Confidential Communities Part I

Two years ago last June I wrote a post on one of my sites that stated: Going to work for a non-profit. Will let you know how it turns out. I then dropped off the internet radar for quite some time.

Prior to this moment I had been working with neighborhood residents doing assets based community building (ABCD), code enforcement and clean-ups. I was on the HUD Continuum of Care panel for our county and I was the chair of the HMIS subcommittee. For those of you who don’t know what an HMIS is it’s a Homeless Information Management System. Draconian sounding, isn’t it?

Well, I’ve mentioned naivete before in my approach to life in general. I tend to expect the best as a general rule and am usually shocked at myself for that. It’s a curse, really.

I thought (going by HUD’s philosophy for CoCs) that linking service providers together through an information system that was client-centered would be a great idea for the client (i.e homeless person). Supposedly, using one system meant that the client, inside a Continuum of Care (i.e. County receiving Federal funding to serve the homeless) would be able to do a single intake (i.e. provide unbelievable amounts of identity-theft worthy documentation) with a single provider and thereby be “on record” with all the other providers who would provide additional services (hence the use of the phrase “Continuum of Care.”)

O my God. Enter reality would you please C.L.

First, the funding is so tight, so micro-managed, so non-existent as to make it so the non-profits view each other as fellow vultures, hyenas or wolves feeding off the carcass. It is not a trust for the common good. And this doesn’t even begin to touch on the individual egos involved. But that’s a whole other subject I’ll tap into at a later date.

Secondly, dyslexic HUD (duh), whether part of the grand Republican design or typical myopic big picture lacking refusal to seeness, failed to consult it’s cohort, the Department of Health and Human Services about designing such a Rube Goldberg Orwellian creature such an this. The thought of basic privacy issues (read HIPPA regulations) never clouded the brilliance of their thoughts.

No, instead DUH (ah yeah maybe it was the excuse that they’re all of the “older” generation and they don’t understand computers) laid out a MANDATE that required the collection of numerous data points (99% ultra sensitive i.e Social Security Number, Date of Birth, HIV status, Victim of Domestic Violence) on every homeless individual without any understanding of basic computer security (i.e hackers and hacking, VPN, Thwarte Certificates). Never mind that a serious hard core homeless person prolly ain’t got their social security card on ‘em anyway. But then that’s another subject too.

OK, so this isn’t so bad just yet, right? But wait. They required all this data to be entered into a centralized system so they could achieve their one single aim: An unduplicated count of the homeless in America.

And wait, there’s more. This mandate was handed down at the Continuum level. Each Continuum was to come up with their own system. What do you think happened and how do you think it went? I’ll give you a hint: Domestic Violence Shelters went apeshit.

Everything had to be spelled out for HUD by, you guessed it, non-profits fighting for the rights of their clients. For years, they had to make arguments, on their own dime, in order to protect and help design the ultimate systems that were being developed all across the country by more-than-happy-to-design-yet-one-more-silo, without no stinking XML export option for you, per user, subscription only based, cloud hosted system, keep-your-stinking-open-source-commie-shit away from me software (i pledge alliance to bill gates) developer. Except for one–there is one, up in the Northwest, I believe. But that was a Continuum who trusted their staff to provide for them and didn’t outsource. Nearly everyone that I’m aware of bought whatever they got sold.

It’s as if HUD said “tough, if you want to continue to get funding you have to document every homeless person in a centralized database because we don’t believe there are as many homeless as you say. And to add to that we want this big ole list of information about them–are they veterans, married, HIV positive? Do they have mental illness or a disability? How much money do they earn?” All the typical questions if you ever go crawling to your government for help.

So, okay, that’s all to be expected by big bro. But then to say, figure it out yourself (I hear my readers shouting they provided technical assistance–yeah, they did but for all intents and purposes you can discount it–it never infiltrated the craniums of [most] of the decision makers. At least not in my continuum. Again we are talking about a huge gap in basic computer knowledge, the Federal Government and State and Local governments and non-profits all trying to come together to figure out something that had never been clearly defined in the first place, that stood to make some software developers tons of cash and further crush the necks of struggling non-profits under the weight of more reporting requirements.)

