Archive for May, 2015

Bike San Pablo

Friday, May 29th, 2015

Tomorrow (Saturday, May 30) there is again an open streets event in my neighborhood, Love Our Neighborhood Day (coverage 1, 2, 3, 4). San Pablo Avenue (California Route 123) will be closed to cars for a stretch going through North Oakland and Southwest Berkeley. Last year, looking toward downtown Oakland:

Love Our Neighborhood Day 2014 San Pablo Avenue

Flyer for this year:

In the 6.5 years I’ve lived half a block from San Pablo Avenue, it seems to me that bicycle traffic has multiplied. I suspect many of the people I see in the morning and afternoon are commuting. I very occasionally ride on San Pablo because it’s much more direct to many places than safer routes. There are no accommodations for bicyclists on San Pablo in Emeryville, North Oakland, and Berkeley.

Emeryville’s plan calls for a “corridor redesign” that does not officially designate San Pablo Avenue as a bicycle route but does suggest “Bikes May Use Full Lane” signs and painting shared lane markings. Berkeley is updating its bike plan but I don’t know if San Pablo Avenue is yet on its agenda. It does not seem to be for Oakland.

To the north, El Cerrito and Albany are apparently planning protected bike lanes on San Pablo Avenue. Hopefully tomorrow’s event will get people in Oakland and Berkeley thinking likewise.

Much of the Oakland stretches of San Pablo Avenue (there’s another to the south between Emeryville and downtown Oakland, passing under 980) has substantial and poorly maintained medians (weed control cloth which is exposed, tattered, and does not control weeds is ugly-tacky several times over; plus dead trees) that could be removed to make room.

At the same time, because people cruising for parking are dangerous to bicyclists, some parking spots would probably be lost to bike accommodations, and the neighborhood is booming, parking on San Pablo Avenue and nearby should become paid, preferably as part of a community parking benefit district as recently implemented in the Montclair neighborhood of Oakland.

Democratizing Wikimedia Innovation

Wednesday, May 27th, 2015

Through the end of this month the Wikimedia community is electing 3 members of the Wikimedia Foundation board. You qualify to vote if you’ve made at least 300 edits before April 15 and 20 between October 15 and April 15 to any Wikimedia project.

If you don’t quality to vote, it won’t be hard to do so for next time if you get started now: Log in or create an account and be bold when you see a typo, incorrect or missing information in a Wikipedia article. Familiarize yourself with Wikipedia’s sibling projects; edits to any of them count. Play the Wikidata Game. I heartily recommend doing these things as a matter of learning and sharing knowledge regardless of desire to vote in Wikimedia elections or lower threshold and more fun votes such as for the Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year. The current election is just an excuse for inserting this Public Service Announcement. ;-)

If you do qualify to vote, please do. I voted for Denny Vrandečić and give him the strongest possible endorsement. I also voted for and endorse James Heilman.

The election uses approval/disapproval ratio to determine winners, so disapproval votes are powerful. I made a few but don’t want to publish because frankly all of the candidates are excellent and extremely qualified for a Wikimedia Foundation community board seat.

community-centered theory of changeThe central issue in this election is evident in the Candidate statements, discussion, structured Q&A (1, 2, 3, 4), in a series of blog posts by Pete Forsyth (who was briefly a candidate but stepped aside), and outside the context of the current election, in blog posts by Lane Raspberry and Nimish Gautam., and the one message I’ve sent on the issue, which the first paragraph of Vrandečić’s candidate statement sums up:

Wikimedia is a modern wonder – and yet, it must change: most of our projects, as they are today, cannot truly succeed. To achieve our mission, we must increase the effectivity of every single contributor. At the same time, the communities are often seen as change resistant – but falsely so: they do welcome change, done right, as I have shown with Wikidata.

Along these lines, I especially commend Vrandečić’s and Heilman’s answers to the following Q&A topics: Use of Superprotect and respect for community consensus, Retaining current volunteers versus recruiting new ones, Improving content, and Diversity and scope.

It’s commonplace for central organizations (of which I am a fan) to neglect or denigrate communities they serve, whether the relationship is one of collaboration, constituency, or consumption. Sometimes a version of neglect is even the right behavior, e.g., a product or project with some users may need to be EOL’d. But most organizations could do much better. It is essential that the Wikimedia Foundation do so, as the people who edit or otherwise contribute to the various Wikimedia projects are its key competitive advantage. If Wikimedia and other commons-based peer production projects are to stay relevant, nevermind helping achieve world liberation, they need to figure out how to become more effective, starting with embracing the idea that most of the vision and innovation needed to do so will come from the community, not the central organizations, and implementation done in partnership with the community.

Unrelated to the community issue, I’ve previously blog cheered Vrandečić’s and Heilman’s work on Wikidata and Wikipedia/medical journal collaboration respectively.

