A search for Tucson on SeeClickFix.com reveals dozens of yet untended complaints, most of which are about graffiti or potholes. The Web site can’t solve the city’s budget problems, but it can alert city officials to problems and serve as a way to monitor the response. Some complaints do have a status of “closed,” meaning taken care of, though there are “hot” complaints several months old.

Another technology that could be a hit with neighborhood associations is SeedSpeak, a social media platform set to be launched in February. The idea is to share ideas that you think would make for a better city and to get other people involved in making the idea a reality. The Web site describes the process like this:

Once you plant a seed, other SeedSpeakers discover it by location, category and keyword. SeedSpeakers grow the seed by adding their own thoughts and ideas, rating the seed, promoting it through their own social networks, and making commitments to real-life action. You and others can see how many seeds you have planted, how popular they are, how long they’ve been growing or how many are now completed projects.

In other municipal digital news, New York City hired Rachel Sterne to be its first chief digital officer, in the name of better communication and transparency. We will, I hope, see more of these.

Jared Lee Loughner

Among the unanswered questions about the Jan. 8 mass shootings in Tucson is, Would Jared Lee Loughner have come enough to the attention of the Pima Community College Department of Public Safety to merit suspension (or a mental health evaluation) if he had not posted a YouTube video that included the words “Pima Community College” and “genocide” in its title?

Administrators had met with Jared Loughner and his mother a few days earlier to put together a behavioral contract because campus police had been called on five occasions, said Alice Callison, the school’s legal counsel and spokeswoman. However, the school did not recommend or force a mental health evaluation until it came across the YouTube video. “That was the last straw,” Callison said. Administrators then went to the Loughner home to inform the family that Jared Loughner was suspended until he received a mental health evaluation.

The New York Times and others have looked at whether the school was following its policies in not forcing Jared Lee Loughner to get evaluated (It was; administrators don’t see mental health services as the responsibility of the school.). The newspaper also examined the policies of other schools and what it might take for Pima Community College to have some kind of internal mental health program (It now doesn’t; Callison said the week after the shooting that the school’s policies were not newly under review.).

I can’t help but think – regardless of how the school sees its role – that there is a lesson in the fact that this particular video was a turning point. All along, during the months in which teachers were calling campus police into their classrooms to deal with Loughner’s outbursts, Loughner was also posting YouTube videos and comments in various other social media forums. Those posts didn’t include Pima Community College in their titles, though they did include many of the philosophical obsessions and jolting logic featured in the “last straw” video, including the notion that his First Amendment rights were nearly constantly under attack. I wonder: Was this video found and acted on because of its obvious negative effect on the school’s marketing?

It’s easy to say in hindsight that authorities should have seen this coming. There were signs. The hitch rests at least partly in the division of responsibilities. Whose job would it have been to catch this? Should campus police have done a more-thorough online follow-up to Loughner’s classroom outbursts? If they had, what’s the next step? And ultimately, would this chain of events have prevented the crimes with which Loughner has been charged?

Who knows? But perhaps tweaking our view of the role of social media is in order. Loughner is not alone in turning to the Internet for a public forum, a place to air his views and make connections to other people. If social media is how we interact – as friends, customers, fellow devotees of one thing or another – all the societal functions that normally accompany community conversation should be there. Social media is not without a dark side. If there was a concern with Loughner voicing certain of his views in person, should there not be concern about those views voiced otherwise? I’m not advocating controls on what is said on the Internet, but rather more cognizance among people who monitor the conversation for purposes of public safety and providing other community services about how integral the social media conversation is. I noticed the Center for Social Media is now offering free social media training for law enforcement.

If you have social media questions you would like to see answered, let me know. Tweet me @TucsonCitizen or leave a comment below or on Facebook.

Twitter logo

A Shorty Award is to go to the best journalist on Twitter. You get to vote. Right now, William Bonner is in the lead. Interesting – a Brazilian twitteiro, even though Larry King and Anderson Cooper are suggested as popular journalists on the awards Web site.

I want to hear from you, too, though you don’t necessarily have to vote. What makes a good tweet? What makes a good tweet from a journalist? Comment here or send me a tweet @TucsonCitizen.

