Archive - Apr 2005

Date

April 23rd

What's upcoming?

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 04/23/2005 - 08:29

Now, that Meetup has jumped the shark, we need to think about what’s Upcoming.

Upcoming is a new website, where can add events, tag events, and explore the social network of people attending events. Gregory Heller pointed me to this site via a CivicSpace mailing list. It will be interesting to see what sort of interfaces to upcoming emerge out of the CivicSpace community.

I went to Upcoming and found The Personal Democracy Forum was already set up as an event. I was pleased to see that xian had already signed up.

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April 22nd

Outcome Management

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 04/22/2005 - 16:06

One of the final sessions at The> Organizers’ Collaborative’s Grassroots Use of Technology Conference was Outcomes Mgmt. & Case Mgmt. for Human Service Organizations: Build, Buy, or Lease?. It started off with some interesting comments about output management and outcome management and went on to clearly lay out a framework for understanding the total cost of ownership (TCO) of different systems.

As an old IT guy, the idea of TCO was nothing new to me. However, the aspects about output and outcome management were particularly interesting to me. How do we know if the projects we are working on, or the technology we are using are getting us the most desirable outcome? We can measure output, the number of people cared for, the number of people who have signed up for a mailing list, or for a website, the number of visits that the website has had, but how do we get better at measuring meaningful change that has come about as a result of our efforts?

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April 20th

Blogmaster for DeStefano

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/20/2005 - 10:35

A year ago, my eldest daughter worked as a volunteer on Dan Malloy's gubernatorial campaign. It was part of a school project where she was supposed to get real world experience. Mayor Malloy is a good person whom I think would make a great governor.

During my wife's campaign, we often ran into Secretary of State Susan Bysiewicz. Some people have warned us against her brashness while others have suggested it is exactly this what is needed to win back the Governor office. Kim and I have gotten along well with Ms. Bysiewicz and I believe she would be a great governor as well.

Meanwhile, everyone is waiting to see is Chris Dodd or Richard Blumenthal will throw their hats in the ring. Kim and I have also run into them on the campaign trail and have a lot of respect for them.

However, many of the people whom I respect politically are very excited about Mayor John DeStefano's campaign. Several have suggested that I talk with the Major, and so the other day, I drove up to New Haven to talk with him. On the way up, I was passed by a car with license plate 6; Dick Blumenthal on his way up to Hartford.

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April 18th

South Station WiFi Bubble

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 04/18/2005 - 09:11

"I'm sitting in the railway station, ticket for my destination..."

I fire up the laptop and check the WiFi connectivity. There are about half a dozen WiFi Access Points listed. Most of them are encrypted, however, there are two with strong signals that are open. The first is entitled something like publicwifi. It looks promising. I connect, to find that it isn't really all that public. It is public if you want to spend seven dollars an hour to access Wifi. I wonder how well they are doing with that. It doesn't seem to be part of any of the larger WiF vendor networks. To me, it isn't worth seven dollars. Would it have been worth two or three dollars? Maybe.

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