City
New website collects open letters to Mayor Ford
A new website aims to make good on Mayor Rob Ford's claim that he wants to hear from his constituents. Called Dear Mayor Ford, it aims to foster political engagement by enabling users to read and write open letters to the city's leader. It went live early this morning, and as of the time that I write this, already has 17 letters published to the site.
According to the about page, the website "has been built, and is maintained by Constituents of Toronto on behalf of all Toronto Constituents with the sole purpose of providing a unified public forum where we may post open letters to the Mayor's Office." That's a little vague, of course, but one assumes the idea is to make the project as open and democratic as possible, so why advertise a single author as creator?
Many of the letters thus far could be termed predictable — there's a lot of frustration on display — but others genuinely address the mayor and ask him to explain or account for his decisions and policies. These are the most interesting to read, but you have to surf through the lot to get to them.
Given how easy the site makes it to write a letter, it'd be beneficial to have some sort of filtering system for those that have been uploaded. Should the site get up to 100s of letters, too many good ones will get lost in the plot because readers won't have the time to sift through them all. Perhaps, then, it would make sense to sort them by topic or to implement a reader-voted ranking system to bring the most pertinent to the top of the heap.
In the absence of such a strategy, I suspect it'll be tough to engage the public in any meaningful sense. Writing a letter involves more than signing a petition. People want to know someone's going to read it — even if it's not Rob Ford.
For more info about Dear Mayor Ford, check out the site's Facebook page
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His platform may have been most closely matched to the plurality of voters, but his views don't represent the people of Toronto.
Letters, petitions, protests...all great, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to an election. It should be interesting next time 'round.
As for the questions about delivering the letters to the Mayor's office, that is something that has been given some thought. Originally the idea of emailing them seemed like a good idea, but it's far too easy to delete an email.
Printing them off and delivering them really does sound like a good idea. It's pretty hard to ignore a stack of letters from your Constituents. It might even be worth while to make an event of it, see if we cannot get some supporters to come down and deliver them. It would definitely have a lot more impact.
So please, do send us emails with your thoughts and suggestions on how we can improve the site and make it easier to use. dearmayorford@gmail.com
Think big!
I know you are a "Ford," but try thinking more like a "Lincoln."
Quite the contrary. There are several smart satirical posts. Take a look at #21, #29, #45, and one of my favorites #49.
The post you mention that I removed was not satirical. It was an attack on the man's health. That has nothing to do with politics.
public should spend money on arts and culture, please take one moment
and consider history. Every great civilization of the past has fallen
from within due to certain forms of overspending on cities, their
culture and buildings therein. Every great civilization that has spanned
a continent has failed due to over-taxation of the working class and
farmers. Don’t take my word for it read some global history, I would
recommend for starters, Chris Harman, A peoples history of the world. I
know it’s nice to have opera houses, bike lanes and arts endowments but
the truth is that none of that keeps us going economically, what does
keep us going is cheap and abundant food and plenty of gainful
employment. Thanks Rob Ford for getting started with this work, I would
invite you to read the book as well, if we don’t know our history we
will most certainly repeat it, lets try to repeat the good parts only.
I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE PERSON UNDER YOU WHO SENT YOUR GARBAGE TO OUR LITTLE TOWN WHERE IT HAS BEEN SMOULDERING IN A SHADY BUSINESS IN ATTICA N.Y.SINCE LAST OCTOBER.WE THE VILLAGERS HAVE BEEN BREATHING IN THIS BURNING GARBAGE WHICH IS NOW PUTTING TOXIC CHEMICALS AND HAS KEPT US IN OUR HOUSES ALL SUMMER.PLEASE GET ON FACEBOOK -SOMETHING STINKS IN ATTICA AND READ OUR STORY.HOPEFULLY THIS WAS NOT HOSPITAL WASTE.I'M NOT BLAMING YOU WANT YOU TO SEE WHATS GOING ON.OUR VILLAGE GOVERMENT DOESN'T HAVE A CLUE.THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME.GEORGE E. CARRICK JR.
9 SOUTH PEARL ST.
ATTICA N.Y. 14011 585-591-4221