The Percival

News for Olympia, WA.

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Open data in Olympia

What data does Olympia make available to the public? How do we find it? How does Olympia compare to other cities in towns in Washington and across the country?

Using the US City Open Data Census as a guide, we’ll be exploring what Olympia has available and how you can access and use the data. In cases where the data is not available, we’ll be making public record requests for that data and making it available on the website of The Percival.

This is an ongoing project, and you can watch the progress at http://thepercival.com/open-data/

Want to help?

Do you know if any of these datasets are made available in Olympia, and where to find them? Add notes to the Data page on the Olympia LocalWiki.

You can also send us an email with questions or ideas: hi at thepercival dot com

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Great Comments on News Articles

You can't argue with math. Comment from Part 3 of The Olympian's Taking back downtown series.

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Why does going to weeklyvolcano.com point to a website named northwestmilitary.com?

It's weird! Try it. Or don't. Because weird.

This is awful. Weekly Volcano, why is this happening?

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Jezebels being replaced by Obisidian

Jezebels on 4th is gone. A new place named Obsidian will take its place.

So far there's limited info about this new space, but there's a facebook page and an interview at a publication named northwestmilitary.com.

(Sidenote: weeklyvolcano.com redirects to northwestmilitary.com. What's the deal with that?)

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The Kiss in Olympia WA

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There’s a wiki page for The Kiss here: http://localwiki.net/oly/The_Kiss

Add pictures / what you know about the statue!

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If you missed this weekend's tugboat race at Harbor Days, this video from The Olympian pretty much shows what it was like.

Tugboats are cool.

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Whereas, there is a paywall to public records in most other counties. 

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We're hosting a Learn to Code Workshop on September 15.

Seth Vincent, who has hosted a bunch of these workshops up in Seattle, is running the workshop. Over the course of a few hours, you'll have a good foundation with Javascript and will have completed a small project. 

It's from 5:30 to 8:30 at The Harbor House right on Percival Landing and you can sign up here. 

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This game bunnies having sex sounds really adorable.

The game is Twitterpated being developed by Olympia based Electrotrash Games. 

In the game, you play as Cupid making shy bunnies fall in love and reproduce. As the game's Kickstarter page says, though:

The world wouldn't be that colorful if we were all the same. When the player matches two bunnies of the same gender together instead of producing offspring a rainbow appears in the sky!  The next time a bunny is born it is randomly colored.  The player gets extra points for helping to bring colorful bunnies into the world.  It takes all colors to make the rainbow!

Then, once the population gets too high you have to "cull the population." The developer wants to release it for browser, iOS, and Android and 10% of the proceeds from the game goes to Stonewall Youth. 

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OlyNews is now The Percival.

We were on hiatus and now we're back with a better name.

You'll find short blog posts on interesting things related to Olympia, Washington, longer explainers to give you more context about current events here, workshops and meetups, and stories on things that need more attention.

You can follow us at @percivalnews on twitter.

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Intercity Transit ranks pretty well for most mid-sized transit systems in the country.

REUBEN FISCHER-BAUM, at fivethirtyeight.com has a handy table ranking the 290 cities who gave data to The Federal Transit Adminstration. 

“The measure used is “unlinked trips,” which counts transfers during the same journey as separate trips. This figure can be converted to “trips per resident” by dividing unlinked trips in 2013 by 2012 population estimates from the American Community Survey (ACS), yielding a figure that’s neatly comparable among cities of varying sizes.”

Basically, the less busses you need to catch to get where you are going, the better. Intercity Transit, is ranked 42 out of the 290 cities, right above Spokane at 30.2 trips per capita and, according to their website has a daily ridership of about 14,000.

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Do you give money to people who panhandle?

Dylan Matthews from Vox has a post about GiveDirectly, a non-profit that gives cash to people in developing countries with almost no-strings attached, asking its staff if they give money to people who panhandle in their area.

