West Seattle, Washington
04 Friday
Can you spare a few minutes to help us evaluate the present and look to the future? We appreciate any time you can take to answer “4 Questions for You, from WSB.” Considering we buried the link’s debut at the end of a loooong story late Monday night, we’re heartened by how many people still managed to find it and use it. But in case you missed that link, here it is again. We hope you’ll consider taking a few minutes to answer those 4 questions sometime in the next few days (we’re only keeping it up for a week, figuring that most regulars will have seen it by then). Thank you!
As a blessedly safe, quiet holiday weekend closes, a few bits of WSB news to share – and a request.
First, if you didn’t see our note in the WSB Forums: We are proud to announce the latest award for WSB, because this one, like the national award last fall from the Online News Association, is much more about you than about us. When the Society of Professional Journalists announced its Regional Awards last weekend, WSB was honored for Best Online Community Engagement. (We’d drop that last word and simply say, Best Online Community … or maybe drop the “online” too!) Tough competition – our friends at KING 5 came in 2nd; 3rd-place honors went to Amy Duncan for MyGreenLake.com, who presents news and information earnestly and thoroughly to, and with, her neighborhood. What was taken into account for this award was your participation and how we work together – comment threads that so often yield new information about stories; news that is a collaboration between your notes/tips and our research; user-to-user WSB Forums; the neighbor-alerting-neighbor heart of West Seattle Crime Watch coverage. Your daily involvement and caring is often breathtaking. (P.S. The SPJ awards also included one for our partners at the Seattle Times on behalf of a project with which we were involved, special coverage of the graffiti-vandalism problem – celebrated with an Innovation Award.)
Second – We are overdue in telling you about a nationwide grassroots campaign we have helped found, Authentically Local. 
We are founders along with more than two dozen other independent, community-collaborative, local online-news publishers around the country. We all decided to start it because our “industry” is currently under siege from megacorporations that are moving into communities with one-size-fits-all operations to try to templatize and commoditize neighborhood news/information. The attraction for them is twofold: Once they have hundreds of sites, they can sell space to the highest-bidding national advertiser, and/or try to save their own failing old-media businesses through amassing small-business ads. But Authentically Local isn’t just an awareness campaign for those of us who do news; our counterparts in New Jersey at the nation’s first successful grass-roots independent online-news site, Baristanet, who hatched the idea, have suggested it might be appropriate for other types of businesses too. Check it out here.
To the localism point, two links that might be of interest. Your editor here offered perhaps-radical thoughts in a recent interview with Street Fight Magazine, a new national online publication looking at the “business of hyperlocal” (the latter is the shop-talk term for “neighborhood”; we don’t like it, so we don’t use it). And the inherent localism of WSB has drawn attention across the Atlantic: Gretchen sent a note pointing to this Financial Times (London) article about a wave of “localism” sweeping Britain – it seems some aspects of what we take for granted in civic life are wholly new ideas there. The sidebar story to the right of the main text column leads off, for some reason, with a quick summary of “Localism, Seattle style,” with WSB as exhibit A – noting recent WSB discussions on schools and transportation, and commenters’ tendency to question authority.
NOW, OUR REQUEST FOR YOU: Four questions we’d love to have you answer, if you can spare a few minutes, as we look to the future. Your answers can be short, long, or somewhere inbetween – just go here. Thanks in advance!
