The “Strassman for Mayor” Website

 

I ran my campaign by talking to reporters and putting materials—text, audio, and video—up on my website.  The website was built and maintained by Raymond Steding, president of the Linux Public Broadcasting Network (LPBN) (http://www.lpbn.org), where the site was hosted. 

 

The only media outlets that posted the campaign site’s URL were

NetPulse (http://netpulse.politicsonline.com/content.asp?sname=IN+THE+STATES&issue_id=6.18),

Wired.com (http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,55911,00.html),

and Telephony magazine (http://currentissue.telephonyonline.com/ar/telecom_talk_broadband_economy_25/). 

 

The Daily News and the Los Angeles Times, enjoying a duopoly of coverage in the Valley and the City of Los Angeles, refused to include the URL of my campaign site (or that of any other candidate) in any of the many articles about the secession election that they published. 

 

The League of Women Voters/Smart Voter site did include a link to my campaign site on its own site, at http://www.smartvoter.org/2002/11/05/ca/la/vote/strassman_m/.

 

Since most people got most of their information about the campaign from these two papers (the local radio and television “news” stations, private and public, were fastidious in not covering the San Fernando Valley Reorganization Area Mayor’s race), my multimedia website was like the proverbial tree falling in the forest.  With no one knowing where the site was, all the text and audio and video ceased to exist, at least as a source of communications.

 

But I’ll include the URL here, so you can see what most voters missed:

 

http://sfm.lpbn.org

 

I’ll also include a copy of website itself:

 

The Historical Strassman for Mayor Campaign Platform


The Candidate on MSNBC


The Candidate Speaks Out at Adelphia


The Candidate Addresses the Ad Hoc Committee on Redistricting in Van Nuys - 04-23-2002


The Candidate Prepares to Talk to the BBC - Part 1

The Candidate Prepares to Talk to the BBC - Part 2


The Future Candidate Questions California Secretary of State Bill Jones About Digital Certificates 10-26-2000


 

The Candidate's page at the League of Women Voters//Smart Voter website


 

"An E-Mayor for Virtual L.A. City," by Patrick di Justo in Wired News

Real Audio Message by Candidate Strassman

The Last Questionaire - Q and A with Wired News


Video from the Granada Hills "Meet the Mayors" Public Forum


Candidate Strassman Addresses United Chambers of Commerce 08-14-2002


Candidate Strassman Replies to the Progressive Coalition Questionaire, August 29, 2002


Candidate Strassman Replies to the Los Angeles Daily News Questionaire, August 26, 2002

 

 

 

 

 


Joe Shea
www.American-Reporter.com


Marc Strassman
sfm.lpbn.org

An Interview with Joe Shea, Editor-in-Chief - The American Reporter

The Internet's Digital Daily

Talk of the Valley - Episode 2

Charts of the Percentages

 

 

Talk of the Valley
Episode 1
08-23-2002


Rev. Leonard Jackson


Marc Strassman


Mel Wilson

 


Is Valley Secession
good for Los Angeles?

 

 

 


Click on the links below to hear the candidate deliver a briefing to a group of Etopia Consulting clients
from NEC/Nexsolutions at the Marriott Downtown Hotel in
Los Angeles on June 24, 2002.

 

Understanding E-Government Part 1 --------------------------- Understanding E-Government Part 2


Comprehensive, up-to-date, and neutral compendium of everything Valley secession


 

 

 

 

 

 


Here’s how I did:

 

Official Results in San Fernando Valley Reorganization Area

Mayor’s Race

(November 26, 2002)

 

http://rrccmain.co.la.ca.us/0022_LocalContest_Frame.htm

 

LA-SFV AREA REORG - MAYOR

 

Candidate

 

Votes

Percent

KEITH S RICHMAN

 

91,865

52.6

BENITO B BERNAL

 

20,186

11.56

D R HERNANDEZ JR

 

16,139

9.24

LEONARD SHAPIRO

 

15,015

8.6

MEL WILSON

 

12,009

6.88

BRUCE JOHN BOYER

 

4,350

2.49

HENRY DUKE DIVINA

 

4,316

2.47

MARC STRASSMAN

 

4,132

2.37

GREGORY E ROBERTS

 

3,647

2.09

JIM SUMMERS

 

2,978

1.71


 

Registration

563,857

Precincts Reporting

681

Total Precincts

681

% Precincts Reporting

100

Remember, you need to refresh this page to ensure that you have the latest results.

