THE NABOU CHRONICLES

An Adventure into the Great Bear Rainforest (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 18:33:00 +0000

This trip into the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR) was rich in learning. It would be impossible to describe all the knowledge and experiences gained through it. Two experiences stand out in my mind and may help me illustrate.The first experience was the opportunity to observe wild life in the GBR environment. I had mentioned the many encounters with whales in my previous post. But this time we were on land in a stand overlooking a creek. We were fortunate enough to see a number of black bears hunting fish in preparation of their hibernation.[All photos courtesy of Mike Robbins].

One of the three black bears that we were able to observe was an older one, getting slow and less successful in catching fish. It fed on the leftovers of the other bears. It was not certain to survive the coming winter. Watching it was sad but reminded me of the immutable realities of life.

The ultimate experience was to be able to see the very rare Spirit Bear and to observe it for over half an hour relatively close. The Spirit bear was the most successful in catching fish. Apparently he has an advantage because of its white fur; fish don't get alarmed as much as with black bears. Another amazing fact I learned from our guide is that bears artificially constipate themselves ahead of hibernation by eating sand with the fish. In spring they then consume a specific plant that gets them normalized again. In the first photo below you can see the Spirit Bear looking for the fish hiding under a tree fallen into the creek .

In the second photo you can see the Spirit Bear finishing a large fish it caught a minute earlier.

Until very recently Gitga'at people were forbidden to speak about any sightings of Spirit Bears in order to protect them from hunters. But with support from Tides Canada the Gitga'at people have set up a watch program that has significantly reduced hunting and poaching in their territory, though not completely eliminated them.

The second experience that marked my memory of this trip was the visit to Whale Point. We landed on the southern tip of Gil island at a rugged rocky coast (no docks of any kind) and climbed a steep hillside of slippery black rocks. There we found two wooden buildings. A house in a small clearing and at the cliff overlooking the sea, a barrack. It turns out these are the home and workplace for Janie Wray and Hermann Meuter for the last 11 years! The house was built without cutting a single tree, using mostly drift wood, we were told. Power is generated through 2 banks of solar cells, one tree-top wind generator, and a run-of-the-river generator all charging a bank of 12 volt batteries. The batteries in turn feed a DC/AC inverter that provides 110V AC for the house and the barrack.

The barrack houses a lab (part of what Janie and Hermann call their Cetacea Lab) with electronic gear to listen and record whale signals from hydrophone (underwater microphones) placed at strategic points around Whale Point. Over the years Janie and Hermann have not only accumulated an extraordinary collection of recorded whales vocalizations but gained amazing insights into the whale songs construction. Janie told us about their observation of a whale adding a "sonnet" or segment to the pod's song, which then gets picked up by the rest of the pod. They also developed a number of catalogs for the different whales observed in the region.

You can learn more about this amazing story of commitment at forwahles.org where you can read about Janie and Hermann work and even try to listen live to whale signals.

An Adventure into the Great Bear Rainforest (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 22:37:00 +0000

In the last week of September I had the opportunity to visit a rare corner of BC, the Great Bear Rainforest (GBR). Getting to Vancouver and attending the prep briefing went all as planned. The next morning we were supposed to leave very early through a chartered flight to Bella Bella where we would switch into a smaller amphibian plane (Goose) for transport to a lodge reachable only by air or waterways.

Due to heavy fog at destination our take off was repeatedly delayed until it was decided to change the plan and fly us to Terrace. From there we made our way by bus to Kitimat (about 1.5 hours) where boats would be waiting for our group. The boats turned out to be two speedy launches with covered cabin and one open boat for the luggage.

The final leg of the travel started around 3:30 pm making for a long day of travel. Fortunately, the weather was reasonable (cold but no rain). The scenery was breathtakingly beautiful. In one spot I saw an area without any vegetation that looked odd. It turns out that's what a logged area looks like.

