Science Library Pad

the blog is quiet

The blog is quiet for a number of reasons, including

* I have moved to using Twitter (@scilib) and FriendFeed a lot more for sharing information
* I have a new iPhone and as I discussed in my Twitter modes posting, short-posting services like Twitter are a more natural match for using on mobile devices.  You can blog from an iPhone, but it would take a lot of patience to tap a long posting out on the virtual on-screen keyboard.
* Reason I can't tell you which will be announced soon

In the meantime, you can look to Twitter and FriendFeed, e.g. for the recent ICSTI conference in Ottawa look at the #icsti2009 hashtag and the FriendFeed room.

This does point out one really unfortunate thing about Twitter search - it's not like Google, it doesn't go forever back in time.  It is intentionally limited to recent tweets.  So it looks like there was only one #icsti2009 tweet, when there were actually dozens, as you can see in the archive on FriendFeed.  (In fact making a FriendFeed room is one way to get some preservation of your tweets, although I believe FF search also doesn't cover all the way back in time either.)

And I recognize that Twitter is a much noiser information channel, full of half-formed thoughts, asides and insider person-to-person conversations.  The blog is still the best platform for long-form thoughts.

Britain's Science Minister uses Twitter for two-way discussions

Quite a few politicians have a presence on Twitter -- Barack Obama among them -- but most see it as a tool for advertising their activities rather than interacting with voters. But Lord Drayson, Britain's Science Minister, is different.

Times Online - Science Minister takes to Twitter - June 10, 2009

You can follow him: @lorddrayson

Quantum to Cosmos at Perimeter Institute - October 2009

For 10 exciting days this October, Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future (Q2C) will take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe. All events will occur on-site in Waterloo, Ontario and online at q2cfestival.com

http://www.q2cfestival.com/

October 15-25, 2009  Waterloo, Ontario

They have usual blog, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed.

You can attend in person, but I think all events will also be streamed live online.

There's a good list of speakers already.

World Science Festival (New York) 2009

The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at Lincoln Center Wednesday night. Over the next three days the curious will have to make painful choices: attend an investigation of the effects of music on the brain with a performance by Bobby McFerrin, or join a quest for a long-lost mural by Leonardo Da Vinci at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Learn about the science behind “Battlestar Galactica” with actors from the show, or head to one of various panels of scientists and philosophers arguing about free will, alternate universes, science and religion, time and what it means to be human?

New York Times - Science, the Extravaganza - June 11, 2009

It runs June 10-14, 2009 in New York City. See http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/ for more information.

downtown location for new central Ottawa Public Library?

The proposed location is currently mostly a parking lot, on Lyon, between Albert, Slater and Bay. (It's not clear if the library will cover just the currently open area, or the entire square block.)  This is the view looking EAST (the clearest view as buildings block the other angles).

See in Virtual Earth.

This is the Google Maps view looking down, with the location in the centre top of the map.


View Larger Map

You can also see in Yahoo Maps.

This location is really good news.  Ottawa has a lot of wide streets and surface parking.  I was just walking down Lyon the other day on the way to ICSTI 2009 at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and thinking what a dismal street Lyon is as you enter this part of what I would call the Central Business District (which I guess is also called Upper Town).

The former Ottawa official plan says

In the future, Upper Town will contribute significantly to the vitality of the Central Area and especially the Core, as an attractive, livable urban residential neighbourhood which focuses on a unique heritage district and enjoyable pedestrian environment.

Which if you've ever walked down the car-friendly, pedestrian-boring Lyon or Laurier in this area is pretty hilarious.  And quite sad given the density of people jammed into the hideous concrete towers on Laurier.

This location has a lot of advantages:

• it is actually central, unlike the ridiculous "Ottawa is big so let's put the central library out in the suburbs" plans previously mooted
• it is right on the major transitway routes downtown, and apparently near the planned downtown tunnel as well
• it will bring some people and street life into this pretty dead urban space
• as an added bonus, there is a big and (as far as I can tell) totally unused green space just a block away, bounded by Bay, Laurier, Slater and Bronson.  I don't know if it even has a name, Google just shows it as an empty green block.  It's actually one of the biggest greenspaces in the downtown area and currently vastly underused.  I look forward to "library in the park" events there.

The only loss in this whole equation is the Scone Witch, which was always a bit of an odd location and building - OttawaXpress put it well: "Among the parking lots and commercial buildings of Centretown's business district lies a little eatery called The Scone Witch."  But presumably it can remain nearby and benefit from much larger traffic once the library is built.

I did find it a bit odd that they announced the location (finally) because they had always said they didn't want to announce it before securing title to the land, in order not to get stuck paying inflated prices.

Many of the news outlets reported a similar story.  Here are the key points from the CBC story (which features a nice photo of the current hideous brutalist library jammed into a corner downtown):

• Jan Harder, the councillor for Barrhaven and chair of the library board, said it plans to ask the city for $26 million to go toward buying the land.
• The library's board said it plans to build a new $180-million library building in the city block bordered by Albert, Lyon, Bay and Slater streets.
• Harder said the board was hoping to have the doors to the new building open by 2014.