When you think of children, and mentors, your first thought may be of adults mentoring the kids. But for groups such as Girl Scouts, it means youth mentoring younger kids – as was the case on Saturday at Camp Long, for West Seattle’s Junior Girl Scout Troop 41504. Troop leader Patricia Hahler is so proud of her Scouts (6th graders) for earning their Bronze Awards, she invited the media to cover the crowning event – a Fun Day her Scouts hosted for younger Scouts (three Brownie troops – 2nd/3rd graders – and one Daisy troop – kindergarteners/first graders). The Junior Scouts set up three “stations” around the park for the younger Scouts to visit, in rotation (above, First Aid; next, Improv):
Other stations included Hiking/Compass and Games/Sensory – which is where we found this activity:
Patricia explains that Bronze is the first of three levels of awards that older Girl Scouts earn – at the next level, Cadettes, they earn Silver Awards; then as Senior Girl Scouts, Gold Awards. And it’s not easy; she explained, “There are many requirements within the Bronze Award requirements to satisfy before reaching the service project.” (They are explained on the Girl Scouts’ national website, here.) Congratulations to the Troop 41504 Girl Scouts earning their Bronze Award: Penny Dierich, Corinne Manley, Jane Miller, Kaitlin Morgan, Regan Nagle, Haley Pyscher and Hana Kurahara Sisk!
NEW PLACE TO FIND CHIEF SEALTH INTERNATIONAL HIGH SCHOOL ONLINE: Seattle Public Schools has been revamping its web presence, not just for the district’s own website, but also for individual schools. The latest West Seattle school to get a new site – and new URL – is Chief Sealth, at chiefsealthhs.seattleschools.org. According to the announcement, CSIHS families should know “the new site has new capabilities for connecting with your students’ classes and teachers,” though they won’t be fully functional till fall (they’re explained here). Meantime, one event you’ll find listed on the new site is coming up Wednesday:
5:30-7 pm on Wednesday (May 25), student art will be on display, with some on sale too. Then at 7 pm, Sealth 9th graders will perform original poetry, written in the Book-It Repertory Theater “page to stage” style.
(Recent screengrab from the “incident response” map [incidents are NOT “real-time”])
From last night’s West Seattle Blockwatch Captains Network meeting at the Southwest Precinct: A city delegation spoke to the group to provide a full list of online resources available from Seattle Police. Amy Hirotaka from the city’s Community Technology program, Sol Villareal from the mayor’s office, and Shanna Christie, who runs SPD’s online operations, were on hand. From the list she distributed:
SPD website: seattle.gov
SPD Blotter (summaries of some incidents): spdblotter.seattle.gov
SPD on Twitter: twitter.com/SeattlePD
SPD on Facebook: facebook.com/SeattlePolice
Download police reports online: seattle.gov/police/records/online.htm
Map of recent police reports: web5.seattle.gov/mnm/policereports.aspx
Map of recent 911 responses: web5.seattle.gov/mnm/incidentresponse.aspx
File a crime report online: seattle.gov/police/report
Crime statistics: seattle.gov/police/crime/stats.htm
Crime-prevention info: seattle.gov/police/prevention
Block Watch info: seattle.gov/police/programs/blockwatch
Night Out info: seattle.gov/police/nightout
Open city datasets (not just police/crime-related): data.seattle.gov
They also discussed what additional resources might be helpful; WSBWCN’s Deb Greer suggested a video explaining how to start a Block Watch. Christie says the SPD site is going “through a revamp process,” so comments are welcome: shanna.christie@seattle.gov.
WSBWCN also has links on its website from last night’s presentation – so far, two handouts with more context for city resources, current and future, and more may be added – here’s that link.
Aside from the presentation, one topic of discussion, brought up by attendees: Whether medical-marijuana businesses attract crime. The City Attorney’s precinct liaison, Henry Chae, said there aren’t many stats to point to yet. He reiterated that the city is continuing to wait to see what the state will do, as SB 5073 – which would license and regulate medical-marijuana enterprises – is still awaiting Governor Gregoire‘s action (she has hinted she might veto parts of it).
The West Seattle Blockwatch Captains Network meets on fourth Tuesdays at the SW Precinct, 6:30 pm. They’re online at wsblockwatchnet.wordpress.com and on Facebook here.