We were also lucky to encounter two pods of Orca whales on the way to the lodge that made us forget the long day of travel. They are such majestic and graceful animals. It's not easy to capture the whales on a photo with a point-and-shoot camera on a wobbly boat, but I did see them come up and blow and dive again less than 20 yards away. The blow noise from a near distance sounds almost human (a giant swimmer coming up for breath). I did capture one at the tail-end of diving (literally!).

We finally arrived at the lodge, which turned out to be quite a luxurious and interesting operation. Here is a view from the air (coming back from a helicopter exploration of the surroundings). The actual lodge is to the right. The building on the left houses all staff and personnel.

The lodge operates within the Gitga'at First Nation Reserve and hires at least one third of its personnel from the local community. I was very impressed with the level of knowledge and environmental commitment of all the lodge staff. I was told that their CEO speaks to staff every year about the Triple Bottom Line concept. To what extent that commitment went, I couldn't have guessed.

As I discovered later both buildings are actually on floating barges. I was told that the lodge was built on a retired Navy crane barge. At the end of the season (mid September usually) two tug boats tow the buildings, the docks, and all the rest to Prince Rupert Island, where the barges are maintained in sea worthy condition. Nothing is left on site. The barge has it on-board power generators, 3-stage drink water filtering system, and a gray water processing. You can see the barge carrying the lodge and some mooring cables on the right in the picture below.

Click here for the official King Pacific Lodge site.In the next installment of this blog, I'll be writing about my visit to Hartley Bay and Whale Point, two interesting and learning rich visits on the same trip.

Euro Diaries - Oslo

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 18:36:00 +0000

The last Scandinavian destination on my study tour was Oslo. For this leg of the trip I flew SAS. I had checked in electronically with a Nokia Lumia 800 phone that Steve Heck, the CIO of Microsoft Canada, had lent me to try its Windowsphone 7.5 OS. My boarding pass was downloaded as a PDF to the phone and included a QR code. I had to check in my suitcase and was directed to the SAS self-service kiosks to get the tags to be affixed to the luggage. When I was prompted to put in my boarding pass for a scan, I put in the Lumia 800 with the e-pass open. That didn't work. After several attempts at enlarging and positioning the QR code and not having success, an employee of SAS came to help. He took over the Lumia and tried everything I had already done, which told me that the use of e-boarding passes is normal and that Customer Service reps behave the same everywhere. We finally used the flight booking reference to print a paper boarding pass, which then allowed me to get the luggage tags.

I am not sure what the cause of the problem with the Lumia e-pass. Nokia phones are very widely used in Europe, particularly in Scandinavian countries. I suspect it has to do with the PDF rendering of the QR code by Windowsphone within the e-pass. More testing required.

My main destination in Oslo was AHO, the Oslo Architecture & Design School. It is in an interesting building. It used to house the maintenance workshops of Oslo's electric utility. AHO re-arranged the building and added a new wing.

The building has three levels, the second of which is designed as a green roof and patio with "green" stairs leading to the cafeteria on the ground floor:

On our arrival day at AHO critiques/defenses of graduation thesis was in progress. I visited a few of the Architecture Institute graduation projects and learned a few facts: the jury is fully external to AHO and usually includes 1-2 (sometimes all 3) from other Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Sweden). Jury members receive the full thesis text a couple of weeks before defense, prepare written comments on it and then each jury member presents his/her opinion to the audience attending the defense. The first such presentation was so detailed, I thought it was the student presenting!

I also attended some of the sustainable design graduation projects. They were taking place in a large studio, where each of the defending projects had to be displayed on a dedicated wall space. Summary color prints where available as take away as well as a few copies of the published thesis in a paperback booklet format that I found really nice to handle and to read. One project I found particularly interesting was a study of a small island called Utsira and the planning for developing the island to meet ecological objectives by 2022. The analysis and planning addressed energy, buildings, food, culture, transportation and communications in an integrated fashion.