Here's more info from the Citizen

• at least 300,000 square feet
• the library would likely be a building of about six storeys
• the city would seek a deal with the CS Co-op, which owns most of the land, and other smaller owners
• there would be lots of room in the block of land to also build offices, stores and apartment housing.

The only thing that worries me in an otherwise positive commentary article "It's more than books" is the idea that this might be a so-called world-class iconic building.  Please people.  Stop trying to redo Bilbao.  It's been done.  Just build a nice, airy, light, functional maintainable building.  One that can handle Ottawa's extremes: -30°C winter with metres of snow, and +30°C summer.  One that can be a great gathering place for citizens, not just some tourist stop.

It is a shame that neither the library plan nor the transit plan are going to be ready in time for the current round of government infrastructure stimulus funding.

And in case you're like z0mg, $180 million dollars?! I will point out that that's less than the infrastructure money going into shiny asphalt roads in the Ottawa suburbs in a single round of stimulus funding (and just in case you think I'm ranting, the exact quote from the Citizen is "[part of the funding] will be spent on $192 million worth of road projects, including several new and bigger suburban roads.")

As I've said before, if you wondering why we have no great public buildings, it's because the money for them is all beneath the wheels of your tyres, in endless expensive ribbons of asphalt.

I've had a lot to say previously about the importance of a great central library:
July 22, 2008  the public library is for: the public
December 21, 2007  the central public library is a key civic space
August 25, 2007  America, land of the grand library

science for breakfast on the Hill

"Let's say my arms are the extent of the galaxy and I'm the black hole," she says, gesturing at her head, "our solar system is way out here," pointing at her outstreched hand.

The audience of 60 MPs, Library of Parliament workers, political staffers and scientists watches appreciatively.

Their attention hasn't flickered since she started talking 40 minutes earlier. Even those who haven't done a science course since high school often show up every month or two for a Parliamentary breakfast lecture, like this one on Thursday, from a prominent Canadian scientist.

Ottawa Citizen - Breakfast lessons for MPs bridge science, political gap - June 5, 2009

The series is put on by the Partnership Group for Science and Engineering.

UK open data, open government

I was sorely tempted to title this "would uk like some data, guv?"

The UK government is picking up the challenges issued in the excellent Power of Information Taskforce report.

Via Andy Powell in my FriendFeed, I find a Guardian article Free our data: UK set to follow successful US data method

Now the UK government has picked up on the idea, and in a post on the Cabinet Office blog Richard Stirling is asking the British public how a UK version of the US site should be implemented. "What characteristics would be most useful to you - feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by FTP?," he asks. "Should this be an index or a repository? Should this serve particular types of data eg XML, JSON or RDF?"

Although there is a list of dozens of the UK government's published data sources there is no clear pan-governmental approach to making data available. The proposal has been received with pleasure by a number of web developers and would-be data users, although it is not clear how free people would be to use the data commercially.

Richard Stirling is writing in the UK Cabinet Office Digital Engagement blog

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/

At some point I will no longer be saying things like "yes, that's an official gov.uk blog" but... well, it is.

The four themes they list on their about page: open information, open feedback, open conversation, open innovation.

A more extensive extract of what Richard Stirling asks in his posting Information and how to make it useful :

Any solution must support open standards and would ideally be open source, but there are a couple of other questions we are pondering at the moment:

• What characteristics would be most useful to you – feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by e.g. FTP, etc?
• Should this be an index or a repository?
• Should this serve particular types of data e.g. XML, JSON or RDF?
• What examples should we be looking at (beyond data.gov e.g.http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data)?
• Does this need its own domain, or should it sit on an existing supersite (e.g. http://direct.gov.uk)

There are already 19 substantive comments, and he indicates they are also monitoring Twitter for the hashtags #poit (Power of Information Taskforce) and #opendata

There is a new Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, according to his official Twitter feed, @DirDigEng , he was scheduled to start in his position yesterday.

Sometimes I feel like a certain country often considered to be between the UK and the US is missing out on this whole official open data, blogging, twitter thing...

If anyone were to want someone to start blogging officially about government open data in a certain northern neighbour of the US, I am available...

has the day come for science in Canada?

At the Ottawa meeting - dubbed Science Day in Canada and organized by the Public Policy Forum - attendees considered points made by two recently released reports, one by an expert panel of the Canadian Council of Academies, the other by the federal Science, Technology and Innovation Council:

• That Canada's private sector lags behind those of most other OECD countries in its financial commitments to research and development;
• That this lag appears to be related to a lack of “innovation strategies” on the part of many Canadian companies rather than some deficiency in government policy or R&D tax incentives;
• That R&D conducted in Canada's public sector, including universities and hospitals, is among the best and best financed (on a per capita basis) in the world;
• That stronger collaboration is required among all components of the innovation chain - researchers, universities, governments and their agencies, businesses and the financial sector - to maximize the return on Canada's R&D investments.