Need someplace to get online with a publicly accessible computer, besides library branches? Here’s a new option – Southwest Community Center (2801 SW Thistle) has just announced classes as well as a couple hours a day of “open” use time. Read on for the announcement, with details:Read More
If you have a 5-gallon bucket (or more than one!) to spare, West Seattle High School can use it. Jennifer Hall explains why:
Our YMCA Earth Service Corps has been getting West Seattle High School students and staff ready for a “Compost Test Drive” to be held on Tuesday, April 5. Cedar Grove Composting will be partnering with us, as we get our program up and running. They are helping us out by delivering a trial compost dumpster on Monday. We are also looking for donations of five gallon buckets to be used for food scraps and napkins in classrooms, in offices, and in our staff lounge. We are also going to be using the buckets as liquids buckets, and encouraging better recycling of milk cartons and cans at our school. Students will be able to earn community service hours by helping us out at lunch times, before and after school.
We are a little apprehensive; food composting at WSHS is going to be a big undertaking. But we are also excited, and feel that food composting is the right thing to do for our school environment, for our community, and for our future.
If readers would like more information about food composting at West Seattle High School, or if anyone would like to help us out by donating a bucket or volunteering, please e-mail or call Jennifer Hall, West Seattle High School Earth Service Corps Advisor – jlhall@seattleschools.org, 206-252-8845.
From West Seattleite Irene Stewart, who’s an aging/disability services (ADS) planner with the city:
Every four years, ADS prepares a new Area Plan on Aging for King County, which guides our work. As we prepare to draft a new plan for 2012 through 2015, we need to hear from Seattle and King County residents. We invite residents of all ages to complete an online questionnaire. We especially encourage people who are age 60 or older, adults with disabilities, and family caregivers to respond.
Click here to take the survey. Irene adds, “Everybody is aging, so everybody should care.’
If you check in with WSB sometimes via Facebook, you might be aware we’ve been stuck for a long time at 5,000 friends, FB’s arbitrary limit for “profiles.” We didn’t know things would turn out that way when we started on FB as “WS Blog” almost four years ago (before WSB even became a business), but for months now, there have been more than 100 friend requests we weren’t allowed to approve, and an increasing amount of people who couldn’t even get into the queue because, they would message us, “FB says you have ‘too many friends’.” For a while we hoped FB would change; they won’t, so we have to. Please go HERE to “like” the new West Seattle Blog page (nothing fancy – yet – but at least, no limits) if you are so inclined. Thank you!
Another online upgrade from the City of Seattle: A map to track potholes. They’ve long had an online-reporting form, but now there’s a map to go along with it, just unveiled today. See the map here; see the accompanying information (including weekly status reports) here.
Give it a test drive – the city’s just taken the wraps off on My.Seattle.Gov, a customizable way to access everything they’ve put online. Click ahead for the official announcement:Read More
In case you aren’t on Facebook or Twitter, where we have been talking about this for going on four hours now: Our server-management company WiredTree, historically wonderfully reliable for the years we’ve used them, has been dealing with a “denial of service attack” that took down many of the sites who run on its servers. For at least an hour, that meant no one could get into our site; then at some point, we noticed some people were starting to get in, and finally figured out that access had been restored for everyone but Comcast users. We switched immediately to our Qwest access and got right in. Not sure why that happened – the folks at WiredTree have been working frantically to figure out how to get around the attack; perhaps they had to block Comcast. Checking the logs again, it appears Comcast users ARE now starting to get through, so hopefully this means everyone’s access is restored.
