Following this logic, it would be impossible for African Americans in New Orleans to ever make a legitimate claim that they are victims of racism. Since a significant percentage of the city’s white-controlled organizations and agencies have black leadership, these groups too, would be immune to charges of racism.

The problem rests with the use of the term “racism” to mean the beliefthat whites are biologically or intellectually superior to blacks. Using that definition, I agree that it would be impossible for black police, who serve under black administrators, to be racist. But that definition of racism is outdated and limited and does not reflect the new social science research on the many forms of racism (institutional,structural, cultural) that goes beyond the idea of racism as individual prejudice.

For example, following the French colonial tradition, African Americans owned slaves and participated in slave patrols in Louisiana: does that mean slavery was not a “racist” institution or slaves caught by black patrollers were wrong to say that it was a “racist” injustice? No, it simply means that the terms “slavery” and “racism” are definitions based on generalizations about ideologies and social systems. The terms describe the general functions of systems and ideologies and, like all definitions, they have exceptions. In 1990 civil rights icon James Meredith once campaigned for long-time Klan leader David Duke: that did little to acquit Duke of his racism.

Before Katrina, blacks were clearly the political majority in New Orleans, comprising 70% of the population; they exercised significant control over many of the institutions of daily life (city government, police, courts, education, and even to some degree healthcare for the uninsured, i.e. legislative control of Charity Hospital). Acting from a position of power, African Americans generally perceived police abuse as a political problem, not a racial issue. If the police misbehaved, it was due to bad management by black elected officials who could be lobbied or replaced.

No one could reasonably say that blacks control New Orleans today. With less than 30% of their population returned, compared to nearly 70% of the white population, the last two elections demonstrated that blacks are now the electoral minority. Even with a black mayor, African Americans no longer control most of the education system and they have lost their majority on the city council. Moreover, the long tradition initiated under black majority rule of setting aside one of the at-large council seats for the racial minority was repudiated by whites in the last election, signaling that whites were not interested in sharing power now that they were the majority. My reading of the black community is that most believe that the prolonged diaspora, prohibitively high rents, and the plans to purge 100,000 black voters from the rolls, will result in the election of a white Mayor and even stronger white majority council by 2010.

This radical demographic and political transformation has profoundly changed the perception of who actually rules the city–who has the power and influence to force elected officials to resign or cut funding to punish dissent. So when Jerome Smith says that he sees racism when
black cops act as if they can abuse black people with impunity in his neighborhood, I interpret this as saying that blacks are now a powerless minority, dispossessed of a city they once controlled, and that the color of the agents of their oppression does not change who ultimately holds power and who is accountable.

I don’t think the distinction between prejudice and racism is academic. We cannot bridge the growing racial divide in New Orleans if we deny that blacks have legitimate reasons for feeling that they suffer discrimination at the hands of a new governing class–be the agents of that discrimination black or white.

The article How social networking saved New Orleans, written by John Fontana, tells the stories of the Crime March, the Green Dot Map, Beacon of Hope, Squandered Heritage, and Fix the Pumps.

My host, Mike Gotta, invited me to speak on a track about the new way of work, a track about social networking in the corporate work place. New Orleans was held up as an example of what people can do with social media as grassroots organizing infrastructure. Burton Group basically set me up to succeed at their event. It was another incredible opportunity for outreach, just like the NetSquared Mashup Challenge.

Connections were made. I’m reaching out to the people that I trust to try to figure out what to say when people from Cisco or Sun Mircosystems ask me what they can do to help. It makes it all the more important to get the neighborhood coworking center up and running at Trinity Christian Community, so that we have a place to invite people who can plug in and help us expand our capacity from the bottom up, making use of the innovative new ways of work that we’ve all been compelled to discover as part of this recovery.

But, someone did. Karen Gadbois, keeper of Squandered Heritage set out to investigate the origins of the claims made by the signs. Working with Sarah Elise Lewis and Eli Ackerman, through a series of public records requests, she obtained copies of the houses supposedly remediated by NOAH.

New Orleans Affordable Homeownership Incorporated is one of those peculiar nonprofit/city agency hybrids that are commonplace in New Orleans. They had a Home Remediation Program that was supposed to gut homes for the elderly and low income. Karen, Sarah and Eli found houses on the list that were ungutted, houses that were empty lots before the storm, houses that were subsequently demolished using FEMA funds (gut then demolish), houses that belonged to Orleans Metropolitan Housing, a nonprofit in the hands of the family of indicted Congressman William Jefferson.

Lee Zurik did a report on WWLTV that you need to watch, because it makes the press conference that followed it all the more hilarious, and the smackdown follow-up form Lee Zurik all that much sweeter. The press conference is where the words “No Services Rendered” are triumphantly sung to the audience.

Nagin claims that the lists NOAH issued the wrong lists. He berates Lee Zurik for not realizing that the lists given to him in response to public records requests where not right. The incompetence defense, delivered with such indignation. It always awes me.

But, now there’s a new list. A fourth. We’re on a roll.

In the interview with Ed Blakley, mention is made of a series of folders of before and after pictures that justify the federal expenditures. Which is going to be how I inaugurate public records request Wednesday. Please skip over to Think New Orleans for a public records request for these files that you can print and send to NOAH.

It is no wonder that we’re unable draw down federal funds for the recovery. I’m sure they are shy to draw down federal funds now that they’ve misplaced at best and misappropriated at worst, funds destined to save the homes of the elderly and low income.

*Update*: Yesterday, as I wrote about NOAH, I stepped out to catch the recovery meeting covered in this WWL News Report.

The way it’s played out, the previous directory Stacy Jackson claimed to have gutted 1,200 for about $3.5 million. Now the number has been reduced to 871 and the amount of money spent is $1,795,874.84.

I am and always have been a strong supporter of an 8/29 Investigation into the levee failures that caused massive devastation in New Orleans, St. Bernard, and surrounding communities. In Congress, I have worked with Sen. Mary Landrieu to push legislation creating a commission to lead this investigation, modeled after the 9/11 Commission, so we can get a complete and unbiased expert opinion on what went wrong and what we can do to make sure those mistakes never happen again. The flooding in New Orleans and St. Bernard after Katrina was a man-made disaster, one that we have the power to prevent from ever happening again. But to do so, we must authorize outside experts who don’t have a personal interest in the outcome to conduct an independent investigation into the levee failures. An 8/29 Investigation would do just that, and I will continue working to convince my colleagues in Congress of the serious need for this independent analysis.

Congressman Charlie Melancon

With the third anniversary of the worst engineering disaster in America almost here, we at Levees.Org are pleased by the Congressman’s strongly worded support. Earlier this week, a staffer with Rep Melancon alerted me that the Congressman had filed a House version of the 8/29 Investigation on July 18 that did not differ from the Senate version (filed on April 7, 2008 by Senator Mary Landrieu) in any significant way. The bill number is HR6526.

The other news is a more subtle indicator of success for levees.org. Yesterday, in an article about New Orleans’ restaurants on the front page of the New York Times, a reporter wrote, “…By one count, there are 105 more restaurants than before the levees failed….” A reporter for the NYTimes, not a New Orleanian described the events on August 29 as levees failing, not Katrina.

Thank you for all you do to support levees.org’s mission and goals.

Coming soon. By coming soon, I mean check back Monday. Seriously.

I’m just back from Burton Group Catalyst 2008 and I’m getting a lot of traffic from the Network World article How social networking saved New Orleans: Powered by community, New Orleans residents exposed city hall and the power of social software where John Fontana has asked you to look around Think New Orleans.

Thank you Network World readers for visiting. Of course, I’ve been so busy preparing to speak at Catalyst 2008 that I’ve not had much time to update lately.

Please stop by again on Monday. I’ll tell you more about our new collaboration to create GIS guided block by block surveys that neighborhood organizations can perform themselves. It’s part of a partnership with Tulane School of Architecture, Mapufacture, Orleans Parish Communication District, Mid-City Neighborhood Organization and Beacon of Hope. Recovery is taking place at the neighborhood level.

Neighborhood organizations are primary organizational unit of the recovery. When a neighborhood recovers, that neighborhood needs data to measure the progress of their recovery. They need to know who’s back and if they are not back, what they plan on doing. These surveys have been conducted by clipboard and fed into desktop spreadsheets. Kathrine Cargo from Orleans Parish Communication District, GIS professional Tom Nehrbas, and MCNO Housing Committee chair Jenifer Farwell are work to create an ArcGIS database with an accompanying standardized survey, questions that a block captain can answer about a house looking at it form the curb.

This data collection needs a way to display, so Andrew Turner of Mapufacture, Francine StockM of the Tulane School of Architecture and Jeannette Gutierrez are collaborating on GIS presentation software. This tool will allow people to create a focused map of a particular issue using a library of point sets, boundaries, and historic maps. People will be able to reference their Flickr photo journals in the maps, so that they can present solutions.