Last Updated: 10:38 11/26/2002

November 5, 2002 - Los Angeles County General Election


One title I’ve held for a while now is “Contributing Editor” at NetPulse, an online newsletter about e-politics and e-government maintained by PoliticsOnline (http://netpulse.politicsonline.com/).  After the Valley Secession Election I checked to see what I’d sent them over the years.  Here’s a copy of it. 

 

Contributions to and Coverage by NetPulse

(February 2, 1999 to November 8, 2002)

Search Results

Your search returned 18 articles.

  1. POL CONTRIBUTING EDITOR FIRES UP THE WEB OUT WEST
    Note: From Issue 6.18, section "IN THE STATES".
    Contributing Editor Marc Strassman has been making a stir out West online lately. A mayoral candidate for the unsuccessful Valley City (the vote for secession was beaten out on Election Day), Strassman ran on a platform that focused on technology and ran an exclusively online campaign. Good try, Marc. Read on for more.
  2. CALIFORNIA CANDIDATE MAKES TECHNOLOGY HIS CAMPAIGN PLATFORM
    Note: From Issue 6.15, section "IN THE STATES".
    Contributing Editor Marc Strassman has an interesting campaign going in the Golden State. Strassman is running for Mayor of the currently fictitious Valley City. (It will be created if the San Fernando Valley is allowed to secede from Los Angeles.) He is calling for the creation of the most wired jurisdiction anywhere. But better yet, he is running the entire campaign online. No staff, no volunteers, just he and his trusty laptop. Very interesting...
  3. EU ONLINE VOTING
    Note: From Issue 5.16, section "THE WORLD'S WIDE WEB".
    Contributing editor Marc Strassman reports that while Internet voting is battered in the U.S., Europeans have invested about $3 million to build a continent-wide system for online voting from PCs and mobile phones. More: EUCybervote.
  4. E-GOV BILL
    Note: From Issue 5.14, section "MODEM-OCRACY".
    During a July 11 hearing, Senate Republicans were skeptical of Sen. Joe Lieberman's blueprint for building an electronic government. According to Federal Computer Week, Lieberman said his E-Government Act of 2001 would harness information technology to make the federal government better deliver services to citizens, improve accountability and cut costs. More: USA Today. In a related development, Los Angeles-based Contributing Editor and President of Citizens United for Excellence in E-Government Marc Strassman was invited by Senate Government Affairs committee staff to submit testimony on S. 803, the "E-Government Act of 2001." You can get a PDF copy of his testimony and access links to a copy of the bill, other witnesses' testimony, the official analysis of the bill, and an article on the status and benefits of e-government worldwide by following this link.
  5. INTERNET CZAR
    Note: From Issue 5.12, section "DC CONNECTION".
    Contributing editor Marc Strassman forwarded a Bush Administration press release in which the Office of Management and Budget named Mark A. Forman to serve as associate director of OMB for Information Technology and E-Government. In his role, "Mr. Forman will work to fulfill the President's vision of using the Internet to create a citizen-centric government."
  6. ILLINOIS
    Note: From Issue 5.04, section "IN THE STATES".
    Contributing editor Marc Strassman of the Smart Initiatives Project says the state of Illinois is moving aggressively to provide up to 1 million of its citizens with digital certificates, which would make it easier for a wide array of secure government e-services, initiatives, petitions and more. To read more, go to: http://www.fcw.com/
  7. ONLINE INITIATIVES
    Note: From Issue 4.17, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    Los Angeles-based contributing editor Marc Strassman reports he recently submitted a request to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer to allow his Smart Initiatives Project to begin collecting the 420,260 signatures it needs to be put on the March 2002 ballot. According to Strassman, "The Smart Initiatives movement is working to give all citizens the right and the means to sign initiative and other official petitions online, with binding legal effect, using free digital certificates issued by state governments. Our slogan is 'Political Reform through Internet Power'." For details, visit the Smart Initiatives Project website. Other news: Strassman will be addressing the PKI Forum's annual meeting in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Sept. 12, 2000, on the subject of "Ubiquitous E-Democracy Powered by a Universal PKI."
  8. ONLINE VOTING GARNERS MORE ATTENTION
    Note: From Issue 3.24, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    More states are considering using online voting to boost turnout, USA Today reported Dec. 7. Wired outlined in a Dec. 9 report how Arizona, Alaska, California and other states are seriously looking at the medium’s potential. Contributing editor Marc Strassman of the Campaign for Digital Democracy is a big booster of online voting. He says the results are in for the first Internet Presidential Primary Election. Take a look: Politics.com.
  9. NATIONAL ONLINE PRIMARY STARTS FRIDAY
    Note: From Issue 3.23, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    What's being billed as the first online U.S. presidential primary starts Dec. 3 and continues through Dec. 8, according to Business Wire. "The mock primary will allow all eligible Americans to make history by voting online and getting a glimpse of the future of the voting process, according to Politics.com and Votation.com," the two companies sponsoring the online primary. Results will be announced Dec. 9. In other online voting news, the University of California at Davis tested online voting in November in an attempt to increase turnout, according to contributing editor Marc Strassman.
  10. BEATTY WATCH
    Note: From Issue 3.18, section "THE WHITE HOUSE HORSE RACE".
    Contributing editor Marc Strassman, who lives close to Hollywood in California, says he’s been having fun watching the emergence of the online “Beatty for President effort. “Anyone interested in watching or helping Clyde Barrow-John Reed-Mickey One-Dick Tracy-Bugsy Siegel-Bulworth in an extensive audition for the role of American President should visit http://www.beatty2000.com/ and/or join the fun at: beatty4pres-subscribe@onelist.com,” he writes.
  11. VOTE NOTES