Twitter logo

Brooklyn-based letterer and illustrator Jessica Hische has created a lovely layperson’s explanation of how Twitter works and how to use it. She calls it “mom, this is how twitter works,” but the subtitle is “not just for moms!” The page is clear and beautiful, not to mention utterly useful. So if the question of what Twitter is has been gnawing at you or if you don’t quite get the whole @mention thing, check it out. It the best walk-through I’ve seen yet.

Unsurprisingly, I learned about this page on Twitter, through Gannett’s social media maven Jodi Gersh. That’s @jodiontheweb.

The numbers are in: News about the Jan. 8 mass shooting that killed six and wounded 13 others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was the top Twitter trend of the past week. I may be biased , but I suggest following @TucsonCitizen. You’ll find news and views from Tucson’s largest community of bloggers, several of whom, sadly, were directly affected by the events of the past week.

For those of you who did follow TucsonCitizen.com and its various social media outposts during the past week, what did you think? What would you like to see done differently in the future?

PBS’s MediaShift has posted a really interesting article about the current state of online people searches. I know that in my household, the past few phone books that have been delivered have gone straight into the recycling bin. As a reporter, I almost always check to see if my sources have Facebook pages or Twitter handles. Many people are easier to get a hold of that way.

But online identities have implications for privacy. In some ways, our identities are more controlled – we decide what to put on our Facebook pages and in our tweets. But we also have little control over what other people post about us online. A friend of a friend of mine couldn’t get a job after college because someone had posted pictures of her topless all over the Internet. She spent quite a sum employing companies that specialize in controlling online identities to help her scrub her online reputation.

The coverage of the Jan. 8 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Judge John Roll, 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green and 16 others is a prime example of the use of social media as a reporting tool. I posted earlier about @caitieparker, but there have been others, as well, located and interviewed and, some have argued, harassed over the Internet.

Which brings us to the question: How much control should we have? How has your privacy been affected by your online dealings?

Carli Brosseau

I learned that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her staff and constituents had been shot while I was washing the dishes Saturday morning. I heard my friend Peter Michaels on the radio, and his voice was shaky. He sounded rattled. I believed the news because I believe Peter Michaels. I mention this not because my personal story is important, but because it is universal. We relate to friends in more concrete terms than we relate to strangers. We believe them because we know them, and in knowing them, we know ourselves. We become through reflection and refraction. We are prisms of our basic and daily interactions with the world.

My first reaction when I heard the news was to log on. I checked to see who was reporting what; I told my friends, via Facebook. I reached out to those links for confirmation that my reality was theirs. They also confirmed that I had a task. My role was as social media editor for a Web site that bills itself as the Voice of Tucson, the voice of a city to which now all eyes were turned, a city whose name will long be associated with one of our democracy’s darkest moments. My goal was to make that voice relevant and real and useful with whatever tools I had. I posted updates for more than 12 hours and woke at 3 o’clock the next morning, unable to turn off the stream of questions: What does it mean to be a part of a community where this can happen? What can I do in this situation that matters?

The posts that I and others made about the minutia of the investigation and politicians postulating were useful in the quest for information and I, as a journalist, am not one to downplay information. But in this time, I can’t help think that it’s almost beside the point, perhaps because the attacks did hit so close. In five days of reporting, I have yet to talk to anyone who didn’t at least have a friend who knew one of the shooting victims or a story about how the victims indirectly touched his or her life. Each conversation seems so fragile, each participant so vulnerable, and I remember that it is a conversation, that that’s how we relate to each other, and that those links hold us together. Those links keep us from falling apart.

It is perhaps because I had been musing on the subject of links, networks of “friends” and “fans” and “followers,” that President Obama’s speech hit me so hard. We ought to remember that we live for each other. We owe each other. We depend on each other not only for political or economic or even cultural reasons. We depend on each other to know ourselves. It was when President Obama turned to Daniel Hernandez, the intern whose quick response may have saved the congresswoman’s life, that my nose began to run. Heroes, I think, are the ones for whom the links are closer to the surface. Hernandez surely qualifies. But if we all paid more attention, we might each qualify too.

