Lane Involvement - using the Salons will help

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The note below was sent to me from a local Eugene woman who is concerned about Y2k and wants to do something locally. I follow her note with my response about the importance of acting locally, using the Salons, the Net, and the existing community structure. Having to write this again (I've reiterated it often in the last 12 months) reminds me that even though we may look like a lot is being done in our area, there's still a long way to go.

Our city and our county have yet to formulate real outreach to the community, beyond the initiative of sole members of council and commission like Commissioner Sorenson, whose public forums are bringing in more and more attendence.

The post below is common, and will become more so. "Surely there's a local task force," people say.

No, there's no local task force. If you think it through, a local citizen driven task force can make good progress initially, but then they will come up against the walls that are inevitable in a problem as inscrutable as random or planned computer system obsolesence.

Sooner or later, the citizens' task force will meet those at critical nodes of infrastructure power who do not want to change. If the task force has not navigated the community waters skillfully, they will most likely have alienated key people who will be intractable at some point - polarized into naysaying or minimizing for one reason or another, and not having the courage or the grace to admit it. The net effect will still be less work done.

Democratic citizen processes are not well known for an adroit and polite navigation of community waters. In fact, they're downright messy at times.

So, you will not see me, personally, advocating for the creation of a Citizen's Y2k Task Force that is not coordinated within the auspices of the elected community of city, county and appointed civil servants, for the following simple reasons:

1) We have too many people to coordinate
2) We can only co-coordinate massively and formally on the grounds of extreme potential emergency in which personal politics (not rights! politics!) may need to be temporarily suspended
3) We have too little time and must address the most potential extremes first.

On the other hand, I believe that the polite and respectful treatment of one another begins at home, and in our immediate neighborhood groupings, councils and relations. It is somewhat easy to do in peace time. It takes a supreme effort to do this when under stress. Always, without fail, I find myself to be confined to the mode of "practice". Mostly, of course, because of how easy it is to fail.

Cynthia

*********

From:

Hi there-

I found your email address in a y2k article and asked for info, to which you replied, but I have a more specific question for you. Are there any groups that physically meet and have made plans for a cohesive support group at the advent of y2k in Eugene or nearby? I am very interested in knowing whether there are neighbors to share the burden of preparations with and whether there is an outlet for an offer of services I could give.

Thank you

Hi;

Thanks for your note. I'm going to give you a few questions/homework bits here. Did you call:

your Lane County Commissioner and
your Mayor and
your City Councillor and
your public safety/neighborhood watch coordinator and
your Neighborhood leader (if you're in Eugene)

and

will you register at the LCC Community College class

and

could you share all the information you learn in the Millennium Salons forum, under threads labelled "Eugene" (in the "Preparation: Community" catergory listed on the lower part of the main screen, if not in plain sight on the top list)?

and

would you join the Alert2000 or the Y2kforum listservs and introduce yourself and participate with and educate the other Eugeneians you might find?

When you call your officials, and they tell you what to do, will you express your opinion about that? Can you request action immediately, and get on a mailing list and can you be ready to devote 10 hours a week minimum to this from here on out?

An isolated approach to y2k in a community our size doesn't make *any* sense. If you think the challenge is something to prepare for because it may pose problems for your family and your neighbors, it *has* to go through normal channels that most of us can use. We can't prepare "as a community" if we're not behaving as a community, and that means using elected officials, paid public staff, mandated civic processes, and the rest of it.

If you don't have the interest in shaping those channels and you think the problem is serious enough to significantly and openly prepare for, you may not want to remain in the area. You are only as prepared as your neighbors, and your neighbors include all the residents around you, and not just your block (although that's one of the key components to awareness).

Otherwise, my suggestion is to simply meet and talk with your friends and family and immediate neighbors, and you know those people better than I. If you want to "reach out to the City" and appeal to folks of like mind you've never met, and you're trying to talk about a potential emergency, I can't see any way around the normal civic process that would bear much real fruit. The deadline is too short, and the potential you're trying to address is too critical to expect a handful of un-elected folk to do a better job. Of course, in the end that's what we may end up with - but it shouldn't be for lack of trying to get our responsible people to act responsibly.

We're not elected. We're not hired by our collective community to work for them, on their behalf. At this point, we're mostly just a few quirky citizens with opinions, easily marginalized. Unless we use the normal channels to explore whether or not this is an issue of interest to our community, we won't reach people on the scale we need to until it's too late.

I have yet to meet a citizen who thinks it's a bad idea to know which people in a neighborhood will be most hurt by a power outage or the combined glitches of administrative failures (I really *like* the government's warning to people on aid to prepare for delays in checks or services...), but most of our officials are still doing very little to promote the awareness needed to simply handle a tiny glitch - imagine what we'd really need to do in Eugene if we needed to handle just a week of power and government outage. At this point, the early predictions of a lot of last minute scrambling next year at this time seem inevitable - if anything, we should all be planning how to do absolutely nothing else but deal with everyone else dealing madly with getting ready.

I know your question seems simple, but you didn't give me ANY information about yourself, and I'm handcrafting an answer that may or may not be relevant to you, but it's the best I can do and probably the last time I can do it for awhile (which is why it's here and why I'm posting it in the Salons). To be really helpful to you I would have to list everything I know about Eugene's y2k work - over a hundred people - in the hopes that one of those channels would work for you. As it is, I send out the automatic response because I am very serious - I do not have the time to share the exact specifics in a one-on-one, and have developed channels in all the above in order to use my time more efficiently.

The answers you want are complicated. I get many requests for information, and have asked everyone to participate in the ways I suggest. There are hundreds of little cells forming all over the county. Many are organic, growing out of church, neighborhood, and personal interest groups, and stimulated by attending the LCC class. Nothing is coordinated. Until you do all the things above, they won't be coordinated. Until they are coordinated, all you will do is re-invent the wheel 300,000 times in the next year.

Until we start talking to *all* the folks I listed above, for the reasons in all the posts I've made to the Salons and mostly the listservs (archived, and you'll have to order them and cull through them and it will be about 100 hours of work, and will only be a fraction of what the rest of us have done) and start sharing what we find with our research, and go through central channels we are not going to do anything but create a muddle.

And, just so you know, I've had very little actual supportive response through the levels above (Pete Sorenson and Bobby Lee have been great...), and it's precisely because I've been told I'm one of the only people who's openly concerned (I know this isn't true, but this is what I'm told). In October 1998, Bobby Lee told me I was the only Eugene citizen who had *ever* called him about this. Everyone who's concerned and hasn't contacted everyone elected they can think of is *not* yet helping with solution development. So, until you're spending a lot of time banging on the doors, nothing's going to get visibly done.

The magnitude of this problem mandates a coordinated government-level civic action. It makes no sense to plan for this sort of disruption without the aegis of our county communication system. We need people who can see that they need to do this work for themselves. I tried to make that clear in my posts, and am sorry I didn't make it clear for you.

There are dozens of neighborhood watch organizations, neighborhood groups, classes, workshops, seminars, forums, etc. It will take a significant amount of your time to participate appropriately. Consequently, I have limited my methodology of involvement to a very narrow spectrum - the Salons, the Listserv, the LCC class, my store's business, my personal neighborhood watch meeting, and a very few other meetings.

I apologize that I wasn't clear enough in my Salons post or my letter about my thoughts on what is useful to do.

Good luck.

Cynthia



-- cynthia (cabeal@efn.org), December 27, 1998


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