Writing to be read

Last week I had a short humor piece published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. It's been exciting not only because I adore McSweeney's as a publication and am honored to have a byline there, but also because it reminds me how fun it is to have my writing distributed for others to read. And, it's the second time it's happened that way in as many weeks.

I've had that excitement to some degree or another in a few other places: as a reporter and editor for my high school and college newspapers, as a writer for a satirical high school publication (called The Hierarchy of the Zucchini People, naturally), having some creative writing accepted into literary magazines, as an occasional columnist for my local city newspaper, and as a long-time blogger.

Still, I've been conflicted at times about calling myself a writer. And while I subscribe to the notion that one can be a thriving writer even if no one is reading your stuff, it does feel pretty nice when the universe affirms the value of something I've written.

Yes, this website is a largely built around my writing, my longest standing byline of them all. And some of my posts here have seen thousands of views in a day when they're linked from Hacker News or Reddit. But most of the time there are a few hundred visits per day at most, and many of those are to the same handful of technical articles; I don't publish here consistently enough to draw much of a regular readership. It's easy to think of it as "just a blog."

So If I'd posted the above humor piece on this site and linked to it from my Twitter account, I'm guessing it may have been seen by tens or maybe hundreds of people. I might have gotten a comment or two, maybe a few likes from my Twitter followers, and that would be fine.

By publishing on McSweeney's, it's been very different. My own tweet about the piece has been viewed over 13,000 times, the link clicked many hundreds of times. It's also been fun to see other people sharing and discussing the link on Twitter, and presumably on other platforms too.

Most commenters see it as "that new bit from McSweeney's" and not anything from me in particular, just as we tend to associate writing from The Onion or The New York Times with the publication more than the author. That's okay with me - I'm happy to contribute to what McSweeney's is and does in that way.

It also makes me appreciate publications that are open to submissions and that lift up writing done outside of the traditional publishing model (Longreads, part of the Automattic family, not least among them).

I plan to continue putting most of my public writing on my various personal websites. But I have lots of ideas for other publications and media that I could submit to and work with, and myriad notes on possible book topics, editorials, screenplays, journalism projects, short stories and more that I'd love to pursue. Seeing my writing being enjoyed by others certainly encourages me to spend more time on all that, and to live further into the part of my identity that is and probably always has been, "writer."

Using MoveOn for petitions

It's been a long time since I started a petition to try to change something in my world. But in recent weeks my local City Council has been threatening to do some silly things related to funding the development of bike and pedestrian paths here, and I'd heard enough people say informally that they were concerned by those threats that I decided it was time to create a central spot where they could put all their names for Council members to see.

And that's how I ended up using the petitions.moveon.org service, which has turned out to be excellent for this purpose.

A few things in particular that I like about it:

  • While clearly scaled to support national and state level petitions, the MoveOn tool did a great job of enabling a smaller petition targeted at a local legislative body that might not otherwise be in their system. I was able to enter the names and email addresses of my local Council members as "targets" of the petition, and they then were set up to receive deliveries of signatures directly.
  • Related to that, the MoveOn system allowed the targets of the petition to respond directly to the petition signers with a message, without giving them direct access to each others` private contact information.
  • The system automatically picks small signature goals to start with and then scales them up as new milestones are hit. I think this helps avoid the awkward "WE'RE GOING TO HAVE A HUNDRED MILLION SIGNATURES HERE!" declarations by petition creators that quickly yield disappointment.
  • The system offered up interesting summary stats about where signatures were coming from and what activity on the petition looked like over time.
  • When I had to contact MoveOn's petition support (one of the signers had accidentally left out a word in a comment that significantly changed the meaning, and wanted it corrected) they were fast to respond and provided a quick solution.
  • Other features in the petition tool, like handling delivery via print and email, contacting petition signers, "declaring victory," and more seemed really well designed; simple, effective, built for bringing about real action.
  • The petition application is open source and available for anyone to contribute to it.

One of the things I wanted to do as the signature numbers climbed and as I prepared to present the petition to Council was create something that visualized the signing names in one place. The signature count on the petition itself was not super prominent, and in only displaying 10 names at a time it was easy to miss out on the sense of a large part of the local population making a clear statement about what they want.

So I sniffed the XMLHttpRequests being made by the MoveOn site and found the underlying API that was being used to load the signature names. I whipped up a simple PHP script that queries that API to fetch all the names, and then does some basic cleanup of the list: leaving out anything that doesn't look like a full name, making capitalization and spacing consistent, sorting, etc.

I published the tool online at https://github.com/ChrisHardie/moveon-petition-tools in case anyone else might find it useful. (I later learned that MoveOn makes a CSV export of signatures and comments available when you go to print your petition, so that's an option too.)

Using the output of my tool, I created this simple graphic that shows all of the signed names to date:

All in all the MoveOn petition platform has been great, and I think it's made a difference just the way I wanted it to. I highly recommend it.

Article on Strong Towns

I've been enjoy and appreciating the articles on Strong Towns for a while now. They bring a provocative and practical long-term view to the conversation about how cities and towns in North America can become strong and resilient. Their mission and approach line up so well with the advocacy work I've done in my own community, and the thinking that I see leading to great results in communities around the world.

Now it's an honor to have one of my own essays on community building appear in Strong Towns. I wrote about how to get a response from local leaders when you need to get something done. Most of what I write on RichmondMatters.com is specific to life in Richmond, Indiana, but in this case it turned out that with a few refinements to the original article, the information might be relevant to a national audience.

I hope it helps someone out there find a way forward on positive change they're pursuing in their own town.