Five things I learned this week (innaugural Windy City edition)

Convention Crowd, Chicago. 1912. Library of Congress via Flickr Commons

1. Kuler (via Liz Gerber) – Adobe-owned site for user-uploaded color combinations. Elegant color combinations can be wonderful tools for data visualization, graphic design, and more. In this case, the names provided for the combinations are more colorful than the combinations.
2. Metro Chicago Data – A handy repository of public datasets from various government agencies and other public sources.
3. Chicago Crime Map – Crime statistics with a friendly interface. Provided by the Chicago Tribune.
4. Bewtween the Bars – Brilliant prison blogging project initiated (as I understand it) by Charlie de Tar at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Best of all, you can help transcribe posts!
5. Bikenapped (via Mako) – A site mapping bicycle theft data around the Boston area. This should exist for every city.

Of Mitt Romeny, El Salvador, and bicycles

The news that during the creation of Bain Capital Mitt Romney sought large investments from some of El Salvador’s notorious “oligarchs” should not be particularly surprising given the extent of the support the US government and private sector provided to the Salvadoran government and political elites during the country’s civil war from 1980-92.

In the grand narrative of the 2012 presidential campaign, I suspect this story will figure as (at most) a very minor footnote. Nevertheless, I wanted to draw attention to it because of my personal connections to El Salvador and the persistence of that country’s civil war in the lives of so many of its residents.

During and after my first year of college, I visited El Salvador for almost 9 months. At the time, I worked with a small community organization called Grupo Tamarindo (that would later be known as the Tamarindo Foundation – warning: link is to their Facebook page).

The Tamarindo Foundation online presence doesn’t really do the group justice. By the standards of the nonprofit and NGO sector, it’s a tiny organization with almost no budget and even less in the way of public relations materials to document what its members have accomplished in the group’s nearly 20 years of existence.

During that time, the group and it’s leader John Guiliano have sought to rebuild the town of Guarjila, El Salvador and, in particular, to create opportunities for the town’s young people to pursue education, arts, athletics, and entrepreneurship.

The Tamarindo has made progress towards all of these goals and more while working on a shoestring budget, microscopic scale, and generational time-horizon. That said, any progress has been slow, and the underlying cycles of poverty and violence that make life in El Salvador and in Guarjila so precarious persist.

In this way, over twenty years since the Salvadoran civil war ended, its effects can still be felt, whether in the gangs that were formed in U.S. prisons by war refugees or in the lack of adequate educational and career opportunities that lead so many of El Salvador’s young people to seek employment and security through illegal migration.

The current goal of the Tamarindo is to build a community center where the organization can continue to do its work. In order to support this goal, John has started a bicycle ride across the United States. After handing in my dissertation draft last Sunday, I joined the first three days of the ride from Boston to New Haven. You can follow the ride through John’s Facebook updates and donate (via their ImAthlete page). The itinerary includes stops across the country and, if you want to learn more about the Tamarindo, the ride, or El Salvador, I encourage you to contact John and attend one of the tour events.

Members of the Grupo Tamarindo training for the ride.

so many bicycles, so little time

"the king of skitch"

Sad I missed the bicycle film fesitval while it was in Boston last week – I love bicycles and I love movies, so the combination would probably have worked well.

Maybe it’s coming soon to a city near you?

(h/t AG)