Register Now for the Allied Media Conference!

Friends!

I’m working on the How-To Track of the Allied Media Conference this year.
There are already a lot of exciting things in the works for it.   I’ve been working on a hands-on project to refurbish and build media workstations using Free/Libre/Open Source software during the conference.  I’ve also been talking about developing a session to use mobile technologies to mobilize people to act quickly to do things like respond to foreclosure evictions.  Finally, I’m always excited about how the AMC respects and prioritizes even the youngest participants with the kids track.

This year’s AMC is going to blow your mind.
I’m writing to ask you to register early, at the $100 level, and help us organize the best conference possible.
I also encourage you to propose a session, whether or not you can lead it.  What do you want to see happen at this year’s AMC?

Register here: http://alliedmediaconference.org/register
Propose a session here: http://alliedmediaconference.org/propose
Read the vision statement for the 2009 AMC, We Are Ready Now, here: http://alliedmediaconference.org/about/mission_vision

I hope to see you in Detroit,

Geoff

Holla at your representatives that you don’t want to fund abstinence-only sex ed.

Act at http://capwiz.com/advofy/utr/2/?a=12162006&i=92217564&c=

This is what I wrote:

I am very concerned about the safety, health, and happiness of youth in Indiana and across the nation.  So, I am writing to ask you to end funding for ineffective abstinence-only-until-marriage education programs including:

* Title V Abstinence Education program, Section 510 of the Social Security Act – (state formula grants), funded at $50 million

* Community-Based Abstinence Education under Title XI of the Social Security Act – (direct grants), funded at $116 million

* Adolescent Family Life Act (Title XX of the Public Health Service Act) abstinence-only grants, funded at $13 million

GRAND TOTAL: $179 million per year

It is my hope that by de-funding programs that don’t work, we can provide support that will help youth in Indiana, and across the U.S., safer, healthier, and equipped to make the best choices in their lives.

I know that my local school district has an abstinence-based curriculum and not an abstinence-only sex education curriculum.  However, the pressure of funding programs that do not fully discuss contraception, STI prevention, and acknowledge the reality that youth in Indiana (and around the US) are sexually active, regardless of whether this is the best choice or not, means that many youth in my community do not have the information they need to be safe and healthy and to encourage their peers to make safe, healthy life choices.

I have first-hand experience working as a volunteer doing presentations about healthy relationships, sexual assault, and domestic violence in Bloomington-area middle schools and high schools.  I have found that, because of the local school district’s and Indiana’s emphasis on abstinence and reluctance to talk about even the biological mechanics of sex, many youth lack the basic information they need to participate in a comprehensive discussion about preventing sexual assault and relationship violence.

This is just one local and personal example about how non-comprehensive, abstinence-only-until-marriage education sex education is failing to make Hoosier youth safe and healthy.  However, there is ample additional evidence at the dangerous shortcomings of such approaches.

Here are the facts:

• In spite of their receiving over 1.5 billion dollars in federal funds since 1996, not a single, sound study has shown these programs to have a beneficial impact on young people’s behavior.

• Recent studies show these programs can create harm by undermining contraceptive use when young people in abstinence-only-until-marriage education become sexually active.  In one study, abstinence-only-until-marriage program participants were one-third less likely to use contraception when they did have sex compared to students not receiving the restrictive abstinence-only education. Nationally, over 60% of young people will have had sex before graduating from high school.

•  Over 135 national organizations, including the country’s major medical organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, belong to the National Coalition to Support Sexuality Education and strongly believe in teaching young people both abstinence and contraception.

I know that issues around sex and youth can be controversial, but I believe that I stand with the majority of Americans who want comprehensive sex education for their young people.  A 2004 survey by National Public Radio/Kaiser Family Foundation /Harvard University Kennedy School of Government found that 86% of voters want young people to receive a comprehensive approach to sex education that includes teaching about both abstinence and contraception.

By voting to end the 179 million dollars per year funding for the following failed programs, you will be sending a clear message that you support science and common sense.

Both fiscally and in terms of public health, we cannot afford to continue funding this unproven, dangerous approach. Young people’s health and lives are at risk.  We urge you to side with public health, with the medical community, with parents, young people and teachers and oppose any new funding for the abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

Backing up and verifying files in Mac OS

There are some interesting backup tools for system backups (Time Machine) but I want to just be able to copy and verify a directory (and its children).  I’ve heard that the commercial product Retrospect provides copy and verify functionality, but I’m cheap.

