Jason Clarke

For some reason, my Gmail address (jgclarke@gmail.com) receives a surprising amount of mis-directed emails from people who apparently meant to send to jclarke, or jgclark, or some other variation on my particular address. This isn’t totally surprising, as first names which start with “J”, and Jason in particular, are pretty popular.

In any case, these wrong emails arrive to me with some regularity, enough that I have a label in Gmail to group them. Individually they may seem mundane, but taken as a slice of a stranger’s life they can be quite interesting.

I’ve thought about the privacy implications of publishing some of these emails in a series, and I think the process of removing people’s email address or any personal details (and in fact I’ve changed names where I see fit) essentially renders the emails ‘found items’ and makes it reasonable to publish them. If you disagree, please do so respectfully in the comments.

Now, on to the first few in a series. First up, a woman whose return home is apparently imminent, perhaps from a business trip? And who is Bridget? Their nanny?

To: [hidden]
From: [hidden]
Date: 9/20/2007, 10:07am
Subject: I really miss Goldie and you and home

Oh, coordinate whatever is going on with Goldie with Bridget please.

Here’s another one- apparently the correspondents were debating the provenance of the famous Christmas song?

To: [hidden]
From: [hidden]
Date: 10/09/2007, 12:09am
Subject: Cantique de Noël

“O Holy Night” (”Cantique de Noël”) is a well-known Christmas carol composed by Adolphe Adam in 1847 to the French poem “Minuit, chrétiens” by Placide Cappeau (1808-1877), an accomplished amateur. It has become a standard modern carol for solo performance with a operatic finish.

MaineOpenGov.org is a revolutionary new website which creates some amazing opportunities for enterprising journalists, bloggers, and citizens to ask questions in public and among friends about our state government and back them up with facts.

How and why? The how is simple: Sponsored by the Maine Heritage Policy Center, the MaineOpenGov.org website provides a powerful, usable search engine which allows for thousands of public records to be searched on a variety of metrics. From state employee salaries to state payments to outside contractors, citizens can access a variety of information previously difficult to obtain, or unavailable altogether.

The why is equally simple: Transparency and accountability, two forces which are not only severely lacking in almost every government enterprise, but which can be powerful change agents for citizens to hold their elected (and non-elected) officials accountable.

Anybody with an internet connection (or access to a library) can search for patterns- or even single instances- of data, and use that information to tell their friends, publish it on a blog, or contact their representative(s).

This is big stuff, people of Maine- I hope to dive more into it in the coming weeks, and I encourage other Maine citizens to do the same. It’s at MaineOpenGov.org- give it a minute of your time today, even out of curiosity’s sake.

And on a side note, how have I not heard of the Maine Heritage Policy Center before? Judging by the MaineOpenGov site, as well as their organizational website, they are definitely an organization to watch, right in our own backyard.