Tweening Around the Tworld!

More pieces are getting installed. The mid-line of the HDTV is at my eye level. The vertical distance between the camera and the eye mid-line is a problem. To look directly at the person, you need to look at the camera. It feels very unnatural to be looking up while your peer is looking at your throat. Though she is looking at the camera too. Of course, if you look at the screen you aren’t meeting the eye of your peer. I once tried to file a patent on a screen with a hole drilled in the middle to solve this problem. But AT&T already held patents in this area.

Isn’t the Wii cute in its little cubby?

My stand-up desk is just about done. (It only needs pulls for the drawers.) The desktop is 42 inches off of the floor. A normal desk is 30 inches high.

I’m involved with a research project in advanced web media integration and user interface experimentation. A conversation station is used for a one on one video conference. It is intended to be the proverbial water cooler of the remote/home worker.

The custom mount for the high definition video camera is being fabricated. It will be centered above the screen. The screen is on an articulated mount. By the way, that is a Wii light bar mounted on the top of the screen. While I do use it to play games, the Wiimote is also one of the most interesting UI input devices developed in a long time. It is only rivaled by the iPhone and its accelerometers.

The first rule of NDA Club is,

you do not talk about NDA Club!

Photoshopping by my friend:

Steve Stedman

Stedman Design.

I’ve been thinking about an idea I call Sister Precincts. Much like Sister Cities, a Sister Precinct is about building political bridges between different nearby communities. Our precinct is likely to start trying this idea out by helping register Latino voters. I’ll report on our success.

Members of the Texas Bloggers Caucus at Netroots Nation adjourned to join the BBQ Caucus meeting at the Ironworks BBQ Caucus room.

Left to Right: Richard Holcomb, Jeb Boyt, David Niver, Michael Polacheck and Carol Doty

It’s been a long time since the BarCamp during SxSW but we finally have started work on our Austin iPhone Developers Group. Attendees were: Chris Cooley, Andrew Donoho, Tom Myer, Steve Stedman and David Pruett. We discussed the following items:

1. Whether to have periodic meetings? Answer: Yes.
2. Whether to actually participate as a satellite to the iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco? Answer: Yes
3. Should we try to participate with next year’s SxSW BarCamp? Answer: Yes.
4. Are we doing a Wiki? Answer: Yes. Tom and Steve have taken this action item.
5. PR for iPhoneDevCamp? Answer: Yes. Tom and Steve have taken this action item.
6. Structure for this organization? Answer: Informal. Do as little as possible.
7. Meeting Location? Conjunctured Co-working Facility.

Potential Meeting Programs:

1. AJAX on Safari
2. Simple ObjC Programs (Weight World)
3. iPhone Games
4. iPhone Enterprise Development.

We chose to reconvene Tuesday evening at 7:00 PM at my house to finalize our plans for iPhoneDevCamp on August 2-3.

My Floating Credenza has arrived!

(Now I have to get stuff up off of the floor.)

Money and Obama

On Thursday June 19th (a.k.a. Juneteenth here in Texas), Senator Barack Obama declared his emancipation from the public financing system for US Presidential Elections. The punditocracy thinks this is a funding battle between two political parties and their respective candidates. In my opinion, there is a transition happening to a post-Internet political party. Obama has recognized it and his funding decision embraces it.

Political parties control access to money and political activists. This control, if it can be marshaled for electoral success, results in real power. The iron triangle of parties, media and special interests has worked to reinforce that control. Senator Obama, by exploiting the power of the Internet, has split a large chunk of the money out of any party’s control. He is also using the Internet to attract the activists. In other words, the parties no longer control the entrance to the political process. After Obama, any candidate can raise money and gain supporters without having to be vetted by party insiders who support the status quo.

The Obama Paradox

Senator Obama, as a community organizer, has long worked for campaign finance reform. Most of the criticism of his decision to leave public election financing system is his apparent betrayal of that goal. Yet any decision is about balancing values and goals. Let us look at some factors Obama had to balance.

