Jepstone.net

Sad news from Andrew Gilmartin, who in his most recent posting to South Kingstown, RI Now, writes:

Yesterday night the Town of South Kingstown Council voted against the “Automatic Open Records” petition funding the “Automatic Open Records” Committee outlined in my letter to the Town Council on March 30, 2009. The general tenor of the comments were that the goal is good but that funding it now is not good.

…

I’d really like to see something like this go forward, even if the end result is simply our town publishing the raw data needed for people like Andrew and me to make our local government more open and accessible.

I really appreciate the work that Andrew Gilmartin’s been doing with his attempts to bring my home town’s government into the 21st century. His goal is to increase public participation in the Town of South Kingstown, and to this end, he’s petitioning the town to adopt modern technology for publishing information and inviting the community to participate. One of his early posts, “A call for a new kind of town hall” explains:

We need our public documents, meetings, and other artifacts online. We need to be notified about additions. We need to be notified when they have changed. We need to be able to comment upon these online and have this commentary considered. These new tools of participation are not ancillary. They are as primary as the existing ones.

Doing this is not a great technical challenge. The software development industry routinely uses these tools everywhere and everyday. Doing this does not require a great operational cost. The tools are free, the storage and computational costs minuscule, and the support costs reasonable. The most challenging cost is to the school’s and town’s processes. It is not that more work will be required of officials and staff but that the work is done differently. The difference results in making visible to online tools the workings of the school and the town.

Despite the fact that the South Kingstown Town Council flatly refused to even study his proposal, Andrew is still pressing on, and I hope he succeeds. As someone who grew up in SK, graduated from high school here, and got a college degree here, I can tell you we need this. I’ll be reflecting on Andrew’s experiences when we next return to the polls, and I’ll be encouraging everyone else I know to do the same!

You can keep up with Andrew’s progress at South Kingstown, RI Now.

CC-licensed Lolrus image from Pete Mandik’s photostream on flickr

Life here in southern RI is not quite as boring as I let on. A few weeks (or was it months?) ago, a story broke about a woman who was discovered in a sorority on campus, and in the process of being escorted out, the discovery of what are alleged to be burglary tools led down a rabbit hole that’s oh-so-deep. Now the woman stands accused of having robbed from numerous people in her neighborhood (which happens to be my neighborhood as well). One person I spoke to recounted the story of receiving an envelope with their last name on it from the police. At first, I thought, “that’s a very organized police department”, but in fact, one of the accusations is that this woman tracked the schedules of the victims, managed to collect keys, and kept them all organized. Very strange.

To this day, as far as I know, nothing was stolen from me. But a few days after the story broke, word started getting around that this woman had a couple dozen cats, and that police did not believe they belonged to her. That’s where it started to intersect with my life: we lost our totally kick-ass awesome cat Oscar last year, and hey, if this woman has him, well, I’d like him back.

We got in touch with the police, but they weren’t able to confirm the story about the cats, and they have yet to follow up with us. For the moment, I’ve written it off as a story that spread quickly and got exaggerated, but who knows?

Today, the story picked up for me again. I’ve been made aware of a blog that’s covering this saga with a mixture of news excerpts and random speculation. In fact, one post is consistent with my theory that the cat story was an exaggeration:

An officer may have said “there’s like 20 to 30 cats in that house” not meaning it literally but simply as an exaggerated expression. Somehow, someone, printed a flyer saying that there were 20-30 cats. This simply was not the case.

And that’s fine, because I’d like to move on and accept that I won’t get my cat back. But as I spent more time at the blog, things took a marked turn for the bizarre… as if this story could not get any weirder, it apparently includes a real-life version of one my favorite memes, the Lolrus Bukkit Saga. From She Had My Buckets:

He went around the side of the house and came back with my buckets. He put them on the ground and another guy took a photo of them. They then put them in my car for me. Now the buckets are back home…

So the only thing I can say for sure is that it’s still going to get weirder. And if a little more weirdness raises the possibility that my cat might come home, that’s fine with me.