At the risk of stating the obvious, democratic government is unlike running a business in a number of important ways. David Olive gives one of the similarities in his excellent blog at the Toronto Star:
It is the death of any commercial enterprise to starve itself of necessary expenditures on R&D, new-product development and marketing. I'll never understand how today's conservatives fail to make that connection, slavishly devoted as they claim to be to free-market principles. Maybe it's because so few of them have run a business. Or had to make their way in the private sector - as I do - without being subsidized by a Rupert Murdoch, the Fraser Institute or the Heritage Foundation.
Incompetence is universal. It should be evident that the architects of such spectacular failures as the overdue Boeing 787 project, the GM bankruptcy or the Wall Street meltdown would do no better in public office, where oversight is more open but less effective. However, even successful companies are usually inappropriate models for government.
Choose Apple, for example, whose innovation and focus on design has made it wildly successful and won it hordes of fans who might well vote for a President Steven P. Jobs. But the breath-taking, march-stealing nature of Apple's product launches depends on a rigid and well-documented culture of secrecy. As much as politicos might envy the impact of Apple announcements, they would be ill-advised to try and duplicate it. Funding announcements without stakeholder input will miss the mark and be ineffective; unannounced funding and/or cuts make the granting government look guilty when they are inevitably unearthed.
Yet governing parties at all levels, in Canada and elsewhere, continue think they can engineer positive surprises and suppress negative ones—and they continue to fail in doing so.
You can observe a number of common privacy tactics among your friend with an online presence:
I use none of the above. If identify theft is a concern, they will foil only casual (harmless) attempts. As for sharing details of one's personal life, it is mostly pretentious to expect they are consequential, or that large numbers of others will be interested in them. I—and certainly others—often neglect life proper, so why further the problem by spending time writing about it?
Alternate identities are another easy target. We spend entire phases of our lives struggling with identity, so maintaining a second (or third, or fourth) introduces needless complications. Where concerns about one's employer motivate anonymity, there is doubtless a value conflict that deserves close examination.
Having grown up before the advent of cyber-bulling and, being male, unlikely to be the target of sexual violence, I am no doubt privileged in being able to hold these views. Still, I firmly believe in consistency and honesty of online identity.
Finally, the Walrus (after disappointing in May) redeems itself with this excellent short story by Zsuzsi Gartner in its September issue. Delicious! If the quality of writing remains so high for a full year, I can quit whining forever.
The May issue of The Walrus contained this article by Daniel Stoffman. An illustrative quote:
Because they are amateurs, homegrown terrorists prefer soft, undefended targets — a restaurant rather than a military installation, a bus rather than a hydro dam. And because they are part of the community, they are hard to detect. “We have cases of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants converting to the most radical forms of Islam..."
The author perhaps hopes you will supply your own, "...because we all know white Anglo-Saxons could never be terrorists." The paragraph also opens with one of many misleading or patently false assertions about terrorism and terrorists.
Stoffman seems to be an author of xenophobic books, a troll and doubtless enjoys spitting in people's soup—so be it. I would still read his writing, and gladly, if it were at all constructive. What distresses me most is that The Walrus has chosen to waste ink on the cheap sensationalism, fearmongering and demagoguery of publications I deliberately choose to avoid supporting. Instead, strive for forward-looking, intelligent, creative discussion. Publish the controversial, by all means, but don't publish the merely bad.
If you like, read
more of my disappointed logorrhea on The Walrus' website.
I have been involved in a number of small organizations in which I held either explicit or de facto roles as a director of communications or webmaster. These include the Iron Dragons, the University of Toronto Engineering Society, the Leaders of Tomorrow Working Group (WG) for Engineering Science and later the Graduate WG, as well as project groups for several courses.
As a web development tinker, I have been able to introduce a number of tools to these groups, including:
Some thought processes are useful when choosing and deploying such tools.
Identify the spanning set. I have written about this previously. Technology needs to be applied judiciously. For example, using MediaWiki for most small projects is a little bit like sandblasting a soup cracker. Ask yourself the following questions:
The answers should help guide your selection of software tools for the organization. Further, once you have committed to a tool, they may govern how you use its features. Larger Drupal websites rely on interlocking contributed modules, configuration and theming. Often there are many ways to skin a cat; instead of using the first you come across, research and make a careful choice.
Question the need for control. Not every organization is committed to being an Open Organization, but many would do better to try. Consider information:
- Regular reports - Reported activities and future plans allow monitoring and participation.
- Information accessible - Even internal operational information is available by default.
- Explicit confidentiality - It is explained what areas are confidential, why and who access them.
The first is often a requirement; especially in representative (student) government, where reporting of minutes is a mechanism for accountability. Even in smaller groups, #3 can be useful. By acknowledging and delineating what information is shared, you defend the organization against the unpredictable actions of members who feel they are being shut out of decisions they care strongly about. Finally, #2 can serve two purposes; the first is recruiting. The casual visitor may be enticed if (s)he sees something intriguing; it would take considerable effort to replicate this effect through deliberate marketing. In groups whose activities include leadership development, internal operational information further serves as evidence of the development process, as well as fodder for reflection.
