This site is not exactly what I was thinking of, but close. Found it from a Rafe Esquith video on Youtube. Seems worth checking out. If its good, will post the details on http://bteaching.com
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update: looked at the site, while the causes they support seem positive, I’m really looking for something much less scripted and controlled. For instance they have a program specifically giving African-themed stories (”Tinga Tinga tails”) to schools in East Africa. This is all right, but it feels to me a bit patronizing; and ‘Conspiracy for Good’ which is a sort of live drama but it is unclear to me from reading it what part, if any, of the story is true? I am not saying not to support http://wegivebooks.org, it is certainly doing good and is getting the job done of delivering thousands of books where they are needed! I am only thinking that at some point I would like to see a person-to-person solution that helps people give specific books that they feel are valuable, and helps others get books they specifically want (whether or not the solution involves supporting libraries or clearinghouses).

When I talked several years ago to the owner of a company involved with maquiladoras in Mexico, he was not interested in discussing living standards or wages of his employees, but expressed willingness to donate to a local library. It may be that US companies operating overseas could be tapped to donate to libraries in the areas where they operate. This particular company was a client of mine, thus I had at least one time access to speak to the owner, but I find that following the five-F policy (Fair, Fast, Friendly, Factual, Frank) it is often possible to get a short conversation even with very busy and important people.

* I read of the five-F’s many years ago in a public relations book, but I think they apply in many other contexts as well.

Oh – and the (un)meeting? Wed Jan 27 at Himmel Library @ 6:30 PM.

Ellen Goodman wrote a recent column in which she made a great call that crowdsourcing leads to the basing of facts on opinions, instead of opinions on facts. There is truth to this. The famed ‘many eyes’ approach of open source software works best when all the eyes are dispassionately looking for truth, and not spin.

I believe though that journalism has a fascinating future. The key is trust, and for readers to be able to make informed judgements. Goodman pointed out that there seems to be no consequence for bloggers who make things up. Some consequence exists, in that other bloggers may write about their lack of veracity, and individual readers reduce their trust level, but it doesn’t reduce the number of links to the lying blogger’s page and thus does not reduce their PageRank, which is essentially Google’s level of trust that they have something useful or interesting to say.

The web may need an explicit TrustWeb, where users and webmasters/bloggers can state their level of trust in a website or even a website author (the latter requiring some of the semantic web technology that allows more explicit markup of relationships between things). Initial work has been done on Trustwebs (search on Guha + trust web) in a controlled setting. To have a distributed trustweb may come out of semantic technology, or it may get done as some kind of a hack: <a href=”somesite” trustlevel=-8 rel=nofollow &rt;this guy is ridiculous </a&rt;

If TrustRanks become public (and perhaps disjoint – there may be different named trustwebs that propagate separately) you can bet having a high trust level will get a dollar value attached – either from associated advertising or from micropayments from readers. Then abusing the reader’s trust will once again have an immediate consequence to the writer – maybe even more so than an irate boss.

The only links I’ve found online that reference the program are this one in Canada:
http://www.7thstep.ca/aboutus.html
and a publication from around 1966:
http://tpj.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/46/2/21

It seems to me like effective help for convicts is just an extremely important area – not only for the convicts themselves, but for communities and even state budgets.

One day I took a walk in the Santa Cruz wash, happened to be after a city sweep of the homeless camps. They had pretty much bulldozed them, so leftover things and trash were scattered around. I found a book, that one of the homeless folks had owned. It was some kind of psychic text that sort of blamed problems on society in a kind of ranting way. I can’t remember the name of it now but it struck me that this book probably wasn’t going to be the one to help someone get their life back together.

On the other hand, some books are truly powerful and inspirational. I posted somewhere else about the prisoner with a quote from Anne Frank’s diary tattooed on his back. And that is not even one I would have chosen. Maybe Victor Frankl? My Shadow Ran Fast by Bill Sands?

I am curious, what books people have found to be really helpful in changing their lives. Especially that would be relevent to prisoners today.