First, Obama is, to quote Senator Clinton, “in it, to win it.” Hence, tactical and strategic advantages need to be carefully weighed. The Obama team has demonstrated a huge tactical advantage over Senator McCain’s campaign from their prodigious network fundraising. Apparently, half of Obama’s $240 million primary campaign election funds came from 1.5+ million people donating less than $200 each. In other words, just sticking to his most numerous donors brings his campaign more money than the public financing system ($120M v $85M). In a real and profound sense, his campaign is already community funded. One does not throw your community funded financial advantage away lightly.

Obviously, in early 2007, Senator Obama naïvely offered to make a deal with the Republican nominee to mutually preserve public financing. Equally obviously, he had no idea he would also have the great success of building a true small donor, community funded election campaign. Here is the paradox. Both funding methods are public. One organically grew up around his campaign. The other uses government funds. Which one is more aligned with Obama’s values? While some may quibble about the difference, let’s remember that no candidate has ever raised so much money from so many individual investors in the history of any democratic campaign anywhere. I assert there is no meaningful difference between the methods. The community/small donor funds are intrinsically aligned with Senator Obama’s values. His decision makes sense.

Second, can either candidate actually reign in or otherwise control members of his party? A promise to preserve public financing is not a suicide pact. As Senator McCain demonstrated recently, his own party ignored his pleas to stop playing a racially divisive ad in a recent primary. In other words, neither Senators McCain nor Obama can actually make a deal that would be respected by other members of the political firmament. That is the lesson of the 2004 “Swift Boat Veterans” 527 groups character “hit job” against Senator Kerry. They are, by statute, independent of every campaign operation and, hence, any agreement the campaigns may make cannot have any force over the 527 groups. While the Republican 527 groups are not in evidence right now, they are out there and they’re keeping their “powder dry”. Senator Obama has to expect them to show up in the fall. When they do, he needs the resources to fight back. Perhaps Senator Obama was naïve to suggest working out a deal with the Republican nominee. Or is Senator McCain cynically calling for Senator Obama to unilaterally disarm his campaign?

Third, Obama wants to control his own message. When a significant number of political messages are funded outside of the candidate’s control, he or she is at their mercy. Once again, Senator Kerry versus the “Swift Boat Veterans” shows the imbalance. Senator Kerry, with his limited, publicly financed resources, had to respond to the “Swift Boat Veterans”, a foe with potentially unlimited resources. That response could not have legally been coordinated with any other organization. Hence, Senator Kerry could not fully respond and he suffered the consequences. To put it bluntly, in 2004 Senator Kerry brought a knife to a gunfight. Senator Obama has already started to show a rapid message response methodology. When an attack comes from any member of the opposition, they respond to nullify it and then start a riposte to reframe the debate. Senator Obama is bringing a Special Forces platoon to a gunfight. He can only do this with enough resources to roughly match their aggregate resources. The “Swift Boat Veterans” and other 527 groups killed effective public financing before Obama was elected to the Senate.

Obama’s paradox is a tough one. He has successfully created a broad base of supporters (1.5+M) for funding his campaign. It meets many, if not all, of the goals of the public funding model. Does he walk away from that to embrace the public funding system and its attendant restrictions? This single decision could cost him the election.

On Juneteenth, he chose to stay with the system his team had already built. He has emancipated himself from external constraints. Hopefully, he has emancipated the rest of us.

Postscript:

Obama could have handled his withdrawal from public election financing announcement better. His speech vaguely covers the paradox I describe above. Unlike most of Senator Obama’s speeches, it wasn’t focused or clear. I think this is due to the transitional nature of his candidacy.

Juneteenth celebrates the day the Emancipation Proclamation came into force in Texas, June 19, 1865.

Doris Gayle and the rest of Precinct 236’s delegation for Senator Obama attended the Texas State Democratic Party Convention on June 6th and 7th. Accompanying Doris were Jeb Boyt (at large alternate), Blair Dancy, Andrew Donoho and Nancy Scott. Standing in reserve were Nathan McNair, John Moore and Bryan Spaulding.

Here’s the team posing with “Senator Obama”:

From Left to Right: Blair Dancy, Doris Gayle, “Senator Obama”, Nancy Scott and Andrew Donoho.