One obstacle to more productive relations between the federal government and the STI community is confusion over exactly how and on what basis the federal government allocates funds to the science-oriented programs, agencies, councils, institutions and projects it supports.

Globe and Mail (online edition only) - Every day is ‘science day' - Preston Manning - June 2, 2009

The Public Policy Forum might want to work on its social media mojo - unless there was a hashtag I don't know about, searching Twitter for "science day" canada brings up all of 5 tweets.

I will have posts up about the CCA and STIC reports sometime this week.

Previously:
December 19, 2007  Preston Manning on federal science policy in Canada

data.gov, Whitehouse open gov, Rewired UK Parliament and whither Canada

Data.gov is live.

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data.

But there's more.  Much, much more.

In the Whitehouse (yes, The Whitehouse) Open Government blog http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/blog/ they have announced a national consultation on open government.  Note the very aggressive timeline.

Today we are kicking off an unprecedented process for public engagement in policymaking on the White House website. In a sea change from conventional practice, we are not asking for comments on an already-finished set of draft recommendations, but are seeking fresh ideas from you early in the process of creating recommendations. We will carefully consider your comments, suggestions, and proposals.

Here’s how the public engagement process will work. It will take place in 3 phases: Brainstorming, Discussion, and Drafting.

Beginning today, we will have a brainstorming session for suggesting ideas for the open government recommendations. You can vote on suggested ideas or add your own.

Then on June 3rd, the most compelling ideas from the brainstorming will be fleshed out on a weblog in a discussion phase. On June 15th, we will invite you to use a wiki to draft recommendations in collaborative fashion.

These three phases will build upon one another and inform the crafting of recommendations on open government.

There are more details from the Collaboration Project

Today, the National Academy of Public Administration, in partnership with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has launched an Open Government Dialogue to solicit ideas from the public on how the government can become more transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This online brainstorming session which is now open through 1pm on Thursday, May 28th, will enable the White House to hear your most important ideas relating to open government, including innovative approaches to policy, specific project suggestions, government-wide or agency-specific instructions, and any relevant examples and stories relating to law, policy, technology, culture, or practice.

We would like to ask you to participate by doing the following:

1. Go to http://opengov.ideascale.com/ to participate in the dialogue, and

2. Follow @ogovbrainstorm on Twitter to keep up with the highest rated ideas.

They are hashtagging things #ogov

But wait, there's more...
Sunlight Labs has announced Apps for America 2

I'm pleased to wave the green flag on Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge. This is a development and visualization challenge to see who can come up with the best application and visualization for data from Data.gov. These are exciting times for us-- the walls between Government and Developers are starting to shrink, and we here in Sunlight Labs are terribly excited to get to work on doing great things with the data that's coming out. Government has made a move in the right direction-- now it is time for us to show them what we can do.

and in the UK at a grassroots level the Rewired State project has announced Rewired Parliament is coming up, along with many hacking events.

above info from Twitter - edsu, ideascale, citymark and rewiredstate

There are no comparable Canadian federal initiatives.

Nothing even close. The only thing even remotely along these lines is the internal-only IT Innovation Campaign.  (Which, don't get me wrong, is an amazing development - just not on the scale and without the public visibility and engagement of the Obama administration's initiatives.)

There are some municipal level activities, such as the recent Vancouver open city announcement (see it on YouTube being read into the record), but nothing on a national scale.

My tiny little group is trying to bring up a site with some data about the budget (StimulusWatch.ca), but just that is a huge challenge.

We need Canadian open government leaders at all levels of government.  We can do some from the grassroots (as we just demonstrated at ChangeCamp Ottawa 2009), but we need our political leaders to embrace this vision.  Even if you don't care about the tech bits, here's the takeaway: opening up government and government data will create tremendous opportunities for technological innovation and efficiency, and increase the wealth and competitiveness of Canada.

Previously:
March 5, 2009  data.gov is coming - Vivek Kundra named US Federal CIO

a call to journalists to do serious reporting on content copying

Here is some Serious Business Reporting from the Globe

About 32 per cent of the computer software in Canada is pirated, contributing to losses of $1.2-billion (U.S.) in 2008 alone, according to a report from the Business Software Alliance (BSA). If Canada were to crack down and get its piracy rate to around 23 per cent – close to the U.S. rate of 20 per cent – it could result in 5,200 new jobs and contribute $2.7-billion to the country’s economy by 2011, according to a 2008 report from market research firm IDC.

Globe and Mail - Download Decade - New media, old rules - May 19, 2009

Wow: jobs, billions, Business Alliances, all very professional.
There's only one problem.  Those numbers are sh-t.  The RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and CRIA all report dire numbers for piracy and billions lost, numbers which they obtain by... making them up.

