House Bill 2500, and more

[Pete Forsyth]

Hello all!

After an initial flurry of activity, this email list has been pretty
dormant. However, there are about 50 of us subscribed, and we all have
an interest in making Oregon government more accessible and open to
the public. It may take us a little while to figure out how we want to
work together, but I'm confident that this will become an exciting and
effective group in good time.

At the moment, there is a bunch of activity on House Bill 2500 that
you all should be aware of. The bill aims to set up a web site making
agency expenditures visible to the public. Recently, it passed the
House unanimously, putting it before the State Senate Rules committee.

On Thursday evening, several of us (Bart Massey, Eric Hanson, Laura
Rose, and myself) had an extensive discussion with Rep. Jefferson
Smith, who would like to see our group influence any potential
amendments to the bill on the Senate side, and the implementation of
the bill.

The bill will set up a commission that will oversee implementation; so
one excellent possibility is that we might get one or more of our
group on that commission.

Eric Hanson, a computer science and open source guru, has volunteered
to carry forward an effort to draft some recommendations by Monday
afternoon. If anyone would like to join us in that in the next couple
days, watch for a message here from Eric about where and how we'll be
proceeding.

Looking forward to working with many of you on this -- it looks like
an excellent opportunity to develop our sense of shared purpose, and
introduce ourselves on the Oregon political stage.

Thanks to all who have already made an effort to move this forward!

-Pete

[Eric Hanson]

Thanks Pete!

Our current charge is to make a recommendation for edits to HB2500, to
Rep. Smith's office by Monday morning. We'd like your help in making
the bill the best that it can be. Rep. Smith has committed to
fighting for whatever recommendations we give him, so we have a very
real and tangible opportunity here to have our voices heard in this
bill.

That said, we are all in agreement that the bill is already in pretty
good shape. Rep. Smith emphasized the importance of "getting a win"
and gaining some momentum with this bill. We can't ask for the moon
and sky at this early stage, because it could jeopardize the bill
actually getting passed. However, we can recommend some gentle tweaks
and refinements of the bill.

Here's the current draft:

http://www.leg.state.or.us/09reg/measpdf/hb2500.dir/hb2500.a.pdf

So let's talk logistics for a minute. I know it's the weekend and
quite lovely but if you have some time to look over the bill tonight
or tomorrow, that'd be great.

Before we start making recommendations, I think the best way to
proceed is to explore the space outside the bill itself, its
foundations, its motivations, its peers, its historical and political
context, etc. Our group is diverse and represents a vast spectrum of
expertise, and we want to make sure that each voice heard and
represented.

In order to do that, we're introducing a web-based tool that derives
insights from three speech locations: The head, the heart, and the
gut. We're familiar with phrases like "speaking from the heart", or
"my gut tells me that...". The tool just asks you to do that, in
response to a seed thought. It allows the user to speak from a place
that precedes synthesis of the many voices inside us, and, in doing
so, provide raw insights--untempered, primary resources. I think
that's the place to start.

Let's break our time between now and Monday morning into two phases:

1) Insight Generation, Ideas for Recommendations: NOW - Sunday 7pm
a) Brainstorm, explore the foundations, look at the problems this
bill addresses, and generate insights. I'll be sending the seed
questions in another email.
b) Record ideas for inclusion in the recommendation document on the
PDX wiki page:
http://pdx.wiki.org/HB2500_Recommendations

2) Draft the recommendation document - Sunday 7pm
Myself, Pete and whoever cares to join us will be collaboratively
drafting our final recommendation from Sunday night. We'll be using
EtherPad (etherpad.com) which lets us collaboratively and
simultaneously edit a document, and chat. I'll send a link out to the
list with the URL to our space.

Looking forward to hearing from you all.

Regards,
Eric
--
Eric Hanson
503-929-1073
er...@aquameta.com