We hope to have an appication as impressive as the Repopulation Indicators Map created by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center with the help of neogeographer James Fee.

We’ve been busy since our presentation at NetSquared brought Andrew, Francine and I together to define the web geography component of this software.

This is something I didn’t get to in my presentation. We are beginning to develop a capacity to create our own software to meet the needs of our recovery, though the same open social patterns we’ve adopted in our collaborations to gut our houses and plan our recovery.

Will America’s breadbasket be fixed faster than America’s party town, brought to its knees by water-overwhelmed levees in August 2005?

Rob Couhig, 59, thinks it will, partly because of Midwestern self-reliance. He thinks they’re not about to sit around, wringing their hands, waiting for the government to bail them out, which, he says, sadly, was what his beloved home town did – and still does.

A no-nonsense corporate lawyer in an open-collar white shirt, Couhig is a commissioner on the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and is thought by some to be one of the smartest men in town.”

“Talk-show host Robinette, a Cajun who devoted countless on-air hours to the danger of flooding before and after it happened, says that the city’s high ground, which was spared the flooding, exactly matched the boundaries of the original city. “If the engineers of 200 years ago knew those areas, you shouldn’t build there.”

This came in response to me asking if it is wise to rebuild the entire city.

To the same question, lawyer Couhig gave me an answer as long as a Ryan Howard home run, but didn’t directly answer.

“You’re saying ‘no,’ aren’t you?” I asked.

Couhig didn’t reply, but he smiled. I guess there are some things that you don’t want to be quoted as passing through your lips.

The columnist gets things wrong too, assumedly from his chat with Garland Robinette:

One who believes this to be true is 65-year-old Garland Robinette, a former TV anchor and now popular talk-show host on WWL-AM, which earned its bones by remaining on the air with emergency information after the TV stations drowned and the local paper couldn’t get delivered.

In fact, the T-P stayed on line the whole time and was publishing within a couple of days. WWL-TV stayed on air continuously. Both won the most prestigious prizes in their respective fields for those feats; the T-P got a Pulitzer in 2006 and WWL-TV got a Columbia-DuPont prize in 2007.

Rob Couhig can be emailed at: couhigre@couhigpartners.com

Garland Robinette can be emailed at: grobinette@entercom.com

You can email the column’s author, Stu Bykofsky at stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977, which is his direct line.

This column came out of a columnists conference held last week in New Orleans. Lt. Gov. Landrieu and Mayor Nagin spoke to the assembled ink-stained wretches. The organization that put it on, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, has high hopes for lots of columns to come out of the conference:

NSNC Annual Conference Main Page

Since New Orleans’ attempt to recover from being virtually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina is one of the most dramatic stories of our generation, we’re expecting some great columns to come out of the conference.

We plan on collecting these columns (with permission, of course) and assembling them in an attractive book. Current plans call for proceeds from the sale of the book to go to help the recovery effort, which still needs help almost three years after the storm and flood.

If the rest of the columns are like this one, it’ll be a pretty thin book.

Update:

I emailed Mr. Bykofsky with my request for a correction on his statements about the Times-Picayune and WWL-TV’s post-storm performance, both of which won them the top awards in their respective fields. Here’s his response:

From: Bykofsky, Stu <bykofss @phillynews.com>
Subject: RE: What Philadelphia (and possibly Garland Robinette) has to say about the local media after Katrina
To: mcbrid35@yahoo.com
Date: Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 10:36 AM

I got your voicemail Matt.

You didn’t have to go to the NSNC Code, the Daily News has its own policy on corrections.

I didn’t say the Times-Picayune didn’t publish. I said, “the local paper couldn’t get delivered.” Not the same thing. That is correct and no correction is warranted.

I did not say TV stations went dark, although I implied it. Three of four — as you show below — did go off the air. I will suggest that as a correction to the editor who handles that. It might be more of a clarification.

I did not say Rob Couhig is the smartest man in town. I wrote, “is thought by some to be one of the smartest men in town.” I have two qualifications in that statement, and I stand by it. You would be among those who don’t think so.

I hope you understand the difference between a column, which is supposed to be opinionated, and a news story, which is supposed to be objective. Your voicemail made mention of “a number of errors.” Given I devoted over 1,000 words to the subject, I am happy with the result, although unhappy with the one small error. I have heard from others in NOLA who liked, and appreciated, the columns I did from there. So far, just one other email complaint, from a “nolajoe, clearly an employee of WWL-TV, who called me an “asshole.”

I deleted him, but respond to you because you were civil.

I am sorry for your loss in Katrina and hope you understand my mission to NOLA was to help by highlighting the volunteers, done in the two previous columns.
Best wishes

Stu

P.S.: Are you an employee of WWL? Just wondering. It changes nothing. Facts are facts.

I wrote back with this:

From: Matt McBride
Subject: RE: What Philadelphia (and possibly Garland Robinette) has to say about the local media after Katrina
To: “Bykofsky, Stu”
Date: Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 11:11 AM
Stu,

Rather than simply hitting “Forward,” I thought it best to ask if I could send this along to other residents and concerned citizens of New Orleans?

No, I do not work for WWL-TV. However, I understand the extreme stress the employees there were under, as well as the recognition they received from their peers and the community at large.

Matt

He then wrote back:

From: Bykofsky, Stu
Subject: RE: What Philadelphia (and possibly Garland Robinette) has to say about the local media after Katrina
To: mcbrid35@yahoo.com
Date: Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 11:18 AM

It’s very kind of you to ask, Matt.

Yes, you may forward, as is.

I have already forwarded a request for a clarification to the public editor. I hope it will run. I have no problem admitting errors, when I make them. I do hope you will go to phillynews.com and take a look at my two previous columns.

Best wishes,

Stu

I then wrote back with a long email taking issue with his characterization of New Orleans’ people as having received warnings, but not taking heed. I pointed out no one had said the levees would burst below their design loads (including the T-P in their 2002 “Washgint Away” series). I also noted that southeast Louisianans evacuated in record numbers, and also bought flood insurance in record numbers, and backed both statements up with citations.

Mr. Bykofsky wrote back:
From: Bykofsky, Stu <bykofss@phillynews.com>
Subject: RE: What Philadelphia (and possibly Garland Robinette) has to say about the local media after Katrina
To: mcbrid35@yahoo.com
Date: Tuesday, June 24, 2008, 12:35 PM

Matt, I don’t have time to quibble indefinitely. I have a Thursday column to write.
T-P editor Jim Amoss told me the paper did countless stories. Which I knew before I asked him.

You cannot take the term “no one” literally. I think the general reader understands that.
Best wishes

Stu

P.S.: I just got off the phone with Eli Ackerman. Nice guy, we had a nice chat. But I must get back to my future columns.

The online version of Monday’s column will be amended.

In fact, that correction has now been posted:

CLARIFICATION:

Stu Bykofsky’s Monday column implied all four New Orleans TV stations were knocked off the air by Hurricane Katrina. In fact, WWL-TV remained on the air and broadcast continuously.”

Stu Bykofsky: Flooded Midwest getting fixed faster than the ‘city that forgot to care’

Again, Mr. Bykofsky’s email is: stubyko@phillynews.com

Yet, so many questions remain unanswered.

This long piece in the Times-Picayune by Sarah Carr on Mr. Vallas reflects a balanced assessment of his administration, incorporating critiques that had previously been marginalized by the news cycle’s short term memory.

Mr. Vallas has been given what he himself admits is the least red tape out of any superintendent in the nation. He has been given the benefit of the doubt to spend copious amounts of money with little oversight.

The question I have raised in response to the article and the question that I ask you to ponder is: For what are we “buying momentum?”

The Recovery School District, administered by the state of Louisiana and Paul Pastorak, has been empowered as a stop-gap bureaucracy to shepherd Orleans Parish public schools while our municipal capacity rebuilds. The eventual goal has always been to have a unified school district controlled by local voters.

The spending practices of Paul Vallas and the expansion of the state’s bureaucratic reach into Orleans Parish education seem to indicate that the RSD is entrenching itself as a educational power player rather than facilitating the reintegration of local oversight.

One aspect of that is expansion by contraction through the privatization of schools using charters and vouchers.

Charters have been a big part of Paul Vallas’ M.O. dating back to his time in Chicago. Since he has come to New Orleans, the RSD has shepherded 26 schools to charter operators.

This week, the State Senate approved a voucher program for Orleans Parish that will directly subsidize private education using public money. It is close to becoming enshrined in law.

Ultimately, to me, this design inflates test scores by concentrating energy and attention on select schools, students, and communities while others are left as outliers.

Another important initiative to monitor is the upcoming release of the RSD’s ten year master plan. Originally scheduled for release this month, it is now appearing that it will not become public until August.

This is critical. The RSD and the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education have been preparing a master plan that will govern the future capacity of the New Orleans public school system.

The master plan included a public participation component that many members of our community believe was disingenuous by design.