Well, you can tell, after more than two years, this still gets to me. This little rant is only the beginning. A lot of what’s wrong these days shows up right inside this little story. I’ll be talking more. I’m interested to hear what people think, especially if there’s a place to have this dialogue. For me this is what radical transparency would mean. It’s not always about being nice and polite when people’s lives are at stake.

What do I do for a living?

Anything that is interesting.

Primarily, I am a technician.
I enjoy parts and processes.

I’ve spent a big chunk of my life learning about “how things work” —from jet-propelled fighters to computers, non-profits and local government. For most of my life I’ve been curious to know how it all fits together (or doesn’t). As a kid I was constantly taking things apart, looking to see what was inside. To this day, I’ll dismantle anything but can’t promise to put it back together exactly the same way . . .

I’ve worked as an aircraft and hydraulics system mechanic, an office machine repair technician for Xerox, a pizza cook, and as a neighborhood tech support specialist. For a while, during the dotcom boom I had my own web design business. I’ve managed video projects for non-profits, built databases for the fun of imposing order on chaos and spent many hours in classrooms both as a student and as an instructor.

I can install and learn to use ANY piece of software available.

I’ve worked in a stained glass shop. I once spent 6 weeks underground, inside a dam, as an apprentice carpenter. I’ve crawled down the intake of an F-4 and taught college freshman composition.

I have worked from blueprints, drawings, sketches and verbal descriptions to create things of function and beauty.

I’ve worked in a ceramics studio, a hydraulics shop, a dam, a university and a community center. My experience is eclectic and colorful. And I wouldn’t trade it for a pension or a Lamborghini.

I’ve been an algebra tutor, a college English instructor, a stained glass window artist and a factory worker. I curated my own art exhibit at CSU Stanislaus called: From Pulp to Pixel.

I’ve final prepped computers for packaging, repaired broken electronic typewriters, corrected freshman compositions, facilitated discussions, created web graphics, installed Red Hat Linux, PHP and Apache, and I’ve been a crew chief on an RF-4C in Zweibrucken, Germany.

I’ve spent literally years reading. From comic books and Hardy Boys mysteries at 8 to semiotics as a graduate student I’ve read a little of nearly everything. I am constantly looking for information. Once I spent a year researching the field of community building. While in graduate school I read hundreds of books and articles relating to the writing process in anthropological fieldwork practices and the college classroom. The literature covered an area of inquiry that included discussions of methodological practice, the values and uses of narrative and qualitative writing. For a while I thought I might end up a philosopher but I couldn’t find work.

I am interested in how man thought during particular periods in history. I am drawn to the histories of science, anthropology, education and contemporary art through the 1960s. My mind is structured around semiotics, social construction, computer logic, Buddhism, Democratic-Christian ideals and Zen. Ideas enthrall me. Theory compels me. Conceptual thought sustains me. Sometimes I think I live in the question.

I learn through juxtaposition.

I resonate to the theory that man is a product of his environment. I believe that the most interesting issues, problems and challenges confronting us at this time don’t belong to any existing systems or academic discipline but instead live in a “space-between“. This is a subject I plan to elaborate on, in the near future, at another website.

In the meantime I am available to work on projects.

I’m familiar with and have used much of the major desktop software available including Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Pagemaker, Premiere and After Effects; Macromedia’s Dreamweaver and Flash; Linux, Macintosh and Windows operating systems; PHP and MySQL; a multitude of open source web application projects and programs; numerous utilities programs as well as groupware, mail, word processing, spreadsheet and database software such as Word and Excel as well as hundreds of Web 2.0 apps.

If you have something that you think I might find interesting drop me a line at seaelle [at] gmail [dot] com.