column and thus made them a more prominent part of the front page.
by Jon Garfunkel
I still haven't found any blogs on politics that are must-read on a daily basis. I thought that the Columbia Journalism Review's CampaignDesk would be one, but then I read Managing Editor Steve Lovelady remark to Jack Shafer in a recent Slate dialoge: "To date, the version that I have been to skeptical readers who ask me how Campaigndesk.org is 'different from any number of blogs?' is this: 'Read my lips: IT'S EDITED!'"
by Jon Garfunkel
Attention Massachusetts residents who are U.S. citizens: If you are not registered to vote, you must register by tomorrow so that you can vote in the March 2 primary. ( Registration Information).
Why register with a party? So that you can vote in the primary, of course. Even though the Democratic primary may appear locked up by Senator Kerry, the Massachusetts delegates to the national convention are assigned in proportion to the vote totals they get in the primary. In addition, registering with a party in your residence is used to determine the voting power for your locality in the state party convention. Here, for example, is from the bylaws of the Massachusetts State Democratic Committee on the selection of selecting state committee members:
by Jon Garfunkel
Some readers may wonder how a site which has a few sharp attacks can call itself Civilities. I started reading the book Civility: Manners, Morals and the Ettiquite of Democracy by Stephen L. Carter, Professor of Law at Yale (The Da Vinci Code is still difficult to get without a hold). On page 22, after considering a sharp retort from Maureen Dowd against President's Clinton's "call for a more civil Washington", Carter recalls the argument of Charles P. Flynn's Insults and Society:
by Jon Garfunkel
It was perhaps the most historic day in Boston so far this year, but I neglected to exit at Park St. on the way work to take a photo of the gathering crowds at the State House. As a punishment, I subjected myself to an hour's watching of legislative debate on WGBX-44. My reward was finding out that the convention, after rejecting two amendments, will pick up tomorrow. (So I have tomorrow, to try and capture with my digicam, a demonstration of civilities on the steps of the State House).
by Jon Garfunkel
I hereby apologize to Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean: I passed on the mistaken observation that he had improperly benefitted by steering Dean campaign ads to his agency. Fortunately for me, I only told this to Same, of my lawyers on the C-line (where all of my lawyers hang out), who never takes me seriously.
As a penance, I'll promote Trippi's new blog, Change For America, where he convincingly explains that the financial arrangement with the Dean campaign wasn't a conflict of interest. Trippi in fact has picked up where he left off, which was Dean's Blog For America, with just a small change. Trippi's makeover came as he was heralded at Monday's Digital Democracy Teach-In in San Diego at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Wired News reported that he told the sesion:
by Jon Garfunkel
Picking a candidate is hardly done rationally (as I had feebly done earlier in trying to deduce, according to the Civilities Themes, who would be the best candidate).
More often it's about rationalizing your choice once you've made it. Now obviously, Kerry is the best choice for me, for the Network/Access reason alone. After all, I know people in Massachusetts politics, and I'm more closely linked to Kerry than the rest of the candidates. Besieds, it looks like he's going to be the nominee.
by Jon Garfunkel
My campaign season has officially leapt from this virtual world onto the street. Here's my write-up about my drink-up for Kerry, and my meetup for the Dems.
by Jon Garfunkel
Having written about forty articles so far, I thought it necessary to disclose some of the ethical and style considerations that I've been making while writing this site.
by Jon Garfunkel
Dr. Yang Jianli is a neighbor of mine in Washington Sq., but it may some time before I run into him again. Dr. Jianli, had been living in forced exile from China since his participation as an activist at Tiananman Square activist. He returned to China in April 2002 to assist labor activists, but within a week was caught and detained by the Chinese government-- as a Communist country, they have a version of the "USA Patriot Act" which allows citizens to be detained indefinitely without access to a lawyer. His wife and children remain here in Brookline. Joining them in appeals to the Chinese government are his employer, the John F. Kennedy School of Goverment at Harvard, and the United States Congress. And now me.
by Jon Garfunkel
Watching some of the news shows this week reviewing Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I was appalled how many of them peddled a Jew-Christian dichotomy over the film: that is, Jewish observers were portrayed as being on the offensive over anti-Semitic undertones in the film, and mostly Christian faithful defending the it, often conflating an attack on the movie as an attack on religion. I started wondering whether this pattern was exhibited elsewhere.
by Jon Garfunkel
I ran into my streetcar lawyer again this past week, and he still buttonholes me on Kerry. "Why does he take two sides of every issue? Why can't he stand for anything?"