Though we had no direct technical control over this, we of course apologize – as a 24/7/365 news service, we are committed to absolute reliability, and have taken many other steps toward achieving that, but this is a new one, so we’re exploring how to set up redundancy that would kick in immediately if anything like this (or another server problem) happened again. Thanks for your patience and support! We’ve got a few more stories in the hopper that had been waiting for things to normalize, so back to the news …
Will the Young Evils play that tonight during their gig at the Tractor Tavern in Ballard? Maybe not, considering it’s being hailed as a potential West Seattle anthem. Seattle Weekly commissioned it to celebrate the issue that’s currently on the stands. We’re mentioning it tonight just in case you haven’t seen it yet, online or offline: It’s their one-week conversion to West Seattle Weekly, perhaps not coincidentally, shortly after West Seattleite Mike Seely was promoted to editor-in-chief. In an espresso-steam-filled room a few weeks before publishing the special edition, Seely sat down with your WSB co-publishers and asked if we’d help with one section – the section that resembles our main focus, top news stories – since the Weekly usually pulls that section’s content from stories covered by its Daily Weekly online operation, and needed the top West Seattle stories of the week instead. Here’s the link to the one story featured online, regarding the Steve Bushaw murder-case trial; if you have the print version, our West Seattle news roundup starts on page 9, and includes three additional stories, including the Charlestown/47th crash and power outage, the police/dogs shooting incident on 44th, and the West Seattle Chamber of Commerce‘s annual meeting. If you have some time to sit down and read this weekend, many great Weekly staff-reported stories too, including a closer look at the photo history book the Southwest Seattle Historical Society has just co-published, a review of West Seattle’s political clout, and a chat with the founder of Morgan Junction’s rockin’ Feedback Lounge (WSB sponsor), Jeff Gilbert, and editor Seely’s scene-setter.
(Photo by Cathy Jaramillo)
That photo of the stairs to Solstice Park (site of tomorrow night’s winter-solstice-sunset watch) is courtesy of Jake and Cathy Jaramillo, who e-mailed to share the news that their Seattle Stairway Walks website just got a mention in Sunset Magazine. Though Jake and Cathy live on Genesee Hill, they have been writing about and photographing stairways all around the city (here are the West Seattle-specific entries), “discovering and exploring the neighborhoods of Seattle through its often-hidden, always-picturesque stairways.” Though the story’s not online (so far), Jake says their mention is “at the bottom of page 36 as part of a Sunset story on L.A. stairways.”
SIDE NOTE: If this story reminded you of a tale told here earlier this year – Bob Estep and his mission to map West Seattle’s staircases – this is the perfect opportunity for us to mention that WSB contributor Keri DeTore turned more than 30 of his entries into a clickable Google Map (with number of stairs per staircase) – you can see it here.
WSB was down for more than two hours this afternoon – along with a number of other sites whose servers are managed by the same company. 
That’s the longest outage we’ve experienced since changing server managers two years ago – the company with which we work, WiredTree, is usually fabulously reliable and fast to fix problems (their last notable problem was a 45-minute outage 9 months ago). We’re awaiting their full explanation of what went wrong, but in the meantime, we want to let you know that we always have alternate channels you can check in case there’s a problem here: Twitter (@westseattleblog), Facebook (WS Blog), and on the Web, our main backup is our White Center site, whitecenternow.com – its server is managed by a different company, in a different city, so it was up the whole time WSB was down, and there’s little chance that one problem in a certain geographic area can take out everything we use to get you information. Thanks for your patience, and now, on with the news – we’ve got several new stories in the works, and we’ll be at the first Christmas ship stop in a couple hours (5:15 pm at Seacrest), never mind the rain (remember two years ago when that stop immediately preceded The Snow?).
Circulated on a couple of city mailing lists today: A reminder that the Delridge Community Center has a computer lab available for anyone to use, teens through seniors. Lab coordinator Leslie Howle says there’s usually room for more to come use it, explaining:
We provide a free computer lab for teens through seniors to use our 12 computers and access the internet. We offer homework help for teens only from 2:30 – 4 every day and the rest of the time we are open to everyone to drop in and use the lab. We offer very inexpensive classes, some geared for seniors in particular and some for all adults, on computer basics and fun things like Photoshop and building a blog or website. … Beginning in January, we will be expanding our hours and offering the time between 1 and 2:30 for seniors to come use “open lab” time or take a class. We will also be available to help adults with resume writing and job search during that time and in the evenings.