    Note: From Issue 3.17, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    Swarthmore political science professor Rick Valelly argued online voting would be a big mistake in the new issue of The New Republic. Online voting, he says, will foster even more apathy. Absentee voting, for example, has long been an option for people who couldn’t make it to the ballot box on election day. “The problem is that e-voting will transform voting, an inherently public activity, into a private one,” he writes. “If our era is a time of citizen disengagement, of staring at screens and passing in and out of our gated communities or apartment fortresses as we wave to private security personnel, then e-voting from home is all too congruent with the spirit of the age. Far from enriching democracy, e-voting pushes us toward political anomie.” As NetPulse readers would expect, Valelly’s comments raised the ire of contributing editor and e-voting proponent Marc Strassman, who fired off a letter to the editor of The New Republic. In the letter, he countered that the virtual community wasn’t a sheltered, lonely place. Instead, it is a lively community “in which almost every form of political activity except voting is taking place with increasing breadth and intensity as we speak….Adding the right to vote over the Internet is, in the most profound sense, giving these communities and the people that live in them the right to vote where they live.” The debate continues.
  12. GETTING GOOEY
    Note: From Issue 3.16, section "NEAT IDEA".
    EGooey is a free Web/chat tool that allows users to post little electronic yellow notes and “talk” with others who are simultaneously using a Web site. Says contributing editor Marc Strassman: "This is either the latest way to waste a lot of time online, or a valuable tool for building community among like-minded Netizens."
  13. ONLINE VOTING ROUNDUP
    Note: From Issue 3.13, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    In recent days, stories about online voting whirled through the Web. Here's a summary of the top news:
    1. Military voting muscle. The U.S. Department of Defense is leading the way for online voting through a pilot program in five states. The DOD's Federal Voting Assistance Program will allow service members in Florida, Missouri, Texas, South Carolina and Utah to vote online by absentee ballot in the 2000 presidential election. In 1996, about one quarter of service members said they did not vote in elections because their ballots did not arrive in time to be counted, according to a report by the American Forces Press Service.
    2. Global referenda. IBM Chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner told a congressional committee in June that technological developments in the infant information age have the potential to have worldwide impact on political systems with innovations like global referenda, according to a CNN report . "Why not envision a day when we vote with much greater convenience - - from our home or workplace - - or a day beyond that when issues are presented to all the people of the world and we vote as a global statement of individual preference without regard for conventions like political parties or national borders?" Gerstner asked at a hearing on Capitol Hill.
    3. Changing everything. Contributing editor Marc Strassman says online voting may empower people in a June 17 column in Intellectual Capital. "It may become practical to allow voters to aggregate themselves in new and creative ways. Voters can achieve representation in ways they consider more meaningful than the current geographically-based system," he says. He also encourages people to visit his online voting site, VoteSite.
    4. Louisiana says no to online caucus. Louisiana Republicans cast aside a plan to allow members of the state GOP vote online in next year's presidential caucus. Full story: The New York Times.
  14. VOTESITE.COM
    Note: From Issue 3.12, section "WEB SITES".
    Contributing editor Marc Strassman's newest project is VoteSite.com, an online effort that's being launched to win the right to vote over the Internet. The site, a project of Strassman's Campaign for Digital Democracy, is starting its efforts in California. Strassman says the site isn't fully operational but he invites readers to take a look and offer comments.
  15. POLLSTERS THREATENED
    Note: From Issue 3.10, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    ONLINE VOTING UPDATE Contributing editor Marc Strassman has been making media waves in pushing online voting. "Internet voting and its cousin, digital signatures on initiative petitions, are now seen by many observers as inevitable steps in a national effort to get people back to the polls or, more accurately, to get the polls out to the people," he wrote in a May 6 article in Intellectual Capital. Also on May 6, Strassman was interviewed by IBM's Institute for Electronic Governance. The conversation is available online at: ieg.ibm.com.
  16. ONLINE CONFERENCE
    Note: From Issue 3.09, section "THE ELECTRONIC ADVOCATE".
    The Initiative and Referendum Institute is a non-profit organization that
    exists to educate people about the initiative and referendum processes as political options. On May 6th-8th, it will be conducting "A Century of Citizen Lawmaking: Initiative and Referendum in America." Visit the Institute site to learn more about the Institute. Contributing editor Marc Strassman will participate 4 p.m. EDT May 7. The forum will be webcast by D.C. Orbit.
  17. GOLDEN STATE CARPE DIEM
    Note: From Issue 3.05, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    In California, elections in seven cities around Los Angeles have been cancelled because of a lack of competition. Two Internet political activists (both NetPulse contributing editors) believe the new media can change that. On Feb. 22, Marc Strassman of the Campaign for Digital Democracy wrote, “Perhaps allowing people to vote over the Internet would solve both the problem of diminishing participation and the problem of paying so much to conduct the elections.” The following day, Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation opined, “Three of the seven cities that cancelled their elections don’t even have a municipal Web site. The Internet is the best place to begin addressing these problems…Given that there is no master list of municipal elections in California available on the Internet, CVF hopes to compile one soon that at the least can inform voters that there is a local election going on in their area."
  18. ONLINE ELECTIONS SOON
    Note: From Issue 3.03, section "NETPULSE BRIEFS".
    A recent article in Governing magazine suggests that some voters in November 2000 will vote online. “The era of Internet voting will inch closer this spring when a mock election is held in Cyberspace,” Christopher Swope reported in November. “Dozens of U.S. military personnel stationed overseas will send ballots over the Internet using specially developed encryption software.” Also, Florida is considering using Internet technology in elections. And contributing editor Marc Strassman of the Campaign for Digital Democracy reports that Washington State has moved to the front lines of providing online elections with the recent introduction of House Bill 1594. There is draft legislation that is being drafted for consideration in California that Strassman offers a view at: http://www.suresite.com/ca/e/elelbill. Says Strassman, “The current fiasco in Washington has convinced millions of citizens that either some new ways of governing ourselves have to be found or many more people will just opt out of the self-governance process entirely. Electronic elections, including Internet voting and electronic initiatives, may offer a way out of the current crisis of (non-) participation.