March
by Jon Garfunkel
I was trying to figure out how The Passion's resonance with believers can be understood by non-Christians. Were there any equivalent movies that could be made, or had been made? Movies about faith and inspiration which are overtly religious demand not just a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of belief-- one's own-- which make them difficult to watch.
by Jon Garfunkel
In the town of Brookline, the cable company had given an ultimatum to customers to convert to digital, and pay extra per month to rent the convertor boxes. This has caused a bit of rancor, as cable television is expensive enough as it is. When everyone has a digital cable box, the cable company will be able to fine-tune each viewer watches; no longer will a subscriber be able to simply hook up to a cable-ready set and watch channels. This could be a cause of deep concern. Or it could be a great opportunity, to finally introduce a real market in television by using à la carte pricing, where users can choose to only pay for the channels they want.
by Jon Garfunkel
What's the difference between a falsehood spread by a journalist and one spread by an amateur who gets up on a soapbox when he writes a letter, or calls a radio show, or posts to the web? Well, after the journalist is exposed, the publisher will acknowledge the error. (The fabricator will write a book, option a movie). When an amateur does it, the falsehood just hangs in the air; the publisher couldn't be bothered to correct it.
by Jon Garfunkel
The RNC must be pent-up for cash-- they are now reaching out to Massachusetts liberals! (Did anyone else get a pitch in the mail?)
I was thinking of sending them my annotations... but then realized that they wouldn't think it very funny. So instead I'm going answer their request and tell them that I have indeed been let down: I really expect Republicans, when they control the legislative and the executive branch, to spend less money...
by Jon Garfunkel
Draw two axes of American politics-- social issues and economic issues. Along each axis, consider how much individual liberty . Do you want to extend civil rights, women's rights, gay rights? Climb up the left. Loosen regulations? Climb up the right. Congratulations-- you've come upon the "Nolan Chart", which was devised by David Nolan, who first published it in 1971. But have you ever seen this in any political article intended for a general readership?
by Jon Garfunkel
Can't tell the politicians without a scorecard? Looking for a free online equivalent of the Elias Sports Bureau of American politics? Check out On the Issues, a website which made its debut in the 2000 Election and has continued keeping its data updated to reflect recent votes. It has vote details and issue grids for each national poltician, governor, as well as those for many challenging candidates.
by Jon Garfunkel
You donate through me, of course. I signed up as a KerryCore fundraiser, which means you can list me as your link when you give. You in fact don't have to even write my name anywhere, just use this link to donate:
https://contribute.johnkerry.com/index.html?source_code=00016157
I've included a little rallying statement there to indicate why it's important.
by Jon Garfunkel
I've updated the discussion systems to leverage dynamic HTML better-- namely, by making the message bodies collapsible. See a page where users have responded.
I've made my best effort to make them multi-browser compatible, with the help of
QuirksMode, a website by PeterPaul Koch of Amsterdam. In every (web-browser) generation there comes along a website which clearly and plainly illustrates the different ways that each browser implements web standards (javascript, DOM, CSS). QuirksMode is it today, and for the foreseeable future. Koch's illustrations are simple and elegant.
by Jon Garfunkel
This document lists the guidlines for posting to this website.
by Jon Garfunkel
I was at the John Kerry $25 fundraiser at Brandy Pete's last Saturday night, which I'll take over a Meetup any day of the week. (The only thing lacking was food, which drove us to dash over to Chinatown at about midnight, just as the DJ moved into old-school Madonna). First of all, my compatriots Dave and Alex now could use the new pickup line, "Our friend over here is one of the big shot KerryCore fundraisers." Well, maybe not really big shot-- I have absolutely no idea what my standing is on KerryCore until they improve the website-- but thanks to the Karen Zelevinsky's donation of thirty minutes ago, I've just smashed through the $1000 barrier for the KerryCore fundraising.
April
by Jon Garfunkel
Following is a bunch of hack attacks against my server which are trying to exploit the problem identified by the Computer Emergency Reponse Team (CERT) as
CA-2003-09 Buffer Overflow in Core Microsoft Windows DLL (also see its CVE entry)
Essentially, my access logs fill up with lines like "SEARCH /\x90\x02\xb1..." (for 32,000 characters), and my Apache configuration has proved very stubborn in filtering them out automatically. So it's a bit annoying. Plus I don't like 32KB getting sent to my server unsolicited, in much the way that spam is.
by Jon Garfunkel
My friend Stephanie has hooked me up to three social networks now-- the original SixDegrees.com, which shut down in 2000, the still-popular Friendster, and now LinkedIn. This trend is partially due to the fact that Stephanie is one of my oldest and most trusted friends, and also, being a journalist and events publicist, it's her job to be hip on this.