Seriously, they just pull them out of thin air.  I might as well say eliminating software piracy would cause Canada to have more pleasant summers and would increase the bison herd.  There's just as much evidence for that.

It is in the interest of industry associations to make digital content copying - which I might add is impossible to prevent technologically - to make this out to be some giant economy crushing disaster.  In the face of counter-evidence (tens of millions in ticket sales for the latest Star Trek, for example) their argument is that some imaginary amount of MORE money would be made, if not for the dread piracy gap.  This is complete, total, unscientific, evidence-free public relations nonsense.

I call on all serious journalists to follow the trail of these numbers from the industry advocacy organisations, do some investigation, and I guarantee you will find that they come from nowhere, they're simply made up.

Stop reporting these numbers as facts.  They're not.  They're basically idle speculation dressed up with scary numbers.

There are lots of real issues to report on, for example, incredibly complex international rights agreements that mean Canada almost always gets online content access later than and to a lesser extent than the United States, and archaic Crown Copyright and cost-recovery approaches in government that mean Canadians can't access their own digital data, paid for with public funds.

ChangeCamp Ottawa 2009 - from circle to grid to circle

Just a quick post to capture a sense of ChangeCamp Ottawa yesterday.  This a deliberate echo of my SciFoo 2007 posting, as SciFoo is where I learned about unconferences.

The basic format is you all gather around a common interest, but there is no set agenda - the participants at the event draw up the schedule (in ChangeCamp terminology "The Grid") of sessions and then facilitate and participate in them.

Opening Circle

CC-BY-NC-ND http://www.flickr.com/photos/crangulabford/3536145033/

Opening Circle (the community gathers)

CC-BY-NC-SA Richard Akerman

The Grid

CC-BY-NC-ND http://www.flickr.com/photos/crangulabford/3536168537/

The Grid (live action version)

CC-BY-NC-ND http://www.flickr.com/photos/crangulabford/3536997430/

The Closing Circle - at the end of the day, we came back into the circle again

CC-BY-SA http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlq/3538191922/

Together - apart - together.  A constant dynamic.  This is the nature of the new communities we are forming online and offline.

There was also lots of video captured - there are over 50 videos up on YouTube and as well Gwen captured a lot of video on Ustream.  There was a fair amount of audio coverage too, there are a few "audioboo" interviews from Ian, as well Apartment613 was going around with a mike and Robin Browne was there with his cool microphone/recorder thingy.  There are over 300 photos up on Flickr.  The tag to look for is cco09

The "virtual grid" of sessions is up on the wiki, but there is still a fair amount of work to get all the notes integrated.  (We had some technical challenges with the particular wiki software.)

We had some good discussions about open government and open data.

Overall very successful for a first event in Ottawa.  And yes, we're already talking about next year...

Previously:
May 13, 2009  ChangeCamp Ottawa - May 16, 2009 - sold out

Google and the web of structured data

Google has announced it will be using (some) microformats and RDFa to enrich search results.  They call this Rich Snippets.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can easily add to your own web pages. In most cases, it's as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags.

Official Google Webmaster Blog - Introducing Rich Snippets - May 12, 2009

O'Reilly Radar says

Moving toward the Semantic Web will allow our searching technologies to become more intelligent and will set the stage for the next revolution in which computing systems can become more aware of the "meaningfulness of data".

We've already seen a shift toward "semantic search": Google has already been augmenting search results with Google Maps, limited catalog searches, and more recent entries into the search market such as Amazon's A9 and the yet to be released Wolfram Alpha differentiate themselves by the structured data and content that can be extracted from a search result. We have yet to a see a compelling reason for web masters to place RDFa or microformats into a site to enable this semantic data to be mined until today, until Google provided a social incentive for site designers.

O'Reilly Radar - Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa - May 12, 2009

Google has a help file to get you started: Marking up structured data.

Incidentally, if you're thinking, "why didn't someone tell me this structured data thing was coming?" I should mention that actually I did try to tell people, whether it was in my presentation to Allen Press in 2007 (where I talked about the need for microformats and semantic enrichment) or in my keynote to NISO Discovery last year (where I talked specifically about Yahoo SearchMonkey using semantic information).

Previously:
September 8, 2008  semantic search thoughts

Wolfram Alpha and the web of structured data

The good news is, WolframAlpha can understand a query like "unemployment in Ottawa".

The bad news is, as you can see in the Result, that while it knows what data it needs to compute the answer, "(data not available)".

This is as clear an example of why we need open data as I can think of.  If you want your computers to start providing you with smarter answers, you have to give them better information to work with.

WolframAlpha provides two channels to try to address this problem: Contribute Structured Data and Suggest Data Sources.  You can also contribute individual facts, but that won't scale very well.

the Open City - the next driver for innovation?

Mayor Gregor Robertson and Coun. Andrea Reimer want the City of Vancouver to support open-source software and open standards.

