no, i'm not mayor yet

Thursday, August 19, 2004, at 05:50AM

By Eric Richardson

So, a funny thing happened last night: I became an elected official.

I think my title is "Area-Wide Resident Artist", a position on the Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council. Yeah, "Resident Artist"... Me... What does that say about art?

Here's how it went down:

Around noon I got an email from Brady Westwater asking if I was going to be at the election [last night]. I called him back and said something to the effect of "What election?" He explained , sort of, and said the Higgins building was behind a candidate and I could just show up to vote. That's cool, I'm curious about this whole hyper-local government via neighborhood council thing, so I figure I'll show up.
6:30pm I show up where the voting's going to be. I then find out that the actual votings not until 7pm. No problem... I hung out and got to know the few people who were there already.
It gets to be 7pm. The Higgins group hasn't showed. Brady's calling people. Somebody's stuck in traffic. That person says they'll call the candidate. No one else shows.
Several of the 6 or 8 people there to vote are getting impatient. There's no one to vote for. To pass the time I ask more about what the position is. I don't get a very clear answer, other than the title and that the person attends the board meetings and is expected to be on a couple of DLANC's committees.
A minute or two more pass, and they're telling me that web design counts as an art these days. All of a sudden I have a candidate form in front of me and I'm filling out my name.
Paperwork done I get nominated, give a very short speech telling a little about me, how I love living downtown, and how I'm interested in pursuing ways to enable localized community via the Internet, and the voting ensues. I'm running unopposed, and everyone votes for me.
As of 7:20 or so I'm an elected official, with a position I didn't even know existed until seven hours earlier.

This is the kind of random stuff that happens to me in LA. Cool stuff, but so random...

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

Previously on this date...

2004
Eastside gets funding
Nice to see this morning that the eastside Gold Line extension got its funding passed in Congress. I haven't looked at the design docs much, but here...
2002
getting down to writing
So I'm at the point where I finally have to sit down and write the paper I figured out a topic for about a month ago. I hate that transition to actually...