About JoinTheConversation
About Me
This is Scott Chacon’s blog. I am a computer programmer living in the Bay Area of California, working with Ruby, PHP, MySQL and other such fun stuff. Here I tend to write about my life and the things that interest me, such as my wife Jessica, her genocide studies, Ruby on Rails, Africa, Open Source Politics, hiking and camping, my cats, distance running and triathlons.
Ruby on Rails and Web Development
I have been working with Ruby on Rails for a little over 2 years now, since the spring of 2005, I think it was around v0.11. I have written around a dozen full web apps since that time using Rails, probably even more if you count projects I was just playing around with. I’m even lucky enough to work on Rails apps professionally as well.
Before Rails, I used PHP since 3.0 very first came out, way back in 1998 or so. I was an avid user of PHP versions 3, 4 and 5, all the way up until I met Ruby. I’ve also used MySQL and Apache and the rest of the standard OSS stack for a long time.
Africa and GlobalEyes
In the summer of 2006, my wife and I traveled to Kenya and Rwanda for several weeks with Dr. Margee Ensign, a good friend of ours from my foray into local politics. We visited our friends at Tropical Focus NGO in Kisumu, Kenya whom my wife had raised some money for through Dr. Ensign’s not-for-profit, GlobalEyes. They run an orphanage and help local widows in the area. After we got back, my wife and I were invited to join the board of directors for GlobalEyes, and have been involved ever since.
After Kenya, we flew to Rwanda, where Dr. Ensign met with several local officials, some of which we were lucky enough to sit in on, including the ministers of Foreign Affairs, Science and Technology, and Tourism. We got to trek to see the mountain gorillas (of Diane Fosse fame) and tour several genocide memorials. We were also given permission to film a Gacaca trial, which is an incredibly rare opportunity, and to interview several survivors. My wife, Jessica, has been studying genocide for a while (she is a USHMM Teacher Fellow), so this was fascinating to us both.
My Africa Posts,
My Africa Pictures
Open Source Politics
I have been interested in what I call “Open Source Politics” for several years now. It is the idea that openness and transparency through technology can improve our political system. It is probably best articulated by people such as Andrew Rasiej (Closing the Imagination Gap) and Micah Sifry (The Rise of Open Source Politics), and I am interested in it’s development and future.
Congressional Campaign
At the end of 2004, after participating in a frustrating campaign for Congress for Jerry McNerney in CA-11, I decided to run for Congress myself. I knew it was not something I was likely to win, but I wanted to provide an example of what technology could mean in politics and the only politician I could get to fully embrace my ideas was, well, me.
I was able to do a lot of stuff - I met Dr. Ensign, dozens of interesting people in the area, people like Mr. Rasiej and Mr. Sifry, people on the Mark Warner for President campaign (Trei Brundrett and Nancy Scola), and dozens of others around the country that were interested in the ideas I was putting forward. These included things like:
* $100 campaign contribution limits
* Open Schedule – first come, first served campaign scheduling
* Micro Goals – small, easily achievable, specific donation goals with reports
* Call Me – Letting people request a personal call from the candidate online
* Open Books – realtime feed of donations and expenditures as they happen
All of which I was able to implement with Rails and demonstrate as interesting ideas for a campaign. It was interesting and fun, and I learned enough about politics to know that I’ll probably never want to do it again. 
