Author Archives: thumbtackhead

Like many Canadians, I grew up watching some, ok a lot, of US network television.  I admit that there wasn’t a great deal of educational value there.  Perhaps an episode or two of School House Rock that told me what conjunctions are, but not much more.  Now that Saturday morning cartoons don’t dominate my schedule, although I can’t pass on the Simpsons, those “educational” experiences are less overt.  But they still come up on occasion.

One such occasion happened a few years ago during the US mid-term elections.  It just so happens that the US network stations that we get here in the Nation’s capital herald from Detroit.  We Canadians were bombarded with campaign commercials from any number of candidates seeking seats on the US Congress or US Senate and perhaps even a few seats in important places.  Of course I can’t recall any of their names, nor tell you who won the important jobs.  I can tell you what struck me most was the commentary from the many autoworkers that lent their support testimonials in the TV ads.  Most of these people were supporting particular candidates for helping provide funds to keep their particular automotive plant open.  It struck me that perhaps these hardworking people would have been better served by funding training programs to prepare them in today’s evolving job marketplace.  The recent turmoil in the US automotive industry, personalized by the Oscar nominated HBO documentary “The Last Truck” suggests that perhaps more could have been done to better prepare these communities for the Digital Economy.  Let’s keep a close eye to make sure we really learned this lesson.

The second learning came more recently, well actually earlier this week when I saw another commercial.  Yes I only pay attention to the commercials.  This commercial from the Detroit Medical Center promotes a web-based real-time Emergency Room wait times at their five hospital facilities (http://www.dmc.org/ERwait ).  ER wait times are a key concern here in Ontario as well http://www.health.gov.on.ca/en/pro/programs/waittimes/edrs/default.aspx.  Before you jump to conclusions about the results on either site, stop.  There are too many differences between the measurements to even start to make any reasonable assertion.  What we can learn is that someone, someplace in Michigan has found a way to report useful data about the ER in what seems to be a real time basis, and that the data is useful for the community to help them make an informed decision should they have the luxury to plan their visit to the ER.  This is the lesson of making data more readily available to empower individuals to make more informed decisions.  And that’s one to grow on…

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about open government and greater citizen engagement in the machinery of government.  Local governments have had the most success in reaching out to their communities and getting greater involvement from businesses and individuals in local affairs.  This is partly because of the far larger number of daily interactions that we have with our city services.  If you think about it for a minute you appreciate that many of those things that you see during the day, like tap water, electricity, public transit, traffic lights, trash collection, public pools, local policing, restaurant health checks and more are all city services.  On any average day it seems that we take advantage of well over 10 city provided services.  It’s difficult to think of many provincial services over and above health, driver’s licensing and outdoors.  It’s even more difficult from a direct federal government interaction, perhaps passports, citizenship and RCMP.

So how do we get better citizen engagement across the three levels of government when the interaction between the jurisdictions is so different?  One common “service” across all governments is tax:  municipal, provincial and federal taxes.  Maybe there could some way that we could encourage greater citizen interaction in the allocation of taxes to government programs.  Maybe taxes could represent a catalyst for Canadians to give their 2¢ worth of input.  2¢ is hard to subdivide across multiple programs, so let’s up the ante a little and suggest that we use $20 as a baseline.  Since Statistics Canada states that average personal taxes amounted to $14,600 in 2008, (http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/091218/dq091218b-eng.htm, $20 represents less than 0.14% of the total tax bill.  I’m sure CRA probably won’t mind that 0.14% is being put aside for this project.

