Double take: Hakeem Jeffries

Wait a second.  Something about this isn’t right.

This is how Assemblymember Hakeem Jeffries explains his “Summer at the Subways” office hours:

Since not everyone has the time to visit the office during the day, I will bring my office to a location where many community members find themselves at some point when returning home from work: The subway.”

Isn’t there some kind of contradiction between this tacit admission that most of his constituents are rail commuters and his strong stance against congestion pricing?

My read on this is that Jeffries is caught in a political trap.  He appears to genuinely want to support his constituents and do right by them, but likely had to cave under party pressure on the congestion pricing issue in order to maintain any influence in the legislature.

Others will not be so charitable.

Pimp moves, local politics edition

Yesterday morning I was stopped at the entrance to the subway by my Assemblyman, Hakeem Jeffries, who handed me a card explaining that he would be holding office hours each evening inside subway stations in his jurisdiction.  I am impresed.

I’ve heard some complaints about his politics.  But there is no denying that this is a pimp move.

The New York Times has more coverage.

Why not OpenLayers?

Last week I attended the OpenLayers sprint hosted by MetaCarta in Cambridge, Massachussetts. It is likely that you’ve never heard of OpenLayers. Here’s how the website describes it:

OpenLayers is a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data in most modern web browsers, with no server-side dependencies. OpenLayers implements a (still-developing) JavaScript API for building rich web-based geographic applications, similar to the Google Maps and MSN Virtual Earth APIs, with one important difference — OpenLayers is Free Software, developed for and by the Open Source software community.

OpenLayers is a flexible, powerful library that can read, display, and write geospatial data (or “maps,” as they call them on the streets) in a number of formats. You can load it to a web page in a compressed, single file version, or look at the whole, unobfuscated library and tweak things to your liking.

What’s strange, then, is why in a world where for web development “mashup” has become synonymous with a Google Maps application, OpenLayers–which has in many cases identical functionality–has so few users. Even at The Open Planning Project, where several of us work on OpenLayers development, most of my colleagues turn to Google Maps for their web mapping needs instead.

While at the sprint, I had several of fruitful conversations with the other developers about why this is the case. Here are the explanations that those conversations brought up.

• Data. The single best reason to use GoogleMaps instead of OpenLayers is that GoogleMaps gives you access to their now ubiquitous base layer bundled with their JavaScript for controlling the map. If an OpenLayers user wants to use that base layer, they need to import the JavaScript that implements their API along with the map. The OpenLayers library then becomes redundant–it’s just an extra 100 KB of Javascript on the page, when the user could just use the Google code instead.
• Documentation.  The other big advantage GoogleMaps has are its beautiful tutorials. Basically all OpenLayers has going for it in terms of docs are the somewhat inscrutable natural docs and a suite of examples. The documentation is designed for OpenLayers developers, not as a way of making OpenLayers easy for users. That naturally scares a lot of people..
• Design. The default UI for the various OpenLayers controls suffer from indifference to design. Neither prettified nor minimalist, the best word I can think of for it is “literal.” In principle, web applications that use OpenLayers can easily re-theme their maps. EveryBlock does some nice work along these lines. But in practice, redesigning OpenLayers is actually labor intensive when you include how long it takes to figure out how to do it. The Community Almanac project we’ve been developing at OpenGeo, for example, still uses the default zoom control, even though the rest of the site has had some wonderful design work done for it. OpenLayers could be made much more appealing right out of the box.

What do these three things have in common? They are outside the realm of the normal activity of its development community, which is made up primarily of engineers from places like TOPP, MetaCarta, and Camp-to-Camp. Data, documentation, and design are not our forte. Many would argue that accumulating, styling, and hosting free data is completely out of OpenLayers’ scope. But nevertheless, these issues are exactly what’s holding OpenLayers back from being a widely used tool across the web. Its ultimate success depends on the community’s finding a way to overcome them.

Public vs. grassroots campaign financing (part 3)

Earlier, I argued that grassroots campaign funding doesn’t really make campaigns more democratic. Public campaign financing is better, but only if it is designed to actually level the playing field. The U.S. federal campaign finance system is not well-designed for this.

One of the often cited problems with public campaign finance in the United States is its susceptibility to ‘loopholes.’ While most campaign finance systems will attempt to impose some constraints on private contributions, it appears that the politically motivated always find a way around the restrictions. 527 organizations are the most notable examples of this, but there are others. For example, a thorough study of the donors to local campaigns will reveal that in many cases all the employees of a particular company will individually make donations to one candidate up to the local limits. If it is possible for the leadership of the company to pressure employees to contribute in this way, then company has effectively gotten around the legal restrictions its own ability to donate as a company.

The typical response to this sort of news is the http://digifesto.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=57&message=4call for stronger restrictions and better enforcement of them. But this generates a backlash. Many argue that we have a right to make private campaign contributions, a right derived from our right to free speech. Whether or not this moral argument is correct, it has been enforced by the Supreme Court in Randall v. Sorrell. In addition, many see private ‘grassroots’ campaign contributions as a revitalization of political participation.

So removing the influence of money from politics completely appears hopeless. Thankfully, one fact means that despite ‘loopholes’, public campaign financing still can mitigate the problem of unequal representation based on wealth.

That fact is the diminishing returns of campaign funding. A candidate with a $15,000 budget has an enormous advantage over a candidate with a $5,000 budget. But if candidates’ budgets are $30,000 and $20,000, then the advantage is much smaller even though the dollar difference is the same. At some point the campaign message saturates its audience. Empirical research into the effects of campaign finance consistently report that the effect on elections of differences in funding between major candidates is surprisingly small

What public campaign financing can have a big effect on, though, is who gets to be a major candidate in the first place. Third party candidates don’t get a break in our system. And in states where the major party PAC’s have a lot of funding and power, representatives from low income districts can be held hostage to the interests of their state PAC without whose support they would not be able to run for office. A strong and fair system of public campaign financing solves these problems.

So ultimately, grassroots funding and public campaign financing are compatible–we can have a system that allows for both. But public financing is absolutely necessary to reduce the effects of money on politics, even if it can’t eliminate them entirely.