Haven’t been to Delridge Community Center? Here’s a map. And you can check Delridge CC hours on its website.
If you haven’t been to the WSB Forums (open round-the-clock for WSB’er-to-WSB’er discussion, 100,000+ posts in less than 3 years) lately, a couple things to point out this afternoon: First, member DP suggests night two of White Center’s Dia de los Muertos celebration as a creative activity for tonight, 5-8 pm (maybe to “kill” time waiting for that big round of election returns?) He went to night one and has posted a report with photos and info. Second, the Forums get a few lost/found posts (aside from pets, which have their own page) each week, but this one is unusual – a mom who left a stroller outside a Junction eatery the other night came back out to find it gone, with a similar one left in its place, and is hoping to get hers back (read more here).
Two years after the stalled buses of Snowpocalypse (right) – one year after a virtually problem-free mild winter – Metro is taking steps today to make sure it’s ready, and its riders are ready, in case this winter turns out to be more like 2008-2009 than 2009-2010. Metro boss Kevin Desmond is briefing the King County Council this morning at 9:30 am; you can watch live on cable channel 22 or kingcounty.gov/council. And Metro’s just sent out a news release with reminders about the route-specific e-mail/text alerts you can sign up for now in case something goes awry with your bus (or the Water Taxi!), whether it’s snow, rain, bridges, or any other trouble. See it here (links included). We’ll have more on the Metro briefing later. (P.S. Our preview on the plan that never had to kick in last year was in this November 2009 story.) 9:43 AM UPDATE: The briefing has just begun. 10:46 AM UPDATE: The briefing’s over. No big surprises but we are working on a separate summary – we’ve also asked for the graphics from the presentation, so that we can share that info if you missed the briefing.
ADDED 4 PM: The summary’s been sidetracked but here, courtesy of Linda Thielke at the KC Department of Transportation, is the PowerPoint presentation given today – including an example of how the Metro website will look when they kick into severe weather mode. Interesting points included the county’s “memorandum of understanding” with the city of Seattle and its commitment to helping plow key in-city bus routes, particularly, they say, SODO.
One month ago, we shared the news that we – and you – were in the final running for a national Online Journalism Award. Tonight, your editor here is at the awards banquet in Washington, D.C., the final event in the Online News Association‘s annual conference – and we won! We’ve just had the thrill of accepting that award on behalf of not just the WSB team but all of West Seattle. (Tough competition – the other three finalists were projects by CNN, CBC, and the LA Times.) Too dark in here to add a photo of the trophy yet but we will later. Trophy at right. Most importantly, THANK YOU for your collaboration in sharing West Seattle news, information, and discussion 24/7 … collaboration that has drawn national attention and now, formal recognition of its extraordinary nature. We are honored to be working with you and for you, 24/7.
9:18 PM: The archived video of the awards banquet is online now – if you’re interested in the WSB announcement and acceptance, it’s about 22:30 in.
ORIGINAL 10:33 AM REPORT: The mayor and city tech boss Bill Schrier (a West Seattleite) have just started a briefing on the new look of seattle.gov – you can watch live above. Notes as we go. Key points: This is the result of a usability study; it streamlines “the interface to five portals instead of nine.” The search feature is stronger, Schrier explains. Also, the right-side links to elected officials, on the home page’s right side, will include their Facebook and Twitter links. There’s a dropdown toward the middle of the page to get you to the relatively new “My Neighborhood” maps, which include layers for 911 calls (not all “live” – there’s a few hours’ lag for police reports) and police reports.
(10:44 am) The mayor is noting that the new look does NOT run throughout all seattle.gov pages yet. Schrier says Knowledge As Power is the firm that has conducted a usability study that helped pave the way for some of the changes they made. He also notes there are 100,000 pages on the city website at the moment so “it will take a long time for us to circulate through (all the pages) to upgrade its look and feel.” The mayor says ask.seattle.gov will be launched in the future for people to post questions – and he says his office will monitor and forward questions to appropriate departments. He says he intends the web to be used more for engagement than to just “push information out to people.”
