PTP Blog

With a daughter in school there, we have visited New Orleans a half dozen times in the last 5 years. It’s a city of stunning poverty side by side with tourist glitz and wealth. With typical northern naivete, we’ve been shocked by the lack of city infrastructure. And that was in good times before Hurricane Katrina hit.

The failure of emergency responders to anticipate and repair breaches in the dikes around New Orleans has turned a natural disaster into a city-extinguishing catastrophe. The people that couldn’t get out of the city are now being inundated. The poorest areas were hit first, but water ignores privilege and now middle and wealthier neighborhoods have gone under.

There’s another connection that is important to all of us concerned with community organizing: ACORN’s national headquarters is located not far from the flooding Industrial Canal. They are starting a Hurricane Relief Fund. The commonweal was not the highest priority for the State of Louisiana (or Mississippi and Alabama, for that matter. Mississsippi had the idea that building tourist- and worker-attracting casinos on the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast would be a steady cash cow for the state. Now Governor Barbour has been quoted as saying this will cost 500,000 a day in lost tax income - lost just when it’s most needed), so the State’s ability to respond is severely limited. Television reports show helicopters rescuing people from rooftops, but the heroic efforts of first-responders can’t make up for decades of neglect. Our donations will be a poor substitute for a healthy political system that looks out for the interests of all, but it’s very important and necessary.

You can donate to ACORN’s hurricane relief fund from their web site www.acorn.org or go directly to their secure donation page on groundspring with this link here.

A technical note: The GIS people at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center just published an elevation map of New Orleans. It’s interesting to compare it to the corresponding poverty map of the city. The elevation map is a handy tool for evacuees trying to determine from afar the liklihood that their home is flooded. Kudos to the map maker.

There are also some interesting computerized storm surge predictions from LSU’s Center for the Study of Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes

Greetings All! My first blog entry since joining PTP. *Hand claps* Well to be honest, the purpose of this blog has not been fully fleshed out. But what I do know is that this blogging experiment will be concerned with encouraging conversations about development work and its interactions with technology and organizing. The good news is i’m not a tehnology guru, so my commentary and questions will be be from a jargon-less perspective.

On Kintera & the Walk for Justice:
we are walking for justice on september 18th. it promises to be a fantastic time. Please support us, and make a donation to our technology grants program. The money goes right back into the field to fuel and facilitate community organizing in marginalized communities. Its about time community organizing is brought to the right side of the digital divide.

The walk for justice is mostly an online intensive fundraising experience. Of course development 101 should probably make us suspicious of excessive depersonalized fundraising methods conducted via cyberspace. In my opinion cyberspace is a functional part of fundraising especially for small community organizations who are hard-strapped for personnel. it could be the beginning of a relationship or perhaps even just a very convenient way of communication for even donors.

Being able to have realible stats from fundraising is important for future efforts *at least that’s what i’m learning.* The walk for justice uses kintera’s services: primarily for emailing & payment processing.
the upside: it is really easy for donations to be made and it also keeps stats on how many donor appeals have been made.
More on the limitations later.

Southern Echo has a small grants program for emerging grassroots groups engaged in community organizing in eight southern states. Note that it comes with technical assistance from Southern Echo staff. Deadline is October 10, 2005.
I like their definition of community organizing: “community organizing is understood as the process of building powerful, community-controlled, democratically run, inclusive, grassroots organization capable of developing leaders and effecting social change for its constituent members. “

PTP is participating in the Headwaters Foundation for Justice sponsored “Walk for Justice” on September 18. We’re interested in discovering the best ways to identify supporters of improving technology use for community organizations, so we’re dedicating 100% of the donations to our technology grants program.
You can find out more by going to our web site and clicking on the t-shirt link. Your donations are more than welcome!

I’ve been trying to stop carrying the mac around again, and so for the last few days have been back on a Windows machine. It’s a horrifying experience that I’ll talk about some other time. Right now, let’s focus on happier things, things like my mac which has programs like this Tea Timer:
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The Tea Timer does one thing, and it does it really well - reminds you when you tea is done. Sure, I could have created an appointment in Outlook and set a reminder, but come on, it’s tea!

As you can see from this picture:

Google Talk is up and running. I haven’t tried the Windows client out yet, but expect to shortly. If its anything like the other stuff Google does, I’m sure that it will be intuitive, easy to use, and will in Google’s scary way, quickly embed itself into it’s users lives.

Of the many things that we do at PTP, resource development and dissemination is one of the most important. We put a lot of work into developing good resources, and regularly hear from the field that our resources are helpful. That’s why it’s been such a big embarrassment to me that our resources page was such a confusing eyesore for so long.

That changed yesterday when I renovated the resources page. The new design should make it easier to find our resources and should cut down on the scrolling and hunting for what you’re looking for.

This renovation is really just a step on the way to a larger revamping of the whole site that I’ve had planned for some time now. Of course, redesigning a website is not unlike redoing your kitchen or other living space - it’s not something to be undertaken lightly, and it always takes more resources than you expect. So, until we can block out some time to really buckle down and work on the site, we’ll continue to make small usability modifications here and there.

Next on the list? Site-wide searching. Stay tuned, and let us know what you think of the new design.