Author: spjika
Make WordPress.com Your City’s Virtual Home
If you think your cities website stinks, or if you helped build one and you know it cost way to much, there is hope! WordPress now has a crackin new service for cities to use. Fast to deploy, super stable, super secure, and Free? What? This seems like an ideal approach for all the small east bay cities like Albany, Pinole etc.
Farewell to the Achievement Gap?
@DrCamikaRoyal wrote a solid piece today on @Good entitled Please Stop Using The Term Achievement Gap. It really resonated with me and I wanted to share my perspective on this issue through my work with Urban Strategies Council.
Dr Royal talked about the history of this phrase and the clear and present meaning conveyed when it is used most commonly to describe the performance difference between white kids and kids of color in our public schools (and mostly just for black and brown students). This paragraph states the reality quite well:
Because of America’s racial history and legacy, the cross-racial comparison that holds up white student achievement as the universally standard goal is problematic. Further, the term “achievement gap” is inaccurate because it blames the historically marginalized, under-served victims of poor schooling and holds whiteness and wealth as models of excellence. And, as with all misnomers, the thinking that undergirds the achievement gap only speaks of academic outcomes, not the conditions that led to those outcomes, nor does it acknowledge that the outcomes are a consequence of those conditions.
At the Council we worked heavily in partnership with OUSD in setting up the African American Male Achievement initiative in Oakland last year, and there was a huge focus on the achievement gap that we pushed back on with all the goal indicators- the assumption that our black and brown boys must be achieving to the same level as white boys just did not make any sense- if the bar is set low then reaching the goal is a BS waste of time. There were some instances where white males had great outcomes, and in those cases the District chose to keep them as the benchmark…
When we look at California school districts like Oakland, the outcomes for white males are not GOOD, so why would we seek this for our most disenfranchised students? We instead pushed for a quality standard that required all students to improve outcomes. It lead us to develop a new Equity Framework at the Council- we’re talking now about how equity requires a measure of quality before there is measurable, meaningful equality.
We also use language that communicates the disparities between ethnic groups- we want people to understand there are differences that are not healthy, but it is not as you say correctly just about those student’s performance- they don’t exist in a bubble, they exist in neighborhoods with unequal conditions and have historical issues to face. In the end, putting it all on those kids as being under-achievers does in fact diminish the wider scope of responsibility that we conveniently ignore as a system and a society.
Check out our equity framework concept here http://urbanstrategies.org/equity/
To get an idea of how place and other factors impact out kids take a look at the map of suspension rates for African American males in Oakland.
Can we multitask Opening Government?
I love this idea from the Opening Government project:
our intent is not to make smarter, decentralized, or collaborative government—it’s to do all 3 at the same time.
This is exactly what we’re trying to do at OpenOakland! It’s not sufficient to try to achieve just one of these goals- they are all related and critical. It’s hard to re-imagine government with just one of these areas reformed.
If this sounds like something important or something you have any interest in then join us to help redefine citizenship and government at CityCamp on Dec 1st: http://citycampoak.org
If this event really gets you excited and you want to do more for your community then we’d love for you to join up with OpenOakland- we meet weekly in City Hall on Tuesdays. Find out more here: OpenOakland.org
The last Democrat in the White House said we had to have a national discussion about race. There’s been total silence around issues of race with this president. But, as you see, whether there is silence, or an elevation of the discussion of race, you still have polarization. It will take more generations, I suspect, before we eliminate these deep feelings.
Fredrick Harris, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University
Finally a CityCamp in Oakland!
Amid the craziness of an election season, negative press all around, people getting political on Facebook, our nation becoming more and more polarized and a never ending stream of government corruption and scandals it’s hard to expect that regular people have any trust or interest in government anymore. But that can and must change. And guess what? You can play a part in this important change! Even in Oakland, a city with quite a mixed history…
CityCamp is in town! We at OpenOakland are proud to announce the first ever CityCamp in Oakland, visit CityCampOak.org to register now, it’s free and it will be inside City Hall on December 1. This is an important event for those of us excite about this thing we call Open Government and for those of us who love this city!
Why should you care, and attend? We all rely on our local governments for so much, from delivering clean water, removing garbage, maintaining streets, parks and libraries and for hosting cultural events. Like it or not you and I rely on government for a lot, and that’s cool. In the USA we are blessed with a democracyfor the people and of the people. This system only works when we are all civically involved. Contrary to popular press there is no “them” and “us”, we are our government, and our government consists of a whole bunch or “us”, that is people who live in our communities. But there is a twist in this system. If we simply treat our cities like service vending machines- taxes in, service out, then we cannot expect innovation, efficiency and openness. That is a closed concept, a limited function system that is dumb and doesn’t adapt.
But government can and should be much more. Many of us dig the idea of governmentas a platform: a platform which supports safe communities, job growth, solid schools, business development and innovation. As a platform we can enable so much in our communities. To most of you this is likely a new concept, but trust me this matters; our governments have a ton of changing to do, and they will not and can not do it without all of us being involved and engaged.
So come to CityCamp Oakland – it’s a whole day of amazing conversations, sharing, learning and ideation with people from inside city hall, local technologists, community members, journalists, advocates, teachers and other awesome people who care about their city and what it can really be. CityCamps are unconferences- we build our agenda on the day. It’s fun. Seriously. You can lead a session on anything you want, it can be a new idea for a government/community partnership, a data issue, a possible technology solution.
CityCamps are a gateway drug to modern civic engagement. We have two big choices in a Democracy- to sit back and be consumers (read- let others do the leading and have no say in how our country is run) or we can be citizens- actively involved in our communities.
We just heard that the City Administrator is taking a lead from Mayor Ed Lee in SF and offering staff a day’s leave if they attend too, which is brilliant leadership- it’s often hard to encourage overworked, isolated city staff to waste a weekend day like this. So thank you Deanna for supporting your team and helping us to build a stronger community through real conversations and collaboration!
See you there December 1st! This is a rare positive event in this political climate, come help us write the future of active, engaged democracy!!
Open Government in Oakland’s Elections
This month the OpenOakland brigade launched the OpenGov Pledge for all candidates seeking election for Oakland’s City Council and Attorney seats. As of today we have nine candidates who have signed on to our campaign in just a couple of days work, check out who has been quick to the draw and which of your local candidates have yet to commit here:
Why would an organization of techs, software developers, engineers and advocates bother with something like a pledge? It’s because this community is being activated more than ever to participate and to become active, engaged citizens, and we’re bringing with us many of the ideals, perspectives and design approaches common in opensource technology development community. Openness, collaboration, sharing, networked communities and networked project teams.
From our perspective we believe that open government is important for a thriving and accountable democracy. With the technology that exists today, government and citizen can interact with one another in ways that were unimaginable before. By opening conduits from which the public can communicate with government and access the pertinent information about their city, the needs of the public are better served.
One powerful (and commonly referred to) example of how a commitment to open government can better serve the public is by offering taxpayer-produced data online in a free and easily accessible format. A web portal can be a clearinghouse for public data without the need to engage in potentially lengthy and costly public record requests. Such initiatives, which can be powered with open source technology as we are demonstrating, could save the city money and time while also allowing the public easy access to important information immediately.
As OpenOakland, we’re asking all 2012 candidates for City Council and City Attorney to express support for open government principles by signing the candidate open government pledge, here. Similar pledges were signed by mayoral candidates in San Francisco in 2011 and Honolulu this year.
We all recognize that Oakland is poised for greatness, however this will only be fully realized should governance be improved. We thank candidates for showing they believe in Oakland through their candidacies. We want all those running and all voters to know that the Oakland tech community is eager to pitch in to help you make good, responsive, transparent, open government a reality!
Lastly we are not undertaking this pledge as a means of political maneuvering, as a way to shame any candidates or as a tool to later use as a weapon against anyone, OpenOakland will always be a nonpartisan, nonpolitical organization with a focus and a habit of doing positive, supportive things in ways that lift up our community. We believe this is important and that our candidates need to know that opengov is a serious issue and that there is a local and worldwide community looking to help them make this a reality, especially when it comes to using technology in new, creative ways!
I don’t have any doubt that giving our Press a lot of data to pore over will at times be uncomfortable for us in Government. But that’s the whole point. A closed door culture encourages complacency at best and at worst corruption.
Carson & Nicole on Flickr.
Teaser shot from Carson & Nicole’s wedding at the @AsianArtMuseum in SF. #photo
Bass Hole at twilight, Cape Cod gets prettier after dark!
Steve Spiker 