Dear City Council:

I am writing in regards to your consideration of changing the situation around allowing private security patrols on the river levee and other open public green spaces, such as local beaches.

In summary:

* I am opposed to having the private security river levee patrols in the first place.
* I do not want you to make this change in the law, especially not without first doing your due diligence of really hearing from the public in multiple well-publicized open meetings.
* I disagree with the process of making our open public spaces illegal, which includes the million-dollar broom sweeping street people around.
* We would be better served as a population if the City hired more social workers to walk around the levee and other locations to help people directly.

As a lifelong citizen of Santa Cruz and California and resident of Riverside Ave. right next to the levee, I deeply feel the eroding of my social rights in the name of false security. We are no safer by having private patrols on the river levee. We may in fact be less safe, and certainly have more of our liberties curtailed.

Personally, I find the private patrols as bothersome to my frequent levee walks as any of the travellers, street people, and outright derelicts I navigate around. The patrol cars disturb my enjoyment of this city treasure, with their sight, sound, and smell. I dislike having to hold my dog out of the way so they can conveniently drive down the levee.

I don’t perceive what the driving patrols are actually doing other than showing presence. They can’t see crimes any better from their cars (vision and hearing are impaired compared to e.g. a bicycle or walking), they can’t see items such as trash or used syringes, and they can’t respond to people in as human a way when wrapped in steel.

I would rather see the City take our hard-earned money and spend it on:

* Social workers who can walk around (probably more cheaply) and work on solving individual problems that keep people on the street. There is ample evidence that it is less expensive to shelter and solve problems than to sweep people around and in to jail again and again.

* Improve the river levee by specifically encouraging activities that draw people, such as riverside cafe carts and tables, benches, art, shade and shelter, free wifi, and a welcoming attitude (and publicity campaign.)

I would rather not see the City Council conduct itself as if it is our fatherly protector. Making changes such as this that affect all citizens is something that needs an enormous amount of daylight shone on it before it even starts to get off the ground. Taking this directly to vote without working hard to involve the public in the first place is unconscionable and unethical.

In closing I want to say that as a private citizen, private security patrols are frightening. They are not beholden to the same standards nor receive the same training as sworn peace officers. I’m more frightened of crossing a private security guard, especially one who feels they are especially deputized because they are being permitted to act in a role normally held by a public peace officer. That sense of entitlement and control is a scary thing.

Thank you for your consideration,

You can then cycle back with something like a tack on survey to redhat employed contributors and try to develop aggregate information about how often people are doing off-the-clock versus on-the-clock work. Obviously it will differ from person to person, but you might be able to stand up the average to apply in aggregate to the subgroup as layered approach to pull your strict upper/lower boundary statement and make it a statistical statment with quantified average and stddev.

-jef

Relative importance is relative. To some folks, a set of TTF files is more valuable than all of LibreOffice. I’d rather not try to track that, either.

I’ll leave RPM Fusion up to someone else, for now.

Can’t you just look at the groups in FAS?

For example, for Red Hat employees contributing to Fedora there is:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/group/view/cla_redhat

(there are equivalent groups for Dell, Intel,…)

That seems much less tedious, and much more future-proof (in case somebody gets hired for example).

Another hard to count factor is the package importance, since not all packages are equal, is different when one maintain a the *whole* LibreOffice and someone a set of TTF files (for example).

And yet another thing which can’t be aggregated into the official statistics are packages available elsewhere – and I am talking here about things like RPM Fusion, practically but not officially they *are* Fedora.

Exactly! I’m pretty sure we can do all sorts of automagic to help flag potential bottlenecks (or downright trouble), and it’s ultimately about giving us humans a chance to reach out to each other.

It’s not really like a system monitoring setup, humans aren’t like servers. But human interaction – especially creating free and open source software on the Internet globally – is a social network with a lot of programmatic interfaces. Now we’re starting to get to something we can monitor and analyze, a network with API calls flying across it.

I’m really excited by your effort here.

I would love to be able to mature methology and trending to the point were we can start to identify bottlenecks and some outreach goals.

I think the nuances you mention would matter statisitcally if I were trying to track how Red Hat spends payroll down to small percentages of a full-time person. That is something that really is between a manager, a team, and an individual. Even where you may have some Fedora duties as part of your job role, it can be very fluid how much time it takes, and you may get interested and pulled in to other parts of Fedora outside of that, again on a fluid basis. I think that overall flow is extremely important to the value and success of Red Hat in both producing free/open source software, and in making a business out of it.

Ultimately, my goal is to create something that people who take it on themselves to care about the health of their community – people like you and I – can have a dashboard-like view in to the kind of output of stats++ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Ianweller/statistics_plus_plus, with associated content to help analyze and act based on what the metrics show.