This is the method that I used.  I’d be interested on hearing feedback about it:

# Copy the files using ditto 
$ ditto /Volumes/Backup/columbus_da/ /Volumes/ghingexternal/columbus_da

# Get md5s for the original and copied files
$ find /Volumes/ghingexternal/columbus_day/ -exec md5 '{}' \; > md5s-new.txt
$ find /Volumes/Backup/columbus_day/ -exec md5 '{}' \; > md5s-old.txt

# Strip out the directory prefix from the md5 files
$ mv md5s-old.txt md5s-old.txt.bak
$ mv md5s-new.txt md5s-new.txt.bak
$ sed 's/\/Volumes\/ghingexternal\///' md5s-new.txt.bak > md5s-new.txt
$ sed 's/\/Volumes\/Backup\///' md5s-old.txt.bak > md5s-old.txt

# Compare the md5s of the copied files
$ diff md5s-old.txt md5s-new.txt

hfs+ on linux

I got a new MacBook from work and need to migrate files from my old Dell notebook running Xubuntu Linux.  Luckily, I had recovered a drive from a bricked machine that was donated to pages that I could use to transfer the files.

I don’t like the Fat32 file system, so I formatted the external drive as hfs+.  My workstation, running Debian, mounted the drive fine, but I couldn’t write.  I found that I had to disable journaling on the drive before I could write it in Linux:

$ diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/ghingexternal

Note: that command has to be run on the Mac.

Once I did this, I could write to the disk, but only as root.  Permissions of hfsplus partition, a thread on the Ubuntu message boards, provides this insight which is likely the case:

I got a new MacBook from work and need to migrate files from my old Dell notebook running Xubuntu Linux.  Luckily, I had recovered a drive from a bricked machine that was donated to pages that I could use to transfer the files.

I don’t like the Fat32 file system, so I formatted the external drive as hfs+.  My workstation, running Debian, mounted the drive fine, but I couldn’t write.  I found that I had to disable journaling on the drive before I could write it in Linux:

$ diskutil disableJournal /Volumes/ghingexternal

Note: that command has to be run on the Mac.

Once I did this, I could write to the disk, but only as root.  Permissions of hfsplus partition, a thread on the Ubuntu message boards, provides this insight which is likely part of the problem (since the mountpoint of the hfs+ formatted drive has uid:gid 99:99 on my Linux box):

I have to preface my entry with the warning that I am a complete newbie. I was having the same problem with accessing my files on my hfs+ partition. What I discovered is that by default OSX doesn’t allow any access for the gid for files and folders in your User’s folders. I don’t know if this is the wisest thing, but I went into the Finder, did a “Get Info” on all the files/folders I wanted to access in Ubuntu, I then went under permissions and switched the Group ID to something I could use in Ubuntu. I then made sure that the line in the fstab that mounts my hfs+ partition had a “gid=XXX” statement that matched what I set in OSX. I also made sure that the user I was using in Ubuntu was part of the group mentioned above. If this doesn’t make sense, let me know and I will clarify. Also, if you need help with OSX permissions, here is a link to an Apple KB article: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107039

Mailman Subscription Form with Drupal’s Webform

I’m trying to use Drupal’s webform module to make a subscription form to a Mailman mailing list.  Tracking thoughts and problems here.

I like webform because it stores form responses which might be useful.

Webform also lets you send e-mail on form submission and specify the sender/subject.  I was going to use this to send an e-mail from the address that user enters in the form to the -request address of the mailman list.

The problem is that the module lets you set the From: header but not the Sender: header and mailman uses the Sender: header to detect the requestor.

Options

  • Find a way to use tokens to set the subject to be ‘subscribe address=<form_submitted_address>’
  • Try to send my own e-mail with PHP code specified in the Additional Processing textarea of the Webform advanced settings fieldset when editing my form.

Core technologies/concepts for community organizing

Last summer at the AMC, I presented a session about Web 2.0 and social movements.  Because I inherited the session from someone else, I kept the session proposer’s rubric of introducing technologies/services by name  (Twitter, Jott, del.icio.us) so that people would be able to link the name/buzz with an idea of what it could do.  If I had it to do all over again, I would start with core concepts and technologies that I see as being really helpful with my own use of tech. in organizing.   These would be things that underly a lot of Web 2.0 services and also make technology more fluid for users of all levels of technological familiarity. I’m starting a list here.  What core concepts/technologies do you all use?

RSS Feeds/Aggregation

One of the biggest frustrations that I (and other users I would suspect) have with the multitude of useful sites is having to have a bunch logins and remember which information lives where.  One has to choose between using the right tool for the job and making it easy to locate and access information.  E-mail is one convergence point, but that doesn’t neccessarily mesh with every service that people might use.  Services from del.icio.us to Twitter to Google Calendar to most blogging platforms all allow you to publish RSS feeds.  I would explain what a feed does, show what a feed looks like in various services, and then show how to aggregate and organize feeds with a web-based aggregator and a desktop app.