Back in December, the RSD had already pulled demolition permits several school buildings. Not only was this well in advance of the completion of the master plan, but it also predated any community involvement process.

Lockett School at Piety and Law was on the demolition list. A case against demolition of the main building may have been compelling. I say “may have been” because this is Lockett today:

These are the stakes.

Many local bloggers have stories about the state of New Orleans schools. There is a lot more out there, particularly about the inherent and practical inequality of charter schools.

Please keep up with G-Bitch, Liprap, and I. These stories are not going away.

Also, the Frederick Douglass Community Coalition is beginning to mount some opposition to the RSD as a result of unpopular short term plans for Frederick Douglass High School. I urge you to check them out and attend the next meeting.

Also, TONIGHT at 6pm Paul Pastorek and Paul Vallas will hold a public meeting at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church, 2515 Franklin Ave. Go ask questions.

First, take a look at a schedule of projects the Corps showed at a small business contractors’ gathering on April 23rd (go to page 10):

USACE Small Business Contractors’ Gathering Presenation.

The line for permanent pump stations is somewhat jumbled, showing “pre-award” activities extending into the first quarter of 2009, but also showing construction beginning this fall, the third quarter of 2008. I believe the second line, showing construction, is the one that counts. It would seem that construction is anticipated to last 3.75 years, finishing up before June, 2012. This would be in line with most public statements from the Corps.

However, also in April the Corps placed a listing of all their hurricane protection contracts, including future ones, on their website:

USACE Potential Upcoming Contracts.

If you scroll to the bottom of page 3, you’ll see the listing for the contract for the permanent pump stations. It is shown as getting awarded in the 3rd calendar quarter of 2009. That would appear to be significantly later – possibly a year after what the other schedule shows. If one assumes the same duration of construction, then a year of delay at the start means a year of delay at the end.

The Corps has publicly promised the permanent pump stations would be done by the beginning of the 2012 hurricane season. However, if the very detailed April 16, 2008 schedule is to be believed, it would appear that:

1) That deadline has been pushed back a year

or

2) The Corps has figured out how to shave a year off the construction schedule.

There have been other subtle hints that the permanent pump stations might get delayed. They include:

- A solicitation issued last month for cranes at the current floodgates included an option for rental of those cranes through the entire 2012 hurricane season. If the permanent pump stations were to be in place by 2012, there would be no need for those cranes. Here’s the solicitation:

38 Rental of Three 60 Ton Hydraulic Cranes for Outfall Canals.

- Also, note Colonel Starkel’s hesitancy at the end of this June 1, 2008 interview on WWL-TV when asked when the permanent pump stations would be finished:

http://www.wwltv.com/video/news-index.html?nvid=250644

His exact words are “we’re looking about 2012.”

- Completion of the Individual Environmental Report for the stations has been repeatedly delayed, with an April public meeting pushed back to July. An article in the Times-Picayune last week mentioned that the report will be delayed again, likely meaning a further postponement of the July meeting (which was intended to outline the contents of the report).

- The Corps transferred most of the appropriated funds out of the permanent pump station project to pay for the Industrial Canal closure project (that contract was awarded in April). The pump station account is currently nearly empty. The replacement funds are tied up in the Emergency War Supplemental bill now wending its way through Congress. President Bush has vowed to veto that bill for reasons unrelated to the Corps funding. The Corps has said publicly that if they don’t have funds on October 1 of this year, projects (like the pump stations) would definitely get delayed.

- Finally, it took the Corps over a year to award the design-build contract for the Industrial Canal closure project. The permanent pump stations are of the same scale, and the Corps does not appear to have begun the bidding process yet.

All signals point to further delays on this project.

If I’m wrong, then the Corps needs to come out publicly and say with certainty that those stations will be there June 1, 2012. They also need to explain why one of their schedules shows a year difference from another of their schedules.

One has to wonder if the stations will get built at all?

How to Polish this One?

Today I received another comment about the school-buses that were left to flood, that could have been used to evacuate people from New Orleans during Katrina. I was reminded of the years of corruption in New Orleans and Louisiana under Democratic leadership.

It was a talking points attack on New Orleans. It was an attack by numbers, taken directly from the talking points that were immediately orchestrated by Karl Rove, even as people drowned in their attics in New Orleans. I’ve just read the most appalling account of the rapid politicization of the disaster response in How Karl Rove played politics while people drowned.

I could feel it. We were all working together in a relatively small building. We were in close proximity. But I could see where Rove was going. Blame Blanco. Blame the levee board. Blame the corruption in New Orleans. ‘The reason the city is going underwater is because the city is corrupt,’ Rove was saying. ‘But don’t blame the Republicans or George W. Bush or David Vitter. We are the white guys in shining armor, and we are going to come in and save the city from years of corruption.’ That was their story and they sold it very well.

The response to the flood was the responsibility of the federal government. Local agencies are not equipped to respond to disasters of this scale, which is why we maintain agencies like FEMA. The response was appallingly slow. As documented in Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security, Homeland Security comically muddled around attempting to establish their own lines communication, ignoring State of Louisiana officials, in some sort of parody of the hyper-secretive government agency making a Spy vs. Spy charade out of natural disaster response and flood rescue.

To give you an example of the absence of federal response to the disaster, the first trained rescue squad to reach St. Bernard Parish was the Heavy Urban Search and Rescue Team of the British Columbia Royal Canadian Mounted Police. (2,852 miles and they brought their own boats.)

It’s frightening to live in a nation under the control of a GOP that has become positively Soviet in their desire to create a single-party rule. With this new accounting of the politicization of the disaster response, one cannot ignore the potential of a politicization of the disaster recovery. Does the glacial pace of the recovery indicate a continued desire to shrink the footprint of this Southern Democratic enclave?

CPL Kierys by MATEUS_27:24&25.

As noted last week, I’m setting out to make sense of the Recovery School District and the School Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish. I’m getting caught up today by reading Eli Ackerman’s research into some of the School Facilities Master Plan contractors.

In Who Is Parsons?, Eli Ackerman looks into the contractor who’s tasked with the engineering evaluations that determine which schools are to be demolished.

One of the planners, listed in the section of the website entitled The Planners is a firm from California called Parsons Corporation.

Parsons has made the news last year for their work in the reconstruction of Iraq. Their contract was terminated when “it was found to have finished only six of more than 140 primary healthcare centres it was supposed to build, after two years work and $500m spent.”

One of their projects was the Baghdad Police Academy. An important component of the plan to increase the security in Iraq. From the Washington Post article Heralded Iraq Police Academy a ‘Disaster’:

“This is the most essential civil security project in the country — and it’s a failure,” said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office created by Congress. “The Baghdad police academy is a disaster.”

The Guardian tells more about the Iraqi Police Academy in
Corruption: the ’second insurgency’ costing $4bn a year.

In a police college Parsons built for $75m in Baghdad the plumbing was so bad that urine and excrement rained down from the toilets on to the police cadets. Parsons left a sub-contractor to do repairs but in general there is little punitive action that can be taken for shoddy work.

Finally, MSNBC has a slide show of Parson’s work at
Did Iraq contractor fleece American taxpayers?.

We are looking at losing half of the schools in New Orleans to a decision to demolish and we are being asked once again, to participate in a planning process that will give the appearence that we’ve chosen this destruction for ourselves. A peculiar twist that the contracts were let to such an infamous contractor.

It is not at all reassuring to have the future of our school system decided by the analysis of Parsons Corporation.

This is the latest round in a fight between people who want to shrink the city and exclude those that cannot afford to return, and those that want to return. As always, it’s a pity that the latter are not around to defend themselves.

I attended one of the meetings of the Schools and Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish, at Martin Luther King Jr School in the Lower 9th Ward. I appreciated the irony of attending a facilities planning meeting in a school that was open only because the residents forced entry and remediated the contemporary 1995 structure against the will of the school board.

There we saw some lovely slides with the decisions of engineers. People had sheets of paper. They were given the engineers suggestions and asked to choose from one of two or three choices, choices that were very similar.

Basically, some buildings were going to be demolished, some were not. When the building is demolished, the likelihood that the school will reopen dwindles. People where being asked to sign the death sentence for their school.

This is my bias. I’m approaching this from the crushing disappointment of the UNOP which at no point called for the demolition of the big four public housing projects. We’re getting a mini-AmericaSpeaks where we’re being shown a slide show and asked to markup a form. At the end, the forms will be used as evidence that we agreed to the new barren landscape of our school system.

I’m happy to be proven wrong. I’m happier still to help people get their hands on the contracts for the contractors of this process, the engineering reports from which the PowerPoint is drawn, and the enrollment data on which the closings are based. I’m happy to repeat the stories that others tell in their blogs here at Think New Orleans, and welcome guest bloggers who can help me understand what is taking place with the schools.

This is an initial collective journalism project. As always leave your comments in the Recovery School District forum.