And if you want to meet Stephanie, or learn more about me, just search for me on either one of them.
by Jon Garfunkel
The most effective way to raise money for a cause is through personal connections. It provides a relationship for the fundraising organization to reach individuals, and it also provides access for the individual up to the campaign. The basis of the system is that donors, when they give their money, name individual fundraisers, who can therefore take credit for bundling the donations. I call this "Social Network Fundraising".
by Jon Garfunkel
I've written on length about Social Network Fundraising, which is so called because it pulls people in to the network. The nature of this "pull" campaigning is that a relationship ties each person into another person closer to the campaign.
by Jon Garfunkel
As Internet discussions have moved from primarily text-based environments (such as mailing lists) to the web, it has become possible to greatly augment the experience. Participants can quickly scan multiple discussions at once, and catch up on older discussions. The downside is that as barriers to entry and exit dropped, many more casual users could disrupt what were once small community discussions.
by Jon Garfunkel
Out of what appears to be eight thousand online fundraisers in John Kerry's March Madness campaign, I finished second. How improbable! No matter, I won a three-day pass to the convention! (the fourth day I'll go sailing).
by Jon Garfunkel
"I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it."
--President Bush's immediate response to a question about what his biggest mistake was after 9/11, and what he learned from it.
Putting aside the question of where the Bush's quote ranks with other incredulous answers in uttered in Presidential news conferences (cf. Eisenhower on whether he could give an example of a major idea of Vice President Nixon's that had been adopted in his administration: "If you can give me a week, I might think of one."), as well as how grace under pressure is perceived as a reliable indicator of leadership (Eric Rauchway considers these in Altercation today), not too mention, after three years, is this guy still embarassingly underprepared for the most important job on Earth? let's actually consider the point.
by Jon Garfunkel
"I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it."
-- President Bush, at his 4/13 press conference.
This perhaps drew winces in every living room in America. But it did inspire me to consider how a structured forum for questions & answers can offset some of the better-known deficiencies of press conferences. I wrote it up in a proposal called the Question Scoreboard. This page is a sampling board for questions for the President and the 2004 campaign.
by Jon Garfunkel
I never had an idea that I would place in the KerryCore March Madness contest (a last day effort garnered me second place). I figured that somebody out there must have bundled a lot of more money-- like an order of magnitude more-- but I had no idea of finding out. If you search Google for "March Madness" KerryCore, you find three links from the campaign website, and two to me.
And now I just learned (thanks to Matt Gordon) that somebody had in fact raised more money online-- a lot more money: $75,000. He is the anonymous blogger Atrios, who pointed out on his blog afternoon that Kerry HQ had not included this contest entry until too late. This might also explain why the contest results were not readily publicized.
by Jon Garfunkel
Today the Brookline TAB, our weekly town newspaper, published my piece
Rallying for a Neighbor as a guest column. This was a vast reworking of the piece on Yang Jianli of several weeks back. I met Dr. Yang's wife, Christina Fu, in preparing this story, and we had a nice chat about the neighborhood and about activism and such. I rewrote the piece a couple of times, and settled on a theme of zoning. Our neighborhood retails shops are zoned for commerce, and we customers are "zoned" for commerce as well when we do business there. All in all, it was a nice exercise in writing, editing, and cutting.
by Jon Garfunkel
I was able to convince my friend Abby that there was no better way to mingle with the beautiful people than to hit Fire + Ice for the $75 "Young ProfessionalS" Kerry. For sure, it was tall people. (I am 5'8", and Abby's 5'7". I felt dwarfed). This campaign is so tall, I am waiting for the Bushies to accuse Kerry of being Dutch, and not French.
by Jon Garfunkel
I came up with the term journalactivist to describe what I do here. I wanted to work on journalism-- pursuing truth through the collection and presentation of facts-- as well as activism-- doing something based on those facts. "Journalactivist" may be useful word to describe this, so I will discuss the definition and some of the ramifications.