They also want the city to make as much data as possible freely available to the public. Reimer will introduce a motion [PDF] next Tuesday (May 19) that would see the city endorse the principles of open source, open standards, and open data, as well as start work on publishing data on the Web using open standards.

In a press release issued today (May 14), Robertson said that an “open city” philosophy would help create new opportunities in the information-technology sector.

City of Vancouver set to back open source, open standards, open data - straight.com - May 14, 2009

via Twitter - Rob Giggey (Rob works at the City of Ottawa) - May 15, 2009

(I tried to find the Gregor Robertson press release referenced above, but I haven't been successful - can anyone point me to it?)

Toronto Mayor Miller has also announced toronto.ca/open (which still shows "under construction").

In Ottawa, supported by some City of Ottawa staff but not (yet?) endorsed as any kind of official policy, we're starting the open data discussion as part of ChangeCamp Ottawa.

What can you do as citizens and what can we do as libraries to enable the sharing of our civic data?  Is sharing civic data a next logical step for public libraries as enablers of the public space?

Previously:
May 5, 2009  Web APIs explained on CBC Spark - and Open Data Under Construction

ChangeCamp Ottawa - May 16, 2009 - sold out

ChangeCamp Ottawa is sold out.  This unconference about citizens re-engaging with government and with each other, enabled by technology, will be this Saturday May 16 (2009).

Here's a kind of bookend from my perspective (I'm sure it's different for all the organisers):

http://friendfeed.com/scilib/f3bdb183/some-changecamp-ottawa-history

this tweet I sent was actually a question, but somehow turned into the plan - from @scilib (me): @thornley So that's #changecampottawa planning at say 6 PM at http://www.clocktower.ca/ on Bank on Monday February 16? http://twitter.com/scilib/status/1203041472

from @scilib (me): last big ChangeCamp Ottawa planning meeting tonight May 11. Event itself will be this Saturday May 16. #cco09  http://twitter.com/scilib/status/1762070027

In case you're wondering what the point of Twitter is, it was a key enabler that helped to make possible all of the connections between people who had never met.  From tweets in February, to a sold-out event in May.

You can find us on the web:
* the (closed but public) social network for the event, courtesy of one of our sponsors, Pathable
* the main changecamp.ca site
* Twitter hashtag #cco09
* tag cco09 anywhere else
* I've also made a FriendFeed aggregator which should be a good place to track live reporting / uploads during the event.  (Unfortunately due to the FF redesign, it kind of looks like all the items come "from" ChangeCamp Ottawa - they're actually just being pulled in from various sources on the web.)

Apartment613 has an interview with Mark Faul, and CHUO Around the Block interviewed Morgen Peers.  (To some extent Morgen and I helped to sustain the event through its initial growing pains - we were the only two people in common between the first and second organising meetings.)

UPDATE: I see Mark Faul has written a post (rather more thoughtful and insightful than my just-the-facts approach above) - and he has also made a NetVibes aggregator for the event.

UPDATE 2: I should mention that ChangeCamp is also in Facebook, if you like that sort of thing.

Acfas - La science en français

L’Université d’Ottawa est heureuse d’accueillir, du 11 au 15 mai 2009, le 77e Congrès de l’Acfas, et fière de contribuer ainsi plus que jamais à l’avancement et à la mise en valeur du français dans tous les champs de la connaissance. Notre institution bilingue fait sa part en se classant 5e au Canada en termes d’intensité de la recherche scientifique. Aux portes du Québec et au cœur de la capitale canadienne, l’Université d’Ottawa vous invite à explorer un campus où se vit tous les jours la dualité linguistique de notre pays. Cliquez ici pour en savoir plus: http://www.acfas.ca/ ou http://www.acfas.ca/congres/a_propos.html ou http://www.acfas.ca/congres/2009/pages/grilles.html

via email from / par courriel de Jacynthe de Saint-Hilaire

Some Ideas on the Future of Government Science - May 14, 2009 - Armchair Discussion - Canada School of Public Service

This is just copied verbatim (with minor format changes) from the Facebook notice.

To register to attend in person:
http://www.csps-efpc.gc.ca/cat/det-eng.asp?courseno=S225

To register to attend the webcast:
http://www.csps-efpc.gc.ca/cat/det-eng.asp?courseno=E225

(It's for public servants, so if you don't have a PRI #, I don't think you can sign up.)

Host: Canada School of Public Service - École de la fonction publique
Type: Education - Workshop
Network: Global
Date: 14 May 2009
Time: 08:30 - 09:45
Location:
CSPS Headquarters
65 Guigues Street
Ottawa, ON

Phone: 6139435632
Email: Dean.Landry@csps-efpc.gc.ca

Description

Learn about the evolution of government science and the challenges facing science-based departments and agencies, and science managers, in the current environment. This discussion will focus primarily on public policy and will be especially beneficial to people working in science-based departments and agencies or who are involved in the management of science, policy and related programs in government.