Ed McGinnis & Rob Schaefer (and a Map at UNOP 1) by Maitri Venkat-Ramani.

Funny thing happened on the way to the NetSquared Mashup Challenge in San Jose, CA.

Many of you have gotten in touch with me to talk about your own GIS efforts. We’ve seen an incredible coming together of the nonprofit and neighborhoods engaged in collecting, organizing and analyzing recovery data based on it’s physical location.

Thank you for your outpouring of support. I’m no longer going it alone.

Francine Stock from the Tulane School of Architecture, keeper of the Regional Modernism blog, is going to co-present City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery with me at the NetSquared Mashup Challenge conference in San Jose, CA this coming Tuesday, May 27th, 2008. She is the keeper of the Regional Modernism blog. She’s written her ideas for this project in Manifseto for a Mashup.

Thank you for your outpouring of support. Not only will I be joined by Francine Stock and Andrew Turner, who got me involved in NetSquared by insisting that I throw my hat into the ring, but I’ve received the help of many New Orleans organizations that are engaged in the recovery.

• Beacon of Hope
• Carrollton-Hollygrove CDC
• City-Works
• GNOCDC
• Orleans Parish Communication District (New Orleans Emergency 9-1-1)
• Mapufacture
• Morris L. Kahn and Associates
• Squandered Heritage
• Trinity Christian Community
• Tulane School of Architecture

I’m going to arrive in San Jose with the weight of our collective GIS experience.

If there’s any city in the United States that is intimate with the lay of it’s land, it’s New Orleans. We’ve all scoured satilite maps, Sanborn maps, flood elevation maps, we’ve conducted neighborhood surveys, we’ve tracked recovery issues online with Google Maps.

GIS is not just software. It is a discipline. We’re now engaging with our local professionals to use GIS to guide our data collection efforts and sharpen our understanding of our recovery.

Francine and I discussed a strategy for the presentation of the fantastic grassroots GIS efforts in New Orleans.

The message for Silicon Valley is that there is a highly-motivated user base here in New Orleans. We are building what we can with the tools that we have, pushing them to the limits of our understanding. Neogeography has become part of our communication. We’re now constantly cobbling together maps and email them to one another, to see clearly what’s going on. We all appreciate the importance of maps to city planning and we’re all, everyone of us, engaged in planning the future of our city.

As always, I welcome your participation in this conversation, but please leave your comments in the GIS forum where the discussion is ongoing.

Home Is Where the Heart Is by Bart Everson.

I’ve set out to introduce the concept of coworking as a means of organizing the grassroots information projects that drive this recovery. The initial focus was to capitalize on the donation of three ESRI ArcGIS 9 licenses to the effort, from the Broadmoor Project. I invited everyone to participate in an initial GIS Coworking session at Trinity Christian Community.

Since then, an initial project has begun to take shame. Jennifer Farwell of the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization is conducting a block by block survey of Mid-City. I told her that to brace herself, because I was going to make her project a centerpiece for this GIS Coworking Center. At the same time I was speaking to two other local people about GIS and they’ve agreed to help on this project.

GIS Guided Neighborhood Surveys

Kathrine Cargo is GIS/Mapping Coordinator for the Orleans Parish Communications District. She works on keeping the 911 maps accurate. Kathrine got in touch with me to be on a panel at a convention of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association in October. Kathrine has offered to help me get the GIS Coworking Center going.

Kathrine had already made an effort to introduce GIS to the Beacon of Hope, but the learning curve for GIS was too steep. Beacon of Hope already has an established method for conducting neighborhood surveys, with a rich set of spreadsheet templates. We’re now looking at the Mid-City Neighborhood Organization survey as a model. Jennifer Farwell is technically adept and eager to introduce GIS to the Mid-City housing project. A refined survey, property documented, can serve as the basis for future Beacon of Hope surveys.

Tom Nehrbass followed his wife to New Orleans. She got a job as a journalist at the Times-Picayune. Tom is proficient in ESRI ArcGIS 9. He got in touch when he came to town and saw my initial GIS coworking post. Now he’s volunteered to create the technical architecture of the survey.

Apparently, we have everything we need to execute a GIS guided block by block survey of Mid-City and produce maps quite unlike any produced by similar surveys.

Open Licensing

There have been similar efforts to perform GIS guided surveys, but they’ve not been guided by locals and the availability of the data collected has been constricted. We’re going to ensure that the end information products created by these surveys is available using open licensing.

Open licensing is not, public domain, rather it makes the information openly available on the condition that if anyone improves the information, they will be compelled to make their improvments available under the same terms under which they obtained the original data. For those of you who’ve volunteered for collection efforts, only to see your efforts squirreled away, we’re building openness into the project at the outset.

This way, the data collected does not become the property of whoever happened to gather it up on their hard drive. We need more openness, not more little data fiefdoms.

Replication

We will document the process and make it available through the New Orleans Wiki. The process itself will be open licensed, so you don’t have to ask permission to use any of the materials to conduct your own GIS guided neighborhood survey in New Orleans, or anywhere else.

The organizers of the NetSquared Mashup Challenge are printing up the program. To describe City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery I was given a set of seven questions to answer in 200 characters or less. My co-presenter Francine Stock from the Tulane School of Architecture and keeper of the Regional Modernism blog helped me with these brief answers.

What problem are you trying to address?

Citizens feel besieged by an opaque city government making capricious decisions about recovery. A run away City Hall is demolishing homes out from under recovering families. We need further transparency.

How does your Mashup provide a solution to the problem?

By humbly serving the fantastic efforts of New Orleanians to photo document their recovery and mashing this photo record with new data sets generated by grassroots GIS efforts of local nonprofits.

What changes in the world because of your Mashup?

People come home to New Orleans and rebuild with confidence. They feed their experience into, and base their personal and political decisions upon, a spatially organized library of civic intelligence.

What information/data will people interact with?

Repopulation data derived from US postal data. Building and demolition permits. Road Home Program grant data. Flood elevation maps. Plus, upload of geocoded photos and neighborhood authored reports.

What have you done in the past to give supporters the idea that you can pull this off?

Photo mashups of threatened architecture. Geocoding and mapping demolition patterns and building permits. Social media workshops. We’re partnered with GIS savvy nonprofits throughout New Orleans.

How will you distribute your Mashup?

Aside from the thinknola.com hosted Mashup: We contribute to other social media and GIS efforts. Our data is licensed though Creative Commons. Our Mashup will export data sets as KML for re-Mashing.

How will you encourage use of your Mashup application?

Partnerships with GNOCDC, Beacon of Hope, and City Works will integrate and contribute to existing GIS efforts. We’ve established a pilot GIS project center to help neighborhoods generate new GIS data.

The Internet Rewards Brevity

As always, I’m eager to hear your thoughts. Are we getting closer to a project that you’ll find useful? Leave comments in the GIS forum, where Andrew Turner, Francine Stock and myself are working on defining the presentation and the mashup itself.

He talks about rebuilding trust with New Orleanians. He also says that New Orleans is the Corps’ top domestic priority. Then why wasn’t his Tuesday visit to New Orleans trumpeted all over the local media? In fact, the only mention I could find came in the middle of a NY Times article about the Qatari Emir’s visit on Tuesday:

Emir of Qatar Tours New Orleans to See Fruit of His $100 Million Donation

“Sheik Hamad said he was particularly touched by what happened here, as he explained in halting but resourceful English, in an interview at his hotel…Sheik Hamad, not used to the attention, submitted patiently to questions while aides swirled about him. Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, came to visit. Then it was off, police sirens blaring, through the streets of New Orleans.”

Compare that to the enormous attention Van Antwerp got during his well-choreographed two day visit on the eve of the 2007 hurricane season, when he held a press conference on the Old Hammond Highway bridge in front of the 17th St canal gates. That produced a front page article inthe T-P and TV stories galore:

How about briefing the citizens and taxpayers?

This time, there wasn’t even a press release from the Corps’ own New Orleans office.

Considering that the Qatari Emir was not in town to see earthworks, but hospitals, schools, and housing, I think it may have just been coincidence Van Antwerp met with him. Or perhaps he wanted to talk about base construction in Qatar. But it seems likely that if Van Antwerp really wanted to make a big deal of his visit to New Orleans and rebuild trust, he could have. But he didn’t.

Announcing the Google/YouTube debate.

The strange events of the last few weeks are starting to make a little more sense.

The Mysterious Stranger

New Orleans is back on the map, as a part of the presidential campaign, and the strangest part, because of the Republican candidate. As Stephanie Gracie notes in her article Tour of Duty, New Orleans is an issue that plays into the Democrats hands.

He offered a few glimpses of his famous temper, showing the type of visceral anger that everyone here knows too well. Borrowing a refrain from those dedicated to preserving memories of the Holocaust, he said that “never again, never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way that it was handled.”

McCain spoke at length about the need for affordable housing, although he offered few specifics other than a commitment to “work with the governor on these issues.”

