If you don't know much about Minneapolis and what government data is available to you, that's no surprise; it's somewhat difficult to find out, and requires reading through state statutes and city ordinances in order to know what you can request. That doesn't mean that the process of getting this data is any easier, unless you have experience with governmental processes.

Having become annoyed with a lack of transparency and open government data in Minneapolis, some friends and I are launching a project, OpenMinneapolis.org, to make data on government meetings, officials, elections and various processes more available to the public and private individuals. You'll even be able to check out attendance records for city council members, and know whether they're doing the job you elected them to do, as well as have access to meeting minutes in an open and usable format (in this case XML). Take a look at the announcement on OpenMinneapolis.org for more details...

We're already getting some press too, and have submitted a grant application to the Knight foundation, which you can go and vote on. :)

Greg Brick, author of Subterranean Twin Cities, has allegedly lifted contents of his book from Action Squad's website. Has anyone read it? I assume he hasn't had the gall to lift stories verbatim, but I could be wrong.

If the book isn't worth a read, Action Squad certainly is. It comes filled with photos of urban exploration adventures that are 100% awesome.

If you ever cared to know much about the Ward 9 election and campaign finances, it looks like the shit is really hitting the fan and coming out on this Minneapolis Issues List post. Dave Bicking (Green) took some heat, but responded with an elucidating explanation of who supports Gary Schiff and what their connections are. Dave Bicking is particularly critical of the donations to Gary Schiff from businesses and Political Action Committees, and is prohibited from receiving them as a Green party-endorsed candidate.

It pleases to see when politicians get involved in their campaigns like this, and respond directly to criticism to even up the score. And now one of the donors has responded about their own donations, so it looks like the debate is heating up... I hope it gets more attention!

Councilmember Cam Gordon and a university graduate student are conducting a 'diversity audit' of Minneapolis city boards and commissions, wishing to get solid data on how diverse the Minneapolis government is and how accurately this represents the population of Minneapolis. Ah, democracy!

“I have concerns based on what I’ve seen,” Gordon said. “We are probably more male, more middle-aged and more white than the city as a whole.”

However, Gordon said he could be wrong, and having the data provided by the diversity audit would give the city solid numbers.

Part of me wishes they would conduct an audit of neighborhood organizations, too. My limited experience with them says that they fit well into the demographic that Gordon suggested above: primarily middle-aged, and white. Neighborhood organizations are also composed of a majority of business owners which— not that there's anything wrong with that— only represents a small percentage of the neighborhoods they represent. Also, not all business owners may necessarily live in the neighborhood that their business is in.

I remember a time I went to the Whittier Alliance's monthly meeting because I was interested in discussion of public transit and walkability in the neighborhood. The meeting was primarily white, middle-aged and/or a business owner. There were probably 4 or 5 other people my age (college-age student). I made a suggestion to the Whittier Alliance and attending audience that they look at reducing street parking and widening sidewalks along the parts of Nicollet avenue where they were concerned about improving foot traffic. But, since those in attendance were mainly business owners and people with cars, this was laughed down; with the owner of the Black Forest calling the suggestion a "fantasy". This is a minor issue in comparison to other issues that the neighborhood faces, such as violence and narcotics usage; but, one wonders how issues that concern non-white, non-middle aged and non-middle class residents are handled.

Certainly, more residents who don't fit the current Whittier standard for neighborhood involvement could be brought in through a stronger outreach program. On the other hand, I question how successful or serious organizations would be about such outreach, because I have also heard some troubling anecdotes from a friend living in another neighborhood where one of those involved in the neighborhood organization had a sense of outreach that was much more based in prejudice and racism than anything else.

Although I understand that the diversity audit is targeted at Minneapolis city boards and commissions, I wish they'd take a further look at neighborhood organizations and how their diversity lines up with the diverseness of their represented neighborhoods. If neighborhood involvement can be said to be a starting place for careers in city politics, certainly this could be related to the lack of diversity within city government. While I know already what results will come back, it will certainly be exciting to see the statistics. I'm glad that Cam Gordon and Annie Welch are looking into this— I just hope people listen to what they find and try to do something about it.

A friend of mine recently posted to his blog about a Star Tribune article on the relationship drama of a candidate for city council, Charles Carlson. The original Strib article also pointed fingers at a possible campaign violation, which I think are really more interesting. John also started some public discussion of Quorum-gate; which I don't want to reproduce here out of laziness, but I did make some points there worth reading.

Anyway, someone commented anonymously saying that it "seems irresponsible to make that accusation without any proof" and on a whim I asked John if he could give me the IP address for the anonymous poster. Sometimes interesting things turn up with these sorts of things, and lo', something interesting did in fact turn up.

The IP address (whois) was registered to "Boca Raton Residence Inn", and according to some logs that John graciously donated, this person stumbled upon his blog entry googling for the words "charles carlson jason matheson" (1). Who in Florida would be checking up on that so soon after the news broke?

(1)

12.42.0.8 - - [25/Feb/2009:06:48:51 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 44182 "http://www.google.com/search?q=charles+carlson+jason+matheson&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6"

The logs continued to tell a tale of how this user used John's email contact form to send him an email (2), and then proceeded to post a comment on the fated blog post.

(2)

12.42.0.8 - - [25/Feb/2009:06:53:06 -0800] "POST /contact HTTP/1.1" 200 126 "http://blog.johnschrom.com/contact" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6"

12.42.0.8 - - [25/Feb/2009:06:58:13 -0800] "POST /wp-comments-post.php HTTP/1.1" 302 - "http://blog.johnschrom.com/archives/1362" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011912 Firefox/3.0.6"

As it would have it, Charles Carlson sent John an email via John's contact form that morning, criticizing John for posting allegedly baseless accusations. Content of the form email aside, the case for what happened here is clear, and unless Charles had a travel companion who immediately posted a comment 5 minutes later from the same computer and browser session, Charles is the anonymous commenter.

If someone emailing John from a contact form (it gives you the option to specify any reply-to address) and then posting a comment isn't enough evidence for you, it seems to be widely known that Charles missed a political forum this weekend in lieu of officiating a tennis match in Florida. His recent tweets about Florida sun and a dinner in Fort Lauderdale certainly tie in with this.

There are services for anonymizing your internet traffic however, and a simple Google search will turn those up.

Update: Charles has since dropped out of the race for city council; but this anonymous comment snafu just shows the quality of his character and why it's good he's not running anymore. I hope the tennis officialdom works out for him and is a better fit to his skills.