This status message is about difficult choices, and the **People** who are now writing MVHub.com code. For pay, we have ($5,000) from Google matched ($5,000) by our (mostly) Lowell Massachusetts supporters. This is enough to pay (2) students a living wage. Three other students, we can't afford to pay are volunteering. Our crew is now: Emaad Ahmed Manzoor: http://halfclosed.wordpress.com/author/emaadahmed/ Ferhat Elmas: http://ferhatelmas.com Jeff Bonhag Roger Wieand Sean Cronin: https://github.com/seancron http://twitter.com/#!/seancron PARTY We're having a party. Please come. It will be good, cheap fun for you and maybe some money for us to pay people a living wage to do good work. Party: http://thecsl.org/go/band/ DIFFICULT CHOICES I'm taking a class on running a political campaigns. It is oriented to immigrants seeking political office, I'm not an immigrant and I'm not running for office, but I've been a worker bee on immigrant and lefty political campaigns including http://www.onelowell.net/fairvote/Why_Choice_Voting.html I get to take the class because I'm an honorary immigrant I guess. A recent session lead by some clear-headed lefties at MassImpact had a lot of useful information. Some stuff I knew. -- Don't waste time trying to register people to vote if you are trying to get elected. Repeated, painful experience is that people who aren't registered to vote, don't vote even when registered. It is difficult enough for people have voted in the past to get out and vote. Voter registration, mobilization and education is a great thing, just not for a particular campaign for elective office. Some stuff I believed, but doubted. ---It's ok to lose. It is even to ok to run a losing campaign. Sometimes it is more important to surface an issue or make the connections that running for office makes than it is to win. With choice voting http://OneLowell.net lost at the polls. But... we contributed to a record voter turn out that threw some bums out of office and the effort got respect from Very Important People. Other rules make complete sense for other people. For example the one on "Message Discipline": Pick a easy to understand message, address a concern of the voters. Repeat that message over and over and over and over. It doesn't matter if you are bored sick. Choice Voting is a really fair system. It gives people more choices. It is also really complicated. (see URL above) It took me 20 minutes of careful thought to understand it. Most of what I did for the campaign was phone banking. Given 15 minutes on the phone I could get people to mostly understand. Most people didn't have 15 minutes. The opposition message was easy: This is too complicated. Don't vote for something you don't understand. Much easier than other messages they could have picked: We live in the neighborhoods that are over-represented, so we like the current system. We don't want to give new people to the the country more power. Hindsight is obvious, a campaign to change the rules so city councilors are elected by precinct would have been much easier to explain, would have had a greater chance of wining and would have done almost as much good as Choice Voting. MESSAGE DISCIPLINE From a "message discipline" point of view, this status message is potentially very bad. It doesn't talk about any of the 137 changes we've made to our software this month. A couple of our donors are much more 'righty" than 'lefty'. Our testing (in the campaign class and talking to successful marketing and fund-raising people ) says that the message that works best for us is: 1) Our software helps (local ? ) people 2) Our training (& experience) helps people get good jobs 3) Google gave us money. btw, the ineffective messages that I use when I get bored and lose discipline are: Free software [] re-distributes wealth without killing or robbing rich people. In 10 years, robots will eliminate truck driving jobs, free software helps with that. We want hacker values (transparency, meritocracy, generosity) to be values of the whole world. On the other hand: $1,000 of the $5,000 we raised came from (2) people who like complicated important ideas. A big and growing number of our "followers", especially Facebook ones are now from outside Lowell MA and the USA. (no money from them though) 4/5 of our summer coders are not from around here. We're having a very good summer of work. Money is an means to the end of code & training. Not an end in itself. http://www.cluetrain.com/ MEASUREMENT & GOALS Long term this is all speculation unless we are able to test various messages effects on our goals. ( improve code, provide good training, make the world a transparent, generous meritocracy ) Short term, it is speculation unless people come to our party and talk about this stuff: http://thecsl.org/go/band/