Attending the convention was an all day affair with our carpool departing at 7:15 AM June 6th and our Senate District 14 caucus adjourned at 3:27 AM on June 7th. OK, 20+ hours is more time than any of us bargained for…

After signing in, Doris and I decided that breakfast was in order. While the Hillary campaign was offering breakfast tacos to all attendees, Doris and I decided that a trip to Las Manitas was in order. While the breakfast was, as always, excellent, we were less happy with the downpour that caught us in the open. Fortunately, we were able to flag down a passing cab and were, hence, just soaked to our skin. The convention center’s air conditioning had us dry and cold in just a few hours. Much of the rest of the day would have similar ups and downs.

Attending Issue Group Caucuses:

Doris and I chose to attend the Energy caucus. This was hosted by the Houston based Oil Patch Democrats. While they communicated a great deal of information, they were not very clear on the concept of a caucus. There was almost no interaction with caucus goers. This was a big disappointment. How can we put together any kind of coordinated effort without some real engagement between activists? We also discovered that many candidates, for example US Senatorial Candidate Rick Noriega, used the caucus floor as an opportunity to meet the delegates. I found Mr. Noriega had a compelling story and I think he would be an excellent US Senator.

We next tried to make it to the Democracy for Texas caucus. Where we ran into our next challenge. The poor design of our convention center. (Hereafter referred to as the CC.) The CC only has hallways on 3 sides. Hence, to get from the Energy to the DFT caucus, we have to walk 3 city blocks to go around. (I now know the outside path that is much faster. Of course, that means we’re heading out into the heat; it’s own reward.) We only were able to catch the last 45 minutes of the caucus. At this point, I left the caucus and Doris to get back to the other caucus area to attend the Computer and Technology caucus. The Party really needs to force all of the caucuses onto a similar start and stop times. Leaving one caucus early to get to another one late is suboptimal and a bummer to boot.

One recurring theme this political season has been the changing of the guard due to the influx of new people. This was never more apparent than in the wrongly named Computer and Technology caucus. It was hosted by the extremely competent, long time party regular Tom Blackwell. He was mostly interested in telecommunications and radio/broadcast issues. While, technically, these are technology issues, due to hindsight, they weren’t what the caucus goers came to talk about. After about 25 minutes of a well organized speech about the issues Mr. Blackwell has helped shepherd through the various platform and rules committees, some members of the audience wrested the agenda away from the radio specific issues. (I think part of this was due to the start of the standard rant by amateur radio HAM operators against Broadband over Powerline (BPL) networking technology. This fight between the HAM operators and internet operators will never be resolved in favor of the HAM operators. The network folks will win this battle. The societal good from exploiting rural electrification for delivering universal network access will outweigh the few radio bands that are polluted by BPL radiation. (There are also some technical changes to minimize the interference problems.)

In any event, I had earlier made known to Mr. Blackwell my desire to add a telecommunications and telecommuting agenda item to the caucus. I got most of my issues on the table which sparked a valuable discussion. At this time, I decided to become the recording secretary for our caucus. We hadn’t really needed one earlier due to Mr. Blackwell’s prepared remarks being already available. I’ll be publishing those minutes in a separate blog post. This then kicked off a real caucus with a whole range of interesting issues and ideas about how to mobilize the Democratic party around promoting these issues to address the digital divide and protect our civil liberties of speech and freedom from unreasonable search of our electronic communications. Open source code and data formats were well and thoroughly discussed. I have high hopes we can harness the energy associated with the caucus goers to make some progress on these issues.

Heading off to Senate District 14 Caucus.

I rejoined Doris at 2 PM and we headed to the Hilton for SD14 caucus. After stopping in the Hilton coffee shop for an enjoyable meal of Sun Chips, we joined the rest of our neighbors to get down to the important business of selecting delegates to the National Party Convention. But our party insiders are very clever. They made us vote on all sorts of committee positions before we could have the national delegate “beauty contest”.