Feeds are so important because understanding them is crucial for mashing up services or making them easier for collaborations.  Examples:

  • Blog to twitter using Twitterfeed
  • Twitter “mailing” list using #hashtags and RSS Feed for http://search.twitter.com/

Email Filters

People are often overwhelmed by mailing lists, but few know that you can pretty easily filter out all the different kinds of e-mails that you get to do the inbox triage that everyone is familiar with for you.  I think having imapfilter or Thunderbird sort my mail into folders is super-useful, if only to evaluate the actual importance of data.  If I never click on a partcular folder where some of my mail is auto-sorted, do I really need to be on that mailing list anyway?

Human URLs (TinyURL or similar services)

Things like Google Docs often generate long, difficult to remember addresses for important information.  If people have to first dig through an e-mail with a link to a shared resource (and do this every time they want to access it), they’re going to be less likely to use it.  If they can just remember it (or enough of it that it is found in their browser’s location history) I think these online resources will get more use.

Mailing Lists

I think we all take these for granted, but there are ways to use these that make them more or less effective.  What strategies do you use to handle list management and message moderation.  How do you not flood people’s mailboxes?  How do you make it easy for people to (un) subscribe to lists?  This is more a discussion of usage than particular technologies.

Chat

Electronically mediated communication can often be ambiguous.  I find that I often spend extra time trying to disambiguate something in e-mail when it would have been way, way faster to call and let someone as questions.  Still, a lot of collaboration that I do involves looking at text or files together.  Chat is really crucial for these kinds of tasks.  I use it every day at work.

SMS

I don’t have a texting plan and I share my mobile phone, so I’m not the hugest txter but I like that it’s more purvasive than e-mail but less intrusive than a phone call because it lets people get the information first before deciding their timeline or content for response.  It’s also better than a call or voicemail for infromation that you might have to lookup again (a phone number or address for instance).

Skype/Conferencing

For the times when you want to be more personal than chat, voice/video conferencing is perfect.  We have a fancy system at work for having meetings that span Indy and Bton but I think folks can achieve much of the same functionality with Skype, cheap webcams, and projectors.

Paypal

Cash rules everything around me … There are probably better alternatives, especially if the organization seeking cash is a 501(c)3, but Paypal is definitely the easiest to use.  The awesome Pledgie service helps you use Paypal to organize campaigns.

Institutional Clash

Comments on web sites often make me sad, but it’s good to see how complicated and often conflicting the experiences and perspectives of people are, like this exchange between 2 Wisconsin DOC employees from a pretty one-sided article about contraband in WI prisons.:

DOCemployee
Forumite
Joined: 02/15/2009
Total posts: 2

It is Taycheedah Correctional INSTITUTION, not CENTER. The State Journal needs to fact check. THIS IS YOUR JOB!

This is a poorly written, overly biased article. Being locked in a cage all day, for months or years does breed violence. And many of our inmates do sell drugs and weapons. But where is the mention of the black-market sale of athletic shoes for use in the gym? Or the manufacture of small toys to be sent home for a child’s birthday? Wisconsin’s inmates are people too and upon release they DO deserve the chance to prove themselves and rejoin society. ARTICLES like this simply perpetuate and foster more hate and discrimination for ex-cons. Not all of our prisoners are murders and rapists…some are children who have made mistakes or adults who want to change their ways. Let them return to society and restart their lives in peace, without making it more difficult for them by encouraging prejudice.
DOCBrother
Forumite
Joined: 02/15/2009
Total posts: 1

You know, DocEmployee, people like you are what’s wrong with the Department these days. I’ve been in this business for a long time now, I honestly didn’t think there was one thing in this article that was out of place or inaccurate. By your logic and remarks it appears that you are the type of officer, that when my two brothers in blue got their heads smashed in 2 months ago by an inmate with a hammer, you’d be quick to blame us for giving him the hammer! Or maybe it was an error on clinical services for allowing the inmate to have the job in the first place? If you are going to speak like that, do us all a favor and do so under your own name and keep the rest of your BROTHERS and SISTERS out of it.

Sundown Towns past and present

I’m in the process of reading the book Sundown Towns and I just started the chapter about “triggers”, or events that Whites used to rationalize running all the Black residents out of town.

I was just watching PBS’ Independent Lens when I saw this documentary about Tulia, Texas.  The story sounded all too familiar …