Update: With no objections, the Rules Committee recommended that the full Board of Supervisors appointment me to seat 11 on the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. I’d really like to thank Jeremy and Justin who showed up to offer their support in person, as well as everyone who contacted the members of the committee with letters on my behalf. It’s not quite over, but it’s a big first step!

Update II, Electric Boogaloo: I was humbled by a Walter Paulson appearance at our little meeting, and he wrote an original that I really think capture the spirit of the proceedings. You can watch my whole crazy encounter with participatory democracy on SFGovTV.org.

I found out last Friday that I’m due to appear before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors’ Rules Committee (pictured above) to make my case for an appointment to the city’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force at 1:30pm in Committee Room 263 in City Hall on Thursday. I filed the application over a year ago, so it came as a bit of a surprise! Basically, I would like to help make sure that the city is complying with the Sunshine Ordinance which, like the Freedom of Information Act nationally, ensures public access to government records locally. As a personal or professional colleague I figured access to San Francisco city records might come in handy for you or someone you love some day, and I’d like to be in a position to help.

Letters of support can really help my cause, so I’m asking for few minutes of your time to send an email or a fax to the members of the committee on my behalf. The meeting is on Thursday, March 3rd at 1:30pm, and the it’s the first item on the agenda. Below I’ve included the necessary contact information, a loosely suggestive template, and a link to some background on my motivation from when I applied.

Rules Committee member emails: Jane.Kim@sfgov.org, Sean.Elsbernd@sfgov.org, Mark.Farrell@sfgov.org

You can also fax letters to the office of the Board Clerk at 415.554.7714.

A suggested email/letter template:

To the members of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors,

Regarding agenda item 110105 for the Rules Committee meeting on March 3rd, 2011, I feel that Jackson West is uniquely qualified to serve on the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force as a volunteer. [Something about how diligent and fair I'll be], or [how you feel I'd represent your interests as a [insert public-minded citizen role] well], and maybe [how sure you are that I'd take the responsibility seriously].

Your name
Your title
Any publications/organizations you’re currently working with
An address (especially if you live or work in San Francisco)

So after years of wanting a cat, but it never being the right time, or the right place, or short on money, today I finally took the plunge. After doing my research at the San Francisco SPCA’s website, I came prepared with money and paperwork to their location at 16th and Bryant. Luckily, I just happened to have run into an old friend earlier in the day who sent ahead a note of recommendation to one of the staff — but I imagine I would have been well taken care of, regardless.

After a whirlwind tour of cute cat possibilities, one caught my eye — and also happened to be a staff favorite. Brought to San Francisco from a shelter in Yolo County, this dude was the object of many a crush among the SPCA staff and volunteers. Granted, I had the name picked out long before I arrived — Flashy, short for Flashman — but I think it fits. After all, he’s already a heartbreaker, he’s survived a brush with calamity only to turn up in a sybarite’s garden, and just try to resist those whiskers.

After getting him home and getting him settled in the quiet confinement of the bathroom, he made himself comfortable pretty quickly. And while I intend to lavish him with every luxury a gent of such tastes and sensibilities deserves, including the finest in compostable litter, treats made from line-caught Pacific salmon, and the most potent catnip money can buy, that doesn’t mean he can expect to free ride. I mean, what’s the point of having a cat if you can’t feature them in overwrought cat videos on the internet?

While I’m having some technical difficulties with jacksonwest.com, most of the writing I’ve been doing of late has been over at Joyeur. My latest post is about losing weight and signing up for Joyent’s endurance team. Earlier I shared my ex’s cranberry jelly recipe, at it was rather saucy. Otherwise, I’m serving as the lead editor over there, and I’m pretty enthusastic about the range and quality of contributions from my fellow Joyeurs — check out their blogs, too!

Anyway, to the video tape! Naturally, I’ve highlighted the areas of concern:

I would suggest hanging the jacket for the fitting over his wireless lavalier transmitter?

Granted, Stewart is squaring off with Tim Gunn, who is not only perfectly fit but managed to balance a pinstriped suit and a bold, vertically-striped shirt with a white collar and solid tie (accented by the peek of color in the otherwise black, silk pocket square).

That said, it will certainly move Tim Gunn books and merchandise! Mission: Accomplished.

Spoon Tailor is run by Andrew, who explained to me that he used to be an engineer for Cisco. He has a small, neat shop on Sacramento between Kearny and Grant, and offers incredible prices and even more incredible service at the price.

He normally charges $85.00 for a custom piece, which is as cheap as anything online or in New York, but I cashed in on his ongoing “grand opening” deal and paid only $72 — as little as you might pay at Century 21 or the Nordstrom Rack for something name-brand.

Now I have a red and white pinpoint-check shirt with a white, double-button collar and french cuffs. I blame a subconscious fixation on Slingers for such a Rat Pack, Goodfellas choice. But it has my initials embroidered on the left cuff in serif script, so naturally I love it to death.