State Senator Kirk Watson helped kick this meeting off and then quickly left. To be fair to Mr. Watson, he was the host of the full state convention and surely had other business. Nonetheless, I think by not participating in our caucus for more than 10 minutes he lost some significant opportunities to harness the strength of his district for his personal and Party ambitions. It’s also damn annoying. We made only 3 votes before adjourning at 5:30 PM, 30 minutes late, to catch the general party meeting being convened at 6 PM. Having made the wrong call before about which direction to go, we chose the out of doors path with a stop at Ironworks Barbecue. (After all, we were only going to miss the opening speechifying. Good BBQ v. speechifying, what would you choose?)

Jeb Boyt and Doris Gayle
Showing some good sense.

After the BBQ, we entered the main meeting hall to find almost all of the seats taken. I was able to get Doris seated with the SD14 delegation.

Let the Speechifying Commence!

Once fortified, we discovered few seats. Nonetheless, I was able to get Doris safely situated on an aisle seat between Obama and Clinton supporters.

Doris waiting for Chelsea Clinton

As one would expect from such a large meeting, it is a scripted, top-down affair. We got to meet many of the candidates, at least cursorily, running for important federal or state offices. Yet, the marquee act was the arrival of Chelsea Clinton. I’m of two minds about this. As a representative of her mother’s campaign, she is very welcome to address us. Yet, what can she actually say to us? She doesn’t set policy in the campaign. Unsurprisingly, she made many straightforward bridge building comments. (Since the big event was going to be Senator Clinton’s speech in Washington, D.C. the next day suspending her campaign, there wasn’t much that Chelsea could say.)

Chelsea Clinton

Congratulations to Ms. Clinton for trying to build a bridge. I think it worked with many Obama delegates. (Admittedly, it is always easy to be gracious when you’ve won.) That said, I was deeply surprised at the real bitterness of some Clinton supporters. Without going in to details in one encounter, I was told that I had to “woo” back Clinton supporters. While ignoring the odd sexual overtone associated with their term “woo”, somehow Obama supporters have to bend over backwards to get Clinton supporters to work together to win the White House for the Democratic Party? It mattered not to these Clinton supporters that I was personally hosting a party to unify my precinct just before the National convention. In other words, there was almost nothing I could do, other than, it appeared to me, beg them to return to the party. I went away very depressed. When I got back to Doris’ chair, she was alarmed at how pale and sad I appeared. I hope I am never this bitter about politics.

The Caucus Restarts…

Now we can get down to the serious business of pandering for votes. Doris was a particularly popular choice for photo ops. (It doesn’t hurt to have a 290+ pound advance man telling candidates to get in the picture with Doris.

Doris with her Escort, Andrew

Of course, as the night wore on, we got a little rowdy and kinda blew off any pretense of sitting in nice rows.

Doris and Blair

The pander pen is born…

Doris and her Entourage
(Blair and Nancy)

Before we get to the “big show” there are elections for SD14 representatives to various state committees. These mostly thankless jobs still seem to attract folks. Here is Lorenzo Sadun “promising” to bend the rules for Doris’ pet issues when she elects him to Rules Committee.

Lorenzo Sadun Plying Doris with Promises of Rules Nirvana

The big contest of the evening was, of course, who gets to represent SD14 to the national convention. As the bluest of blue districts, we are sending 8 delegates, 5 for Senator Obama (2 men, 2 women and 1 of either gender) and 3 for Senator Clinton (1 woman, 1 man and 1 of the opposite gender to the variable gender Obama delegate). What this contest exposed was who was a natural campaigner. For example, young David Broockman, 19, hit the ground running with a flyer in state delegates mailboxes 4 days after the county convention closed. That’s right I said a flyer in my mailbox not email. Then, I was really surprised that he knocked on my door at home. David went and knocked on the door of every SD14 Obama delegate. He understands how to demonstrate commitment and it shows he will know how to run a campaign. We need kids like him in our Party. Unsurprisingly, he won one of the seats to national.

David Broockman “Sealing the Deal” with Doris and Blair.

As I was getting to bed at 4:15 AM Saturday morning I noted, we’re rebuilding our democracy.

I felt better.

An Icon for the Ages:

Shepard Fairey’s HOPE.