Carli Brosseau is TucsonCitizen.com's social media editor. She is also a creative writing teacher and freelance reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Caesura, among other places.
Follow @carlibrosseau | Email | LinkedIn
In New York, the emphasis on social media and other digital technology comes from the top.
“Any organization, in the public or private sector, that wants to be a leader in customer service must be a leader in digital media.”
— Mayor Mike Bloomberg
Right now, New York City agencies manage more than 200 social media channels. The city’s website – nyc.gov – gets about 2.8 million visitors per month and has an additional audience of over 1.2 million users through social media. The idea is to create a more centralized mechanism for exchanging information. This will involve training for agencies that currently use social media, working with digital media companies, and creating an advisory group called SMART (Social Media Advisory & Research Taskforce). According to the press release, SMART will manage citywide social media feeds including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr; provide recommendations on social media tools and strategies; help other agencies with social media; evaluate new platforms; and update guidelines and policies.
The city plans to redesign the website and host its first “Hackathon,” which it hopes will produces possible prototypes for the new nyc.gov. It plans to expand NYC Platform, an open government framework featuring Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for city data, launch a hub for feedback from the developer community and create an NYC App store.
The road map includes important steps toward making city government more accessible, though as a journalist, I worry about the centralization of information. I’m hopeful that the collaboration between NYC and the various social media companies now dominating the market will result in innovations that can be adopted by local governments across the country to improve local services.
Facebook Director of Public Policy Tim Sparapani was quoted in the press release as saying that was the purpose of the project: “Social technologies like Facebook can enhance transparency, collaboration, information sharing, and citizen engagement and we’re excited to be part of this initiative. It is our hope that Mayor Bloomberg’s program becomes a model for other cities to replicate as governments around the world find innovative ways to connect with citizens, provide information and deliver services.” We’ll see.
What do you think? Do you have any suggestions for the city of Tucson or Pima County? Check back for more coverage of how local agencies are adapting to the digital world.
Announcing a new regular feature on Social Citizen — The Fix. Each Tuesday, I will post the most recent SeeClickFix reports and write a story about a lingering complaint or a recent repair.
SeeClickFix is a social forum for reporting problems to local government, and the city administration is taking notes. Tucson Mayor Bob Walkup’s aide Andrew Greenhill is active in the Gov. 2.0 movement, and he has advocated the use of SeeClickFix as a tool for prioritizing city problems. City residents can both report problems and vote for the reports they think need the most immediate fix. City officials then know an issue’s exact location and how dire it is. Through this regular feature, I’ll track just how well the pipeline is working.
If you have suggestions or would like your work to be featured, send an email to carli.brosseau@tucsoncitizen.com or tweet me @carlibrosseau.
That’s about the same rate for Germans on Facebook. But if you compare Americans to Facebooking Colombians, of whom 39 percent envision peace within 50 years, the picture changes. Americans, who I thought appeared optimists at first blush, appear cynical, depressed even.
Facebook graphs the daily results of its survey, and the results are startling. Isrealis see a greater chance of peace than Americans. So do Egyptians. And Turks. And Taiwanese.
So what’s the deal? I wish I had a solid answer. I don’t, but I think we can fairly assume that the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya have something to do with current American attitudes toward peace. None of those conflicts has proven as easy to extricate the country from as was initially announced. I also wonder how tied this issue is to budget talks.
Facebook wonders how tied the conflicts are to friendships that bridge conflictual divides. Trends in Facebook friendships among Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis, Jews and Muslims and other warring pairs are graphed and counted. Only Facebook could establish almost 67,000 India-Pakistani “friendships” in 24 hours. I hope those links mean as much as Mark Zuckerberg thinks they do.
Many creative professionals these days work from home. There is a wonderful freedom that comes with that — pajama wearing, dog walks anytime you hit a metaphorical wall — but there are downsides, too.
Isolation ranks high on the list of cons for many creative people I know. We all need a little action. As someone who transitioned from working in a rowdy newsroom to a dark and quiet home office, I can relate. At a certain point, I started singing to the dogs. Regularly. Then I knew things had to change.
If the situation sounds familiar, here are a couple of ideas.
Spoke6 is a co-working outfit located at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Sixth Street. For $150 a month, you can use a desk, a storage locker, bathrooms, showers, a kitchen, a conference room. There is a $20 day-pass option, as well.
Gangplank is a Chandler-based co-working alternative looking to expand to Tucson. They espouse a non-profit, drop-in-for-free model and are currently looking for Tucson businesses or nonprofits with whom to work out a partnership deal.
Names have long been an irresistible topic for me, and in combination with Facebook and revolution, well, I certainly couldn’t pass that one up.
AllFacebook and TechCrunch, two excellent blogs on social media themes, posted today about a just-born Egyptian baby named Facebook. According to Egyptian state-run newspaper Al-Ahram as translated by TechCrunch, the father said the name was a way to “express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl Facebook.”
The new father, Jamal Ibrahim, said that the girl’s family, friends and neighbors in the Ibrahimya region gathered around the newborn to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. “Facebook received many gifts from the youth who were overjoyed by her arrival and the new name,” the newspaper reported (via TechCrunch). “A name [Facebook] that shocked the entire world.”
Allow me to paraphrase. Shock in two phases – the ousting of an autocrat 30 years in power, then the naming of a newborn babe. What a legacy! Facebook is unlikely to forget that piece of Egyptian history.
In the United States, the top baby names in 2009 were Jacob and Isabella, according to the Social Security Administration. I was once asked by an African professor to please name my children something that means something. I’m not yet a mother, but my record so far isn’t so good. My favorite stuffed animal was named Bunny.
What do you think?
Is it an honor to be named for a tool that changed the world? Or will she adopt her middle name as soon as she’s old enough to chose?
The State Department made this video available of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Feb. 15 speech.
Some key excerpts:
There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point. Egypt isn’t inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future. Iran isn’t awful because the authorities used Facebook to shadow and capture members of the opposition. Iran is awful because it is a government that routinely violates the rights of its people.
The internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge. To maintain an internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how.
Now, I know that government confidentiality has been a topic of debate during the past few months because of WikiLeaks, but it’s been a false debate in many ways. Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise.
In the last three years, we have awarded more than $20 million in competitive grants through an open process, including interagency evaluation by technical and policy experts to support a burgeoning group of technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against internet repression. This year, we will award more than $25 million in additional funding. We are taking a venture capital-style approach, supporting a portfolio of technologies, tools, and training, and adapting as more users shift to mobile devices. We have our ear to the ground, talking to digital activists about where they need help, and our diversified approach means we’re able to adapt the range of threats that they face. We support multiple tools, so if repressive governments figure out how to target one, others are available. And we invest in the cutting edge because we know that repressive governments are constantly innovating their methods of oppression and we intend to stay ahead of them.
What do you think? Are Clinton’s comments on WikiLeaks hypocritical? Will the State Department’s strategy be successful? Is it a good idea? Is it possible for a government to completely back openness? I’d love to hear what you think.
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.
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.
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?
The city plans to redesign the website and host its first “Hackathon,” which it hopes will produces possible prototypes for the new nyc.gov. It plans to expand NYC Platform, an open government framework featuring Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for city data, launch a hub for feedback from the developer community and create an NYC App store. 
, but I suggest following 