In using software, implementing access control to hide certain information is always extra work. With the above principles in mind, question why it is necessary to maintain separate and perhaps dissonant sets of information for internal and external audiences.
Use Free Software. Call this bias if you like, but it is more reasonable to point your successors to http://openoffice.org than to expect them to have access to a (questionably legal) "copy" of Word. If your organization is a business, the former practice does away with worries about software piracy.
Free software is not without its faults, however, one of which is that it develops in an ecosystem. Projects which fail to attract users stagnate and ultimately disappear. Balance the features of available alternatives against the apparent health of their community; as with proprietary software, avoid "vendor lock-in". If the community behind your current software seems to be dying, migrate out.
Plan for the future. What is your level of knowledge in web development and software administration? Can you expect your successors to reliably be as knowledgeable? Even if not, favour simpler configurations which are more easily maintained. Perhaps this entails (where it means no inefficiency elsewhere) changing practice in your organization to suit the stock behaviour of some software.
Documentation is invaluable. Even if your own knowledge was assembled from hours of schizophrenic Googling, save and share a collection of links. Spend a few hours recalling problems which at first had you stymied, and explain how you overcame them. Keep this documentation in the simplest possible form, to remove any barrier to your successors in updating it.
It is the organization, and not you, which learns lessons. Do what is necessary to ensure the organization's future behaviour reflects them. The alternative is that your successor, knowing no better, will repeat your rookie mistakes, undo your hard work, and—worst of all—potentially damage the organization's data.
Work hard. If you find yourself grappling with these issues, you have already decided that your organization can communicate more effectively and therefore work better with the use of technology. But you need to do more than simply mentioning as many Web 2.0 social networking sites as you can in one breath ("FacebookMySpaceTwitterYouTubeDigg..."). Indeed, shoddy work can mean an unintuitive setup that will create an aversion reaction in your peers, at which point you have immunized the organization against all technology. The only course is to do the hard work necessary to get a good suite of tools which are accepted and adopted.
Public policy is a growing personal interest, building on my background in engineering, my morbid fixation with local, provincial and federal politics, and a view for leadership.
This term I have a fascinating graduate course in Engineering & Public Policy at the University of Toronto. While much of the material would likely cause the reader's eyes to glaze over, I hope to write about some situations that motivate the use of policy.
My mother grew up in what was essentially farmland in Aurora, Ontario in the 1950s and '60s. School always involved a long bus ride; the nearest neighbours were miles away. Her love of the outdoors led our family to own a ski chalet on 8 acres of land in upstate New York in the '90s, and for decades she has enjoyed an annual, week-long canoe trip with several women her age to one of Ontario's many parks. The works of the Group of Seven are among her favourite art.
I, on the other hand, have resolved never to own a car, which mostly confines my working life to urban areas. I am still interested in living in a Japanese-style one-bedroom apartment, the sort that tend to be too small for even a shower (a nearby bathhouse substitutes). Bicycle activism interests me, and recently I use 'driver' as an ephithet more often that not. Despite these contrasts I find that I share a high valuation of nature, of open spaces away from civilization, of the pristine. I cycle, ski, run and dragon boat because I love being outdoors. Nature's majesty has an unrivalled capacity to awe me.
Whereas earlier generations, especially in North America, had a concept of nature as bountiful and boundless, we are aware today of the limits of our planet. Conventional wisdom has it that a person is entitled to his own homestead, his plot of land, or at least his suburban home on a large lot. When space is plentiful, this is excellent—if each child had his own patch of woods to tromp through, we would surely have better mental health overall.
In Mississauga, where I grew up, there is no longer empty land; every hectare within the city limits has been zoned, and much of it for housing. The consequence is sprawl; youth who feel disconnected from communities they cannot traverse without a license and a vehicle; poor public transit in areas with density too low to support frequent service. Development, far from ceasing, continues in Brampton and other municipalities further from downtown Toronto.
I don't think this should be interpreted to mean that we no longer value nature. Imagery of the Great White North is central to our national identity and we are loath to abandon it. Nor are the developers and new homeowners inherently evil. Instead, I feel, our behaviour has been slow to change and no longer suits our values.
The course has confirmed my distaste for the varieties of conservatism that favour small government and markets. In the Greater Toronto Area, the de facto policy of letting the housing market alone has only allowed the efficient paving of large areas of green land. Yet the market provides no incentive to use instruments of collective benefit (parks, transit and multiple dwellings) over those of individual benefit (backyards, cars and individual homes). Thus the need for progressive policy. Looking to Western Europe and East Asia we can see myriad examples of both success and failure in this policy space, and we have the luxury of adapting the former to our own cities.
Thus also I can reconcile my 'city mouse' predilections with my 'country mouse' values. When wilderness and nature—the urban park, the lakeshore, the ski slopes and national parks a few hours away—are within easy reach, urban living need not feel confined or artificial.