My belief in journalism, whatever the immediate state of the industry, hinges on the link idea. It is, I think, an ability to appeal to commonality and a baseline decency that makes a good reporter. You  have to be someone to whom people want to tell stories, and stories are the link. When Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” it was in all seriousness. Much has been made of social media: that it is a fantastical money-making machine, that it can dismantle disagreeable regimes, that it cements the power of despots, that it increases our alienation from each other and ourselves. We don’t really know yet, but we know the secret’s in the links. May they be real and true.

Green Valley media pro Scott Griessel created the Tucson tear drop logo when he heard that Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others had been shot. “I was really profoundly sad,” the photographer, editor and filmmaker said. “I wanted to do something to express how I was feeling. Facebook is the great means for that these days. It’s the modern, current way of expressing how we feel.”

Griessel figured that if he created an image that was simple, straight forward and moving – as well as nonpolitical – and that if he distributed it for free, other people might use the image to convey how they also were feeling. “I had an idea that it would spread, but it spread faster and further than I expected,” he said. Soon, hundreds of people had posted the image as their Facebook profile picture. Since Griessel had not embedded any copyright information in the image and many people had copied the image from their friends’ profiles, even the creator has no idea just how far the image traveled.

Griessel attributed the popularity to the image’s simplicity and lack of politics. “I wanted to create something that didn’t have any of the vitriol,” he said, citing inspiration in the post-9/11 works of New Yorker magazine’s Art Spiegelman as well as the Obey Giant images street artist Shepard Fairey has posted all over the world. “It was a graffiti approach on Facebook, almost like a sticker,” Griessel said.

Griessel’s image and approach is getting new life off Facebook. Peace Supplies has printed up stickers and T-shirts featuring the logo. The stickers, which are free, can be found at Revolutionary Grounds, Originate and the Medicine Shoppe. Revolutionary Grounds is also selling the T-shirts.

Griessel owns the media company Creatista with his wife, Anna.

P.S. Sorry for the technical malfunctions of the original post. This is the story as it was intended to appear. –cb

I earlier mentioned the plight of @caitieparker, who mentioned on Twitter that she knew Jared Lee Loughner, the man accused of shooting Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, killing six and wounding more than a dozen others. There have been several interesting accounts of what happened since then. Here are a few:

Seeking out sources, made transparent on Twitter

On twitter journalism, cronkite and sausage making

How incorrect reports of Giffords’ death spread on Twitter

Thoughts?

As of now, the Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords Prayers Page on Facebook is liked by almost 28,000 people. That’s 28,000 people, I’m told by the administrator, from all over the world and all political persuasions. The administrator knows this because he monitors the stats, but also because he, himself, is not a Democrat. Jason Asselin identifies as Republican and associates himself with the Tea Party. He volunteered for the campaign of Tea Party-backed Rep. Dan Benishek, who was elected to the seat earlier held by Bart Stupak. Asselin lives in Iron Mountain, Michigan, but when he heard the news that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had been shot, he immediately thought: “That could have been him (referring to Benishek). That could have been anyone.” He immediately started to Facebook memorial page because at the time, within half an hour of the shots ringing out, it was being reported that Giffords had been killed. “When I heard she had not been killed, I quickly changed it to a prayers page,” he said.

Asselin is passionate that political bickering ought to be thrown out at times like these. “Our positions political don’t matter right now,” he said. “We need to come together as America.” He said that the motto emerging out of the 9/11 tragedy stuck with him. “United we stand, divided we fall: I try to live by that every day.” Despite Asselin’s willingness to put aside political ideology in the name of empathy, the Facebook page has been evidence that not all share his perspective. He said his ability to post updates to the page has been taken away, leaving him only able to delete comments and comment on them, and he believes the change is the result of objections from people who think he is trying to use the page to further his political views. “It’s really upsetting,” he said, describing how he has painstakingly read and moderated each comment on the page and deleted those that violate his sense of decency. “I banned like 50 people today,” he said.

Though Asselin has posted text on the site that says he can’t update it and he’s reached out to reporters, at least this one, via email, he said he hasn’t turned to Facebook for help. “I’ve been told that to Facebook you don’t exist and you can’t get a hold of them,” he said. “I’m willing to hand the site over to family if that means they can update it.”

Asselin is also a prolific creator of YouTube videos.

What do you think?