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Category Archives: Government
Local Government
Oct. 16th Superior Court 15B Forum: High Profile Cases
Voting Fabuloso Sports Racer Style
Hey fabuloso sports racers, ZeFrank lays out the voting gig:
Greensboro’s Chief Problem: Transparency in the Hands of the Blogsphere
Via Ed Cone, the consultant’s report (RMA) I posted on earlier is in the wild. An anonymously redacted and posted version is available on Greensboro101.
Guarino has a nice precis of the report – says that the report is “remarkable because of its relatively narrow scope”.
Now, the big question, at least for blogactivists: will Greensboro101 need the services of the Electronic Frontier Foundation?
Oct. 16th Superior Court District 15B Forum
A quick reminder of tonight’s Superior Court District 15B forum. This one will be telecast, so I’ll probably not create a bazillion youTube clips like Oct. 11th’s forum.
From the N&O calendar:
The 15B Judicial District Bar will hold a forum for District 15-B Superior Court judge candidates at 7 p.m. Monday in the Chapel Hill Town Hall. The forum will be broadcast live on Time Warner Cable channel 18 in Orange and Chatham counties. George Doyle will moderate with questions coming from lawyers Barry Winston, Nat Smith, Ed Holmes and Sam Williams. You may submit questions by e-mail beforehand to Winston at btw@winstonandmaher.com.
Greensboro’s Chief Problem: Transparency?
One of the more interesting aspects of Greensboro’s Chief Wray debacle involves a report (the RMA) prepared by outside consultants for internal consumption by Greensboro’s leadership. Questions swirl around both the legality of releasing the full report on the conditions leading to Wray’s firing and the public necessity of those revelations.
A number of GSO bloggers, current ‘blogger and former Council candidate Dave Hoggard for instance, have called for a redacted version to be released. As the Hogg points out,
After reading the whole thing I’m convinced our City Council should call a meeting and vote to release at least the first 31 pages of the report (Section 1). From my non-legal view, that section of the report confirms Bledsoe’s Rhino reported investigations and presents all of the justification needed for the public to understand why David Wray is no longer employed as our Chief of Police.
Others, like Greensboro’s newest ‘blogger (but longtime commenter), The Conservative Alternative, question the assertions that legal action can and will be taken against GSO ‘bloggers publishing the report “in toto”. The grounds for doing so, at least based on her/his analysis, seem pretty shaky.
My interest is more than academic. As a local citizen working on governance issues, the extent to which I can publish or provide documentation of governmental malfeasance hinges on the legal determinations at play in cases like those exposed by Greensboro’s RMA report.
This is one of the reasons I support the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their efforts to preserve and protect the online community’s First Amendment rights.
ConvergeSouth 2006
I really enjoyed Greensboro’s first ‘blog-con ConvergeSouth, an “unconference” that attracted quite a few interesting and/or notorious folks. Good conversation (no surprise as Anton “Mr. Sugar” points out that ‘bloggers are usually good conversationalist), good food and a chance to learn by interaction.
Tomorrow’s promises to be even better.
Elizabeth Edwards will keynote on “Building On-line Communities”. I imagine she’ll be talking about her just released book Saving Graces and her experiences ‘blogging on One America Committee‘s ‘blog.
Beyond that, there’s an interesting list of other “known” guests.
- Elizabeth Edwards of OneAmerica Committee
- Robert Scoble10 Ways to a Killer Blog
- Maryam Scoble – Maryamie
- Jim Rosenberg aka Mr. Sun
- Daniel Rubin – Philadelphia Inquirer
- Wendy Warren – Philadelphia Daily News
- Doug Fisher – South Carolina
- Lex Alexander The Greensboro Model
- John Robinson – Editor, News & Record
- Allen Johnson – N&R Editorial Page Editor
- Bill Wood – NC A&T Help Desk Manager
I plan to get some feedback from the news-oriented folk on how to break the perma-link mess our local ‘blog community has with the HeraldSun and News Observer.
Easthom, Stancil Breath a Little Life Back into Municipal Network Initiative
From Council member Laurin Easthom’s ‘blog The Easthom Page:
At our last council meeting, I read the above history of wireless in town, and gave our new town manager, Roger Stancil, the opportunity to begin a process. He appointed a staff committee headed by Flo Miller to keep the process alive in exploring a municipal wireless system within the context of a technology master plan. Additionally at that meeting, when the Town was discussing the timing of the fiber optic traffic signal system, Kevin Foy reminded David Bonk of our desire to study and consider the laying of fiber along with our upgraded system (for a possible future municipal broadband network backbone.) Now we have a council discussion of wireless and our master technology plan scheduled to be on our agenda at our next council meeting.
Phew! After a recent discussion with some local citizens about the majority of Council’s rather tepid and slow response to reconstituting the municipal networking initiative, I was ready to join with Laurin and start beating the drum for both a exploratory task force and a renewed effort to implement a strategic technology plan for our town.
Looks like Laurin went ahead without me 😉
She also reports that Mayor Foy hasn’t forgotten our strategic opportunity to “tag-a-long” with NC-DOT’s efforts to lay fibre to each of our nearly 100 signalized intersections. This community-owned high-speed networking loop would thread its way through every commercial district, lie along almost every University boundary and penetrate deeply into several underserved residential areas.
Long time followers of my efforts to promote municipal networking will remember that former town Technology Board member Terri Buckner and I focused attention on this once in decades opportunity nearly 3 years ago.