My complaint, broadcast by NPR station KPCC on Halloween Day, 2001, that the government, reluctant to allow the use of computer and Internet technology for political empowerment, was chomping at the bit to use it for surveillance and monitoring, seemed to be corroborated when word hit the media that DARPA, the same Pentagon agency which had helped create the Internet, had embarked on a program of “Total Information Awareness,” which aimed to harness the same dual use tools I’d been recommending on behalf of democracy for purposes possibly far more sinister.

 

So I wrote a series of three articles about this.

 

Transparency:  Seeing It Through, or

A Dozen Things Excellent Transparency Should Be

 

By Marc Strassman

 

November 28, 2002

 

Copyright © 2002 by Marc Strassman.  All rights reserved.

 

Now that “transparency” is all the rage for governments and corporations, it’s important to take a minute to delineate just what’s involved in making an institution truly transparent, easily visible, not camouflaged, or directly knowable by normal citizens and reporters who want to scrutinize it or just know exactly what it’s up to.

 

To help provide a basis upon which to judge the transparency of a city government or a big corporation, here are a dozen characteristics that any institution aspiring to transparency ought to exhibit.  The information provided by an organization to establish its transparency should be:

 

1.                  Accurate

 

                  Unless the information provided is truthful and correct, it doesn’t contribute much to transparency.

 

2.                  Timely, if not Instantaneous

 

Data delayed is knowledge denied.  To the greatest extent possible, data needs to be captured, added to the transparency data base, and made available for viewing as it is generated.  This is “real-time transparency.”

 

3,         Complete

 

            Partial information may be worse than no information at all, especially when it creates an inaccurate picture of an important context or all the implications of some isolated facts.

 

4.                  Accessible

 

If citizens and the media don’t have convenient, no-cost, readily-available access to the information that is supposed to make an organization transparent, then that organization isn’t transparent.  Universal broadband connectivity is the best way to provide this level of accessibility to transparency data.

 

5.