After working as a university lecturer for many years, in 1978, Jim Mitchell began a government career where he had experience in the analysis and resolution of complex public policy issues. He was also a principal advisor on the 1993 reorganization of the federal government.

After leaving the public service, Jim Mitchell became a founding partner of the policy-consulting firm Sussex Circle. Now as a consultant, Mr. Mitchell provides policy and organizational advice in virtually every area of federal responsibility including defence, science and agriculture. In his lecture, Mr. Mitchell will be drawing from this experience to talk about the challenges and opportunities facing government science and the science community.

Speaker: Jim Mitchell, Founding Partner, Sussex Circle

Government of Canada internal IT Innovation Campaign

The Government of Canada has opened what I would call an ideas market, a system to submit ideas, vote on them, and comment on them.  The Campaign is internal only and for IT staff only.  You can see a screenshot (by permission of the GC and the developers, Publivate)

Rather than give a URL which most of you can't access anyway, I'll just suggest that if you're in the Government of Canada, you can find more information and the link to the site by searching for "innovation campaign" on GCPEDIA (which is also accessible within GC only).  The site opened for submissions of ideas May 4, and will close May 29, as you can see from the countdown bar in the upper right.

Like GCPEDIA itself, I consider this a great development, showing a government willing to embrace risk, try new technologies, and draw upon the expertise of the community (about 18,000 federal IT specialists, in this case).  I think this is a measured approach, and I certainly would expect that if successful, it will lead to more consultations more broadly both within the government as well as ones open to all Canadian citizens.

I think this approach is really effective for breaking silos and circulating information - in some of the ideas already, a few things being proposed turn out to already be available, people weren't just aware of them elsewhere in the government.

I'm using the hashtag #gcitic to discuss and ask questions about the campaign on Twitter.

UPDATE 2009-05-06: I should mention another innovation aspect of this site, which is that it is the first time I've seen machine translation use in an official way.  Currently all Government of Canada websites must have all text in both official languages, which is usually done through manual translation.  This makes it basically impossible to have a dynamic site with constant changes.  If we're allowed to use machine translation, it will make it much easier to bring up e.g. public blogs.  Now that being said, the translation engine they are using is Google Translate, which is ok for a free translator but is by no means perfect.  I know there's tons of work being done on machine translation at NRC and elsewhere in the government - it would be nice if there was a standard machine translation service available that we could also use... hmm... I think I'll submit an idea... ENDUPDATE

Google uses this approach internally, their site is called simply Google Ideas.

(Screenshot via blogoscoped.com - The Tools Google Uses Internally)

I have seen this approach used to some extent in the library community, the example I always point to is JISC Repository Ideas (which is still up, but no longer active).  There are probably many others that I have missed.

The Obama administration has also used this approach a number of times, see e.g. my recent posting about the National Dialogue to gather IT ideas for the Recovery.gov site.

Previously:
November 03, 2008  Government of Canada launches official wiki for federal employees

Web APIs explained on CBC Spark - and Open Data Under Construction

(I almost wrote Spark CBC, since that's their Twitter name.)

Spark Episode 76 (audio link available directly in the post, as well as various podcast options)

At 22:02 or so in, they take on the challenge of explaining web APIs, or more specificially, they ask Jer Thorp to help walk them through the concept.  It's always interesting to hear the descriptions people use.  For example, I would generally say "machine-to-machine", which is probably way too abstract.  I also tend(ed) to describe APIs in the context of Service-Oriented Architecture, which probably confused the issue (and the audience).  I don't generally talk about computer programs communicating with other computer programs.

I think in general what's presented on the show is a pretty good explanation: websites are opening up their information using APIs, so they can leverage open innovation - outside developers.  We are a long long way from a completely interoperable web of standard APIs though.

Here's the Twitter-sized explanation I had proposed (taking quite a lot of my space to talk about how there wasn't enough space):

scilib: @sparkcbc I don't think that will fit in a tweet. Basically standard interfaces (APIs) allow data to flow between sites, which = mashups.

I would argue as well that web development has gotten sophisticated enough that, while APIs are ideal (at least if well constructed), you can actually get a lot by opening your data, which is the key first step.  Open data enables mashups, APIs just make mashups easier.  Open data means sharing the information your organisation has, out on the web - ideally your default becomes to share.

We're still in early days of open data.  The Guardian calls their approach "Data Store - Facts You Can Use".  I've written previously about the US Data.gov initiative, which currently has the world's simplest website (a giant box reading "coming soon"), but I think is supposed to launch this month.  It's similarly challenging to point to open data cities, because while the Twitter-enabled Toronto @MayorMiller announced toronto.ca/open at Mesh, it also reads simply "Under Construction".

What will be possible is mashups, visualizations, APIs, analysis and much more.

I believe the long term success of projects like StimulusWatch Canada and ChangeCamp Ottawa will depend on open data, and (eventually) on all levels of government having open APIs as well.

