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Friends,

We began this journey eight months ago in front of the Skidmore Fountain, celebrating its quote about citizenship. The journey ended for me last night, at least for now, but I’m elated by what we have accomplished:

• We gathered 1145 qualifying contributions, more than any other campaign in this race.

• We promised to make this campaign an example of what Voter Owned Elections can bring to Portland’s elections, and we succeeded with a great campaign, including FIVE VOE candidates — and the winner of the runoff will be the first non-incumbent Commissioner elected with a VOE campaign!

• I had the opportunity to meet hundreds, probably thousands of citizens of Portland and learn from them about an incredible array of issues.

• We’ve impressed upon the other candidates the importance of the themes we articulated: the necessity of Portland leading the nation in creating a model for sustainable cities and the opportunities it will bring to us; and the vital need to engage all parts of our community to make Portland the city it can be.

This journey would not have been possible without your support. I am deeply grateful for all the volunteer hours, $5 contributions and the kind words I have received during the last eight months. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart!

I don’t know yet what’s next for me, but you can be sure that I’ll keep working to make Portland even more extraordinary…

Chris

After nine months on the campaign trail, we're getting ready to party!

Come join us starting at 7:30pm on Tuesday at Cafe Reese, 1037 NW 23rd Ave (at Marshall St.).

Under Voter Owned Elections, campaigns are prohibited from spending public funds on election night parties. So I’ll provide soft drinks myself, and we’ll encourage you to purchase coffee drinks, wine and delicious food from Glenn Brugman and his staff at Café Reese, a neighborhood small business.

See you Tuesday!

Our campaign's "strategic objective" for Candidates Gone Wild was to "not disgrace ourselves" (I suspect many of the campaigns had the same goal).

Mission accomplished :-)

Thanks to Aaron Tarfman for the photo

Today the League of American Wheelman awarded Portland the coveted Platinum Bicycle City status. We are only the second U.S. city and the first major metro area to receive this award. This is tremendous recognition of the work so many of us have done toward making Portland the leading cycling city in the country.

Now it's time to shift our goals toward becoming one of the best cycling cities in the world!

Get all the details on our Platinum award at BikePortland.org

While I watch the big game, I'm taking the opportunity to finish off the last thank you notes from the qualifying period. One thing I've insisted on since beginning to gather contributions in September is that every contributor gets a hand-signed thank you, even if it's just a postcard.

I've just signed the last one and wanted to take the opportunity to thank everyone, contributors, solicitors, volunteers and especially my family for helping us submit almost 1200 qualifying contributions.

Thank you!

The good folks at the Bus Project have generously set up table space available to all VOE candidates at their Rebooting Democracy conference this weekend.

So if you've been looking for an opportunity to add to my total of $5 qualifying contributions, come on by Montgomery Park and look for us!

I'm off to a meeting and a house party, but several people have inquired, so I wanted to give a quick update.

Thanks to help from lots of folks (and more than a bit of candidate shoe leather) we're at 762 qualifying contributions as of this morning (that's a raw number, we're going to need some extra to compensate for the few the auditor rejects).

Keep those forms coming in!

Thanks.

Generally I keep my professional life (as a software architect and middle manager at Tektronix and now Xerox, after our division was acquired in 2000) separate from my political life.

But there's an intersection that I think is worth commenting on: transparency in government and open source software. My experience is that both are very valuable for the same reason: more eyes make for better quality!

Just as having more programmers looking at code and making contributions makes for great software (often of much better quality than closed-source commercial software), the more informed citizens we have participating in government decision-making, the better the results will be.

And there's also the issue of trust. The more transparent program code or government processes are, the more we can trust what they're doing.

As a City Commissioner, one of my goals will be to re-invigorate and strengthen our citizen input mechanisms so we can keep those good ideas coming.

It's a long way from over, but I feel better after sending out the press release saying that we passed 500 contributions.

Not that I can pause for more than a minute, because we need 500 more in the next six weeks.

For those who are keeping score, when the Oregonian reported last week that we only had 375, they were using data from the Auditor's web site, which has two lags built-in: the lag from when we collect to when we report (we try to keep that short, but it's still a few days) and a lag from when we submit the data and when the Auditor posts it.

Back to making phone calls (well, first thing in the morning, it's almost midnight now)...

We're having a campaign get-together this Wednesday (12/19). Please come down and join us (preferably with $5 in your pocket, but you're welcome either way):

5:30-7pm
Wednesday, 12/19
Sound Grounds Coffee
3711 SE Belmont St

One of the great things about Voter Owned Elections and the interaction with voters that it fosters is that I'm ALWAYS learning something.

This week I met a woman at Southeast Uplift who wanted to contribute, but could not complete the form because she is legally blind.

Yes, the system has an accommodation for this, but I hadn't learned what it was. Now I have! The Auditor's office has an assistance form, which both she and I sign, and which allows me to fill out the form fields for her. She still has to sign the form (although there is an option for a signature stamp, for those who are also unable to sign).

She was kind enough to meet me this morning and we completed the whole process. So now I have one more contribution, and I'm smarter about accommodations for disabilities in our legal systems (she shared with me how painful it is to execute real estate documents)!

I'll be up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to get positioned on the Hawthorne Bridge by 7am to meet and greet bicycle commuters.

It's the unveiling of our campaign's bicycle policy (PDF,162K), which got previewed today on BikePortland.org.

Pass me some caffeine as you ride by...

Thanks to Scott and Ellie for helping put the event together.

It's not quite a debate, but the Witigonen blog posted a piece today with responses from all the candidates in the race about whether they favor the Commission form of Government, and their thoughts on representation by district.

My answer should be no surprise, since former Mayor Bud Clark and I co-chaired the recent campaign to defend the Commission form.

But it would appear that I have company, all of us running for the Commissioner #1 seat apparently agree that Portland should keep our current form of government.

This is the first of what will be a series of posts over the course of the campaign as I invite the citizens of Portland to dialog with me, the candidate, and our campaign about issues of concern to Portland. I’m looking forward to your feedback!

A little over a week ago, I had the opportunity to attend a “Connection Café” for Portland’s Community Connect project. Community Connect is an effort “to increase the number and diversity of people who are involved in their communities, strengthen community capacity, and increase community impact on public decisions.” Certainly a laudable goal!

After listening to the presentation and recommendations, it seems to me that the rubber meets the road on one particular question on the feedback form:

Thanks for visiting the CitizenSmith.us web site -- in the coming weeks we plan to post blog-style messages from Chris and campaign volunteers. Watch this space...