Representanators

Support for (or against) members of the New York City Congressional, State, and Local Delegation requires paying attention. Change occurs rapidly through term limits, the high cost of running for office, and in NYS, change becomes likely for many reasons.

The idea is uncomplicated. Working quietly as a team with the resources available.

At the federal level, representation demonstrates political power through participation in committee structures of the House of Representatives and the Senate.  The material developed here focuses on an analysis of that power. What gets out takes the study of the professional watch organizations because it is not about naming a post office. It is about following the money.

At the city and state level of representation, added attention is required. The state of New York has the same Gross Domestic Product as Canada.  Its budget is xxx billion, and nearly half of the revenue is produced by the state’s largest cities, of which NYC plays a considerable role.

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,” which includes Unbreaking America video with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Silver. Nearly two million people saw it by February 2019.

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 offers methods to measure the “connectedness” of readers and users to specific issues presented by RepresentUS-NY. An online interactive platform aims to aid in the development and support of volunteers, organization affiliates, and associates. This must be 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 is the kind of feedback people need, but there 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 friends) 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, RepresentUS 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 are excellent searchable sources for readers interested in understanding how political corruption works.

Collective knowledge technologies help to use “all of the above” to manage a common resource. Securing this information and expanding its use for a wide range of uses and users builds consensus. For 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 police force with the right to use deadly force in the face of danger (real or supposed) is protected by prosecutorial immunity all the way from cops on a beat to state attorneys. A better path to the reconciliation of error on both sides of the law requires reform.  A resource such as “a commission” to provides for the complete exposure of a human error is a far better route to pursue than a regime of punishment and the cover-up of misconduct. 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.” Perry, a secret agent platypus, foils the doctor’s evil deeds. You can go only so far with a cartoon metaphor other than Perry is one of the only egg-laying mammals of the species of echidna and monotremes. The crossover of Dr. Doofenshmirtz into the cartoon series “Milo Murphy’s Law” brings in the power of Melissa, who is daring, loyal self-possessed, smart, and curious. This contrasts with how Candace (Phineas and Ferb), is gaslighted in every episode, not by the act of their brothers, but a kind of whimsical happenstance of her brother’s male privilege. It is up to us to pay attention.

Stay with the theme of play for one more moment.  The suffix “er” and “or,” along with “ist,” make “agent nouns.”  They also make words denoting 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. 

Is there a force capable of erasing all police wrongdoing in a single leap?

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. (here)

Seriously Corrupt

In the words of Senator Hirono of Hawaii, POTUS45 is a “liar and grifter who sits in the Oval Office” (source). (deep end @vox). Let’s say the facts outlined during that time sinks deeply into the American consciousness, and it becomes a key removal tipping point. Well, that did happen.

We are living with many of those tipping points now, so put them in rank order. The first most serious t-point occurred in mid-2019 and is known as parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere that guarantees irreversible climate change. But, unfortunately, some tipping points don’t slap you in the face until it is too late. This will happen.

RLC

It is not POTUS45 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 t-point situations does 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. You might pick one of these strategies, and you might as well laugh along the way and fight corruption from your American political breakfast table.