Dan Gillmor

I’ve been a fan of Salon since the day it started, and a paying subscriber as long as the company has offered that option. If you visit Salon often, you already know why.

So I’m delighted to be bringing some of my blogging there, including many of the items I’d normally be posting here. My arrangement with Salon gives them exclusive access for one week to new posts, after which they’ll appear here — as always, under a Creative Commons license from this site.

Here’s my first post.

During the years when I’ve been an employee of large enterprises, as I am now, I’ve tended to make a donation through the United Way’s annual campaign. I’ve always targeted the donation, however, specifying what nonprofit organization I wanted my money to help.

I usually aim it at something the United Way finds politically difficult to help directly, such as Planned Parenthood. My logic: I figured the umbrella group’s other recipients would do okay with the default selection by most folks.

This year, I’m sorry to say, the Valley of the Sun United Way (VSUW) in metropolitan Phoenix refused my directed gift, which I’d attempted to donate through Arizona State University, my employer.

At the end of many conversations, emails and research, VSUW said it wouldn’t pass along the money to the ACLU Foundation of Arizona. The reason? It wasn’t, in the opinion of VSUW, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization providing “health and human services” — the baseline requirement for a targeted donation. Instead, the VSUW told me, based on an employee’s check of the ACLU website, the ACLU is:

more of an advocacy group than a health and human legal aid organization. ACLU’s mission is more about protecting Constitutional rights and more about issues as opposed to serving individual people in need. The work is more driven by the issue or position than the need of the individual.

The VSUW contrasted this with an agency it does consider worthy under their guidelines:

Community Legal Services of Arizona, also known as The William E. Morris Institute for Justice qualifies as a “health and human service” agency.

The William E. Morris Institute for Justice is a private non-profit agency established in 1996 to provide services to the legal services community, to other community-based agency advocates, and to select low-income clients in Arizona. In 1997, the Institute added an attorney who provides Legal-Services-Corporation precluded legal representation to low-income clients on a variety of issues. The Institute conducts research, advocacy and training activities to enhance legal services provided to low-income households in Arizona.

If they’re right about Community Legal Services — definitely a worthy organization — they’re mistaken about the ACLU. I went beyond website PR and looked at the ACLU-Arizona IRS reporting forms, which to be fair I had to ask for from the organization.

The advocacy part of the ACLU operation is in the 501(c)(4) arm. The 501(c)(3) report clearly shows that the organization provides human services though legal representation and public education. I told this to the United Way and sent along the forms.

The United Way’s response: No again. They didn’t address the specifics beyond insisting that the ACLU did not, under their rules, qualify. (I probably hurt my case by asking if this was a political question more than anything else, given Arizona’s right-wing leanings. They furiously denied this had anything to do with it.)

So I’ve withdrawn my donation, which was a generous one, giving instead directly to the ACLU and (as I’ve already done) to one of the organizations the United Way does approve of. At this point, however, I’m not inclined to do anything with the United Way, or at least this branch of it.

Postscript: By the way, the Arizona ACLU was basically useless during this process. The organization made no attempt to intervene, as far as I can tell, with either the university or United Way. And afterward, when I suggested the ACLU work with ASU and UW to fix this problem so it could become a designated beneficiary for gifts, the response was essentially, “Hmmm, interesting idea.” I’ve seen no sign whatever that anyone bothered to pursue this. Who loses? The people who need the ACLU’s services the most. I hope the AZ ACLU’s legal services aren’t as dysfunctional as the fundraising.

It’s disheartening to see so many people refusing to get a flu shot this year, and just astonishing that people are resisting the H1N1 vaccine. Journalists have done the public no favors by giving paranoia the same level of authority that it gives the top medical and public-health professionals.

The evidence is crystal clear that any potential risk from the vaccine is vanishingly small compared to the risks of not getting it.

Which is why I got my seasonal flu shot already, and will get an H1N1 vaccine when it’s available, because it’s selfish not to do so. This is not just about me: It’s about the people I might expose if I get the flu.