Sure, it was made in China like everything you might buy off the rack, but I feel like whatever premium I paid was one paid to skill and risk, not interest and fees. And Andrew, who offered to whip me up a suit for $699, is good people: Once he has your make and measure, you can order whatever you want and have it delivered to your office downtown.

Please do take advantage.

• Expect failures. A component may crash or be stopped at any time. Dependent components might fail or be stopped at any time. There will be network failures. Disks will run out of space. Handle all failures gracefully.
• Keep things simple. Complexity breeds problems. Simple things are easier to get right. Avoid unnecessary dependencies. Installation should be simple. Failures on one server should have no impact on the rest of the data center.
• Automate everything. People make mistakes. People need sleep. People forget things. Automated processes are testable, fixable, and therefore ultimately much more reliable. Automate wherever possible.

Life lessons, people. Life lessons.

I have long been losing trust in online enterprises not to play with me or my data, and the larger they are, the less I trust them. But when I realized I am literally being played with like a toy, that really made my skin crawl.

An email arrived in my inbox from Facebook, one of the standard “someone’s tagged you in a photo” notification. Fair enough. Except I haven’t been out much and I didn’t recognize the name of the Facebook contact. (We’re not still calling them friends, are we?) So I feared the worst. Goodness knows who has digital photos of me doing any number of embarrassing things.

I clicked through with a twitchy finger ready to click “remove tag.” I mean, what if someone caught me with a Starbucks cup and a sheepish look? Or buying cheap, industrial rib eye steaks with food stamps at the grocery outlet? And forgetting to bring my own shopping bag! I don’t have the energy for all the explaining I’d need to do.

But the image wasn’t a photo. It was a screenshot from The Sims 3. From what I gather, The Sims can now assign avatars to your Facebook contacts so that you can play with them. And have you seen what people do to their Sims? As I type, a virtual instance of me is probably pissing himself before dying in a fiery inferno. Though I could be skinnier, so that’s something.

For better or worse, my “sim” wasn’t in the photo — the software mapped me in the field of view, but apparently I was inside (hopefully not neglecting any hungry children). And whoever invited “remove tag,” I salute you. But the damage has been done in Facebook’s database, probably the database of Electronic Arts, and of course Google’s database thanks to the Gmail notification.

And to top it off, the connection was made by a public relations professional who, since this is a rant about privacy and such, I’ll decline to name. Let’s just say the firm works with EA. Also, I don’t want to make this overblown — I mean, of all the things by and about me online, ending up as a PR puppet in a Sims instance probably isn’t close to the worst.

I just felt it was an illustrative anecdote that played to my particular set of reservations and fears. I’ve played the Sims, and I play online games where I diddle with my own avatar, and I’ve even connected one of those characters to a social network for gamers. But this is the perfect storm of creepy, and now I’ll have to spend part of my weekend purging information and fiddling with settings on Facebook yet again.

And here’s where I link to the Facebook app in question, which I’d know more details about if I didn’t have to give it access to my Facebook profile to get them.

Photo by Marshall Astor.

For a quick primer, San Francisco voters approved the Sunshine Ordinance back in 1999, right before I showed up in the Bay Area. It was passed during Willie “Da Mayor” Brown’s administration, because while Mr. Brown has a bright, beautiful smile and wears clothes so fine they’d dazzle a rainbow, his administration was not one marked by an earnest embrace of open government, public access to records and decision making. So the Sunshine Ordinance was intended to strengthen existing “Sunshine” provisions of the city’s administrative code and open meeting and records laws. Sort of like the national Freedom of Information Act or the state’s Public Records Act. Only for San Francisco, so therefore both more awesome and more maddeningly complicated.

All good right? Well, sort of. In fact, the procedures laid out for records requests ended up pissing off all sorts of people, both within and without City Hall, where things have been done a certain way for a long time, and politicians and city departments — surprise! — sometimes go out of their way to take the “public” out of “public business,” especially in the very cases where said public would very much like to know which backs are being scratched and by whom. But even public officials with good intentions (and, really, it’s most of them) and limited time and budgets have had trouble fulfilling Sunshine Ordinance requests in a timely manner, frustrating people with enough time on their hands to file such requests and make a very public stink when their demands aren’t satisfied.

Enter the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force, which is responsible for mediating disputes and making sure city government complies with the law to the best of its abilities. It meets once a month, and is staffed by volunteers. It also gets to suggest changes to the rules, advise the Board of Supervisors on all relevant legislation, gets to commission one or more reports a year from the Supervisor of Public Records and, if serious questions of “shadiness” are raised about an official or department, refer it to a relevant enforcement agency, such as the city’s Ethics Commission. Fun, right? Oh, you weren’t in Junior State and never pored over the World Wide Web Consortium’s accessibility standards documents? Well, then, just trust me, it looks like fun.

