Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 14:26:38 -0800 From: Jim Warren Subject: GovAccess.088: CapWeb, Civicnetters, disabled, Leg sale, RI, Cap phones Seek Occasional Poli-Sci Aid - Professorial Type or Reference Librarian (?) Having pursued my education in classic nerd style, I carefully avoided learning much in the few civics courses I was forced to take in high school and college. Now that I have finally learned that politics *will* be inflicted on me and all of us - whether we learn about it or simply suffer the consequences - and have become involved in it, I have occasional naive/stupid questions. It would be *very* helpful if I could find a knowledgable, reliable=accurate source of basic civics and political-science information, willing to consider my occasional questions - *before* I publish or circulate erroneous comments. E.g., is it accurate to say that the "federal deficit" is how much more that authorizes to spend in a given year than the feds take in, whereas the "national debt" is the sum of those un-repaid deficits, over the years? (See? I said they were naive questions. But I won't ask you about object-oriented programming or vector algebra. :-) If yer willin' and competent to help, please send a coupla lines indicating your expertise. Many thanks. --jim-the-nerd &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& CapWeb: A Guide to Congress on the WWW Thu, 12 Jan 95 09:16:45 EST >From Chris_Casey@kennedy.senate.gov CapWeb is an "unauthorized" hypertext guide to Congress on the World Wide Web. Committee assignments, contact information including phone numbers, fax, e-mail addresses, state delegation lists, and party rosters are among the information that is available for every member of the Senate and House of Representatives. CapWeb will collect and maintain links to information being provided by individual members of Congress on the Internet; the Library of Congress and other Congressional agencies; state governments; political parties and other related resources. CapWeb is part of Policy.Net, a service of Issue Dynamics, Inc. and can be found at: http://policy.net kennedy.senate.gov /''''\ http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/casey/casey.html /______\ |@@@@@@@@| 202/224-3570 ||0||0||0| Office of Senator Kennedy _____/\________ " " " " "_______/\_____ Washington, DC 20510 {|| || || || || ____/\_____|| || || || ||} ______________________________{||_||_||_||_||____/__\____||_||_||_||_||}__ [I wouldn't normally include such an baroque "sig-file," but this is so novel that I tho't I'd inflict it on yer email. --jim] &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Invitation to Join Civic-Networking Collegium (at a fee) >From d.wiesner@genie.geis.com >From MUNI-TELECOM-APPROVAL@CIVICNET.ORG >From The Center for Civic Networking Fri, 13 Jan 95 06:08:00 UTC Over the past two years we've helped to develop the Cambridge Civic Forum - a public dialogue program in Cambridge, MA. Along the way, we've come across similar efforts focusing on citizen planning, neighborhood action, and citizen-government collaboration at the local level. A member of the CCN team (Ken Thomson) co-authored a book, The Rebirth of Urban Democracy, that looked in depth at a number of these programs, including those in St. Paul, Portland, Dayton, Birmingham, and San Antonio. One thing we've realized is that there doesn't appear to be a special forum for those of us in the trenches to compare notes with each other. Ken convened several conferences from 1978 to 1992 for a broad range of community-based organizations, and invariably participants urged development of such a forum on an ongoing basis. There are a number of national-level and collaborative efforts working to promote civic renewal in one form another (e.g. Healthy Cities, National Issues Forum, Alliance for National Renewal, American Civic Forum), but as yet, no ongoing, day-to-day linkage. Since we'd like to participate in such a forum, and can't find one, the obvious thing to do is start one! We'd like to create a forum that brings together grass roots practitioners, who are currently working on (or have worked on) locally evolved programs, with the specific goals of: - providing a vehicle for us to compare notes and otherwise provide mutual support and assistance - engaging in serious examination of issues that we all face - developing ways to disseminate what we've learned in order to help other communities develop their own programs - providing a vehicle for collaboration on joint projects - such as regional forums and joint fund-raising We'd like to start by recruiting 100-150 participants in an ongoing "electronic collegium" - essentially a focused electronic mail list open to anyone with practical experience in community organizing, citizen participation, and/or civic dialogue activities. We'd like to assemble an initial group during January, then use February to exchange introductions, describe the activities each participant is engaged in, and identify specific topics that we'd all like to explore in more depth. Over the rest of the year we'll explore one topic per month in depth (possibly with one or two academic or other experts invited to participate in each topic discussion). Some obvious issues are lessons learned in how to get started, engaging broad-based participation, organization and staffing, financial support, the possible role of technology (a favorite topic of ours), policy impacts, and program models. We'll provide moderation and facilitation to keep the discussions on track. Of course, on an ongoing basis, we also see this collegium as a vehicle for each participant to solicit input