intro + discuss?

[Michael Lenczner]

Hi,

I'm mike lenczner.  I'm one of 4 people that kicked this off (with
tracey, stephane and patrick).   As an intro I am one of the founders
of Ile Sans Fil - a wireless community networking group in Montreal.
I'm also a sociology student, hang out with a bunch of academics
studying 1) community informatics and 2)the sociology of digital
games.  Around the same time we started discussing Civic Access I was
also starting a video blogging group in Montreal.

My blog is http://mtl3p.ilesansfil.org

I was motivatees od to start this group with the three others because
I believe that we making public (much) more civic information and data
and distributing / filtering / mixing / re-mixing it web technology
will have an impressive and very real impact in a short time.  I'm not
a techno-utopist (english?), but I have seen a lot of mind-blowing
stuff come from the open-source community and internet-enabled
volunteering (like my friend Hugh's project Librivox).  And
transparency and more eyes can have very fast results.

My question is:  do people have a good sense of what we want this
group to be?  I think it is already, in a small way, serving the role
we wanted it to play: to bring together people who are interested and
motivated about issuf public information / civic data / access to
government information.

* I know that one of my concerns is that we make this space one which
is comfortable for geeks and non-geeks, phd's and high-school
graduates, policy experts and those of us who know little about the
machinations of gov't.  That means paying attention to jargon and
assumptions about shared knowledge.

* I want to make sure that the tone of this group never becomes overly
antagonistic towards people with other opinions or even towards people
/ departments who we might believe stand in the way of public access
to information.  I think that I speak for Tracey, Steph, and Patrick
when I say that we want to be alternatingly encouraging and critical
towards different layers and departments of gov't but we don't want to
cross over the line and become disrespectful or insulting.  That would
probably end up alienating possible allies.

* Also, so far we've talked a lot about data and specifically
geo-data.  I don't want people to think that we are only interested in
GIS stuff or large data sets.  Personally I'm more excited about
financial budgets, meeting minutes at municipal and burrough levels,
and things like restaurant sanitation records.

Does anyone else have any questions about these thoughts or have other
comments or concerns they want to raise?

And it's really nice to have you all aboard.  :-)  I'm looking forward
to some more introductions.

mike