Representanators

I recently met some smart people from RepresentUS-NY who focus on the question of corruption in all its forms and seek to remove its occurrence with the aid of law enforcement and community activism. I want you to join them, get the emails and subscribe.

Related stories are: “My Represent Us Story,”a bit to promote the Unbreaking America video with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Silver. A description of “Corruption Compelled” among New York State Legislators is very detailed and lists the main sources of enforcement. I have a piece on “Ranking Leadership” using a 21st century innovation to improve our right to a useful vote.

Draft for Comment

The draft below is an attempt to examine the technologies of cooperation available to advance the work that needs to be done in the New York Metropolitan Region.

RepresentUs uses Nation Builder to provide a platform of protocols, specific “how to” papers, and Discord as a resource to help build chapters and aid their membership in selecting useful strategies that discover or encourage the detection of corruption.

Political leaders and the administrators of government policies are being damaged and manipulated. As they old saying goes, “If you dance with a bear, you must dance until the bear wants to stop.” The members of Represent.us watch closely and find ways to cut-in.

Technologies that Support Cooperation.

Access to the statistical tools of digital platforms offer methods to measure the “connectedness” of readers and users to specific issues presented by RepresentUS-NY. The purpose of an online interaction platform is to aid in the development and support of volunteers, organization affiliates and associates. This must be a two-way communication. The Unbreak America video wants 11 million to see it and when I visited in early May 2019 and it was approaching 1 million. That is the is the kind feedback people need, but their is a great deal more possible.

The terms are familiar: total clicks, views and time spent per page, post, or video, the use of search terms, and so on.  Building trust in building large communities of strangers (and friends0 requires reports to users. Building a reputation along dimensions that are appropriate to a specific context requires understanding specific interests and responding to them. To get at the technologies that foster cooperation I’ll use the following example.

The failure of the Citizens Review Board is its inability get accountability and improve civic authority. Reporting on the history of advocacy within this specific community can build relationships for common ground with RepresentUS-NY on police corruption, concealment and cover-ups.

Self-organizing web networks and community grids distribute the burden of corruption investigations through a defined population of issue-based participants. In this example, Represent US would establish a foundation for intelligence from people and devices on all categories of police or general authoritarian misconduct.

The term “grid” is used to recover resources from publicly distributed sources within a network of people and devices, who decide when and how to foster cooperation versus competition used to amplify specific reports organized by the community as peers.

Peer networks combine volunteer communities to accomplish a specific result. These networks are potentially unbounded communities. They create value by rapidly defining and solving problems that would be impossible for smaller workgroups.

The example in this context would seek self-defining human rights participants such as 1) Survivors subdivided as necessary, 2) Attorneys focused on civil liberties and social justice, 3) Social workers and mental health professionals, 4) Activists and community organizers using standard methods as well as innovations such as “playtivism”. All offer a unique peer group process of social change actors to expose violence by building ground for social change.

Social mobility technologies allow large or small groups of people, known and unknown to one another to act in a coherent and coordinated fashion in a set place and time. It is supported by information accessed in current time and space. In this example, the organization ImprovNow has developed a playful group of constituents.

 How should Represent Us approach them for advice on on questions of political corruption or human rights violations? TED’s Senior Fellow on the subject, Yana Buhrer Tavanier describes it is a very good thing to try. They use Meet Up as a mobility tool. The knowledge of that experience could be useful.

Group-building technologies assist self-organized subgroups within a larger network. The possibilities for exponential growth of a network occurs by shortening the social distance among members of the network on specific. In this example, the work to produce greater accountability for holding police offices accountable for serious crimes fits within the larger human rights network and holds the possibility for sharing portions of their agenda.

Social software is known for informal cultural exchanges. It helps people to manage specific purposes like keeping in touch, sharing interests, or as a business for building a following and support participation in events like tastings, product sales or discounts, or get new product notifications. In this example searching Twitter feeds, Facebook, Instagram and other social software platforms may excellent searchable sources for readers interested in seeing political corruption to advance their interests.

Collective knowledge technologies help to take uses of “all of the above” for managing a common resource that is changing continuously Securing this information against deliberate or accidental destruction and expanding its use for accessibility for a wide range of uses and users. In this example, the work to produce a more Citizens Review Board with power goes right to one of the most serious forms of corruption in our society.  A quasi-military force, with the right to use deadly force, in the face of danger (real or supposed) needs a better path to reconciliation of error.  A resource such as the “truth commission” that provides for the complete exposure of human error is a far better route to pursue than a regime of punishment. Wikipedia is a good example of a disciplined source under specific subject areas.

Imagine Yourself in an Animated TV Series

Here is an example of how to take the horror out of dealing with the apologists of brutal authority. Writers, Dan Povenmire and Swampy Marsh introduced us to Dr. Doofenshmirtz (pictured above) in the Phineas and Ferb series. The doctor engineers’ destructive machines and names them with the suffix “er” and “or.” The doctor’s evil deeds are foiled by Perry, a secret agent platypus. You can go only so far with a cartoon metaphor other than Perry is the one of the only egg laying mammals of the species of echidna and monotremes. The crossover of Dr. Doofenshmirtz into Milo Murphy’s Law series brings in the power of Melissa who is daring, loyal self-possessed, smart, and curious. This is in contrast to how the role of Candace who is gaslighted in every episode not by the act of their brothers, but a kind of whimsical happenstance of their male privilege in Phineas and Ferb. It is up to us to pay attention.

Stay with the theme for one more moment.  The suffix “er” and “or” long with “ist” make “agent nouns.”  The also make words denoting an action and identifies the entity of the action. “Driver” is an agent noun formed from the word, “drive.”

A lax and ineffective Civilian Complaint Review Board could be promoted as the operators of the Complaint Removinator under the orders of the Coverupinaters at 1 Police Plaza.  A force capable of erasing all police wrong doing in a single blast.

The “Where is Waldo Demonstration” is an excellent example of the fine art of truth finding and enhanced awareness undertaken by a group of activists in Harrisburg PA.  Have a look.

Seriously

In the words of Senator Hirono of Hawaii, POTUS45 is a “liar and grifter who sits in the Oval Office” (source). Let’s say this fact sinks into the American consciousness and it becomes a removal tipping point like the 415 ppm of CO2 that now guarantees irreversible climate change in mid-2019. It is not Trump or Putin that will cause the collapse of stable climate conditions or the American three-equal-branch system of government. The process that led us to these two situations do not occur independently of what governments can control. The issue is corruption, nothing else will matter as we find ourselves adapting to this changing world. Might as well have a laugh along the way.

I call upon you to fight corruption in every nook and cranny on the American political breakfast table.