My Websites

Placemaking and Community Development

I think creating a healthy community is the best antidote to homelessness. So while I still sometimes update Street Life Solutions and related sites, my focus these days is community development.

There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in. ― Desmond Tutu.

Writing

Miscellany

Last Updated February 12, 2022.

Sticky This: See a typo? Submit a pull request.

For the first time ever, I submitted a pull request yesterday to an open source project notifying them of a typo. It was accepted within hours. Submitting the pull request was easy and took almost no time. The process of submitting it gave me valuable prompts, such as "This field is typically no more than 50 characters." I've been on Hacker News for over eleven years. I began wondering how on earth I can contribute to open source as a non-coder a few years back. I've talked to other non-coders who were just as mystified as I was -- or more mystified -- as to how on earth you get into open source as a non coder. So, no, it isn't just me. I spent probably a few hours yesterday trying to sort out how on earth to notify them of their typo. It took me far, far longer to figure out what I needed to do than it took to do it. This is a huge barrier to entry and will stop most people before they begin. Most people simply can't give you three hours of their t

Me. Woodward Park, Fresno, CA. January 2016.

Privacy and Safety Online

This is real off the cuff and I have no plans to give any kind of citations. If you feel I can't give you any useful advice based on firsthand experience and personal opinion and you want a bunch of links to a bunch of studies, then this is not the post for you. Hopefully, some of this is generally useful to anyone, but it is being written by a woman and based on years and years of trying to sort my personal crap out because I have a long history of being a walking, talking train wreck waiting to happen. I've worked really hard to reduce the online drama that tends to swirl around me and, so far, it hasn't turned into genuine real life drama (of the "need to call the police" variety -- that doesn't mean there haven't been some real world impacts). So I think I know a thing or three that might be helpful. Loose Lips Sink Ships That's a military saying. I've never been in the military, but I've had relatives who were career military. Du

Doreen Michele

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