He even threw in a jab at Road Home contractor ICF, although not by name.

Nothing to get to excited about. We’re all too well aware of the problems. We don’t cotton up to anything lacking specifics. But, as Stephanie noted, he’s saying the right things. The gaff about having a conversation aside, one could imagine that McCain is trying to be inclusive on his tour to places where he won’t really get any votes.

Bobby Jindal’s Jay Leno appearance and Netroots Nation ‘08 after the jump.

Vice President Bobby Jindal

Then there’s Bobby Jindal, who spent last night on Jay Leno and talked about New Orleans, specifically the uplifting bootstrap recovery. Bobby might have been talking to fast, but he was saying the right things. It was Jay who was creepy with his New Orleans stereotypes. I’ve not seen him in a while and that didn’t do to much to recommend the Tonight Show.

In his post PBJ Meets Jay Leno Adrastos knocks Bobby’s delivery, but add “He did say one very funny thing: that he’s not interested in running for Veep…”. For an R-rated live blogging commentary that had me laughing read Liveblogging Bobby’s Tonight Show Appearance by Greg Peters, which is especially funny if you watched it locally with all the commercials. A Liberty and Justice for All I’ve gone and asked what’s so bad about Jindal? in the comments of Jindal on Leno, so tune into that comments section for a response.

Bobby talked about cleaning up corruption and the hard work in the recovery of New Orleans. Two basic messages worthy of broadcast. He danced around the VP question, but as Greg Peters said “I have to give him this: He’s done more to improve the image of the state by this appearance than Foster did in eight years.”

Google/YouTube Debate and Netroots Nation ‘08

Then this morning Bobby Jindal is kicking off the Google/YouTube video, inviting the presidential candidates to come down and debate in New Orleans. We can tell that John McCain is up for it. He was just here with Bobby touring New Orleans. We can assume that the Democrats will have to participate, since this is their issue.

What I like most about this turn of events is that it makes my Netroots Nation ‘08 panel, Can America Save New Orleans? all the more relevant. The McCain visit and the Google/YouTube debate puts New Orleans on the election calendar.

Netroots Nation ‘08

I want to use the Netroots Nation ‘08 panel to brief the campaign strategists on New Orleans, prepare them for a debate, one that won’t focus solely on the emergency response. We need to look at the trauma of the recovery.

For the last three years, the government response to New Orleans has been to throw anchors to people that are barely treading water. While the citizens were rebuilding their lives, the government dithered in a morass of infighting and no-bid contracts. Now the recovery is underway, but it is a piecemeal, credit-card funded recovery. Can America Save New Orleans? Or will New Orleans continue to save itself?

The Netroots Nation ‘08 panel will be a lead in to energize the netroots politicos for a Google/YouTube New Orleans presidential debate. Netroots Nation ‘08 is a gathering of people who understand the use of social media in politics. Our New Orleans debate will be a showpiece of social media in politics with Google/YouTube backing.

The panel is coming together nicely.

Extra! Extra! a photograph of a flood damaged Times-Picayune by an anonymous Flickr user.

Our latest scandal is unfolding daily. Intrepid television reporter Lee Zurik did a piece on newspaper in levees Floodwalls stuffed with newspaper?

“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on the hole of a gas tank of an airplane,” the resident said.

Instead of an airplane, it’s a floodwall, and instead of a Band-Aid, the witness says two years ago, he saw the contractor filling the expansion joint or opening between the floodwalls with newspaper.

“The whole length of the wall was stuffed with newspaper.”

And when he confronted the contractor, the contractor blamed Washington for the substandard work.

“He basically told me when Congress sent down the money, it would be repaired the proper way.”

The contractor is Ercon Corporation who’s website home page immediately raises the question who are these goobers? Their website seems to reflect their commitment to getting the job done.

For those of you who’ve been watching the planes grounded and cranes collapse, you might want to draw a parallel between these failures of oversight and this stunning failure to fulfill a federal contract, let me encourage you to do so. Keep an eye on this story, because it does not unfold the way you would expect.

At this point you might expect that the contractors would be in trouble, that their overseers would be irate that they’d stained the already indelibly stained name of the Army Corps of Engineers. You would be wrong.

This is a cadre whose tone deaf public relations. Who can forget the time the ASCE threatened to sue a high-school AP government class for a satirical YouTube video? The conviction with which the profession suppresses descent leaves us all very weary of any assurances they give us.

Least of all the assurance that newspaper stuffed levees are an accepted yet “expedient” construction method as offered in Corps explains newspaper’s use in floodwall. To quote New Orleans blogger Celcus in his post Yesterday’s Papers.

… cramming newspapers into a gap is considered a “method” as in “method of construction” consistent with standard practice. So that when they say such-and-such has been built to “industry standards” or the like, that can include newspapers stuffed into joints. Perhaps whatever the Corp does automatically becomes the standard, in some sort of transubstantiation.

The contractor was not at fault, since the newspaper stuffing was done by the capable hands of the Army Corps itself. Is that supposed to make us feel safer, or does it simply make it harder for anyone to take action?

Jeffery of the yellow blog writes in It’s Not the Preferred Technique.

So in December 2005, Donald Powell commits to building the “best levee system known in the world” and by May 2006, that’s already devolved into “expedient method to do minor repairs” by something other than the “preferred technique”.

Finally, who here can rest assured that “those three gaps were the only ones where such a method was used?” This is about as laughable as scandal as you could imagine and it’s especially funny that the response is “It’s all good.”

Will it take nothing short of another levee failure to compel the Army Corps to answer questions?

Mr. Okra by Rhys.

Beacon of Hope is a nonprofit organization in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. The Beacon of Hope concept is simple. It is a rebuilding hub. For people rebuilding there homes, a Beacon of Hope is a library of recovery resources, it is a tool shed of physical resources. Rebuilding a home in a flooded neighborhood in New Orleans is an easily overwhleming task. A Beacon of Hope is a place to go to get your bearing, learn the hard won lessons of your neighbors who came before your, and even borrow the tools necessary to get your family’s recovery underway.

One of those resources is a truck. Each Beacon needs a truck.

The Beacon of Hope is reaching out and asking for a truck. A typical full sized pickup truck, 3/4 ton, V8 and automatic. They are seeking a truck and a sponsor who will run the truck.

Let me tell you more about the Beacon of Hope after the jump.

Beacons of Hope

The first Beacon of Hope was created by Lakewood South residents Denise and Doug Thornton. They ran the Beacon of Hope out of their flood damaged home.

While the city was dragging us from one recovery meeting to the next, they promised recovery centers. Denise and Doug delivered. Then they took the model that worked so well in Lakewood South, and began to replicate it across the city. Their Lakewood South rebuilding home went from being the Beacon of Hope to merely a Beacon of Hope, one of eight centers across the city.

But Can It Scale?

The Beacon of Hope concept is one that was so powerful and so obvious, but it took a hapless citizen to make it happen. The Beacon of Hope concept was initially a desire just to get the neighborhood as orderly as possible, so that returning families would have a sense of hope. The Beacon of Hope was mowing lawns and picking up debris, to give the neighborhood a sense of normalcy, to the returning families hope and a direction to rebuild their neighborhood.

The Beacon of Hope was a success. What is impressive is that they didn’t respond to their success by trying to grow a central organization, a clearing house or the like. They purposely kept their hub small, the right size to be serviced by on hub with one truck. The created a template. They established a second Beacon of Hope in the same neighborhood.

The system replicated in Lakeview, expanded to Gentilly, now there is a Beacon of Hope in, yes, you guessed it, the Lower 9th Ward. It is unusual for a neighborhood organization to have this sort of geogrpahic diversity, to have an organization founded in Lakeview reach out East toward Gentilly and then across the Industrial Canal.

They created a system that is replicable. They created a system that can scale.

How Can We Sponsor A Beacon?

If you are interested in helping New Orleans, here is an achievable goal. Sponsor a good used 3/4 pickup truck. I’m trying to figure out how Think New Orleans could help make this happen.

My thought is that I could tell you stories about this homegrown nonprofit born of necessity that has developed into a scalable rebuilding hub network that has achieved some of the most illusive goals of the recovery. They have created a system for knowledge sharing and building a knowledge base. They have replicated their system in neighborhoods across the flood zone that are as diverse as diverse can be.

Maybe by telling the story of the Beacon of Hope, people will want to find a way to keep the story going.

Senator John McCain by Wigwam Jones.

McCain Wants to talk footprint again. From a blog entry of Andante Higgins McCain to Tour Katrina-Damaged New Orleans Neighborhood.

He also told reporters he was not sure if he would rebuild the lower 9th ward as president.

“That is why we need to go back is to have a conversation about what to do -rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever it is,” he said.

You mean we’ve not had enough conversations already? The McCain administration is going to hit the ground talking? At least we now know what to expect. More canned civic engagement while the city moulders.