So as Eve discovered, pretty much the entire Task Force is set to see their terms expire on April 27th. And one of the seats, currently occupied by respected area journalist Sue Cauthen, is especially set aside for a “Member of the press or electronic media with an interest in citizen access,” with four more seats set aside for people who have “Demonstrated interest in or has experience in the issues of citizen access and participation in local government.” Which, if you haven’t figured it out by now, all kind of describe me. And did I mention it doesn’t pay? So it’s not like I’m in it for the money, and wouldn’t be taking any bread off of Ms. Cauthen’s table. No, I want the job because I love this shit so that you don’t have to! And, as a “Member of the press or electronic media,” I sure as hell have proven my willingness to work for free in the interest of informing the body politic.

What would I bring to this bread-free table? Well, I’m a sucker for studying public documents, including studying up on the intricacies of the Sunshine Ordinance itself. I have extensive knowledge of and professional experience in preparing such documents for distribution and publication, both digitally and in print. I’ve also made a habit of studying copyright issues, have actually filed FOIA requests (though, in the interest of full disclosure, I still owe the National Labor Relations Board $49 and some change for that one time), have a good grip on parliamentary process (did I mention Junior State?), and, maybe most importantly, but not to boast, I know a lot (or, at least, more than most elected officials) about open data formats, databases, designing for accessibility, data mining and online publishing tools.

So while the SOTF does concern itself with individual cases, there is much I feel I could do as an advocate for more openness online as well. For instance, just in studying the Web site, I noted that on the main Sunshine Ordinance page alone were links to one Word document and three PDF documents. And while admitting that, yes, it’s great that these documents are available at all, and there are links to application downloads to view said Word and PDF documents, these are formats specifically intended for people to save and then print, and do not lend themselves to online viewing, mobile access or easy interpretation by computational tools like scripts and database queries, and therefore might hinder access by users of low-power computers, slow network connections or software for enabling sight- and mobility-impared users. Plus, if you want the latest updates, you’ll have to check the site — there is no RSS feed or even a Twitter account (and we all know how much politicians love Twitter) to send notifications.

Now, I realize that as someone who has written extensively (and sometimes even humorously) about city politics I may not exactly be beloved by the folks who might support my application through the appointment process — which would have to go through the Rules Committee, Board of Supervisors and eventually be approved by the mayor who, if he even knows who I am, probably hates my guts. I have said some unkind things! As I probably have of at least four current Supervisors, which would rule out any veto-proof majority. I have also not always exercised good judgment in many other aspects of my life in ways unrelated, though also probably related, to serving as a public official in even a small capacity.

To them I say, well, I’ve also sometimes written nice things! Or nothing at all! (Which, I realize, may actually make an elected official even angrier.) And of my indiscretions and human failings, well, I’ve been pretty public about those, at least. Also, being composed of volunteers, and having to rely on the understaffed, underfunded Ethics Commission for most enforcement matters, the bickering lovelies on the Board for any amendments, and the Department of Technology and Information Services for implementing any technology upgrades, not to mention ten other SOTF principals who certainly aren’t known for unanimity, rest assured that I’d be doomed to get anything of consequence actually changed, so there’s that.

But I would show up, and I’d be deeply interested, and even though I’d be hard pressed not to crack bad, nerdy jokes what with a public forum and SFGTV cameras possibly rolling, they would be in the interest of laughing to keep from crying, as I would actually take it very seriously. With all the talk of being more open with public data coming from every level of government, and the pace of technological change that many lament said government seems unable to cope with, I actually think (well, to be honest, Eve thinks) that I might be the right person at the right time for the job. And I went to the trouble of starting a “campaign” Tumblr, which is where all the kids are hanging out these days, amirite? At the very least, folks might benefit from learning about the process of applying for a volunteer position like this at City Hall and telling that story might inform and inspire someone better than me to civic participation.

Barring all other qualifications, and disqualifications, when it comes to the Sunshine Ordinance, who better suited than a compulsive oversharer? Also, better an SOTF volunteer than, say, mayor, because as anyone who’s read this blog for a while knows, I’m openly in favor of more four-legged and two-wheeled transportation in San Francisco. So I’m sure you’d all rather have me debating the finer points of OpenOffice Document Format versus Microsoft Word than advocating for more bike- and mule-centric transportation planning.

Furthermore, I promise that if I do get embroiled in what I’m sure is an inevitable scandal, I will do my best to make sure that it’s a sexy one involving hookers and blow, or at least a hilariously inappropriate quote that all the blogs can run with, and not something boring like helping to cover up a tax giveaway to a developer or an arcane bit of parliamentary vengeance.

So there you go. I, Jackson West, am your oversharey candidate for the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force! In the words of Kamala Harris’s Facebook update, “Let’s get 2010 off to a great start. Have you endorsed our campaign yet?”