Which circles me around to the opening topic of the podcast, about whether online activism ("slacktivism") can actually translate into meaningful real-world activity.  The answer, I think, is tied in with the segment about lurking... the web is mostly lurk, only maybe 10% participate.  Some tiny fraction of those online participants might translate into offline actions.  Maybe one in a thousand?  But nevertheless, it does happen.

While I generally refuse to join these "click your support" Facebook groups (in part because I don't like FB much anyway), they can be low barrier entry points, in particular since so many Canadians (who may otherwise not be very social-web enabled) are in FB.

The kind of canonical Canadian example is the Fair Copyright for Canada group, with its (at time of posting) 90,071 members.  It was brought up in the House of Commons.  It did translate into some offline activism.  And the sheer numbers did, I think, get both attention and generate concern for the party proposing the bill.  There are still lots of issues with that number.  Lots of people around the world care about copyright.  For all I know, that's 81,000 copyright-concerned Americans, and 9000 Canadians.  Such is the global web.

I do think "feel-good clicks" are a bit dangerous, they give you the perception of action without actually doing anything.  I've long been concerned by this kinda of almost mystical power ascribed to online organising.  In my review of Al Gore's The Assault on Reason, I said

Don't get me wrong, I think the Internet has a role to play in reasoned discourse. A small role. A useful tool for pointing attention to falsehoods and referencing inconvenient truths. But electronic communications have a fatal allure of virtual action.

Concerned about the environment? No need to go outside and walk in the woods, or clean up a polluted lot in your neighbourhood, or knock on your representative's door and explain the urgency of your position.

No, instead you can just fire off an email, write a blog posting, and then turn up the air conditioning and the lights and stretch out on the couch and read a good book.

That being said, I have myself translating the online into real world action on a number of occasions.  As I wrote in the StimulusWatch blog, it was an online posting that led me to an event that started a chain leading to the creation of the project.

That same event, and online chatter about a local conference, also led me (as partially outlined in my posting Making government data visible - and is Change coming to Ottawa?) to ChangeCamp Ottawa, a very real event happening at City Hall on May 16, which I have been helping to organise, an event which of course has a substantial online presence including a social network for the specific event, as well as being part of the larger ChangeCamp group on Facebook.

Similarly, a local news article in a free neighbourhood paper (yes, in print, with ink and everything) about a small garden/park space led me to a Facebook group which led me to an offline meeting which led me to create http://www.savethegarden.ca/

And of course, on a much more spectacular scale, the Obama campaign used (and continues to use) online organising as a tool, but they were very clear that the purpose of online was to drive a very extensive (and successful) ground game, people talking and knocking on doors, calling on phones, out in the real world.

So I think when it works best, the online world leads you offline, and offline leads you back online.  It's an ongoing discussion that flows across place and time.

Discussions enable meetings, data enables websites, websites enable more meetings, meetings come to consensus on APIs, APIs enable mashups... round and round it goes.

conversations: local realtime versus global asynchronous - as applied to FriendFeed

FriendFeed has launched its Twitter-like "real-time" redesign, which has some of us unhappy and thinking about why we're unhappy.

What I think is that there are two different modes of operation you can address: real-time and asynchronous.

Across Realtime

So first, what is the nature of realtime, what characteristics does it have?
It's kind of a strange question in a way - we live in realtime.  It is now, I am typing.
But that nature is its strength and its limitation.
In realtime, a big part of your thoughts are concerned with yourself.  This is Facebook and Twitter.  Twitter's question is: What are you doing? but there's an implied "now" on the end.  What are you doing now?

Not what are you thinking.  Not what ideas have you developed.
What are you doing now?

This is a legitimate mode of interaction.  But it has issues:
* realtime doesn't scale, because you only have a very narrow window of immediate attention

I can talk to one person.  I can have a conversation with two people.
Apocryphal stories of Millenials or whatever gen we're up to now having dozens of chat windows open simultaneously aside, there's only so much time in the now.  In the now you can broadcast to many people.  But converse?  It's not like you can type into chat windows simultaneously.  The "multiple conversations" people have is really: slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, slice of attention, one after the other.  We are not multitaskers.  We are serial taskers.  At some point, that attention gets sliced so thin that all you can say is "yes", "no" and "lol".

Realtime by the nature of the limited slice you have, has to be: I, me, doing, now.

* realtime creates a false sense of urgency.  realtime is the pace of short-term business thinking.  realtime is the tick-tock of self-centred false importance.

Look at the crackberry man, out in the world, but staring at his little screen.  Out in the world, but living in his email.  He sent a message almost 10 seconds ago!  Why has no one replied?  Don't they realise he's important?

Yes, it's a caricature, but it has some truth.  Between your twitter follower alerts and your friendfeed follower alert and your facebook sheep throwing and your spam messages and the 100 other new emails and your tweetdeck and your calendar alarms... where are the cycles to, you know, actually think about anything.

Realtime is the buzz buzz buzz of busy-ness.  Business busy-ness.  But don't confuse activity with productivity.