Basically, he doesn’t know what to do. The Lower 9th Ward will be rebuilt, because it is some of the highest, driest land in the city. The levee walls failed in such a way as to flood the Lower 9th Ward, but had the levees failed on the other side, the Faubourg Marigny would have got it just as bad. People don’t understand that the Lower 9th Ward is not low ground. It is high ground and prime real estate.

The question is whether the pre-flood inhabitants of the Lower 9th Ward are going to come back to their home, or if that land is going to be packaged and sold for redevelopment. The reclamation of the Lower 9th Ward by it’s inhabitants is looking increasingly less likely with the glacial pace of recovery in this neighborhood that the media has made iconic.

John McCain punting, because he doesn’t have a plan for New Orleans. Unlike John Edwards who made New Orleans and the Gulf Coast a plank in the platform of his campaign.

We’re all talking about how much we’d like to have a member of the Edwards campaign, or John Edwards himself, talk to us about how we can make New Orleans an election issue in the coming months. We are going to be presenting a panel at Netroots Nation ‘08 entitled “Can the Democrats Save New Orleans?” Please read about the panel and join in that conversation.

Or maybe John McCain is not punting. Maybe he came to New Orleans to deliver a message to a Republican Louisiana. The question becomes, did McCain come here for our vote or is he here for the Northern Louisiana vote? Is he announcing that he’s going to resign the flooded neighborhoods to limbo for another four years?

Update: I’ve cooled down a bit. I hope that McCain is not as calculating as I’ve come to believe our current administration is. Mark Mosely linked to this story with Rebuild it, tear it down, you know, whatever…, noting what I’ve noted. He also linked to a CBS News story McCain Knocks Bush’s Response To Katrina.

McCain said the missteps of the Bush administration were well chronicled and undisputed, citing unqualified leaders, poor communication and a failure to recognize the dimensions of the problem.

In a conversation with reporters aboard his Straight Talk Express bus, McCain rejected the notion that he ran any risk of guilt by association with the Bush administration in coming to New Orleans, saying voters would judge him on his own record, not that of the current Republican president.

Local blogger dsbnola is upset about McCain’s endorsement by Pastor John Hagee The Great Big Easy Whore [Updated] who believes that New Orleans flooded because “it was a city that was planning a sinful conduct.”

The blogosphere seems to be paying more attention to McCain’s visit that it did to Bush’s. For Bush’s visit all we did was exchange traffic updates on Twitter.

Update 2: This unfortunately timed phtograph of McCain and Bush with cake is being bandied about the blogosphere in the context of McCain’s New Orleans visit. It is still hosted at White House website as of this writing.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama at last year’s Netroots Nation (nee YearlyKos) by Chuck Olsen.

I need your help assembling a panel for a major political conference this summer. The conference is Netroots Nation ‘08 on July 17th-20th in Austin, TX. I need your help reaching out to three national panelists and two local panelists who can discuss the topic “Can America Save New Orleans?”

Netroots Nation ‘07 (YearlyKos)

Last year I was invited to participate in a panel at Netroots Nation ‘08. I didn’t know what to expect, so I set my expectations low. I’m not a political blogger in the red/blue sense. My politics are the politics of wet/dry.

I was more than pleasantly surprised. I was amazed. I’m not much of a conference goer, I was swept up in the exictent of a 1,500 like minded people. These are people who are working to change the national dialog using social media, blogs, and the Internet.

It was not a technical conference, but a conference on politics and on media. It featured a debate between the full field (save Biden) of Democratic presidential candidates. Panels discussed political strategy, policy, and media.

People often mistake my efforts for technical efforts, when my work is really about marketing New Orleans, putting our issues in front of the nation using our voices. This conference was incredibly energizing. I felt at home with the people and the message.

These were people active in mainstream politics using grass roots strategies, like the ones that have been so successful in fund raising for the 2008 presidential campaign.

It Did Absolutely No Good To Imagine the Audience Naked

I spoke on a panel with Malik Rahim and Trace Washington. The panel was moderated by Angela Glover Blackwell. Our panel was on a main stage. It went on before the Democratic presidential debate. A debate of the full field (save Biden) of Democratic presidential candidates. When I sat down for my panel, on the back of the chair was a sign that read Edwards.

I’m not sure how I fared. I’m generally a good speaker, but Malik and Tracie are much better speakers. I certainly enjoyed the rest of the conference. I met some amazing people and forged some new relationships.

A fine time. Maybe I’d do it again sometime.

Can America Save New Orleans?

This year, Gina Cooper contacted me. The Netroots Nation ‘08 organizers wanted to feature another New Orleans panel. They were looking for someone to propose one. They called me.

I did not know what to say or do. I said yes. Then I called Dan Lavoie who organized last years panel and ask him what to do. He suggested a topic that would energize participants in an election year. He suggested “Can the Democrats Save New Orleans?” Building on that, we’ve created a panel entitled “Can America Save New Orelans?” to reflect the non-partisan, yet progressive tone of Netroots Nation ‘08.

The design of the panel was to have two New Orleans people, and two national figures, with a national figure as a moderator. This panel would talk about the reality on the ground as well as the reality in Washington, and hash out a strategy to make New Orleans an election issue.

My panel was accepted. Now I need to put it together.

The Collective New Orleans Rolodex

This is tricky, because I am in almost over my head. I’d love to turn this question to you, in the true Bart Everson style, and ask you to use this post and comments section to pitch names of who we’d like to ask.

Then you can hold my hand while I call these scary important people. Or maybe you could make the call yourself?

Keep in mind that Netroots Nation ‘08 is a national conference for political activists in the middle of an election year. Gina Cooper and the Netroots Nation organizers have been very generous in her patience and support. They really want to create an opportunity for us to inject New Orleans back into national agenda.

In essence, don’t let the fact that they dropped this in my lap confuse you as to the opportunity and the potential to influence the election agenda.

The topic, Can America Save New Orleans? is supposed to get participants to think about New Orleans as an election issue. Can America Save New Orleans? or will New Orleans have to struggle on, saving itself one family, one home at a time.

We want people to realize that we in New Orleans are not OK, that the current course has been a failure of government, and that this is a real, pressing issue for all Americans. We need to look at the failure of our government response as indicative of a system problem that needs to be solved.

The failure of our government response goes well beyond the emergency response.

I’ve asked Mark Mosely, Michael Duplantier, and Mary Rowe for their suggestions, and I’ll nudge them to stop by and get this conversation rolling.

see more

Pressed for time, so enjoy an lolcat photo as the story caption.

Too long ago, Keith Twitchell got in touch with me to ask me to get out the word for yet another Internet poll that would determine yet another grant award. This time it is the Case Foundation. There’s $25,000 at stake for the Citizen’s Participation Program.

Many of you have told me about the Citizens’ Participation Program, so I’m telling you, here’s your chance to help out by helping the program jump through a funding hoop. Vote for the Citizens’ Participation Program at the Case Foundation.

You only have one day left to vote. Because I’m a total goob, I’m telling you this right now, and it is almost too late. Vote now.

• Go to Case Foundation – Make It Your Own.
• Choose Citizen Participation, Kieth Twitchell, New Orleans, LA.
• Choose three other things to vote for (see below).
• Click the Submit Your Vote button. You will go to a new form.
• Enter your email address twice and fill out the little test that checks to make sure you are not an auto-voting robot.
• Check I agree to the TERMS and CONDITIONS.
• Click Submit Vote.
• Check your email. You must click the confirmation link in the confirmation email that is sent to your email address.

You must vote for four programs. You might dally as I did, wanting to make sure you chose three commendable programs. If you’d like to cheat and crib from my ballot here’s how I votes.

• Re-Imagining Our City – Because I used to live in Pittsburgh. (Don’t worry my reasoning gets better for the other two.)
• Juveniles 4 Justice – Because it is challenging work to deal with juvenile offenders and I’m eager to explore any solutions to juvenile crime considering all the juvenile offenders in New Orleans.
• Wilson for the Ages – Because it is planning for the future of a small town that probably can’t win an Internet based poll like this because of a small social network. These Internet vote awarded grants really have me scratching my head.

You have until 3:00 pm Eastern on April 22nd, 2008. That’s not long. Please vote. The Citizens’ Participation Program is a valuable program that has a lot people all excited about the prospect of having community participation in the planning of the City of New Orleans written into law.

Update: One of the participants in the Case Foundation Make It Your Own Challenge, Michael Wood-Lewis has left a comment asking you to vote for the Front Porch Forum of Burlington, Vermont. That’s some moxie. Who doesn’t like moxie? Please consider it.

Update 2: Another of the participants in the Case Foundation Make It Your Own Challenge, would like you to vote for the project by Mark Shoul. It is Deliberative Democracy for Royalston, MA. Great use of search to keep up on this vote.

Still feel that these votes are a little peculiar. They all sound like good projects.

First there was the comments and stars. Then there was the voting. Now we’re at round 3. The project that I’ve proposed for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge has been made a finalist.