by Jon Garfunkel
Yesterday on the Esplanade in Boston, the John Kerry table was blown away at the eleventh annual Earthfest (officially, the WBOS Festival for the Earth presented by Whole Foods). First the wind whipped us, in our un-strategic position facing the Charles River (the wind was really great for the Clean Power Now booth, the PAC formed to alleviate environmental concerns the Nantucket Sound Wind Farm). Then the permit police got us for good. Apparently we had a table without the benefit of a permit from WBOS; instead we had the benefit of a favor. So we did what I called strategic dispersal after two hours.
by Jon Garfunkel
Subscribers of Comcast Cable in Brookline and Boston are seeing cable channels get zapped under their very eyes-- an effect not unlike the disappearing memories of Jim Carrey's character in the brilliant new movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But the channels aren't going away completely, they are effectively jumping over to the digital side.
by Jon Garfunkel
With the Kerry campaign blasting out as many as 3 emails a day, and MoveOn and other activist groups pumping them out as well, an average Internet user might think that mass email is an effective tool for advocacy. It's certainly cheap-- especially if you don't have to write it yourself, and instead just forward some junk you got from someone else.
by Jon Garfunkel
For the longest time I thought that every Supreme Court justice sounded like Nina Totenberg, and never interrupted each other. That all changed in the last two days. NPR's legal affairs correspondent gave her commentary and then ran the tape. Souter, Scalia, Kennedy, Ginsburg, O'Connor, all let themselves be heard. It was like a Japanese citizen hearing the emporer's voice for the first time after V-J day. The exchanges were fast but not furious, a little more intelligent than the Hardball slam-fest we're used to.
by Jon Garfunkel
The fundraising bug has bit me bad. Here's tonight's Mastercard damage:
- Friends of the Boston's Homeless Benefit at Avalon: $20
- coatcheck, 2 coats: $6 (+$1 tip)
- Two drinks, $14 (+$2 tip)
- Winning the silent auction for two tickets to Swan Lake: $140 (anything to avoid ticketmaster charges)
- Taking in Jonathan Soroff's presence for 5 minutes, for the second time in a week: cliche.
Next time we'll show up early. Jamie and I missed the dinner (which only would have set us back another $30), missed the Mayor, missed meeting any new people, and missed much of Kendrick Oliver's band playing-- they played one song in the third set. The crowd really thinned out after the dinner; I haver never seen Avalon so empty. And once again, I get that feeling of winning a fundraising contest in weak competition. It would have been nice to learn more about the organizations my money went to. I hope I have the courage to look a homeless person in the face now.
by Jon Garfunkel
Jock Gill and Aldon Hynes of Greater Democracy suggested that people looking to volunteer with the party should check if their town commitees have any seats unfilled. I know that my Brookline's Democratic Town Committee never short of candidates. So I thought it might be helpful to look into whether such a chart exists of opening across the state.
May
by Jon Garfunkel
What motivates people to work on campaigns? I wondered this while interacting with a number of organizers throughout the country on a few of the Democratic/Kerry mailing lists. I think it's important for organizers to consider as they get people involved, and for volunteers to consider when choosing an organization to work with. Here's what you should look for:
by Jon Garfunkel
I took a break last Thursday from the bustle of online activism to see some real government in action. I went to the Cable Ascertainment Hearing in Brookline, at the Public Safety building across the street from Town Hall. The meeting, as I learned, would not a forum for policy, but actually a lecture on electrical engineering. What a treat for the dozen or so people who had showed up for the hearing! With Comcast's funding, Brookline had commissioned a consulting engineer, William Pohts to investigate the safety of the wiring and of the transmission leaks according to federal and industry guidelines. The old cable infrastructure in Boston/Brookline has been notoriously bad throughout its twenty-plus year history.
by Jon Garfunkel
If you get a recorded message from John Kerry calling your home, and you enter the keys on the touchtone pad in order to donate money, you might just reach somebody like me. I spent an hour doing this tonight, and thought I'd record some initial observations.
by Jon Garfunkel
Griggs Road residents Christopher Koch and Michael Traister rolled to victory, knocking out an incumbent in yesterday's competitive election for the Town Meeting Members of Precinct 10 in Brookline. With 16 precincts of around 1,000 voters, the winning candidates usually pull in about a hundred votes. Yesterday about 180 voters showed up at the firehouse to vote. Here's the unofficial totals (incumbents*):
by Jon Garfunkel
In my Performance Management training at work today, I learned something absolutely remarkable: words matter only 10% of what is communicated. Body language and tone account for 30% of the message, while 60% is based on perception and prior prejudices. Absolutely remarkable; I am glad I spent two days in my coworker (and fellow volleyballer) Josh Perlman's excellent training class.