2 people said they give most of the time, 5 said they did so sometimes, and 4 said they never did

You can see their explanations for why or why not here. Then, read this post on the Freakonomics blog back in 2007 asking people like Mark Cuban (owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers) and Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) if they give to people who panhandle. Some of them are incredible and hilariously thoughtful. 

I appreciate two Matthews brings up:

Harvard's Kathryn Edin and Michigan's Luke Shaefer found that more than 600,000 households lived on less than $2 a day per person in 2011, even after you take food stamps and other benefits into account. 

[...]

Second, Penn State's Barrett Lee and the University of Alaska - Anchorage's Chad Farrell found in 2003 that panhandlers are worse off than the overall homeless population; they report lower incomes and less government aid, and are less likely to report working in the past month. They're also likelier to have substance abuse or mental health problems, and the data is a bit old, but this at least serves as suggestive evidence that money given to homeless people who are actively soliciting it might be well-targeted.

I'll give a dollar every once in a while, usually depending on if I am in a generous mood or if the person is nice about it. But I usually don't because I am poor. I don't think there would be a huge difference in the impact of our respective lives between how they would spend their dollar and how I would spend my dollar. I like to believe I would give more often to someone who spare changed me at Sylvester Park if I were a rich man, and I really wouldn't miss that dollar.

I doubt we'll see any Olympia specific studies about either how money gained through panhandling is spent or its effects on local businesses (even the Thurston County Homeless Census calls the effects "real or perceived) so we can make a more informed decision about this. I think it's an interesting thought, though, to say giving money to someone who asks you for money might be a "well-targeted" approach to helping the needy.

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You can edit the wiki page that the list is on! You can do it!

Help by adding links to organizations based in Olympia and Thurston county with programs for people facing homelessness.

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Rainbow Bridge

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A great report on the criminalization of homelessness. Camp Quixote gets (even more) kudos in the report.

In short, the report by Washington DC based National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, basically says that it is a waste of money and resources to make laws against panhandling, loitering, and sleeping in public places.

Criminalization measures do nothing to address the

underlying causes of homelessness and, instead, only

worsen the problem. Misusing police power to arrest

homeless people is only a temporary intervention,

as most people are arrested and incarcerated for

short periods of time. Ultimately, arrested homeless

people return to their communities, still with nowhere

to live and now laden with financial obligations, such as court fees, that they cannot pay. Moreover, criminal convictions – even for minor crimes – can create barriers to obtaining critical public benefits, employment, or housing, thus making homelessness more difficult to escape.

The City of Olympia isn't innocent of this. In Olympia it is considered a "pedestrian interference" if you panhandle within 25 feet of an ATM or a parking meter (which effectively eliminates panhandling in certain parts of downtown), or to lie, sit or sleep on the sidewalk or alley downtown between 7am and midnight. Also, The City of Olympia encourages people to call 9-11 if someone asks you for money within 25 feet of an ATM or pay station. The report gives a shout out to Quixote Village, though, even if it just refers to it as a "micro-housing community" as an innovative way to address the problem. Something to keep in mind that the report left out: Quixote Village came out of a protest against the City of Olympia banning sleeping in the commercial areas of Olympia. That, and it took about 7 years to get the zoning laws changed and facing legal challenges to make the village possible.

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Olympia might get a Hobby Lobby.

National craft retailer Hobby Lobby is planning to open a store in Olympia.

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How to get around The Olympian paywall.

Having lived on the east coast for about a year a half and settling back into Olympia, I'm out of the loop on a lot of things. One of those things being that The Olympian has a pay wall. After clicking through 7 different posts, you'll be directed to the above image and asked to subscribe for around $10 a month. What's interesting, though, is there are plenty of easy ways to get past it. I was able to get past it by opening up The Olympian in private/incognito mode or just switching to a different browser. There's also a Google Chrome app to get past it. I wonder if the ease of which you can get through the pay wall without paying is a feature or a bug. Nytimes.com lets you get past their pay wall for certain stories or if you go to an article through social media. If that's the case, then it's more a "keep off the grass" sign than a wall.