The Accidental Tourist

Now I have to go to San Jose, California and give a presentation at the 2008 NetSquared Conference. Three winners will share in a $100,000 prize to implement their mashup. I’m going to be joined by Andrew Turner of Mapufacture.

Andrew Turner is a friend of a friend. (Well, after this he is most definitely my friend too.) I know Andrew through Edward Vielmetti and the Ann Arbor Bi Bim Bop mailing list. It is a mailing list for a standing lunch of a group of Ann Arbor types. After all this time, it’s hard to say what they have in common exactly, except that they all know Edward Vielmetti.

I’ve gotten to know these people better through my blogging, but primarily by following updates using Twitter. As I was leaving updates about my mapping work, some of the people who follow me on Twitter took note. One of those people was Andrew Turner.

Andrew called me and told me about the NetSquared mashup challenge. He told me that I should throw my hat into the ring.

It was more or less in one ear and out the other. Enough of a message stuck between the ears that I was able to fill out the proposal form. Then it was a matter of asking you all to comment and vote.

I knew there was prize money, but I didn’t realize how much it was until the voting was over. “Really? How much?” Now I’m surprised. I’m happy that Andrew got me to fill out that form.

I want to thank everyone who voted for the Think New Orleans proposal, and for those who left comments.

Neo-Geography

What is a mashup? It’s a an application built using the Google Maps API, like the maps that I posted here at Think New Orleans of various recovery issues. Andrew Turner’s firm Mapufacture has used the Google Maps API to create a website that allows people to build and update maps frequently, to create living maps like this map of parking spaces available in Ann Arbor.

Andrew Turner calls this realm of web based mapping, neogeography. Andrew Turner, incidentally, wrote the book on neogeography.

What so neo about it? Primarily that it is cartography demystified. People are able to create their own maps. It’s not cartography along the sextant lines. Neo-geogrpahy is is about relating data through maps that are accessible and up-datable. It is about showing how your data relates to the real world.

Telling Our Story to Silicon Valley

The next step is to refine the proposal into a presentation. The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center is going to be publishing their demographic information using the Google Maps API shortly and making that information available to the neighborhoods for use in creating presentations and proposals. That data set will fuel the grass roots GIS activity, by providing us with real data to use in GIS coworking.

Again, this was a lark on my part. I was once a computer programmer. I dabbled in programming again one weekend. Then through the magic of “putting it out there”, P.K. Chan from EditGrid added the Google Maps. I didn’t even do it. Then Andrew Turner pushed for this Mashup Challenge proposal. I’ve just been fielding emails.

Look how people out in the world form Hong Kong to Ann Arbor pieced together this Mashup Challenge finalist. Now, I’m going to ask you New Orleans, to help piece together the presentation that will win this Mashup Challenge.

This is an opportunity, in the NetSquared presentation, to draw attention to the innovative use of new-geography and GIS in our recovery. It is an opportunity to go to San Jose, California and to tell Silicon Valley about the practical, real world application of new-geography.

I want to tell Silicon Valley stories of the unprecedented work at GNOCDC in determining population from postal data and the work they’ve done to make that accessible to neighborhoods. I want to tell Silicon Valley stories of how Say Local! used neo-geography to let us know which of our local businesses returned as they reopened. I want tell Silicon Valley stories about the application of neo-geography in advocacy like the Regional Modernism weblog of Francine Stock.

Essentially, I’d like to tell as many people as possible that New Orleans is a hotbed of enterprise and ingenuity. That people here are using information technology as if their lives depended on it. There are ample opportunities for Silicon Valley to plug in and support the recovery of New Orleans, enhance our use of neo-geography and social media, and to get a competitive advantage by learning from a user base that is committed to finding solutions to problems using the tools at their disposal.

What can you add to this story? How would you tell it?

As always, direct your discussions about maps and such to the GIS forum at Think New Orleans.

Jon Steward interviews Lee Seigel author of Against the Machine.

A few days ago in the bloggers listserv, local blogger Mominem shared an email message he received. It was a press release from a man from Memphis, Tennessee who runs a website where he humilates and torments the homeless. The press release was announcing his pending arrival in New Orleans.

The nice thing about the bloggers listserv is the collective processing power, because I only took a cursory look and found it tasteless. I did not realize that it was so aggressive. Then Greg Peters posted the mission of the organization.

Um.

“Street-People.com was created to chronicle the stories of the homeless and raise awareness of the continuing problem of homelessness through the use of humor. Here they are entertainment, like creatures in an online petting zoo without the urine smell.”

I think this is about one step removed from Bumfights.

Wayne Andrews is a 40 year old employee of a Mephis marketing firm who uses his business trips to fuel his hateful little blog, where he posts his stories and photographs of the most disturbed homeless people.

Our departed friend Ashley Morris as moniker for people like this. Yet, I want maintain the Think New Orleans G rating. So, I’ll call him simply a mook.

He is an example of an growing cadre of like minded people. People who are holding up New Orleans as an story of a moral failing and city and people deserving of their fate.

This justification can be felt at every level by the flooded. Whether it is Ed Blakely saying that we need to be put on birth control, or Bay Buchanan closing the window of compassion with the careful rationalization of Katrina fatigue, or merely a weekend urban planner who doling out the hackneyed perspective that the destruction of post-war New Orleans is a golden opportunity to experiment with bulldozers and condos.

These sentiments, and many more, are all underscored on the premise that we had it coming. If not because we are sinful, then it is because we racist, lazy, ungrateful or underinsured. There are many such premises. They are all simple and wrong. They all state that we only have ourselves to blame.

It’s A Just World After All

Intrepid gadfly Karen Gabois went and put the press release sent to Momenem before homeless advocates in New Orleans, who in turn put it before New Orleans City Business, which is fast becoming my favorite New Orleans publication. They have a great sense of what is newsworthy for those of us below the flood line. It is becoming an important second source of news and information in a one newspaper town.

Richard A. Webster is a staff writer for City Business. He wrote Memphis man to expose N.O. homeless on controversial Web site. He managed to contact not only Wayne Andrews author of street-people.com.

Street people, as defined by Andrews, are drunks and drug addicts, the people he calls parasites and cockroaches who would rather leech off of society then seek or accept help.

When he is in New Orleans, Andrews said he will do his best to differentiate between the homeless and street people through one-on-one interviews. Those who lost their homes because of the hurricane will not be featured on his site.

As for the others, it’s open season.

We’re becoming accustomed to people promoting themselves or their interests using New Orleans as their backdrop. Just look at the absurd campaign where children are asked to write essays in a contest called Which lucky child deserves to have their home rebuilt or restored? In this contest, a general contractor will build a home for the child who writes the best essay explaining why their family deserves a home.

We seem to be attracting a new level of vindictiveness, however. We are becoming a whipping boy for the theory that anyone who suffers has somehow, somewhere done something to bring that suffering upon themselves. My friend Lance Hill put me onto this when he invited me to the Storm Bridge workshop at Southern Institute of Tulane University. This workshop talked about how the experience of the storm and the flood provided a common experience through which different groups of people could relate. It was here that I became aware of the “just world hypothesis.”

In an essay by Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez The Just World Hypothesis is described a need to see victims as deserving of their fate in order to maintain a belief that the world is just.

The need to see victims as the recipients of their just deserts can be explained by what psychologists call the Just World Hypothesis. According to the hypothesis, people have a strong desire or need to believe that the world is an orderly, predictable, and just place, where people get what they deserve. Such a belief plays an important function in our lives since in order to plan our lives or achieve our goals we need to assume that our actions will have predictable consequences. Moreover, when we encounter evidence suggesting that the world is not just, we quickly act to restore justice by helping the victim or we persuade ourselves that no injustice has occurred. We either lend assistance or we decide that the rape victim must have asked for it, the homeless person is simply lazy, the fallen star must be an adulterer.

In Andrews case, it is not enough to justify indifference and call the homeless person lazy.

He must go further and adjust his malice and dehumanize his victims. The homeless person is not merely lazy, no. He is a “parasite” and a “cockroach.” Not all homeless people, of course, but those that Andrews deems street people. Then they are fair game, because by his definition they are no longer human.

Wayne Andrews is a 40 year old man who is a caricature of the just world hypothesis.

Against the Machine

I’ve not yet read Against the Machine. I’ll laughably say, however, that I watched the Jon Steward interview. In it Lee Siegel described the Internet as dehumanizing place where we are apt to project the little goblins dancing around our minds onto the distant, faceless persons we encounter in chat rooms, blogs and web forums. When we have only a slight digital representation on of person we can flesh that person out by ascribing motives and assigning blame. Then with the immediacy of the Internet we can attack this opponent of our imagining.

This is so common in an unmoderated forum, like those of nola.com.

It is not uncommon to have someone disrupt the comment section of this website with a comment directed at “you people.” No examples because nola.com, no hairs are split here. The comments are deleted. Those comments are deleted. It is easy to spot an unhinged response.