by Jon Garfunkel
What does the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities mean? Reading through the news, I came upon a couple of damning questions. Is there a culture of permissiveness in the government? Or of suppression of truth? And which is worse?
by Jon Garfunkel
When I heard that President Bush had given an interview on Al Hurra television, I recalled that this was the Arabic satellite channel funded by you and me, the American taxpayers. So I was curious what sort of programming we were sending out this evening, or any evening. How popular the 3 month old network is has not been well reported, but early reviews derided it as poor propaganda.
by Jon Garfunkel
I went to the Brookline Democratic Town Committee's legislative roundtable last Wednesday, which was my first official event. Though first I thought it helpful to give an introduction about the town.
by Jon Garfunkel
MoveOn had a great message, but recently it's becoming twisted against them. Just to review the origination of the term: First they petitioned the Republican Congress to "move on" past the Clinton impeachment hearings (they failed). They revived it in urging President Bush to "move on" past the war threats on Iraq (failed again).
Since then, the GOP has blossomed into the party of no accountability. After all, accountability would be tantamount to admitting error, and admitting error would invite investigations, and that would just get in the way of the important things a government does, like wage war and cut taxes. As Dick Cheney said, in a Saturday night prepared release defending Rumsfeld: "People ought to get off his case and let him do his job." Move on, indeed. The talking points from Republican Senators today (outside of McCain and Warner) were on that message: let's not dwell on the past; let's focus on the present, and the future. I wouldn't be surprised if we have an incumbent President who campaigns on the same theme, to forget the past.
by Jon Garfunkel
When does a petitions become actionable, that is, when people decide that it should be the popular petition of the sort that they ask others to to attach their name to? Here's a timeline of a number of directed petitions regarding prisoner treatment by U.S. forces; only recently, after the publication of the photos did they become popular petitions.
by Jon Garfunkel
"Time to get local" -- the subject line of the email from John Kerry's campaign implores. This rings hollow as the emails themselves come from the national office. Everyday, I and perhaps millions of other Kerry supporters, get emails from a bunch of behind-the-scenes people on the campaign: Josh Ross, Mary Bath Cahill, John Norris, Bill Clinton...
by Jon Garfunkel
I've read many excellent pieces in the New Yorker in the last seven years of being a subscriber-- some which come to mind. Malcolm Gladwell on the "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg" (1/11/99), Michael Specter's "The Rug Missionary" (3/6/2000), Katherine Boo's "The Marriage Cure" (8/18/2003).
by Jon Garfunkel
Recently, I was curious about what sort of programming was going out on the U.S.-sponsored Arab satellite television channel, Alhurra. (I had wanted to suggest certain movies to be aired in place of news). I had a look at its website, which was rather abysmal for a network with so important a mandate. It has an email address which appears to bounce and lists no phone number. I figured that Americans ought to have some oversight of our newest outreach effort to the Arab world.
by Jon Garfunkel
Four years ago, the once-famous political consultant Dick Morris published a book
extolling his vision of the future of politics-- Vote.com, a system of deliberation-based
Internet polling. Even if the conventional wisdom is that
Internet polls are bunk, Morris has an interest in providing some analysis to the
data in order mine some respectability out of the 55+ million "votes" in his
database. None is apparent on the vote.com website, nor does his latest book hint
at it. I thought I would take some time to do it.
by Jon Garfunkel
If you go to sleep with the radio on, you may find yourself waking up at 6am to the delightful strains of This American Life Ira Glass's remarkable show which "documents everyday life in this country." The show has apparently been broadcast on in this early-morning timeslot on WGBH 89.7 for the last year. (Previously it had been on in a comfortable afternoon slot, where WBUR 90.9 has it).
by Jon Garfunkel
I'll be doing the American Lung Association Asthma walk on the Charles River in two weeks, and I've joined team Sánchez. For a couple of simple reasons. One, my Dad has suffered from an asthma-like condition. The more direct reason is that Rep. Jeff Sánchez asked people to join his team at the recent Democratic Town Committee meeting. So I joined up, and I pledged to raise an additional hundred dollars. Sánchez's district covers part of Brookline-- not my part exactly, but just down the street, one of the places that I'm looking to buy a condo. Or just as well, Sanchez's district may yet change thanks to a court-ordered redestricting of Boston's legislative districts.
by Jon Garfunkel
Here's where I generally get my news. I thought I'd provide this as a bit of background to explain not just what I pay attention to, but what I don't. It's very likely that I've missed something because it was published somewhere else.
