Communication and Change
I’ll be arguing the position “Obama: Advancing Civil Liberties in the Face of Difficult Constraints” at the ACLU Santa Cruz chapter’s annual meeting Wednesday, Nov 18, 2009, starting at 7:00 pm.
From the ACLU: “Each speaker will have opportunities to stake out their positions, to rebut their opponent’s statements, and to offer a final conclusion. Following the debate, the floor will be opened for questions and comments from the audience.”
I’ll be giving a free seminar on Understanding Social Media at the Monterey County Democrats’ Center For Change in Monterey Tuesday, Nov 17, 2009 from 6 to 8 pm.
This is part of our Training For Change series for Monterey County Democrats volunteers.
Cross-posted at O’Reilly Broadcast.
The Drupal Content Management System keeps getting better and better. But the learning curve is still steep and the interface is still tricky – even after working with it for several years, some gotchas keep tripping me up. That tells me it’s worth jotting them down, hopefully to spare a few other Drupallers falling into the traps I’ve fallen into enough times for all of us.
This time: Mysterious problems logging in or accessing content.
These are fairly common and can have a variety of causes. The ones I’ve found most often:
1. You just need to clear your browser’s cache (I believe Drupal’s cache management has improved, so that this is less common in recent versions).
2. You haven’t given a particular user role permission to access a particular content type. Go to [yoursiteurl]/admin/user/permissions and make sure the appropriate boxes are checked (replace [yoursiteurl] with your actual site url, of course). Note that you need to do this every time you create a new content type (as when using CCK, the Content Construction Kit), or even when you are only adding a new field to a content type. Also note that giving a permission to Anonymous users does not mean that Authorized users inherit that permission. You have to check the box for each.
3. The SQL database has a problem. This can cause access or login problems even for the super admin user (user 1). Bearing in mind that you should back up your database before doing anything to it, you can try these fixes:
The Sessions table seems to be prone to problems. I recently came across this idea at Stanford Tech Commons for keeping it healthier. It sounds useful, but I don’t know enough about database innards to judge its reliability. Comments?
Lawmakers’ Internet-based town hall meetings increase constituents’ approval ratings for the politician, enhance citizen engagement in politics and ultimately impact the probability of participants voting for that member of Congress, according to a new Congressional Management Foundation report. CMF Executive Director Beverley Bell said online meetings offer lawmakers a flexible tool for communication in addition to traditional in-person meetings, tele-town halls and newsletters. “People like hearing from – and feeling heard by – their representatives in all formats, including online,” she said Monday.
Researchers from CMF, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Northeastern University, Ohio State University, and the University of California-Riverside found that members who engaged in online town halls experienced an average net approval rating jump of 18 points with similar increases in trust and perceptions of personal qualities. Town hall meetings also attract people from demographics not traditionally engaged in politics as well as those frustrated with the political system. About 96 percent of those polled said they would like to be included in similar events in the future.
Among those taking part in the study were Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and Reps. Earl Blumenauer, Michael Capuano, James Clyburn, Mike Conaway, Anna Eshoo, Jack Kingston, Zoe Lofgren, Don Manzullo, Jim Matheson, David Price, George Radanovich, and Dave Weldon. The town halls with the House members were conducted in the summer and fall of 2006, prior to the 2006 election, and the session with Levin was conducted in the summer of 2008.
Read the full CMF report. (PDF)
From Personal Democracy Forum: http://personaldemocracy.com/node/15131
WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago.
The great Drupal switch came about after the Obama new media team, with a few months of executive branch service (and tweaking of WhiteHouse.gov) under their belts, decided they needed a more malleable development environment for the White House web presence. They wanted to be able to more quickly, easily, and gracefully build out their vision of interactive government. General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), the Virginia-based government contractor who had executed the Bush-era White House CMS contract, was tasked by the Obama Administration with finding a more flexible alternative. The ideal new platform would be one where dynamic features like question-and-answer forums, live video streaming, and collaborative tools could work more fluidly together with the site’s infrastructure. The solution, says the White House, turned out to be Drupal. That’s something of a victory for the Drupal (not to mention open-source) community.