What the Quantified Self Movement Says and Tech and Gender
Over the past year or two I’ve been to a couple of unconferences sessions about how people are increasingly measuring different parts of their lives: how far they run, how…
Commentary
Requiring Facebook for Your News Site (or website) – the Missed Opportunity
Last week I published I blog post titled Why Banning Anonymous Comments is Bad for Postmedia and Bad for Society in reaction to the fact that PostMedia’s newspapers( including the…
Why Banning Anonymous Comments is Bad for Postmedia and Bad for Society
Last night I discovered that my local newspaper – the Vancouver Sun – was going to require users log in with Facebook to comment. It turns out that this will…
Is the Internet bringing us together or is it tearing us apart?
The other day the Vancouver Sun – via Simon Fraser University’s Public Square program – asked me to pen a piece answering the questions: Is the Internet bringing us together…
Lies, Damned Lies, and Open Data
I have an article titles Lies, Damn Lies and Open Data in Slate Magazine as part of their Future Tense series. Here, for me, is the core point: On the…
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 –…
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…
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…
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…
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…
What is art?
“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument…
The Mash-Up Mentality
With derivative art invading our cultural spaces like never before, is this the start of a new artistic movement or the death of originality? In 1951, the science-fiction writer Theodore…
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,…
The US Government’s Digital Strategy: The New Benchmark and Some Lessons
Last week the White House launched its new roadmap for digital government. This included the publication of Digital Government: Building a 21st Century Platform to Better Serve the American People…
Would you rather be punched in the face than join Klout?
I completely sympathize with this perspective, but I would ask you NOT to punch me in the face. Despite my better judgement I joined. Look at Klout this way: it’s…
Why doesn’t SF produce “big idea” books anymore?
“…today you don’t need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse “New Scientist”. We’re living in the frickin’ 21st century. Killer robot drones…
Control Your Content: Why SurveyMonkey Should Add a “Download Your Answers” Button
Let me start by saying, I really like SurveyMonkey. By this I mean, I like SurveyMonkey specifically, but I also like online survey’s in general. They are easy to ignore…
The Transparent Hypocrisy of Ethical Oil – who is really laudering money
The other week the Canadian Minister of the Environment, Peter Kent accused Canadian Charities of “laundering money” because they accept some funds from outside the country. This is all been…
Mainstreaming The Gov 2.0 Message in the Canadian Public Service
A couple of years ago I wrote a Globe Op-Ed “A Click Heard Across the Public Service” that outlined the significance of the clerk using GCPEDIA to communicate with public…
There is so much joy in what we do
Hello blog. I know it has been a a week since I posted. I want to apologize and explain it is not out of a lack of love, just a…