Roger Fisher: 1922-2012
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…
David Eaves
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 –…