Recent Posts

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.

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: