Freesteel

More time wikipedia-ing UN information. I dipped into a recent Security Council transcripts where there is a satisfying whinge from the ambassador of Costa Rica about just what a stitch-up these resolutions are among the “Group of Friends” (their code name for the Permanent Five):

It is especially difficult for Costa Rica to understand the opposition to including a reference to the human rights component in the text of the draft resolution. During the negotiation process, we proposed two options for incorporating such a reference. Today, to our surprise, the representative of the Russian Federation threatened to exercise a technical veto of any reference to human rights, despite the fact that the issue of human rights is the object of mutual accusations made by both parties, that it has been raised in consultations by various delegations, and that several references are made to it in the reports of the Secretary-General. In his most recent report, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon himself refers to the United Nations duty to uphold human rights standards in all its operations, including in Western Sahara, and to the need to coordinate action in that sphere.

Costa Rica cannot understand the reasons that have been put forward for rejecting a specific reference to the framework of international law when we are calling on the parties to assume a realistic position in the negotiations, nor do we understand the fact that the Group of Friends should sideline the members of the Security Council in the preparation of the texts of draft resolutions and in the building of consensus. In this case, just a week ago the Group of Friends provided us with the text on which we are about to vote and in which my delegation continued to insist that some of its amendments be included.

I did far too much digging back and this incident boiled down to one line in the Wikipedia MINURSO page. The problem is that all the resolutions relating to the UN intervention in Western Sahara appear to tilt towards the Moroccan government, and are cleansed of all references to human rights, which means that the UN is blocked from doing anything about it. So to the outside world they look incompetant, when they are merely working in a framework set out by the major five nuclear armed states (the Permanent Five). I’d like the citizens of those countries to know that.

Also, all the code has been moved to be under the GNU Affero General Public License, due to the recognition that the General Public License is practically obsolete in relation to server side software which you can interact with on someone else’s computer through the all-pervasive internet, yet not have any access to the source code of because you never touch the compiled code.

Also, the General Assembly is finally publishing some post-December transcripts. I hadn’t noticed because the parser ran cleanly without an error.

Uh-oh. An article in the Guardian showed up today with my name in it.

[Update: The words I misattributed to myself in the article were by Stefan Megdalinski (note spelling). The UN does in fact televize itself, because this is easy to do, but it's like CCTV footage -- needs editing for highlights. Contributions are needed specifically to redo the website (including its features) which I hacked in a hurry. This would give me time and inclination to get back to the parser.]

I completed the “laborious” work of getting the General Assembly meeting 75 and meeting 76 of Session 62 scraped and parsed this morning. Unlike the Security Council reports, which come on-line within hours, the General Assembly transcripts are always months late; these ones represent the afternoon and morning sessions for 17-18 December 2007.

It’s taken an unusual couple of hours to push it through onto the web-page, because I have a very temperamental parser that is able to pick out the most extra-ordinarily obscure and completely invisible problems in this pair of very complicated days involving 34 recorded votes.

Problems included:

Strange characters

For example, the highlight on page 2 of A-62-PV.76 looks like “A/C.2/62/INF/1″, doesn’t it? But go into the third page of the corresponding PDF file and try to copy-and-paste that symbol, and you’ll find it’s not a “C”. In some word-processors it shows up as a slightly different “C”-shaped object, while in others it just gets a “?” or nothing. A unicode detective could track down this blemish about where it has come from. Maybe it’s a symbol available on the Khmer version of Word which, idiotically, inserted itself into a word-completion, and then the symbol was copy-and-pasted from one email to the next by secretaries in an unbroken chain until it wound up in this document. It is almost certain that I am the only person in the world to find it a problem, because everywhere else this reference is dereferenced it’s done by the human eye.

Now, wouldn’t it be much more convenient if there were hyperlinks within the on-line versions of the documents themselves?

Unexplained misspellings

Right in the middle of this vote, I get “Marwill Islands”. Obviously this is meant to be the “Marshall Islands”. But before you think about how explicable this typo is in relation to the layout on the qwerty keyboard, ask why would these country names be typed in anyway? The whole voting procedure is conducted electronically using buttons and a big board full of lights (see the transcript of a cock-up involving that system from 12 December 1995), so how hard would it be for the system to email an electronic page of the votes all laid out properly in which country names are either never be misspelt, or always misspelt the same way every single time?

Either the procedure in the UN is to retype the entire list of votes for the transcripts — a job which could take days of unnecessary work — or someone has got to explain how mistakes like this can happen?

Indentation problems

It’s important to be strict about where the new paragraph lies because when it says A recorded vote was taken, those are not the final words at the end of the previous person’s speech. It’s a signal to engage the vote parser. In the PDF file you sometimes get an actual line indentation (it starts on pixel 504 rather than 468), or the line starts on pixel 468 and they add 2 spaces to indent it! Looks the same to the eye, but not to the computer.

Voting corrections

Oh, and finally when you have a hard day of voting like this, there are dozens of cock-ups, which manifest as:

[Subsequently, the delegations of Bolivia, Burkina Faso and the Sudan advised the Secretariat that they had intended to vote in favour; the delegation of the United States of America advised the Secretariat that it indented to vote against.]

In spite of dozens of variations of these words, and countries containing several words, (sometimes with an “and” in their name just to ruin the nth version of the software from working), this “advice to the Secretariat” is so common it can’t be done by hand and has needed a special program.

Results

So, what does this mean? Lots of votes means lots of information. What’s happening is that the resolutions discussed in the Special Committees are all coming to the floor of the General Assembly in a stream to receive their general votes.

Session 62 Meeting 75 begins with agreements by consensus on Assistance on mine action, Effects of atomic radiation, and International cooperation in the peaceful uses of outer space — these generally schedule what the United Nations is going to do on these topics (usually conduct more studies and write more reports).

That last one was something about the Registration Convention. Where are all the space law nerds when you need them? I had to start that Wikipedia page myself. Don’t you think it’s cool that every space object will now have its own web page?

The next resolution took a vote to extend the mandate of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Nauru, an island state in the Pacific with probably the least interest in this issue of anywhere in the world outside of Antarctica, voted against. Sometimes you wonder whether these smallest states haven’t outsourced their Ambassadorial services to some random New York lawyer firm.

And so it goes on for another dozen votes, with Pacific island states taking a suspicious interest in the Palestinian question. You can look through that yourself.

The meeting for 18 December 2007 does more refugees and tonnes more resolutions about women, all adopted by consensus.

But as usual, when it comes to Children’s Rights, that’s just a step too far for the United States, and they are the only country in the world to vote against. After all, young people are there to be ripped off and forced into debt before they grow old and wise enough to spot this unmitigated, miserable, cruel, mindless trap we, the older generations, lay form them embodied within the entire financial system, because we know that they come into this world penniless and with a naive sense of justice and fair-play that can be abused starting with their first bank-loan.

However, when it comes to the “Use of mercenaries”, everyone in Europe is against restricting that. (Note, the actual text of that resolution can be found here.)

The objectors to a “Moratorium on the use of the death penalty” have a non-European flavour.

“Periodic and geniune elections” has 13 abstainers on the “fifth preambular paragraph”. I think they mean this one.

And so on with a lot of other divided votes on issues throughout the day. But I ran out of time for this today long ago.

I’ve got a lot of emails from people telling me about this new United Nations Data site. Unfortunately, the same people don’t seem to have actually looked at the site before declaring that it’s interesting and sending the top level link to me.

I’m not saying that the site isn’t interesting (it’s a repackaging of the UN Common Database whose current interface will discontinue in July), but you would think that if anyone had actually found it interesting, they’d have found some statistics in it that were interesting, and sent me a note about that.

Otherwise it’s like a friend passing you a book that they say is interesting, but you can tell they haven’t even opened. In other words, they think you might find it interesting, even though it is not even slightly interesting to them.

Anyway, the undata website itself is much better done than it used to be. The way to get into it (ie surf around on it without getting bored within the first five seconds) is to search for the page on your own country (in my case they united kingdom), and then apply one of the filters on the left.

I chose “Energy”, and then looked at the decline in the UK of all its fossil fuel production since 1996.

Oddly, our production of keyboards has gone up about 2-fold in 10 years, and there’s a very low point in in 1997. Also, you can see which countries are manufacturing revolvers and pistols.

While this is all very interesting, it is, sadly, not easy to go any deeper. What I’d really like are links from each of the statistical references to their precise source. Stats are aggregations, and you really want to be able to drill down into them as far as possible. This requires you to know where they came from.

The industrial commodity production statistics appear to come from a questionnaire sent in by each government. The rest of the statistics come from a list of 15 other sources.

Many of the monetary statistics are quoted in US Dollars, which isn’t so good, given the recent fluctuation in that currency. Maybe there should be an option to normalize the figures into another currency of choice. Would it depend on whether the accounts that are summed were in the first part of the year or the last if there has been a drastic shift in its value?

Aggregate stats are a real problem, and there’s no excuse for it when there’s easily enough room on the database to have it at a much lower level of granularity, for example by month.

The gold standard for this type of data is the US Treasury and their debt to the nearest penny and who holds it webpage.

Got bored yet? Thought so.

Look, I am trying very hard to find things which I both care about and which are also interesting to other people. Most of the time it’s a struggle to find any overlap at all. For example, I don’t care whatsoever about Madeline McCann or Lady Diana, both of whom, if newspaper covers are anything to go by, people find endlessly fascinating.

I do care about the coming space wars — something that has major, lasting consequences to everyone on the planet, yet surprisingly few people seem interested in.

Being sent links to unexplored databases doesn’t seem to help with this quest.

I can see everyone queuing at the movie theatres getting all excited about the next Science Fiction blockbuster at the movies, while their government irresponsibly conducts weapons experiments in orbit and cause Kessler Syndrome to manifest, rendering the use of satellites too prone to loss to be feasible for many generations. Maybe we’ve just gotten bored with our GPS and accurate weather predictions to find it interesting anymore.

I received a message through the emailbag:

…I’m interested in learning more and doing what I can to volunteer at undemocracy.com…

Probably the easiest thing to do is find a wikipedia article that needs some updating with citations to the official documents. For a good simple example, look at UNMIN.

A big project would be to work on AMISOM, because there was a United Nations Security Council Resolution passed that extended its mandate a week ago. (Read the meeting.)

Less challenging projects can be found under Category:United Nations observances to bring them all up to the standard of International Year of the Potato, by locating the meetings and General Assembly Resolutions that authorized them.

Those are just two ideas off the top of my head. It depends on what sort of UN activities are you interested in. I’ve designed it so that Wikipedia is the natural way to index the documents, and that’s where I expect there will eventually be a complete timeline of its interventions and of the documents that support them. This is always going to be better than a search engine for leading people (eg journalists) directly to the sources.

Please post any questions about the useability as you go along to the comments in this blog post. Nothing is too stupid or trivial — especially if it helps lead to some necessary clarification.

I hope you are enjoying your little conference in San Diego.

Does anyone else think it’s crazy that a pre-eminent internet/tech gathering has no means of distant on-line participation? Instead, everyone is encouraged to fly their heavy meat bodies halfway round the world to take part.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Maybe when it eventually becomes easier to arrange high quality video conference calls with people at a distance than it is to take hours out of your life flying over to them, we’ll be moving on the right direction.

More specifically, I’d like to talk to people about www.undemocracy.com, because I have quite a lot to say, and some actual software to distribute to enough people so that it makes a difference. Believe it or not, the technology for enabling this has already emerged, so to speak, if it wasn’t for the fact that everyone was too busy flying all over the world going to these conferences all the time.

Here is the 5 minute lightning talk I was able to give at the Chaos Computer Congress (24C3) in Berlin last December. Because it’s too blurry, the slides are available here. (I happened to be in Germany for the month while my partner printed a load of 3D objects to use for her haptic psychology experiments. That’s where I saw a two-way conveyor belt under construction, and completely failed to take a photograph of it.)

I can be contacted at julian@goatchurch.org.uk, or through the Skype-id: goatchurch. Please do so if you have any questions. My mailbox is not exactly overwhelmed by messages about this work.

Postscript notes: The 24C3 Day 2 Lightning talks session was the only one that didn’t make it into the official archive. The only copy of the ASF video stream anywhere on the internet appeared in this directory. With the power of VLC and a MacBook, and four hours trying to work out how it was done, this blurry result was eventually obtained.

Have refrained from doing Wikipedia and UN for a while. Last night I accidentally got onto it and have just lost several hours.

I was pleased to find something which sorts out the rather stringent and obviously counter-productive all rights reserved copyright issue regarding the United Nations documents. It was found in Template:PD-UN, which refers to Administrative Instruction ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2 on wikisource.

I immediately scraped it into ST-AI-189-Add.9-Rev.2 on undemocracy so you can see it in its full shambolic reproduction.

I don’t know what geniuses found out about it or transcribed it. Actually I do; they are credited in the history page in wikisource, although it doesn’t explain it.

JesseW wrote the comment: “(clarify status of this instruction — /Add.2 extended it without a expiration date, and I just checked that it’s in force in the most recent (2007) index.)”

So I scraped ST-AI-189-Add.9-Rev.2-Add.2 into undemocracy.

Now you wouldn’t have thought that a recursively extended and obscurely labeled document would be of any importance a few years on, but this one is, because back in 1985 the Revision 2 of Addendum 9 on the 189th Administrative Instruction by the Secretariat said:

The present instruction revises, on an experimental basis until the end of 1989, the Organization’s policy towards copyrighting as set forth in administrative instruction ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.1 of 26 March 1985.

1/ That policy was, in essence, not to seek copyright with the intention of thus facilitating dissemination as widely as possible of the ideas in United Nations publications. However, numerous exceptions to that policy were made over the years as it became clear that there was a need to retain control over certain United Nations materials to ensure that they were used in the best interests of the Organization, or to protect the revenues that might accrue from sales publications and that would be adversely affected by unauthorized, competitive commercial publication.

2. The following categories of material will, as at present, be left in the public domain, i.e., the United Nations will not seek copyright therefor unless, prior to issue and in exceptional circumstances, the Publications Board decides otherwise, in consultation with the Office of Legal Affairs.

(a) Official Records: a series of printed publications relating to the proceedings of organs or conferences of the United Nations. They include verbatim or summary records, documents or check-lists of documents, issued in the form of annexes to those records, including periodic supplements, such as the quarterly ones of the Security Council; and reports to those organs of their subordinate or affiliated bodies, compilations of resolutions, certain reports of the Secretary-General and other selected publications, which are issued in the form of supplements;

(b) United Nations documents: written material officially issued under a United Nations document symbol, regardless of the form of production, although, in practice, the term is applied mainly to material offset from typescript and issued under a masthead. The term also applies to written material issued simultaneously or sequentially in the form of documents and publications;

(c) Public information material: publications, periodicals, brochures, pamphlets, press releases, flyers, catalogues and other materials designed primarily to inform about United Nations activities. For the purposes of this instruction the term does not include public information that is offered for sale, which may be subject to copyright registration.

There follows a lot of details of the procedures to keep something in copyright if you absolutely have to.

Well, that’s sorted it out at least, up until 1989. However, as JesseW noticed, Addendum 2 of Revision 2 on Addendum 9 etc (known as ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2/Add.2) says:

There is a general consensus that the revised copyright policy has had a positive impact and yielded the desired result of enhancing the control the Organization retains over the use of its intellectual property to ensure that it is used in the best interests of the United Nations and to protect the revenues that might accrue from sales and external publications. However, it is apparent that greater efforts are required by author departments at all duty stations to adhere to and apply uniformly the copyright policy and procedures announced in ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2. It is equally apparent that issues pertaining to the copyright of designs originating within the Organization as well as the copyrightability and possible revisions to the guidelines set out in administrative instruction ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2. The purpose of the present instruction is to extend the experimental period until these issues have been resolved in a further revision to that instruction.

I scraped for both ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2/Add.3 and ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.3 and neither exist, so I guess he may be right in that we are still, 20 years later, experiencing the experimental period.

I think that all of life is an experimental period, so it’s good to hear that someone else sees it that way too.

Just before new year I was in Berlin for the Chaos Computer Congress. The video-casts of that event are finally coming on-line here, or, if you don’t like that, you can pick from this chaotic list of about a hundred conference recordings, where they don’t tell you which ones work.

I got featured in a podcast by bicyclemark — which I’m not going to listen to because it’s my own voice, which is even more excruciating to me than reading my own writing — that I’m told is not bad. I also showed my undemocracy.com site at a lightning talk, which is not on-line. Maybe I have to trawl through the hundred unofficial recordings to find it.

I did see some very good talks at the 24C3, which I can share with you from the list:

• Open Source Lobbying, tips from the trenches - From one angry e-mail to writing national policy on open source - The campaigners in the Netherlands won the case outstandingly. It’s very important to build up a dossier of irrefutable facts that are easy to digest by politicians. They want to share their materials, which are available here.
• The Arctic Cold War - bicyclemark It’s a 45 minute talk (don’t waste your time with the questions) about all the military hardware being moved into position by Canada, Denmark, Russia, etc, and the shenanigans over each country attempting to claim the polar sea according to the shape of the continental shelf, and this business about planting flags by submarine. To get the spirit, check out this long wikipedia article about a rock between Greenland and Canada.
• It was a bad idea anyway - The demise of electronic voting in The Netherlands The performance is just as bad as in America, but without the gratuitous complicity of the government using it for political power. It’s a catalogue of jokes. The speaker said: “You can laugh now, but your government (Germany) is bringing the same companies here.”
• What is terrorism? - And who is terrorising whom? - A talk by blogger whose husband has been picked up by the German terrorism police and is being subject to a state of unreasonable intelligence surveillance. This too was a complete joke, except for being real.

Those are the main ones that spring to mind. I might trawl through and list some other that were good, and watch the talks I didn’t mean to miss. Maybe I can go through the videos of the conference next year and not need to go. Howzat for using the internet to reduce travel, rather than as a tool to find yet more travel opportunities you would not otherwise know about.

What we need is to hold a post-ghost conference where you get a bunch of friends for two days and watch all the videos hourly on separate screens according to a strict timetable and discuss what you’re seen while having a beer in between sessions. You sometimes watch the same thing, or different things.

The groups who do the ghost conference before you can thin out the crap so when it’s your turn you get all the best bits only, and all the talks are outstanding. You could arrange to have the speakers on-line at some point during the day through their Skype connections and take questions.

I want to see people arranging conferences as a visual unit. Maybe the talks of the past three chaos conferences could make one kick-ass day long sessions all perfectly programmed on a timetable because you know what they are like now they are recorded on disk. Then we hold it, much like those Star Trek festivals where it’s every episode back-to-back over 40 hours. Same deal, but with conference material. If it’s worth travelling to, it’s worth doing this.

Our out-of-his-depth Prime Minister, Gordon Brown has hit the news with his support for permanent membership of India on the United Nations Security Council:

Britain is pressing for the Security Council’s five permament members to be increased to include India, Japan, Germany and Brazil, plus an African country. Diplomats refused to say which, for fear of offending the chief contenders: South Africa and Nigeria, both regional powers, and Egypt, which is backed by Arab states. One possibility is a permanent African seat rotating between three or more countries.

Under Mr Brown’s plans, the new members would not initially win veto powers similar to the existing five – the United States, China, Russia, Britain and France. Instead, places on the Security Council would be offered without blocking powers in a first phase, followed by subsequent changes that included veto rights.[1]

The Ambassador from India spoke at length on the subject last November,[2] referring extensively to the book, Surrender is not an Option (Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad), a recently published tome by John Bolton that has had rave reviews from the forces of war.[3]

There are many intelligent things which one can say about the dysfunctional workings of the Security Council, but none were said during those three days of debates.

The first thing to note is that the Security Council is the single body whose resolutions have the force of law regarding war, peace, and international economic sanctions. It is within the treaty obligations of the United Nations that members must respect the Chapter 7 resolutions passed by the Security Council.

Obviously, certain powerful nations with their “manifest destinies” aren’t going to put up with this type of thing, and have negotiated an exception to this rule for themselves. If there is any resolution about to come out of the Security Council which they don’t like, they can strike it out with a unilateral veto. Even if they are in a minority of one, the resolution will not pass, which makes them safe from any ruling. Technically, a nation with this veto power must be on the Council at all times, otherwise the world would merely have to wait until they were rotated off to pass any sanctioning resolutions against them. That is why they are known as “permanent members”.

The veto can also be used to prevent resolutions that “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” by an ally of the permanent member. That’s why Israel doesn’t violate very many Security Council resolutions: the United States vetoes them out of existance. Remember that when the next politician proves that Israel is more peaceful than Iran by counting the number UN resolutions against the respective countries. The judge is demonstrably corrupt. A raw count of the disproportionate attacks on neighbouring states gives a better picture. After all, it’s those which draw blood, not the resolutions in condemnation.

We can be pretty clear that had Iran been a permanent member of the Security Council, no resolutions would ever have been held against them. Iran was an ordinary member of the Security Council in 1955-56. In case you’re wondering what democracy has to do with the Security Council, their CIA backed coup d’état against their elected government was in 1953.[4]

The five permanent members of the Security Council are: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States.

In the meantime, there is another important component of international law known as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which makes it illegal for all nations in the world, except for five, to develop or possess nuclear weapons. These five nations are: China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States.

Clearly, as with United Nations Charter, at least one these five nations doesn’t feel it confers any obligations upon it with regard to disarmament.[5] And another openly flouts the letter of the treaty which in Article III (2), says:

Each State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to provide: (a) source or special fissionable material, or (b) equipment or material especially designed or prepared for the processing, use or production of special fissionable material, to any non-nuclear-weapon State for peaceful purposes, unless the source or special fissionable material shall be subject to the safeguards required by this article.

Those safeguards are embodied by the IAEA and the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

And this is where it all comes full circle. The equivalence between the Security Council permanent members and the nuclear states is not an accident. Only three nations did not sign up to the NPT: India, Israel, and Pakistan. (North Korea withdrew in 2003 during the process of its largely irrelevant political narrative.) Israel, for all purposes, already has the representation of a permanent member. Pakistan built their bomb in response to India and is in record that they would disarm immediately once India does so. Which leaves India as the main front for nuclear proliferation. As a government official once explained

No-first-strike’ policy does not mean India will not have a first-strike capability.

So, what’s the conclusion?

I don’t know. I am not a professional journalist with access to politicians and in a position to bring important questions to the public’s attention, but choses not to. Questions like:

(a) Is Security Council permanent membership simply a nuclear club?
(b) Would India be willing to trade its illegal nuclear weapons for its permament seat, or is the world offering it for free?
(c) Why does the world need the UK on the Security Council at all?

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the Cold War actually happened, with all this continuing military build-up and mass threats of nuclear-death. It seems as if the process doesn’t require an terrifying enemy to stimulate this reaction — our dysfunctional political class seems able to prepare for armageddon all by itself. They’re clearly insane.

On the other hand, one wonders what the hell is going on inside the minds of the engineers who are still devoting their lives to putting these bombs together. Are they doing it only for the money? No way can they believe what they’re doing is helping the world. What do they think they’re doing?

• [1] Gordon Brown supports permanent seat for India on UN Security Council, 21 January 2008, The Times.
• [2] Mr Sen (India), 13 November 2007, United Nations General Assembly.
• [3] Screw The U.N. (before they screw you) blog, 3 January 2008
• [4] 1953 Iranian coup d’état, Wikipedia.
• [5] Brown backs Trident replacement, 21 June 2006, BBC

Well, I’m here in Berlin. I’ve put undemocracy.com back on line for the duration, in case I meet up with anyone. I don’t know if I will, but you never know.

Sometime after the discovery of the International Year of the Potato, there was a late night vote of 1 to 0 with 0 abstentions to put the www.undemocracy.com project on strike, because nobody loves it.

The UN_document wikipedia template has been diverted to the UN Documentation Centre. The front page links to this blog post. And the full output of the parser, which will still continue to run, remains in this directory.

If there is an objective measure of respect for a website, it can be expressed by the number and quality of links that come into it. Aside from the couple hundred structured wikipedia links which I did myself, now harmlessly disabled, the exhaustive list of links to www.undemocracy.com is as follows:

• A large handful from my blog and another blog which I write for
• A spam report page on wikipedia
• A link most of the way down on the Cambridge University Model United Nations Society research page which doesn’t even work
• Two [1] [2] references from blogs about Hack Day in June
• A minor note at the bottom of someone else’s blog post in July
• One minuscule sentence somewhere lost in a blog posting in September
• The page for my scheduled talk at Pycon 2007
• A talk by “net-political troublemaker extraordinaire” Stefan Magdalinski in October where he mentioned the site in detail (I know because I went down to London especially), but where the write-up links to everything else but it
• A link I put in for BarcampUKGovweb under my own name
• er…
• That’s it.

Clearly, in spite of my best efforts (and I’ve left out all the blow-by-blow details), I’ve not got what it takes. And nobody who has what it takes has made themselves available.

This site stays down until further notice, except when I want to look at it, or I want to show it to someone, or I am on my way to barcamp, which I guess is the same thing. I wrote the whole original parser for theyworkforyou.com for no credit, which obviously matured into no social capital of the kind that can be used to influence people. This one is definitely sitting out in an unhappy place.

Feel free to contact me through the comment system on this blog post, or email team@undemocracy.com, which so far has never used.

Messages I do not want to hear include:
(a) “You’re too impatient. You haven’t given this enough time+effort”;
(b) “You’re no good at connecting with people. Try a little more persuading and a little less ranting”;
(c) “You’re being completely unreasonable. You have no right to do this with the work of so many other people.”

Messages I would prefer to hear include:
(a) “It does seem odd and unfair how little has come out of it in six months, even though you have jumped at every opportunity you could think of”;
(b) “You have proven to be far less capable of generating publicity than at programming. I’m pretty good at doing publicity. Maybe there’s stuff I can do which doesn’t involve beginning with a lecture about all the things you’re doing wrong”;
(c) “I can see why you have been driven to go on strike. I thought I was quite interested in the project, but now I realize I have never once put a link to it on my blog or tried to get to know the project better. Frankly, I’m not sure why that is. And if can’t decode exactly why I’ve felt this apathetic, I don’t see why should be able to.”

Anything else remotely productive or encouraging will be gratefully received, although I am primarily looking for tangible offers from people who can convince me they will actually do something. I plan on this lasting at least a couple of months. Maybe a year. Or until I experience a change in mood. But, believe me, if I can get this far on what has basically been zero encouragement, my moods can be pretty stable over long periods.