Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

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> I mean honestly, can we all name the members of our city council, our mayor, etc.

Of course I can. Off the top of my head:

City Council:

Lisa Herbold - neighborhood

Teresa Mosqueda - at large

Sara Nelson - at large, newly elected

Mayor:

Bruce Harrell - newly elected, replaced Jenny Durkan after one term. Was previously on the city council for 13 (?) years.

City Attorney:

Ann Davison - newly elected, replaced Pete Holmes who failed to advance through the primary after 12 years.

County Executive:

Dow Constantine - narrowly re-elected. Recently granted additional power to appoint the county sheriff.

These are the elected positions I vote on. I am also aware of appointed positions like parks, police, and city transit. I’m aware of the the parts of the council I don’t vote for.

I’m also aware of policy. Hazard pay for grocery workers. Attempting to stop catalytic converter theft. Fixing the bridge. Mask mandates. Public transit expansion. Defunding police.

I get a lot of my coverage of these events from the hyperlocal blog that covers my neighborhood. I have their number saved to text reports when I see them. They publish coverage of most local government meetings. I visit that site as often as HN.

> Of course I can.

But are you aware that most people cannot?

This reminds me of a strategy I once heard on how to assign weights to people's votes according to their knowledge. You want to assign a high weight to those with relevant knowledge and low weight to those with little relevant knowledge.

So how do you know who has good relevant knowledge? Rather than just collecting the response to a question: "How many beans do you think are in this jar?" you also ask the _meta_ question: "What do you think will be the average response to the first question above?" For those who perform well on question 2, you assign higher weight to their answers on question 1.

If you just average all the answers to question 1, you are likely to get a close approximation to the true number of beans in the jar. But if you assign weights according to performance on question 2, you can get an even closer approximation to the true answer.

I may have gotten some details wrong, but the idea is that if you are aware of your peers' level of knowledge about a topic, then you are likely to be knowledgeable about the topic yourself.

Related https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surprisingly_popular

Thank you for this. Looks like I got A LOT of details wrong. And thinking about it some more, I don't think my original example holds. Many thanks

Sure or people could just participate locally instead of being apathetic trolls on the internet. You get back what you put in. Nobody owes you anything. Do the work.

That's great that you know, that probably puts you in the top 1-5% of engaged citizens in the country.

It’s not hard. Just a simple choice. Democracy in action. Or perhaps inaction.

some folks are time poor

I could care about them if they were people I knew. For the most part I’m happy to leave the running of my city to the people interested in doing the job (with all the perks and mind numbing boringness it brings).

> These are the elected positions I vote on.

What about Port of Seattle, Seattle Public Schools, King County Council, and King Conservation District?

I don’t know the names but port of Seattle has two new representatives. They are the first minority-only representatives for the port. This is after a multi-year renovation of terminal 5 which is just now seeing new businesses from MSC.

That assumes you even live in a city. I have no idea who our town manager or whoever sits on the various boards of our 7K person town are. And, yeah, there's no hyperlocal blog. Maybe whatever filers through NextDoor and Facebook.

All we have is Facebook and lots of batshit bitching.

Then start one. My hyperlocal blog is sponsored by local businesses and promotes events like art walk where people walk around the local shops and purchase or view art created by local artists. If your community sucks it’s because of the people, not the government.

Can you link the blog you are talking about? I'm interested in starting one for my area but I haven't found any great examples.

https://westseattleblog.com/

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