Over the holidays I read Matt Yglesias fantastic book “The rent is too damn high,” which deals with urban policy in the United States and its effect on housing prices. But really, the book is about equality. Yglesias argues cities in the U.S. have too many regulations for the construction
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The Canadian Progressive: Women’s earnings in BC lag national average: report
by Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: A new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives compares the earnings of women in BC to those in the rest of Canada. The report was authored by Marjorie Griffin Cohen, an economist and SFU Professor of Political Science and Gender, Sexuality and
Continue readingeaves.ca: The South -> North Innovation Path in Government: An Example?
I’ve always felt that a lot of innovation happens where resources are scarcest. Scarcity forces us to think differently, to be efficient and to question traditional (more expensive) models. This is why I’m always interested to see how local governments in developing economies are handling various problems. There is always
Continue readingeaves.ca: Uber in Vancouver: Some Thoughts for the Passenger Transportation Board
So last week the B.C. Passenger Transportation Board (PTB) effectively shut down Uber in Vancouver by compelling the rides they arrange must charge a minimum $75 a trip, regardless of distance. Shortly after being announced, twitter lit up as Uber notified its customers of the decision and the hashtag #UberVanLove began directing angry (and deserved) […]
Continue readingeaves.ca: Proactive Disclosure – An Example of Doing it Wrong from Service Canada
Just got flagged about this precious example of doing proactive disclosure wrong. So here is a Shared Service Canada website dedicated the Roundtable on Information Technology Infrastructure. Obviously this is a topic of real interest to me – I write a fair bit about delivering (or failing to deliver) government service online effectively. I think it […]
Continue readingCanadian ProgressiveCanadian Progressive: Jason Kenney spent $750,000 spying on Canada’s ethnic minorities
Over the past three years, Conservative minister Jason Kenney’s Department of Citizenship and Immigration blew almost $750,000 in Canadian taxpayers money “monitoring ethnic media”, according to The Canadian Press. The political daily media moni…
Continue readingeaves.ca: Ontario’s Open Data Policy: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly and the (Missed?) Opportunity
Yesterday the province of Ontario launched its Open Data portal. This is great news and is the culmination of a lot of work by a number of good people. The real work behind getting open data program launched is, by and large, invisible to the public, but it is essential – and so congratulations are […]
Continue readingeaves.ca: Re-Architecting the City by Changing the Timelines and Making it Disappear
A couple of weeks ago I was asked by one of the city’s near me to sit on an advisory board around the creation of their Digital Government strategy. For me the meeting was good since I felt that a cohort of us on the advisory board were really pushing the city into a place […]
Continue readingeaves.ca: The UK’s Digital Government Strategy – Worth a Peek
I’ve got a piece up on TechPresident about the UK Government’s Digital Strategy which was released today. The strategy (and my piece!) are worth checking out. They are saying a lot of the right things – useful stuff for anyone in industry or sector that has been conservative vis-a-vis online services (I’m looking at you governments […]
Continue readingeaves.ca: Doing Government Websites Right
Today, I have a piece over on Tech President about how the new UK government website – Gov.uk – does a lot of things right. I’d love to see more governments invest two of the key ingredients that made the website work – good design and better analytics. Sadly, on
Continue readingeaves.ca: Playing with Budget Cutbacks: On a Government 2.0 Response, Wikileaks & Analog Denial of Service Attacks
Reflecting on yesterday’s case study in broken government I had a couple of addition thoughts that I thought fun to explore and that simply did not make sense including in the original post. A Government 2.0 Response Yesterday’s piece was all about how Treasury Board’s new rules were likely to
Continue readingeaves.ca: Broken Government: A Case Study in Penny Wise but Pound Foolish Management
Often I write about the opportunities of government 2.0, but it is important for readers to be reminded of just how challenging the world of government 1.0 can be, and how far away any uplifting future can feel. I’ve stumbled upon a horrifically wonderful example of how tax payers are
Continue readingeaves.ca: On Being Misquoted – Access Info Europe and Freedominfo.org
I’ve just been alerted to a new post out on Freedominfo.org has quotes of mine that are used in way that is deeply disappointing. It’s never fund to see your ideas misused to make it appear that you are against something that you deeply support. The most disappointing misquote comes
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: 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: 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 readingNunc Scio: Count me in for “OneCity”
By now you’ve probably heard about TTC Chair Karen Stintz (pictured) and Councilor Glenn DeBaeremaeker mega-plan for transity in Toronto- OneCity. Royson James has all the details over at the Star, so I won’t rehash them here. But in short – subways, LRT, and a plan that actually works for
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
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