Syndicate
To understand the problem of natural right, one must start, not from the "scientific" understanding of political things but from their "natural" understanding, i.e., from the way in which they present themselves in political life, in action, when they are our business, when we have to make decisions. This does not mean that political life necessarily knows of natural right. Natural right had to be discovered, and there was political life prior to that discovery. It means merely that political life in all its forms necessarily points toward natural right as an inevitable problem. Awareness of this problem is not older than political science but coeval with it. Hence a political life that does not know of the idea of natural is necessarily unaware of the possibility of political science and, indeed, of the possibility of science as such, just as a political life that is aware of the the possibility of sicence necessarily knows natural right as a problem.
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History
Also, if you want to get a feel for what I've been listening to recently, this is my chart from last.fm.
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Web Portfolio
I have worked with Drupal since February, 2006, starting with Version 4.6. I have been working with Drupal continuously since then, going through versions 5 and 6, and now anticipating version 7. In that time, I have built sites for myself, issue advocacy organizations, an internet based music project and most recently, for the several political projects of my most recent employer, The Praxis Project.
I have done extensive work in both analytics and policy – I bring the precision of a programmer and data analyst to any work that I do, be it policy research, web development or freelance writing. My writing has been featured in Real Clear Politics and The Moderate Voice, and my political websites have been prominently featured in various list-servs.
I am a firm believer in a strong vision of Free or Open Source Software (FOSS), and I draw a lot of inspiration in my view of the internet as a virtual commons from Dr. Lessig and the IRC enabled development communities. To the fullest extent possible, I will advise my clients on how to best accomplish their goals using FOSS and help guide them to Open Source practices in handling their content and ideas.
I prefer to work with designers unless the client absolutely requires that I do the conceptual work, as well. Here is a partial list of sites that I have done.
Simple Sites
This is my personal site, and has no real budget to speak of nor any purpose besides aggregating my contact information and allowing people to find me. This site began in Drupal 4 and I have consistently upgraded along the way, so it is impossible to give an accurate hours estimate of how this was built. I also frequently use this site for testing things out rather than use one of my live sites.
2.
Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. is the nation's oldest historically African-American sisterhood and public service organization. Iota Omega chapter, chartered in Norfolk, Virginia, is one of the oldest chapters of this organization with a local membership of over 100 professional women.
The web site is designed to provide information to the general public about the chapter's social and public service activities in the Tidewater region, in addition to providing a means of internal communication and operational transparency to its members.
This site was built in Drupal 6. Design and graphics by Tony Teat of Masai Interactive.
This site is done in Drupal 6, and I built it over the course of thirty hours, working with a graphic designer for the banner. The client did not hire a web designer to create an overall appearance/theme with their branding, colour schemes, etc. - I remain dissatisfied with the colour scheme and layout, but they loved it. Some people think that Drupal is so powerful and complex that you cannot simply get something up quickly and continue to refine it. I think that this site shows that to be untrue. The finished product was turned over to the client after twenty-six hours, and they have yet to finish populating it with content. Nonetheless, this was done in less than thirty hours for a group with a $100,000 annual operating budget and less than $1,200 for a website.
4.
This site was a project of my prior employer, The Praxis Project. When I received it, it was in Drupal 5, and had to be upgraded to Drupal 6. This was the first project on which I worked with Tony Teat, Principal and Founder of Masai Design. He built the stylesheets, which I translated into a Drupal theme. This site has a custom module built for it that generates a clickable map with pop-up information. I cannot estimate how much time was spent on the original version, but upgrading to Drupal 6 and redoing the custom module took forty-two hours. This project had an operating budget of $150,000 per annum. The budget for the site was not explicit, as it was built by staff.
5.
This site was a project of my prior employer, The Praxis Project. When I received it, it was in Drupal 5, and had to be upgraded to Drupal 6. This was the first project on which I worked with the design team at The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. They built the stylesheets, which I translated into a Drupal theme. I cannot estimate how much time was spent on the original version, but upgrading to Drupal 6 took twenty-five hours. This project had an operating budget of roughly $10m over ten years.. The budget for the site was not explicit, as it was built by staff.
6.
This site was a project of my prior employer, The Praxis Project. When I received it, it was in Drupal 5, and had so much custom work done for it that we never really explored moving to Drupal 6. This was the second project on which I worked with Tony Teat, Principal at Masai Design. He built the stylesheets, which I translated into a Drupal theme. This site took quite a long time to build because of the Flash involved. This project had an operating budget of roughly $50,000 per annum. The budget for the site was not explicit, as it was built by staff.
More Complex Site
This is the website of former employer. They are currently working to get it into Drupal.
The National Society of Collegiate Scholars is the premier academic honours society for undergraduate and graduate students in the United States of America. With chapters in every state, ranging from community colleges to graduate programmes, NSCS represents the largest share of honours programme college students. Through this website, they provide a constant stream of services to their membership, as well as resources. This site is currently in Drupal 5 for reasons of inherited custom development.
Kick Butts Day is an annual event put on by the Campaign For Tobacco Free kids. For 2010's event, they needed a complex Google Maps integration for their site, which I was happy to write.
Arts For LA is a non-profit organisation working to acheive parity in arts education funding in Los Angeles. On this site, they needed to connect their CRM tool to their website and ensure a smooth integration. It was a fun project to work on connecting Salsa Labs's Democracy In Action platform to Drupal.
The National Association of Drug Court Professionals is a professional assocation and advocate for people who work in drug courts. For this Drupal 6 site, I worked on the Google Maps integration.
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