The Japanese Shinkansen “bullet train” runs at high speeds, but only when you see it up close do you realize how fast. This 16-car express train takes only a few seconds to whip through the Shin-Hanamaki station on its way from Tokyo to Hachinohe in northern Honshu island.

UPDATED

In explaining why Arizona State University (my employer) won’t award President Obama an honorary degree when he speaks at next month’s commencement, a university spokeswoman told the Associated Press:

“It’s our practice to recognize an individual for his body of work, somebody who’s been in their position for a long time… His body of work is yet to come. That’s why we’re not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency.”

That is one of the more incredible — as in not credible — statements I’ve ever seen from a PR person. Period.

There’s surely more to this story than publicly known — even if it’s simply a matter of a cascading screw-up, which is entirely possible, as opposed to a more political situation. Some reporting by news organizations would be helpful.

Whatever led the university leaders to make this decision, they should realize that they’ve embarrassed themselves and their institution.

UPDATE: Looks like the university is reconsidering. Glad to hear it.

LATEST UPDATE: The school apologized, and is renaming a scholarship program after Obama, but is holding to the no-degree stance. Sigh.

Combining mobility, time and location is becoming one of the most valuable techniques of media creation. Last week, some students and I did a small experiment that demonstrates how easy this is to do, and suggests all kinds of possibilities for journalistic follow-ups.

This Flickr map has more than 120 photos, taken by me and some Arizona State University journalism students, at last week’s Phoenix “First Friday Art Walk” — a monthly, self-guided tour of a downtown-Phoenix district that contains a number of galleries and craft-oriented shops.

Putting this together was absurdly simple: We combined the capabilities of the Google/T-Mobile G1 smart-phones and services provided by the photo-sharing site Flickr. (Note: Google provided us with the phones and its carrier partner, T-Mobile, gave us airtime.)

The G1s are the first in a line of what Google hopes will be lots of devices using the Android operating system, which is considerably more open than Apple’s iPhone and has, in my view, roughly equal potential. The G1s contain, among many other capabilities, digital cameras and GPS (global satellite positioning radios that tell location within a few meters).

Each of us shot a dozen or so pictures at various places along the Art Walk streets. After snapping each picture, we sent it by email to a special address at Flickr, using the name of the gallery or other location as the subject line and adding some body text to describe what we were looking at.

Embedded in the JPEG photo files created by the G1s is a critically valuable bunch of zeroes and ones: the location as determined by the GPS. Flickr reads that location data as it imports the picture files, and then places the images autormatically on a map.

In other words, the map was being created in real time, as we walked the streets and snapped the photos.

Now, this is not a new idea by any means. And we could have done a much better display of the pictures with a bit more time; Flickr’s mapping display to the general public is very crude compared with what it could do (the image above, much better than the one you’ll see if you click this public link, is available to the account holder of the map, but not to other people) Moreover, sending pictures via email was a crude way to handle the images; there are applications for the iPhone and Nokia’s GPS-equipped phones that upload to Flickr much more efficiently than anything written so far for the G1.

Still, it was trivially simple to set this up and make it work, using tools that already exist and are, for the most part, easy to use. We’ll be doing much more with the G1s over time (including, I hope, creating applications that more fully explore the devices’ potential).

The point is that some events take place over time and space, and are made to order for this kind of treatment. Journalists are actually quite late to the party. Flickr and other sites are displaying crowd-sourced such events via user-created tags.

We’re planning to open up this page to others in the Phoenix community, so that over time people create a rich photo set of First Friday. We’ll help people sort by dates, not just location, so that we can see how the monthly event changes over time, too.

We are planning a series of other experiments with these phones (and others), and would be grateful for ideas on how we might take best advantage of these incredible devices. Our goal is simple: testing ideas that will help create valuable community information resources and services.

My amazing Dopplr colleagues have sent me my “personal annual report” on my travels last year. Yike.

For reference, here’s the report they created for Barack Obama (no, he’s not a member of Dopplr; it’s a demonstration of the idea), with an explanation of the process.

I don’t plan to click through to that one…
But to the rest of you: Happy Thanksgiving, our finest holiday.

I’ll be in Cambridge December 10th and December 11th for a Berkman Center conference about the 2008 elections and technology…