* realtime is time-zone discrimination.  realtime is local.

Your scope of immediate thought and action is local.  In the now, a fire across the country is interesting, a fire in your building is ALARM ALARM.  Realtime is a great tool for re-connecting with your local community, with the people who are awake when you are, where you are.  But realtime by its very nature excludes the non-local, the timezone outsiders.

* realtime is loss of control

You can't keep up, the thought is gone, the tweet is gone, the friendfeed posting has scrolled... run twice as fast as you can.  Realtime brings not only false urgency, but since no one can keep up with everything, simultaneously, it means a loss of control, over information and over your ability to act.

* realtime is cr*p to monetize, except for search

Realtime is very rapid conversation.  Conversation is inherently hard to monetize.  Conversation is between people, in order to monetize it, you as the advertiser, the stranger, have to step in between the two people talking, and shout.  Imagine how popular that is.

Realtime conversation, scrolling off the screen second by second, is even worse.  Oh, they're talking about cats, I'll put up a cat ad... oh wait, they're talking about dogs... oh wait, they're going to go see Wolverine... oh wait, they're gone.  Oh ya, that's a genius space to try to stick your ads in.  Good luck with that.

You can monetize the search of realtime conversations, but don't confuse search with conversation.

** In Summary **

Realtime has value.  I'm in Ottawa, now.  If GCPEDIA goes down, I tweet that it is down, I see tweets when it comes back up.  I can ask a question of my local community, what's happening tonight?  is Bank Street closed?  where are the buses re-routed?

This is an absolutely useful connection and capability.
But it is only one possible way to interact.

Around the World in 80 Postings

The global asynchronous conversation, web pages linking to web pages, which turned into blogs linking to blogs, is another mode of operation.

There is no question hovering above the big empty box of your Blogger posting.  There is just a word: Create.

Not what are you doing, right now.  But what are you thinking, whenever.  Like this blog posting that I write now, but you may read at the appropriate time for you, in hours, days or weeks.

Asynchronous can have a measured pace, can be reflective, can weave in many different threads from many different sources, because you have the luxury of time.

* asynchronous is about the flow of conversation, not about the immediate individual acting

You link to me, I think, then link back.  I connect to your ideas, I don't speak directly in the moment to you.

* asynchronous is global, timezone agnostic

My friendfeed has people from all over the world.  Some are ending their day as mine begins, others haven't yet awoken.  Where's Berci?  Where's Bora?  Well it doesn't exactly matter, because if they post, I see their thoughts at the time of my choosing, and vice versa.

* asynchronous is actually a lot better to monetize

Because we're taking our time to scan and interact with long form ideas, you can figure out what we're talking about, and stick an ad next to that conversation, and we may actually have time to look at it.

** In Summary **

Asynchronous is about the global circulation of ideas.  I don't need to know where you are, or when you are, because I'm interacting with your thoughts at the time and place of my own choosing.

What this means for FriendFeed

Facebook and Twitter are already in the realtime, "what am I doing now" space.
Delicious and StumbleUpon and others are already in the "look what I found" space.

FriendFeed's strength was in the global, asynchronous conversation about the things that we'd found, the ideas that we have.  This is a particular type of conversation support that lends itself very well to scientific discourse, bouncing ideas back and forth around the globe, day after day.  The scientific discourse is a global asynchronous conversation, by its very nature.

Realtime mode is a nice feature for supporting conferences, when there really is immediate "this is happening now" to report on.  But it's a mode mismatch for long-form conversation about ideas.

As I have suggested on FriendFeed, it may be that in the end, with the divergence of the founder's goals from some of the users, we may have to write user requirements for the global asynchronous conversation, and if FriendFeed can no longer support them, then move elsewhere, or have a replacement site built.

What FriendFeed will lose is people who, at the time and place of their choosing, spend a lot of time on the site.  Time is attention.  Attention is eyeball you can put ads in front of.  FriendFeed will lose the people who were paying the most attention.

I was inspired to write this by Cameron Neylon's thoughtful posting Science in the open » “Real Time”: The next big thing or a pointer to a much more interesting problem?

In a way, this posting is part of my conversation with Cameron, despite the fact I have only the vaguest sense of where (in the UK?) and when he is.

We have taken different approaches to the issue of realtime, and in particular I want to raise a very important, indeed critical point that Cameron makes: filtering takes time.  One of the other incredibly powerful aspects of FriendFeed in asynchronous mode is that it bubbles up items of interest, through the collective action, the filtering that results from my friends liking and commenting on items.  When I open async FF in the morning, what I see is not the latest ideas, what I see is the most important ideas, based on the filtering of a community I trust.  Realtime, by its nature, has no time for filtering.  No time for filtering turns a curated stream of useful information into a firehose of content, the little specks of gold that dance in the stream lost because they are mixed in with the flood of useless noise.

Previously:
April 6, 2009  why I don't like FriendFeed beta