Thank you Laurin for keeping hope alive.
Monday’s agenda will be published here.
Here comes the judge: The Forum – Fox’s Question
Carl Fox starts with the observation that 9 out of 10 people sitting in his court audience are young African-American males.
“What are we doing wrong that is causing so many males to end up in court and what can we do to fix the situation?”
Here comes the judge: The Forum – Baddour’s Question
What is the most important thing, if elected, you’ll accomplish over the next 8 years?
Adam Stein talks about how he can only serve about 1/3rd of a term (about 2 years).
Here comes the judge: The Forum – Question #2
What role should political parties play in judge elections?
Here comes the judge: The Forum – Openings
Oct. 16th’s UNC Young Democrat Superior Court 15B forum. Candidate openings.
In an effort to clean up the original post and make the page load faster, here’s a playlist version.
Here comes the Judge: The Forum
[UPDATE:] All videos have been uploaded to youTube and are available here.
Tonight, four candidates for Superior Court faced off before 24 folks that appeared to be students (grad or otherwise) and, including myself, two older folk.
Our cup runneth over. Every one of the candidates this evening was quite impressive.
While our choices can be narrowed on externalities, like Adam Stein’s preplanned obsolescence, the character, tenor, experience of these candidates came through…
[UPDATE:]
Posting videos on youTube as I process them. This is my first attempt to film an inside event. I ran into a few problems: dying batteries, filled memory cards, mystery heads popping up, bottle woman, standing candidates, Mr. Tongue clicker, etc.
I apologize to the candidates for clipping various speeches (like Carl’s opening statement which starts late due to a camera glitch). My next effort should be PRO quality ;-).
[UPDATE:]
Moved videos to separate posts to improve page loading times.
- Candidate opening statements.
- Question 1: Importance of community?
- Question 2: What roles should political parties play in judge elections?
- Judge Baddour’s question: What is the most important thing you will accomplish in the next 8 years?
- Mr. Stein’s question: What is your experience?
- Judge Fox’s question: What are we doing wrong that is causing so many [African-American] males to end up in court and what can we do to fix the situation?
- Judge Anderson’s question: How can the current system for selecting our judges (by election) be modified to better serve the public?
The forum wrapped without an opportunity for the folks in the audience to ask a question or two. That said, I appreciated the moderator’s giving the candidates enough time to fully answer.
All in all, a good forum.
I’m using a wonderful open source software (OSS) tool VirtualDub to edit the raw AVI files from my Canon S3 and convert them to YouTube (or is it GooTube) friendly 320×240 MPEG-4 XVids.
Here comes the judge, and the judge and the judge and the potential judge
I know, short notice of tonight’s (Wed. Oct. 11th, 2006) forum for Superior Court 15B candidates. The forum is sponsored by UNC’s Young Dems.
From Matt Liles OrangePoltics notice:
The Orange County Young Democrats will hold a forum with all four candidates for Superior Court on Wednesday, Oct 11th at 7pm in Room 4085 of the UNC School of Law.
Directions to the Law School are available at www.law.unc.edu. Parking is available in the lot adjacent to the law school after 5pm and additional parking is also available in the School of Government lot.
The candidates are:
- Judge Allen Baddour – current sitting judge (and a candidate I strongly endorse for November)
- Judge Charles Anderson – who I endorsed in the primary.
- Judge Carl Fox
- Attorney Adam Stein
I hope a few issues come up this evening:
- Mr. Stein’s inability to serve all but a fraction of a term (covered here and here by Duncan Murrell).
- Practical ideas for streamlining the court process (and maybe whack some of the costs out).
- Restoring some humanity to the justice system.
- The incredible amount of monies raised for this race (Stein is on track to beat $100K mark) and the distorting influence that has on future races.
Carl Fox, everyone tells me, has a lock. It certainly looks that way when you he spent the least, $26K, and raised the least, $28K, but was the top vote getter in the primary. That means a 3-way race among Baddour, Anderson and Stein.
Adam Stein has a quite respectable background, a solid list of endorsements, but when I talk to his supporters it always seems like they’re awarding a sinecure for a life of solid and praiseworthy work rather than enlisting someone with a strong vision for the courts future and the wherewithal to carry out the tasks before them.
This is an eight year job. Stein’s problem of a predictably foreshortened career on the bench should be addressed.
I’ve learned a bit about the work of a Superior Court district 15B judge over the last year. It is a tough job.
Our courts system is being battered, unfortunately, by rising demands. Hopefully this evening we’ll hear some innovative, practical ideas for addressing foreseeable stresses on our local court system.
A Measure of Transparency in Local Government
Mark Peters, one of the founders of Orange County political forum SqueezeThePulp and a school-focused activist, created this report card to publicly track local governments fulfillment of their stated goal of greater online efforts to promote e-democracy .
Mark’s site, OrangeRecordings, serves as a clearinghouse for podCasts of school board, council, board of alderman and other public meetings. The archival value of audio recordings and the ability for “time shifting” concerned citizens to “listen in” on proceedings should spur any elected body interested in greater transparency to deploy them.
Unfortunately, while Carrboro leads the way with a %90 rating, Chapel Hill has laid a big fat goose egg (%0).
Chapel Hill’s Town Council is still dragging their feet on using the simplest of technologies to draw citizens into the governance process. Quite unfortunate.
Great work Mark.