It is easy to sense when someone has not actually read the article or the other commentators. They’ve punched “Katrina”, “Nagin”, “public housing” or some other hot button into a search engine. They’ve clicked a search result and landed here. They are now venting their spleens.

They’ve not stopped to consider what’s written, except maybe to pick out a keyword that they can repeat in their diatribe. They respond to arguments that are not made. These comments very often begin with “You people believe…”, because they have to set up their attack by ascribing motive, since the basis of their attack does not exist in the article or the forum.

The racist bile coursing through the comments of nola.com exemplify this sort of outlet of rage. This happens because there are no decent people to face. The commentators would be unable to maintain their rage if faced with decent people starring back with slack jaws and knit brows. When all you have is a textbox and your own inadequacies to inform you, there is no decency to maintain.

The Straw Men Under the Bridge

The website Andrews created is designed to harness this indecency. His angry website attacks and degrades these dehumanized “street people” so that you may join in and further attack and degrade them. For those of you offended by people who are so hopelessly mentally ill that they cannot care for them selves and without a family to care for them, this is your opportunity to voice your offense. If someone has asked you for spare change, you can now go to a website that will assure you that this is a validation for the pure hatred that others might ask you to reconsider. You can voice your offense under the thin rationalization that these people are “parasites and cockroaches” who are somehow harming society. You can voice your offense security in your anonymity in an online environment where no decent person will step in to question your decency.

It’s a easy racket. Here is someone who takes a digital camera on business trips to create a face book of the homeless. He invites you to mock them. He is a position to ascribe whatever failings he can imagine upon his digitized victims. He obviously has the support of followers who are eager to justify their hatred of the most unfortunate.

Yet, he can’t maintain this assertion that he is the real victim of the “parasites and cockroaches” when a proper journalist calls him. From Memphis man to expose N.O. homeless on controversial Web site.

“Yeah, they’re human beings but how is the rest of this frickin’ society able to go to bed at night knowing this is how we let people live in our country?” he said. “Turn that around on (Gadbois) and ask her what she’s doing to solve the problem. We’re supposed to be the greatest country in the world and yet we have people allowed to live in urine under trees with an alcoholism problem. And I’m the bad guy? I’m the guy who’s actually getting something done. I’m attacking the situation.”

When faced with traditional media talking to him about his work, he has to dawn a fig leaf and say that his work is “attacking the situation.” as opposed to his stated desire to attack the impoverished, the addicted and the mentally ill. This does not jibe with his assertion that these people are “parasites and cockroaches.”

He’s casting about for a justification for this little Internet property that he’s created for himself. His victims are “fair game” because they are “parasites and cockroaches” on the one hand, but he is “raising awareness of homelessness” on the other.

Understanding the Spectrum of Recovery Good and Evil

In his piece, Mr. Webster interviews the obvious antithesis to Wayne Adrews, Martha Kegel, executive director of Unity of Greater New Orleans, an organization that has placed 200 of the former residents of the Duncan Plaza homeless encampment in perminant housing.

He also quotes Karen Gadbois, keeper of Squandered Heritage, whose contributions to the community and the recovery are too many to mention. She is one to watch. She is active on all matters of dignity.

Karen has become an important bridge between the recovery underground of blogs and mailing lists and the traditional media. I am grateful that Mr. Webster took the time to write this story for New Orleans City Business.

This is an issue of decency and dignity. It is a grossly exaggerated example of someone seeking to make a point of our the misery of the flooded. Andrews has taken making a point of our tragedy to the extreme. He has done so for the most trivial gain.

He can serve as a reminder.

Wayne Andrews can serve to remind us that when an individual or organization comes to New Orleans with their own set of justifications and assertions, looking for material to buttress their argument, rather than seeking to assess the needs and contribute to the recovery underway, that they are no better than an angry 40-year-old employee of Memphis marketing firm and his website dedicated to the hatred of the inhabitants of our society’s lowest rung.

Wayne Andrews inhabits the far side of the spectrum of people who work help and people who will rationalize. He is a caricature of the just world hypothesis.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have the people from abroad who are working with us, side by side, to create a just world through labor, enterprise and ingenuity.

Wayne Andrews can teach us to differentiate between those that rationalize that the world is just and those that work to make the world just. It’s not difficult to tell the two apart, really. You can spot the rationalizers because their lips are moving. You can spot those truly committed to make making the world decent and just because they are moving everything but.

Nakita Shavers, Ken Foster, Jake Hill by Bart Everson.

Dinneral Shavers’ accused murder David Bonds was acquitted last week. Times-Picayune reporter Gwen Filosa wrote an opinion piece about the murder and about the trial entitled Case bewilders a seasoned observer.

I also don’t know whether a juror saw Bonds make a threat while she testified. I only heard the man tell the judge that Bonds was “fidgeting” during the girl’s time on the stand, and that at one point he rested his clean-shaven face in his hand by pantomiming a handgun with his index finger and thumb.

I just reported what the juror said. I didn’t see it. I was watching the teenage witnesses, who told of living on Dumaine Street without parents, taking care of a toddler and a 1-year-old baby while accepting visits from young boys they liked. The verdict was the story, along with the glimpse into a lonely 6th Ward life for these girls.

A year and a half ago, Dinneral Shavers was murdered in the 2600 block of Dumaine St. Dinneral Shavers was a drummer for the Hot 8 brass band. The Hot 8 played for us at Ashley Morris’ funeral.

h3. The Fall of Eddie Jordan

His murder was at the start of a wave of murders murders at the new year of 2007. Dinneral was murdered driving his step-son out of neighborhood where he didn’t belong on December 28th, 2006. Helen Hill was murdered in her bed while her husband Paul Gailiunas was shot with his baby in his arms on January 4th, 2007.

The outrage prompted a march on city hall. A march that ended in speeches by citizens with our city leaders in quiet attendance. None of them had accepted our invitation to march with us, so none of them were permitted to speak.

These events would bring down our grossly incompetent District Attorney Eddie Jordan when he subsequently dropped the charges against Dinneral Shavers’ murderer. It was ultimately a scandal where Eddie Jordan refused to be forthright when his girlfriend gave refuge to a robbery suspect, but without the slow and constant pressure put on his failed office by citizens, it’s likely that he would have survived his term.

Yet, we’re still without justice for Dinneral Shavers and Helen Hill. The fall of Eddie Jordan is cold comfort.

h3. Notes From the Trial

Ken Foster, one of the organizers of Silence is Violence has written a series on his thoughts about the trial and the verdict.

I can’t say it was ever my intention to be so closely involved, but 18 months ago I gave a ride to Dinerral’s sister Nakita when she needed to get to a meeting with the initial prosecutor assigned to the case in the DA’s office. I wasn’t sure if I should just wait for her, or go in with her, but in the end, I sat with her, as someone who at the time was fairly impartial, I asked a number of procedural questions that Nakita couldn’t get out. She’s like a sister to me now, and we often laugh about that first trip we took together, when neither of us knew the other, or really anything we were doing.

Ken has worked with Dinneral’s sister Nakita Shavers to press this case through the courts, to support the family, and to keep us all appraised of the happenings. He’s written a series on the trial and the verdict. Notes from the David Bonds trial, Part One, Notes from the David Bonds trial, Part Two, and Notes from the David Bonds trial, Part Three.

There is a huge difference between reading reports of a trial and actually attending to witness it with your own eyes. News reporters often can’t stay for the entire thing: they slip, jot down some highlights, then move on to their next assignment. Late Wednesday afternoon, when the defense surprised everyone by calling David Bonds to the stand, there was only one reporter in the room for his testimony and cross examination. Everyone else had already gone home. Yesterday, there were quite a few reporters present, but in reading their published reports, I was shocked at the inaccuracies. One station quoted Judge Bigelow. The problem is that Judge Bigelow stepped down a month ago, and was never in the courtroom for this case. Judge Winsburg presided.

It is worth reading Ken’s first-hand accounts of the trial, especially in light of this quote.

h3. The Children of Dumaine St

This city is not safe. We are living in a city with a failed criminal justice system. We are living with a failed criminal justice system that cannot protect the ordinary citizens, let alone protect the children raising children on Dumaine St.

It seems that we should be looking closer at the more immediate failure of our institutions, rather than engaging in these endless processes of planning. Don’t our guided meditations on the schools of the future seem preposterous when we are going on three years with a public school system that is unable to graduate students?

Underlying the tragedy of these murders is the tragedy of the poverty that makes it impossible for our society to function. We count on unsupervised teenage girls to deliver testimony in a murder trial, when they know they’ll be returned to Dumaine St.

This is a poverty that has now receded out view since of the exposure of the levee breeches. A poverty that displays itself only rarely in our media, as it did in Dinneral Shavers’ trial. It bewilders us when we see it, yet is is omni-present and raging out of control.