Archive - 2008
July 8th
The 2008 Democratic National Platform
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 21:19Four years ago, today, I uploaded to a site that I was running, a draft copy of the 2004 Democratic National Platform. You can find a copy of my blog post, with links to the draft in archive.org.
A few weeks earlier, I had written an introduction to the website (archive) where I said,
The purpose of the site is to promote open dialog about the platform, the process, and all aspects of the convention. . . . you can click on Platform Committee to get a listing of members of the platform committee. There is information on the state they are from and whom they are pledged to. You can find everyone from a given state or pledge to a specific candidate, by clicking on the state or candidate name below each entry.
As platform planks become available, you will be able to view the planks, as well as provide comments and the planks.
All of this led up to the Platform Committee meeting in Florida on July 10th. Many of us used the site to share ideas, to find platform committee members to lobby, and to report of the successes in adjusting the platform.
In particular, Marla Camp wrote about being a member of the platform committee and some of the efforts behind the scenes to get a more progressive platform. (see archive). I had met Marla through the Dean campaign. She spent a bit of time talking with Charles Lenchner, whom I believe had been coordinating the platform activities for the Kucinich, and talks a bit about her experiences on the now archived blog.
This year, hopefully, will be a bit different. Today, I received an email from Sen. Obama, sent out on behalf of the DNC which starts,
Every four years, the Democratic Party assembles a platform that outlines the party's position on a number of issues.
Traditionally, the drafting of the platform is not open to ordinary people.
This year, that's going to change.
For two weeks in July, people all across America will hold Platform Meetings in their own communities to discuss the issues and share their input. The outcome of these meetings will be reviewed by the Drafting Committee as it creates the final Platform.
This is a step in the right direction. Exactly what ‘reviewed’ means is a little ambiguous and disconcerting and I would love to see this taken much further. Will the DNC publish the list of Platform Committee Members and encourage people to contact those members? Will drafts of the platform be available online to look at and discuss? Will people be able to see suggestions from other supporters and discuss those suggestions?
The Obama campaign has set up a site to organize community meetings to discussion the platform. It includes a link to the 2004 platform. Organizing a community meeting to discuss the platform is a great first step, and I hope many of you do this.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Bob Edgar over”.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 16:07Let the games begin. A month from today, the Summer Olympics will begin in China. What a difference a few decades can make. Back in 1980, the United States and numerous other countries boycotted the Summer Olympics in the Soviet Union as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Now, the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, along side forces from other countries that participated in the boycott and people have been talking about China’s human rights issues and whether these games should be boycotted.
One of my favorite songs from around that time was Peter Gabriel’s “Games Without Frontiers”.
If looks could kill, they probably will
In games without frontiers - war without tears
…
Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games
Hiding out in tree-tops shouting out rude names
Yes, the games, political, athletic and personal can all seem silly at times. At other times they can seem deadly important.
Meanwhile, Fiona has been playing games at day camp. I don’t know which games she played, perhaps she played Red Rover or Capture the Flag.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Bob Edgar over”.
Rev. Dr. Robert Edgar is president and CEO of Common Cause. Prior to this, he served as general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and before that he was part of the class of ‘74, a group of representatives elected at the Nixon years. There is a lot we can learn from him and others in the class of ’74 about how to get our country back on track.
Kim works for Common Cause and Bob came to Connecticut recently to talk with supporters about what is going on with Common Cause. He met ahead of time with a few bloggers to provide more insight into his vision for Common Cause. It was a great exchange and he had a lot to say about returning accountability and authenticity to American politics.
All of this came to mind as I received an email today about Common Cause’s new campaign, Recapture the Flag.
I remember my days at summer camp, playing Red Rover and Capture the Flag. They were incredibly important to me at the time. Sure, others might have dismissed it as just games, but looking back, I learned a lot about playing fair, taking turns and good sportsmanship.
That seems to fit very nicely with the Recapture the Flag campaign. It does seem that at the root of our countries current problems stems from people serving in Washington these days who have forgotten about basic ideals like fairness, taking turns and good sportsmanship. Our country was made strong by separate and equal branches of the government playing fairly with one another.
Yet warrantless wiretapping, illegal torture, significant restrictions to Habeas Corpus, abuse of executive privilege and singing statements and numerous other injustices does not represent the fairness that I learned in games as a kid, or that has made our country strong.
