Virtually all of my blog readers, and for that matter, much of the world, will not know that on August 25 Roger Fisher passed away. Roger Fisher was a Harvard academic and adviser to presidents and leaders, and perhaps most importantly – because his writings touched so many people –
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eaves.ca: Transparency Case Study: There are Good and Bad Ways Your Organization can be made “Open”
If you have not had the chance, I strongly encourage you to check out a fantastic piece of journalism in this week’s Economist on the state of the Catholic Church in America. It’s a wonderful example of investigative and data driven journalism made possible (sadly) by the recent spat of
Continue readingeaves.ca: Suddenly, what happens online matters
Yesterday, the Globe and Mail had a very good editorial about online death threats. In short, the piece argues that death threats made online matter and shouldn’t be treated as somehow “inferior” to those that happen in “real life.” Death threats made on the Internet can be as serious as
Continue readingeaves.ca: China, Twitter and the 0.1%
Earlier this month I had the good fortune of visiting China – a place I’m deeply curious about and – aside from some second year university courses, the reporting from the Economist, and the occasional trip over to Tea Leaf Nation – remains too foreign to me for comfort given
Continue readingeaves.ca: Lying with Maps: How Enbridge is Misleading the Public in its Ads
The Ottawa Citizen has a great story today about an advert by Enbridge (the company proposing to build a oil pipeline across British Columbia) that includes a “broadly representational” map that shows prospective supertankers steaming up an unobstructed Douglas Channel channel on their way to and from Kitimat – the
Continue readingeaves.ca: How Government should interact with Developers, Data Geeks and Analysts
Below is a screen shot from the Opendatabc google group from about two months ago. I meant to blog about this earlier but life has been in the way. For me, this is a prefect example of how many people in the data/developer/policy world probably would like to interact with
Continue readingeaves.ca: Using Metrics to Measure Interest in an Open Source Project
David Boswell has a couple of interesting posts (here and here) about how he is using metrics to measure how effective Mozilla is at attracting and engaging people express an interest in helping contribute to the Mozilla mission. Some of the metrics being used can be seen at Mozilla’s Are
Continue readingeaves.ca: What do I think of the Canadian Senate?
Read Jennifer Ditchburn in the Globe and Mail – Senate stubborn on making information about chamber more accessible. It is laughable about how hard the Canadian Senate makes it to access information about it. The lower house – which has made good progress in the last few years on this
Continue readingeaves.ca: Is Civic Hacking Becoming ‘Our Pieces, Loosely Joined?’
I’ve got a piece up over on the WeGov blog at TechPresident – Is Civic Hacking Becoming ‘Our Pieces, Loosely Joined?‘ Juicy bit: There is however, a larger issue that this press release raises. So far, it appears that the spirit of re-use among the big players, like MySociety and
Continue readingeaves.ca: Living in the Future: My Car isn’t Flying, but it is Cheap and Gamified
I remember in the early 80’s when I was about 8 years old I walked up to my dad and said “you know the year 2000 really isn’t that far away, and unless something changes we aren’t going to get jetpacks and flying cars.” Even then I could see the
Continue readingeaves.ca: OSCON Community Management Keynote Video, Slides and some Bonus Material
Want to thank everyone who came to my session and who sent me wonderful feedback from both the keynote and the session. I was thrilled to see ZDnet wrote a piece about the keynote as well as have practioners, such as Sonya Barry, the Community Manager for Java write things
Continue readingeaves.ca: Posts on Open Source Community Management
For those stopping by my page because of my OSCON keynote here are some links on community management that might be of interest: Structurelessness, feminism and open: what open advocates can learn from second wave feminists (this is in part about why open source communities are not pure meritocracies). Developing
Continue readingeaves.ca: Containers, Facebook, Baseball & the Dark Matter around Open Data (#IOGDC keynote)
Below is a extended blog post that summarizes the keynote address I gave at the World Bank/Data.gov International Open Government Data Conference in Washington DC on Wednesday July 11th. Yesterday, after spending the day at the International Open Government Data Conference at the World Bank (and co-hosted by data.gov) I
Continue readingeaves.ca: Reviewing Access to Information Legislation
Just got informed – via the CivicAccess mailing list – that Canada’s Access to Information Commissioner is planning to review Canada’s Access to Information legislation (full story here at the Vancouver Sun). This is great news. Canada has long trumpeted its Access to Information Legislation as world leading. This was
Continue readingeaves.ca: The Long Tail of Ushahidi
I’ve got a post up over at TechPresident on Ushahidi. I’m basically responding to a new site called DeadUshahidi that points out a lot of Ushahidi maps never generate a lot of reports: What has the people at DeadUshahidi concerned is that long tail of “dead” projects. I mean, look
Continue readingeaves.ca: If you are away from your cell phone… Awesome South African Online Ad
Was doing some research for a story I am writing over at TechPresident which had me visiting the site of Mxit, a social network built largely for mobile phones and used by urban youths in South Africa. Check out the landing page for the site (note the red circle): So,
Continue readingeaves.ca: Unstructured Thinking on Open Data: A response to Tom Slee
apologies for any typos, I’d like to look this over more, but I’ve got to get to other work. Tom Slee has a very well written blog post with a critical perspective of open data. I encourage you to go and read it – but also to dive into the
Continue readingeaves.ca: Help OpenNorth Raise 10K to Improve Democracy and Engagement thru Tech
Some of you may know that I sit on the board of directors for OpenNorth – a cool little non-profit that is building tools for citizens, governments and journalists to improve participation and, sometimes, just make it a little bit easier to be a citizen. Here’s great example of a
Continue readingeaves.ca: Should we Start a Government as Platform Business Association
I have an idea. I want to suggest starting a community of disruptive software companies that are trying to sell products to local and regional governments. I know we can make city’s better, more participatory, more accessible, to say nothing of saving them money. But to be effective I think
Continue readingeaves.ca: The End of the World: The State vs. the Internet
Last weekend at FooCamp, I co-hosted a session titled “The End of the World: Will the Internet Destroy the State, or Will the State Destroy the Internet?” What follows are the ideas I opened with during my intro to the session and some additional thoughts I’ve had. To avoid some
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