Guys, we have a problem. We are letting way too many boys get into adulthood without actually becoming men. We’re seeing more and more adult males around who are not men.
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Things Are Good: A New Stove Project Looks to Crowdsource Healthier Heating
Regular readers of this site may know that we are fans of efficient stoves. The Kenya Stove is a new project to get efficient stoves in the hands of Kenyans. Erin, from Kenya Stove writes: First some bad news: More than 3 billion people rely on traditional cookstoves for cooking
Continue readingeaves.ca: Community Managers: Expectations, Experience and Culture Matter
Here’s an awesome link to grind home my point from my OSCON keynote on Community Management, particularly the part where I spoke about the importance of managing wait times – the period between when a volunteer/contributor takes and action and when they get feedback on that action. In my talk
Continue readingPaulitical Satire: Built to NOT Last – Movie Monday
So, most of us have been there at some point, standing at an Ikea asking ourselves “do I need yet another Billy bookcase?” We know it will be of the lowest quality, and maybe even break during our home construction process. But it’s cheap…it will do the job…and we can
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: 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 readingThings Are Good: A Stove That Uses Fire to Charge Electronics
BioLite is a company that focuses on creating clean-burning stoves. We’ve looked at stoves before and why it’s important to create efficient stoves for a better planet and healthier people. Recently, an employee of BioLite gave a presentation at TEDx Montreal about the importance of clean stoves. The company has
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 readingThings Are Good: Use Your Smartphone to Advance Science
Smartphones aren’t just for games and checking your email anymore! Today, these mobile devices can be used to better the world around us by helping scientists understand more about it. Thanks to the distribution of mobiles research can be crowd-sourced to provide information that would otherwise go unnoticed. Below is
Continue readingCanadian Progressive World: This year, Ramadan has a serious Google twist
Today, over a billion Muslims around the world begin to observe the holy month of Ramadan, fasting from dawn to sunset. This year, Google is in on the action. In a serious way. The search engine behemoth will stream Islamic prayers live from Mecca via a dedicated YouTube channel. That means millions around the world
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 readingOffice 15 fails at innovation, no match for Google Docs
If we could all remember when Google Docs came out and revolutionized the way we create, store and edit our work on the internet, we would all be living in a less polarized tech world now. What I mean by that is this: Microsoft just launched its Office 15 product, meant to
Continue readingCanadian Trends: What does ‘sustainable’ really mean?
Enbridge has provided an interesting response to Christy Clark’s concerns over the Enbridge pipeline. “We have a struggle here in B.C. and we know that,” said Janet Holder, the Enbridge executive vice-president in charge of Gateway. She said hearings this week in Prince George “did not take on any different
Continue readingCanadian Trends: Alberta, Canada’s ‘Energy Capital’, implements rolling blackouts
Yep, another Alberta post. Welcome to the reality of the two-tiered Alberta energy system. What do I mean by two tiered? Well let me explain. Over a year ago I wrote this piece on the “requirement” for the new high capacity transmission lines. Quoted in that piece is this little blurb: Alberta
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 readingThings Are Good: Declaration of Internet Freedom
Around the world governments are trying to restrain the ability of people to freely share information across the internet. Bills like SOPA in the USA and Bill C-30 in Canada to the more recent TPP all focus on propping up old media monopolies and curtailing people’s privacy and communication rights.
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 readingPaulitical Satire: Investing in Our Future – Kids in the Tech Era – Movie Monday
So, all those weeks ago when our esteemed videographer William Matthews from Digital Footprint and I started out on this crazy journey to make a movie every monday, I said that we should be brave together. Today, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is: I’m going to
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