So, it is time to Recapture the Flag. It is time to help America get back on course to live up to the ideals that we held on the playgrounds of our youth. Please join with me in helping Recapture the Flag, and all it stands for.
“Red Rover, Red Rover, send Bob Edgar over”.
Clarence and Lori : Foreclosure, Bankruptcy, and Suicide
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 09:08Regular readers of my blog will know that it is named after the house that I lost in foreclosure a few months ago. This past week brought the next step in the saga. We met with our lawyer to finalize our Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing.
There is sadness. I have lost something I loved. There is shame and guilt. I grew up always avoiding debt and repaying those that I had. In addition it isn’t just big evil corporations that are affected by my bankruptcy. There are small business that I am friends with the proprietors that I cannot pay back. Then, there are my children. I cannot give them everything I want to. It is easy to see how this can be very depressing.
July 7th
Laconi.ca update
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 18:46Well, identi.ca has added a replies section, so I figured I should probably upgrade my tarball to have replies as well. At the same time, I didn’t want to lose any of my upgrades, so I would create a new tarball, which you can get here and describe what I went through to update my site, as well as the changes that I’ve made.
Laconi.ca hacking
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/07/2008 - 12:02So, I’ve been tweaking my laconica server. For those of you who don’t know about laconi.ca it is an open source microblogging platform. identi.ca is based on laconi.ca and it has lots of neat features, like OpenID and OAuth support. Being Open Source, you can go in and make various changes.
Geeky stuff
For OpenID, I’ve managed to authenticate using I-names from 2idi.com. Another person appears to have authenticated with Yahoo!. I tried idproxy.net and got a 500 Error. I managed to get through with my LiveJournal, but only after a few different tries. Wordpress wouldn’t authenticate, nor would myopenid.com. I suspect that this is because of running my site off of a shared hosting service that is slow and doesn’t always connect with remote sites all that well. Another possibility is that the problems are because I don’t support fancy URLs.
I’ve mentioned my efforts at building a tarball to support installing laconi.ca on shared hosts. You can pull down the latest version of the tarball here. Follow the directions on the previous post, and you should be able to install laconica on your own server.
For my laconica server, I’ve started tweaking the configuration to make the theme look a lot more like the theme for Orient Lodge. So far, the only thing I’ve done has been to change create a new theme which I called ‘orient’. I changed the config.php file to point to the new theme, and then I started changing the display.css file. It wasn’t much work to make a bit of progress. Ideally, I would like to be able to do themeing similar to how you do in Drupal, but Laconi.ca is still at version 0.4.1 so that may be quite a ways off.
I did join the Laconi.ca mailing list where people are sharing ideas about enhancements. One idea was to enhance the email that gets sent to you when someone subscribes to you. I tweaked the code for my server. I went to the actions subdirectory and modified the subscribe.php file. I set it to look for a file called mail.tpl.php in the active theme directory. This will allow people to change the emails to match the behavior they want for their servers. I’ve included this in the tarball.
As is always the case, as soon as you add one feature, people want to tweak it a little more, so there may be changes coming to the mail.tpl.php file soon.
Discussion
So, what does this all mean? Some people are looking at identi.ca as just another subfunctional Twitter knock off. These are probably not early adopters. If you want a better Twitter right now, identi.ca and laconi.ca is not the place to be. However, if you are an innovator or early adopter, identi.ca and laconi.ca are very exciting. Anyone can set up their own server, if they are geeky enough. Anyone can change it. They can share the changes and lots of new things can be created.
Like what?
Well, let’s say you want to have your own white labeled microblog. Perhaps you want a community microblog. Perhaps you are a media outlet that wants to get readers plugged into your microblogging. With Laconi.ca, you can set that up. You can make it look the way you want. At the same time, your subscribers can still subscribe to other federated microblogs. Right now, as far as I know, only laconi.ca based servers participate in this federation. But, there is nothing to prevent Twitter, Plurk, or others from joining in.
Let’s say you want to build your own version of FriendFeed. You can take the laconi.ca software and get it to subscribe not only to other federarted microblogging servers, but potentially to other services as well. You just need to add the code into the framework, and then in good Open Source style, share your hacks.
Or, let’s say you have this incredible idea that is going to revolutionize the way people use microblogs to communicate. You can go out and create your own modifications to laconi.ca.
So, if you’re a geek and want to hack some interesting code, dig in. If you’re a later adopter, keep your eyes on laconi.ca and identi.ca