and assistance from other members of the collegium. By keeping this as a limited admission, focused forum, we hope to create high value for all participants. As we develop useful results, we hope to disseminate them via our respective participation on other Internet lists, by publishing summaries (electronically and otherwise), by organizing "electronic seminars" for people getting started in organizing new local efforts, and through all the normal channels of speaking, writing, teaching, etc. We would like to ask a modest financial contribution to help support the effort - $35 for the first 6 months, and $15 per quarter thereafter (around the price of a limited circulation academic journal). This will go to setting up a full set of network capabilities (mailing list, archive, WAIS server to allow searching the archive, gopher server containing supporting documents, mail-responder to allow email only participants to access the archives and documents), to partial support of staff time for facilitating on-line dialogue and editing transcripts into distributable summaries (e.g. a periodic report to more public lists), to partial support of staff time for technical administration of the list and servers, and possibly to honoraria for invited expert participants. Of course, collegium participants will get copies of any edited summaries we put together. If you're interested, please send email to CCN@civicnet.org - with a brief description of: 1. who you are 2. what program(s) you're involved in 3. specific areas of interest you'd like the collegium to focus on If we have sufficient initial interest - say 40 or more people - we'll come back to you with the details of getting started. Regards, John Altobello Richard Civille Miles Fidelman Ken Thomson for the Center for Civic Networking The Center for Civic Networking is a non-profit organization dedicated to applying information infrastructure to the broad public good. We work to as informed citizens, and provide "electronic town halls" which can broaden citizen participation in governance at every level. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& L.A. Conf on Technology and Persons with Disabilities, March 14-18, 1995 The Center on Disabilities at Cal State University - Northridge (18111 Nordhoff St, Northridge CA 91330-8340, 818-885-2578/voice/TDD/msg, 818-885- 4929/fax, ltm@csun.edu) has announced the above-titled conference. Fees range from $150 to $295 by March 1st, and $200 to $345 thereafter. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& San Jose Mercury News Publishes 5-Part "Legislature for Sale" Series If you're interested in - or infuriated by - California government, check out this series! It ran the week of January 8th. (For those on AOL, it should be in their Mercury Center.) &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Rhode Island: RI Secretary of State James Langevin Pursuing Online Access This summarizes msgs of the last few days from Nelson Perras (ad795@osfn.rhilinet.gov), Coordinator of the Office of Public Information for Rhode Island Secretary of State James Langevin (secstate@osfn.rhilinet.gov). Currently, they are examining ways to put RI govt info on-line as inexpensively as possible. There are two avenues they think may be productive. The first is to use what already exists - the Ocean State Freenet to which theoretically every RI'er has access thru libraries or at home - and provide as much govt info as possible. The second is to enter into a public/private partrnership to provide some info that RI normally could not financially afford to do, to the public. Perras' laudible current view is that the private sector would want to make use of such information commercially, but considering it is public info already, they could do that anyway. So long as the people maintain ownership of the work product, he's inclined to allow the free market to do what it does best - innovate and provide services and products from existing resources. He also expressed concern for assuring that there be no monitoring of who accesses which documents - that the privacy of those seeking information about their government be fully protected. Perras is actively soliciting input (ad795@osfn.rhilinet.gov). --jim &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Does Newt *Really* Want to Open Congress to Public Access? By Phone? Thu, 12 Jan 1995 13:54:45 -0800 >From Eric.Silber@Eng.Sun.COM (Eric Silber) > From jwarren@well.sf.ca.us Wed Jan 11 23:52 PST 1995 > Date: Wed, 11 Jan 1995 18:00:39 -0800 > To learn the e-mail addresses of your Senators you will need to contact > them directly at 202-224-3121. ^^^^^^^^^^^^ Last year, I couldn't get through to 224-3121, so I called 1-202-555-1212 They say they can't give out Cong. office phone numbers because, 'They don't have them' !, 'Congress doesn't supply them to Atlantic Bell' !!!! Why the h*$$ doesn't Congress supply its office phone numbers to Atlantic Bell for listng with 'information' ? &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& "Every advance in civilization has been denounced while it was still recent." - Bertrand Russell (via mech@eff.org) Mo' as it Is. --jim GovAccess is a list distributing irregular info & advocacy, maintained by Jim Warren, columnist, MicroTimes, Government Technology, BoardWatch, etc. 345 Swett Rd., Woodside CA 94062; voice/415-851-7075; fax/<# upon request> jwarren@well.com (well.com = well.sf.ca.us; also at jwarren@autodesk.com) & To add or drop the GovAccess list, email to jwarren@well.com . & & Permission herewith granted for unlimited reposting and recirculation. & & Past postings are at ftp.cpsr.org: /cpsr/states/california/govaccess &