Your friends and neighbors across Oakland who came together after the murder of George Floyd to try to make changes in policing at the city level. We met after listening to hours upon hours of Oakland government meetings and live-tweeting under #oakmtg. We rooted each other on as we tried to support the movement to hold OPD accountable alongside hundreds of community voices.
Then we became infuriated and fascinated by the lack of transparency and lies we saw so blatantly in front of us. We became hooked on understanding what was happening and why our city is so disorganized. We want to distill our ongoing work to understand our government into something that our friends and neighbors can understand. We may not even vote the same way amongst ourselves, and we think that’s okay, as long as we are all informed.
We created two voter guides: an exhaustive November 2020 guide and a June 2021 tidbits.
And here we are in 2022. We’re exhausted from both the pandemic and politics, differently exhausted than we were this time two years ago, or even one year ago. We were even thinking of just redirecting this URL to the official city voting webpage. Instead, we bring you the most minimally viable voter guide: the Oakland mayoral race.
We still livetweet Oakland meetings using the “#oakmtg” hashtag. Come join us! We started out with and are actively engaged in last mile civic participation: weighing in with local policymakers at the moment when ordinances are debated and passed.
We call in to various meetings, including Oakland City Council and Oakland Police Commission meetings, during the public comment sections. This can and does cause Council Members and Commissioners to change what is being voted on.
We hope you’ll engage with our city’s civic processes, too.