(10:49 am) Questions/answers now. We asked about personalization. Not yet, but my.seattle.gov is still in the works. Another question: Mobile “light” version of the site? Answer: Not yet. Question: Cost of this redesign? Answer: Less than $5,000 in outside resources (Knowledge As Power says their usability study cost the city less than $1K – their report’s been published online, reps from KAP just said).
(11:01 am) The mayoral media availability has now moved on to other Q/A which so far have included Fire Department staffing, the Viaduct questionnaire to be discussed by WSDOT this afternoon, and two City Council bills the mayor opposed.
(11:28 am) The briefing’s now completely concluded. When the video we streamed live earlier is available in archive, we’ll bring back the link. In the meantime, we had a few post-briefing chats: One reason the redesign didn’t include mobile is the cost, Schrier says – they’d made a budget request but it would have been more than $150,000.
Tomorrow, the entire City of Seattle website is scheduled to launch a new look, “making services more accessible,” according to the mayor’s office. Today, Seattle City Light> is already a bit ahead of the curve – with a new “outage tracker” already online. City Light’s Scott Thomsen walked us through it: Go to the SCL home page at seattle.gov/light – and note the System Status box in the right sidebar:
Caveat, this will look different after tomorrow’s redesign launches – but the same info will be available in this order, toward the top of the page. If there’s an outage, a click in the box will take you to a map, where the outage will be marked in red (the bigger the outage, the bigger the mark, but as you zoom in on the map, you’ll get to something like this) – a click on the red brings up a bubble with outage basics:
The biggest thing, Thomsen explains, is that this will be updated every 15 minutes, and it will automatically get new information from what City Light workers are learning from callers and crew members. Previously, the utility used a seldom-used webpage that sometimes displayed outage information – and more often didn’t – Thomsen explains that it wasn’t linked into outage-related info the way this new one is. In addition, the old system wouldn’t be called into action for small outages; this one will show outages of any size. You still need to call and report them, he emphasizes – City Light does not yet have the technology to automatically detect them. But the new software enabling the online “system status” will enable more features around next February, Thomsen adds – perhaps even phone notifications when the outage at your house is over.
Everyone who’s part of WSB – as a reader, commenter, tipster, writer, photo-sharer, Forums member, sponsor, events-calendar-item-sender, ANYTHING – is a finalist for a national award! Before today’s river of news sweeps us away, we wanted to share the details: WSB is a finalist for the Online News Association‘s “Community Collaboration” award. This is only the second year the national group of online journalists will be presenting this, as part of the annual national awards (full nominees list here); the first one last year went to our friends across the bay at My Ballard, so, inspired by their achievement, this year we decided to enter the competition on behalf of you and everybody else in the 27,000 local homes, businesses, 
and institutions who are part of this great news-covering/news-sharing/news-discussing adventure every week. Tough competition – the other finalists are projects of CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and north-of-the-border CBC – but we’ll find out who wins at the Online News Association’s convention in D.C. on October 30th. WSB isn’t the only Seattle finalist this year – our partners at the Seattle Times are also up for Breaking News, Large Site, for their Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Lakewood Police murders last fall. Anyway, we wanted to let you know, and once again, to say: THANK YOU. Your collaboration in turn helps inform thousands of your neighbors – often a story begins with just one tip, question, photo, e-mail, or a call to 206-293-6302, which is answered 24/7 – we may not always do your contributions justice, but we continue to try our best each day. Now back to the news!
The day after North Delridge Neighborhood Council members previewed their new website at their monthly meeting, the site is live at ndnc.org. It’s got features including a photo page – and contact info for council leaders. (The Admiral Neighborhood Association is working on a site too, and that’s part of their agenda tonight.) We’ll be adding the NDNC’s new site posthaste to the list of community-organization links in the WSB sidebar.
| 8 COMMENTS