Periodicals:
Magazines I used to subscribe to, and may yet again:
- Economist (too thick)
- Harper's Monthly (too polemic, too esoteric)
- Scientific American (not sure why I let the subscription run out)
Radio/TV:
Notes
I meet Jewish people who won't listen to NPR or read the Times because they are "anti-Israel". This is absurd. Such people are missing out on excellent journalism. It may be a defensible position to not donate or not buy a subscription; I don't agree with it.
by Jon Garfunkel
Internet polls had a promise once. They are a cheap mechanism from collecting quantifiable opinions from people who want to give it. Typically the data from Internet polling is instantly visible. This promise has been somewhat muted, due to a slow pace of innovation on the part of the community software industry, as well as some caution offered up by the polling industry.
by Jon Garfunkel
I had the oppurtunity this year to tutor a high school sophomore, a girl from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Through the METCO program, she attends Lexington High School, 16 miles up Massachussetts Avenue into leafy subrubia. I hope I taught her a little bit about critical thinking and about creative problem solving. She taught me a thing about how the next half-generation does research. No library is necessary: it's all on Google.
by Jon Garfunkel
Here's a mild proposal to consider as we bring people into the political campaign. When you signup for an organization-- whether that person does it online, or at a meeting or meetup or at information booth, you should be able to specify your "captain". This is the person who will email you, call you, and be responsible for your involvement. You may pick the person who brought you into the organization in the first place. You may pick the actual precinct captain. Or you may look at the list of people volunteering to be captains, and pick the most attractive one. Up to you. That's democracy. That's how real estate companies work. Big brand, personal agent.
by Jon Garfunkel
This is my 100th post/essay, so I thought I'd have fun and reflect back. When I started thinking about putting together this website, we were enjoying fifty-degree weather in December. Now we have fifty-degree weather in May. In between were a lot of cold and rainy weekends and weeknights, which in small part kept me inside writing. Five months ago, I had just been clued in to the online Dean campaign, just as it was fading. I jumped into the online forums, but finding them ill-moderated, I withdrew and decided to develop my own site for "constructing informative viewpoints".
by Jon Garfunkel
My parents, who have volunteered on numerous political campaigns over the last thirty years, attended their first "Meetup" in Tarrytown, NY, at Horsefeathers on US-9. As the campaigns instructions for meetup are not very concrete ("discuss the issues, plan local actions, and build networks of people... or any other action your group wants to take."), the Tarrytown group discussed the issues and came up with some action that they'd like. Here's a plan that my Dad put together and sent to me:
June
by Jon Garfunkel
Many conservative commentators have asked where the outrage is surrounding Nicholas Berg's death. The Boston Herald editorializing on Al Gore's MoveOn speech, began so: "He never mentioned Nicholas Berg. Or Daniel Pearl." A reader of my Civilities piece on Abu Ghraib demanded, in effect, equal outrage for Berg.
by Jon Garfunkel
In October, the Government Accounting Office investigated a number of possible reforms for the cable industry, including à la carte cable pricing. As I write in my review of à la pricing, it is supported across the spectrum, by left-leaning consumer groups and by Republicans in Congress. Nonetheless, libertarian groups like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have objected to a proposal which would introduce read competition in cable programming.
by Jon Garfunkel
It was the worst of sites, it was the best of sites, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness-- so begins my tale of two civilities. In the course of my work on Civilities I participate in other community websites; partly to see how they work, and often to exchange information. Some have good leadership; others merely have good software (and rarely do both exist on the same site). Fortunately, it was the former that steered me to a correction. The latter is balking on helping me do research. Here's my tale:
My helpers were the C-SPAN Community, where some members picked up on an erroneous statement I had writtin an article that the national public access network was funded by cable companies, but also "mandated by the government." The article in question was "When it comes to cable reform, the Cato Institute fears the free market", which I have republished with the correction. I aim to correct any falsehoods and also encourage users to post. Still, I only found out about the complaint by checking the referring URL's in my server logs. (Later that evening, someone did email me directly, but didn't mention the C-SPAN site).
by Jon Garfunkel
Christopher Hitchens left a particularly biting assessment of the fortieth President in Monday's " Fighting Words" column in Slate, including this characterization:
"Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump. He could have had anyone in the world to dinner, any night of the week, but took most of his meals on a White House TV tray. He had no friends, only cronies...."
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