Below are the 5 most recent journal entries recorded in Allen Morris' LiveJournal:

Sunday, August 14th, 2005
9:37 pm	Winmore and Carrboro It's been years since Winmore was approved by the Carrboro Board of Aldermen in the face of large amounts of public protest. Since then, a large area to the north or Carrboro was forcibly annexed, this time in the face of extraordinarily huge amounts of public protest. The off-year elections ar looming in November 2005 (off year by design, since fewer people vote, and incumbents tend to get re-elected). This year appears interesting because Katrina Ryan is running for a seat on the Carrboro Board of Aldermen. Katrina lives in the annexed area previously mentioned and she actually had to move into Carrboro to run! (It seems the Carrboro Board of Aldermen had selected the effective data of annexation such that the new citizens were cheated out of an election cycle by a few months.) There is also a new Orange County politics site that is set up as a BBS instead of a blog. We'll have to see what kind of participation that can generate. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 11th, 2003
8:54 am	More Winmore News The Chapel Hill News ran an article today (May 11) called Contested Project Back in Public Arena. It contains an interesting quote from one of the developers: "We’ve heard from a huge number of supporters, and we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback." This is interesting because, when I looked back at all the public records for all the public meetings, there are approximately 2 or 3 people who speak in favor of Winmore and about 5 to 10 who speak against it. I also looked in some (premium content) newspaper databases and found a bunch of editorials about Winmore, all against. So where are the "huge number of supporters"? and why don't they provide any public input? Why is the only website about Winmore from the opposition? Relating this back to the groups of size 150-180, a "village" of more than 200 single-family homes (with well over 400 people) is too big to have the qualities that are found in tribes (or in housing developments with less than 100 homes). The Winmore project isn't large enough to splinter into an interesting number of 150-180 person sets, but it is too big to be a single 150-180 person group. Lose, lose. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 10th, 2003
12:51 pm	The size of social groups Back in February, the Economist had an article (premium content, sorry) about this work. The really interesting part of the Economist article was this: "Coincidentally (or perhaps not) the figure of 150-180 is the number of people which psychological testing has shown that an individual can know well enough to have a permanent social relationship with. It is also the maximum size that anthropologists find for clans of hunter gatherers, villages in pre-industrial societies, and even infantry companies in armies." [The Economist, Feb 21st 2002, Safety in numbers] In large corporations, departments and sections tend form fiefdoms that usually put the success of the group above the success of the company as a whole. In my experience, these groups seem to approach but not exceed the 150-180 person limit. This suggests that a focused company cannot grow beyond about 200 people without losing an essential human quality. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
5:15 am	Local Development I finally caught up on the last week of newspapers, and there was an article about local housing development. It sounds like most developments are approved without much community input, but one (called "Winmore") that's slated for approval this month has generated quite a bit of concern. One interesting problem in this case is that the citizen advisory groups only have about 2 weeks to evaluate a proposal that's almost a year old. I would have thought that local government would have resolved all these kinds of process issues by now... (Comment on this)
Friday, May 9th, 2003
2:21 pm	Wireless is Good So, I'm sitting on my neighbors porch watching a whole bunch of neighborhood kids playing in the driveway and front yard. All the while connected to my home LAN via 802.11b. Wireless is a good thing. (Comment on this)