Create link shortener for New Orleans community group under g0v.us domain

[patcon]

Hi! I'm working with a grassroots neighborhood group called "Small and Mighty", who aspire to create a land trust in the upper 9th ward of New Orleans, to help long-term residents (predominantly BIPOC) buy and make decisions about vacant land. I'm looking to introduce people (indirectly) to g0v ways of working. I'm helping them do transparent note-taking, and was hoping to set up a link shortener to make sharing resources in spoken conversation easier at our group meetings.

New Orleans government websites are at nola.gov, so the nola.g0v.us namespace could have wider utility over here, if others want to start using it :)

Thanks for considering!

EDIT: We might use sam.nola.g0v.us once we have a need to operate a website, but for now we don't have one :)

[patcon]

Hi again! I'm seeing pretty rapid inclusion of other PRs for the creation/modification of other subdomains, and wondering if anyone could help me understand what information I could provide to move this forward. 🙏

I mistakenly thought that linking our early organizing docs would clarify the following:

• local black leadership of the project,
• my background support role on it, and
• the transparent and open way in which this project is initiating work, which is in broad strokes compatible with g0v ethic.

But I get the impression that something is delaying things, and it's not clear to me what that is. If there were more questions, I'd be happy to answer them!

To be clear about the implications, there's a pre-existing group here that is using government services and niche government programs to try to get possession of below-market vacant lots in New Orleans, and govern them with long-time BIPOC residents. They are using sites like https://property.nola.gov/ to collect data and know which lots are best candidates for acquisition. We are trying to move quickly, because the cheap lots are being scooped up by corporations and outside speculators, which will accelerate gentrification and displacement of local residents.

I am trying to introduce them to the idea of using supportive digital tooling and processes to automate their manual labour. If I made it seem like there is no technology angle, that was my mistake. In the civic tech communities where I've worked, we simply don't start with "tech" as the foundation for conversations. As was contentious in London with the g0v hacknight, the divide was over whether we center "open source" and "open source licenses" when introducing residents to g0v ethos, or instead focus on transparent and authentic collaboration and open processes (with no expectation to start with conversation centred on language from the tech sector, like "open source"). This feels even more sensible in New Orleans, where the tech scene here is VERY small and immature.

I'm currently supporting this group with transparent note-taking practices and processes for distributing leadership, so their efforts are more resilient to burn-out. There is no technology yet (aside from Google Docs and this shortlink infra to support easier communication), but there is certainly the opportunity and intention, that is just slower work, since there are very few tech workers in this city.