Here the concept:  Give every taxpayer a notional $20 that they can allocate towards discretionary projects (that is, projects other than essential services (core policing, clean water etc.))  Over top of a regional map, let people select programs that interest them from a pull down list of government funded activities.  For each activity, allow people to allocate from $1 to $20 of their notional fund towards each project.  So tax payers could, for example, allocate $5 towards a coffee shop in Khandahar for the troops, $5 for maintaining their local outdoor rink and perhaps $10 for improvements to the 400 series highways.  At the end of the selection period, the governments could tally the value, truncate those activities that didn’t receive enough support to reach their minimum goals (it would be hard to build an off ramp with say $100).  The unallocated funds could be re-distributed in a prorated manner based upon support received to date.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/69GS2ZH

It’s funny to read the fine print included in some ads.  I guess I never thought of trying to get double meat on my fast food sandwich for the same price.  After all, a double is a double and a single is a single.  I think we can all appreciate that there are some options that we can choose when ordering which will be included in the price, and there are other special asks that might cost a little more. 

Now you might ask:  “what’s he on about fast food sandwiches and disclaimers” in a technology oriented blog.  Great question!  The connection lies in a recent presentation I made at a conference on “Cloud Computing Law.”  I have to admit that as an engineer, I felt a little out of place in the roster of legal professionals that followed my kick-off session, but having worked with IT as service for the better part of 10 years, especially focused on cloud and legal/policy issues for the last four I could provide a practitioner’s perspective.  Of course I always start off with the “demystifying the cloud” messages that help everyone appreciate the variety of technologies, processes, business models and locations that cloud services can refer to.  There is still confusion out there and it’s making business leaders wary of going to the cloud.  It’s also perpetuating some of the myths I’ve written about earlier.  As organizations look to take advantage of the opportunities of cloud computing they have the choice of whether to build cloud capabilities in their facilities, ask a service provider to host their cloud services or make use of public cloud services over the Internet.

Moving from internal cloud services to the public cloud services allows economies of scale to kick in and decreases, often dramatically; the costs associated with the IT service (see Economics of the Cloud paper).  However, as you move from private, through hosted to public cloud services your ability to obtain customized solutions decreases.  Generally, the broader the audience the solution serves, the more that you’ll have the simplicity of configuration.

This takes us back to the presentations at the cloud computing law conference where there were several suggestions around what organizations should demand from their cloud services provider.  In many cases cloud providers have already packaged these requirements into the baseline services offerings or the business agreements that are struck with customers.  In some cases, well, it just doesn’t work that way.  One example that stands out in my mind is the suggestion that cloud consumers demand a private right to audit the operations of the cloud provider.  Trustworthy cloud operators will have already had independent validation of their operations against one or more audit standards, be it SAS 70 or ISO 27001 to provide a consistent, industry recognized measurement of the trusted operations of their facilities.   These worldwide recognized audit standards have been developed to provide confidence without requiring separate independent reviews.  Think of it like the health inspector checking out the restaurant so that you don’t have to go through the kitchen yourself.  Can you imagine what the operations of a cloud service provider would look like if each of their thousands of customers audited their facilities?  My sense is that on any given day there would be 10s, if not hundreds, of audit personnel in the data centre.  Operators would have little time to actually operate their facilities and would be kept busy shepherding people throughout their facilities and documentation.

If you really want to have your own audit capabilities, you may need to look to a provider who is more specialized to meeting your custom requirements and that, of course, may cost extra.

I mentioned at GovCamp that Canada is at the forefront for Open Data activities worldwide.  In my presentation I had hoped to illustrate a number of the projects underway, but alas, the build just made a mess of the slide.  So I thought it would be interesting to try to capture the timeline of noteworthy open government / open data activities in Canada.  I’ve captured a number of the notable open government / open data initiatives across Canada (and borrowed a couple from datalibre.ca and the open data in Canada wikipedia entry) and fleshed out the dates from news articles and other announcements.  I’ve done my bets to be accurate, but would happily be corrected by those with more detailed info (e.g. When exactly did Nanaimo first publish their data?)

If you have a correction or addition, please leave a comment with it, and I’ll refresh the .xlsx  on a regular basis with the new noteworthy events.

The Excel spreadsheet is here: Canada_Open_Data_Timeline-v2.4