Tangential ex-Wikimedia Foundation links:

I was very sad to read that Erik Moeller recently left the foundation, where he was Deputy Director. Though he seemed to endorse the organization/community vision dichotomy (my one message linked above is a mailing list reply to him), in my view he is perhaps the best example in the Wikimedia universe of community vision — he had written about and many cases prototyped most of the innovations the foundation is still working on implementing, many years later, before becoming an employee.

Moeller has since started a podcast, interviewing another ex-Wikimedia Foundation person, Sumana Harihareswara, for the first episode.

Harihareswara has two recent posts on Crooked Timber, Codes of conduct and the trade-offs of copyleft and Where are the women in the history of open source? I found them both very interesting and left comments.

Former Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner is now “developing a strategic plan for and with the Tor Project” and separately researching “the broader state of ‘freedom tech’ — all the tools and technologies that enable free speech, free assembly, and freedom of the press.” That’s great news; Tor and other ‘freedom tech’ tools are incredibly exciting and important. But, a moment of critical cheering: as I noted around the time Gardner stepped down as WMF ED, I’m inclined to think that re-routing the knowledge economy is even more important than tools that can route around censorship for a good future. The former is what Wikimedia projects do.

A day to remember our fallen predators

Monday, May 25th, 2015

Last year I decried sad and tacky memorials for gang members and advised to take the advice of lower status memorials (street gang rather than military gang) and “stop violence” before robots take it over.

This year I’m embracing the future. Below, a heroic predator defending the freedom of U.S. citizens by killing Afghanis. Not pictured: similar heroic service over Bosnia, Kosovo, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Iran, Syria, Philippines, and elsewhere.

MQ-1 Lethal Presence

Apparently 4 of your brothers have been shot down and 11 died in accidents while on combat missions. Hundreds more brothers and cousins have fallen in other accidents.

Sorry if it was all for lies, delusion, and lack of a non-bullshit peace movement.

The Killing of Abu Sayyaf (according to unreliable, one-sided, and conflicted sources)

Saturday, May 16th, 2015

Read The Killing of Osama bin Laden or a summary on the English Wikipedia entry for Seymour Hersh.

Then read Abu Sayyaf, an ISIS Leader, Killed in Syria by Special Forces, U.S. Says. The part after the last comma is backed up by the article:

Pentagon officials said
One American military official described
the Pentagon’s description
A Defense Department official said
The official said
(The accounts of the raid came from military and government officials and could not be immediately verified through independent sources.)
officials said
American officials said
The White House rejected initial reports
said Bernadette Meehan, the National Security Council spokeswoman
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said
Officials said
Defense Department officials said
a Defense Department official said
the official said
the official said
the Defense Department official said
Defense Department officials said
officials acknowledged
officials said
Mr. Carter said
the senior United States official said

Why bother to publish this story? Why is the disclaimer of verifiability buried in a parenthetical instead of a banner at the top of the article highlighting multiple issues, a la Wikipedia?

The article closes with a conjecture from a former C.I.A. analyst that anyone could have made.

I’m not complaining about anything new; recently reading the Hersh article made me want to skim the article on the apparent killing of Abu Sayyaf, and the opportunity to update the title of Hersh’s article made me want to write this blog post.

Jackson Removal Act

Wednesday, May 13th, 2015

I just learned of and support a campaign called Women on 20s to put the face of a woman on the US$20 bill. The campaign is in the news today because it announced the winner of a poll to select an individual: Harriet Tubman won.

Why the US$20 bill, that is, why remove Andrew Jackson:

Andrew Jackson was celebrated for his military prowess, for founding the Democratic party and for his simpatico with the common man. But as the seventh president of the United States, he also helped gain Congressional passage of the “Indian Removal Act of 1830” that drove Native American tribes of the Southeastern United States off their resource-rich land and into Oklahoma to make room for white European settlers. Commonly known as the Trail of Tears, the mass relocation of Indians resulted in the deaths of thousands from exposure, disease and starvation during the westward migration. Not okay.

An unrelated call last year to Kick Andrew Jackson Off the $20 Bill! The seventh president engineered genocide. He should be vilified, not honored notes:

Jackson climbed the American socioeconomic ladder. Jackson was the only president who worked as a slave trader, and he accumulated much of his fortune that way. In fact, Jackson later pursued his “Indian Removal” policies specifically so that the stolen lands could be used to expand cotton farming and slavery.

Jackson ought be removed from the US$20 bill, and all other memorializations. Jackson should only be first, with many others to follow, as I wrote last July 4:

After 238 years, isn’t it about time to renew US Independence Day? I suggest terminating all honoring of slave owners, including the so-called discoverer of the Americas, all pre-Civil War presidents except John and John Quincy Adams, the first two post-Civil War presidents, the most famous non-president “founding father”, and a real estate entrepreneur whose name graces a commonwealth. Currency, the names of said commonwealth and one state, many counties and municipalities, thousands of streets, buildings and other public places, statues, and two faces on Mount Rushmore, all should change.