Raise the Hammer

Can we call the Organization 'Raise The Hammer'?

I would be 100% involved; aslong as I'm not the Lone Protestor :s

I'm not sure what would be involved as I've never done something like that before but I may be up for it...

I'm not sure I have the knowledge then. I stopped programming a looong time ago lol. I will definitely try it out though and I can work with features and how it should work etc...

I have no technical skills, but I have pretty good blabbing skills. I will help out whatever way I can, but am already spearheading a neighbourhood initiative so I can't really manage a leadership role. Happy to be a worker bee, though.

being the tech illiterate that I am, I just opened that website, clicked on something, had no clue what it meant and closed it.

What the heck is that? And what are we supposed to do with it? And how, if at all, is that going to help us organize more than ripping through wings at the Plucker??

Ryan

The intent of tomorrow's event is about drinking beer, disagreeing and hearing each other's thoughts/ideas. That's what citizenship is about.

Can you guys hold off on the politics / creating a platform till another night?

I don't even live in Hamilton yet (moving in exactly 1 month) but have had my eyes wide open for a platform of this type.

What exactly is the intended function of this platform? Is the idea that discussion between like-minded individuals will give birth to action?

If so, it sounds like what is needed times infinity in Hamilton right now. I'd like to help as much as I can.

Is this event open to anyone?

I wish I could help but I'm woefully technologically illiterate.

Aside from the platform, which is a wonderful idea, people really need to organize into an effective civic advocacy group (easier said than done, I know).

It has to be realized that there are two basic factions tat matter in this town.

Firstly, there is the status quo faction, which is largely based around property developers and the remnants of the business establishment. These people (including most if not all of the council members, and all of staff members who matter) are content to watch Hamilton die as a city (but not as a tax base). The city as an entity is useful to them because it provides a source of free capital to fund their projects (in whole or in part). The Connaught deal is a case in point on how this faction operates.

Secondly, there are the people who want to see the city realize its obvious potential as a great place to live. They want to rectify the planning and policy mistakes of the past fifty years and return Hamilton to its rightful status as, to quote Trevor Cole, a "contender". There is enormous potential for lobbying pressure and political action here but it hasn't yet been realized.

The bulk of Hamilton's citizenry doesn't give a sh-t (which is true of just about every city, but I think in Hamilton's case citizen apathy is particularly deep and widespread).

It will always be a small group of people battling another small group, trying to take control of the agenda. This isn't about the people battling the elite (although I think a strong argument can be made that the people's best interests are more legitimately represented by the second group I describe above). It's about one agenda trying to trump the other. That other agenda is starting to get a voice, but it needs legs too.

Ryan, two quick thoughts:

1) Organizing that takes place in RTH comments is probably pretty effective, because RTH already has the killer feature that is the hardest to build: a community. RTH has active writers and a broad audience. Audiences are hard to build. There is no technological substitute for that.

2) I think there's a risk of falling prey to NIH syndrome with this idea, something I'm really prone to myself. One of my clients uses a tool called Clearspace (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearspace) that "integrates the functionality of discussion forums, blogs, wikis, IM chat and VOIP under one unified user interface". It is proprietary, but the category of software it belongs to, collaborative software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software), probably has many members that are open-source.

I love web development, and I would love to be involved with something, if I thought that it met a need that is unmet with existing tools, and if it seemed obvious that once something got built it would actually get used. A lot could probably get done in the meantime with a combination of existing tools, like a wiki, a Google group, and a shared Google calendar. If there was a lot of participation and users started to outgrow the tools, it might be time to move to an integrated platform, whether it's one we build ourselves or not.

This is a most excellent idea. I don't have the technical know-how but would love to be able to contribute in whatever way I can.

Let's raise this hammer!

Sounds like a great idea Ryan, and though I won't be able to make it to the Plucker tonight, (Wednesdays would be better for me), I'd be happy to help with the framework. The majority of my programming experience is in C/C++ and Fortran, but if this comic http://xkcd.com/353/ is any indication then Python isn't that hard ;)

Hahaha, I have been told that very same thing by some of my colleagues.

I'm not sure how much free time I'll have since we have a project milestone coming up in a couple months and work is about to get crazy because of it, but let me know what you need done and I can do what I can.

LOL, I'm the same as UR there... C/C++ programming. I haven't even heard of Python

Dont forget...

- self-documenting with docstrings
- significant whitespace (those indents matter!)
- cross platform
- garbage collection
- lambdas
- iterators and generators
- decorators
- closures
- with statement
- yield statement
- import antigravity

I am amazed at those who can grasp computer programming. I had to take basic programming 101 just to get a pass and I just passed.

lol i maek facebook group

lol...executable pseudocode.

I played with it a bit last night and you're right its really easy, like they cherry-picked the best aspects of the other languages to make this one. How does it tie into web development though? Are you writing scripts with it.

Sorry if that's a n00bish question but my work is in realtime simulation, I haven't done anything close to web development since high school, even then that was just a crappy html page.

I thought Python was a snake.

I'll leave the fun stuff up to you guys and then I'll check out the final product. haha