I took one afternoon to meet with local Sandboxer Brock LeMieux at his "project" site. The site turned out to be an old pub being converted by Brock and his partner into a co-working space.While conversion work was still in progress, the energy of the place was palpable. We decided to chat outside to take advantage of the sunny weather. Chairs, table and pots of coffee were simply moved to a minimalist deck in front of the place, where we then had a wonderful conversation on models for co-working places and incubation, the future of higher education and the role of design and design thinking. I enjoyed the discussion thoroughly. It reminded me much of our Overlap discussions.

On my last afternoon in Oslo I was taken on a tour of the building by Prof. Hakan Edeholt. During the tour I finally had opportunity to meet with students doing interdisciplinary projects in their studios.

The first group (Bai Daniel Ogaard, Kristian Aarseth, Morten Evensmo and Hanne Nilsen), was working on a Laparoscopic Simulator in virtual reality in collaboration with a corporation, SimSurgery. Laparoscopic surgery is a minimally invasive surgery technique putting high demands of coordination and precision on the surgeons. The simulator they designed is compact, plug-and-play, and an affordable desktop simulator resolving a number of the disadvantages of previous simulators.
The project was part of an initiative called Protohype AHO 2012, which aimed at hyping prototypes of future technologies. It reminded me strongly of the SFI program's tangible futures activities.

The second group of students researched the needs and experience of old people in "assisted living" facilities and proposed solutions for improvements through technology, design and empowerment. After a PowerPoint presentation provided to me on the spot without prior notice I was also shown videos that the students produced to pitch their results and design proposals in an effective way.

An interesting aspect of AHO design program is that groups of students haves to organize themselves as independent commercial design cabinets and develop a pitch of their skills and interests. The companies participating in the program also develop a short presentation of their strengths and research interests. After attending each other pitches each side (student design cabinets and companies) lists the top three preferred "partner" they would like to work with. The program administration then tries to match the parties. In the last round no one got assigned a partner lower in preference than their second choice. IP rights of the then carried out research and developments are owned by the company but students get employment or long-term contracts opportunities through this system.

Euro Diaries - Copenhagen

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 21:03:00 +0000

I was enjoying the travel by rail instead of by plane, so I chose a train to get to my next destination, Copenhagen. I made a short stop to visit an old room mate and good friend in Bremen, which turned out to have a lovely old city including both beautiful historic buildings as well as very narrow streets sprinkled with tiny shops and restaurants. The whole place is really worth exploring.

Continuing my trip I had to catch the ICE to Copenhagen in Hamburg. As the train was just rolling into the station it was announced that the train was cancelled due to a technical problem. You can imagine the excitement this caused to the people waiting on the platform to board the train (including a brief panic by yours truly). The following ten minutes were characterized by chaos and conflicting information given by the platform officials (who all wear red hats to be better identified) about what to do now. But within further 10 minutes, a new train of equal quality and even with the same wagon and seat numbering was brought to the same platform.

I had to admire the German efficiency at logistics, their handling of such a complex situation and the convenience of continuing my trip with no change to my seat reservation despite the swap of an entire train. The electronic technology used to display wagon and seat numbers probably helped a lot, but nevertheless impressive.

The trip continued smoothly. Ever increasing numbers of wind-mill generators appeared in the green landscape of Germany's North. At the coast the train drove onto a ferry boat and once on board passengers were asked to leave the train and head to the upper deck of the ferry. On my way there I noticed trucks and cars loaded onto the same boat, so it must have been a sizable ferry to accommodate all this load. The time to grab food and drink from one of the cafeterias and consume them while soaking the sun on the upper deck like any self-respecting Nordic must do, we had to return to our train to disembark from the ferry and continue towards our destination.

Upon arriving to Copenhagen my first impression of the city was the astronomic number of bicycles everywhere. Many of them drove with frightening speed. You actually were at a higher risk to be run over by a bicycle than by a car! Check out this view of the parking lot in front of the central train station on Sunday.

How would one even find their bicycle upon return? Every conceivable model, size and configuration of bicycle (and tricycles and quadcycles) can be found in Copenhagen, with open or closed basket, aft or forward child seat, pushed or towed cart (for passengers or cargo), open or with rain/wind or sun covers. Apparently over 60% of cyclists continue to use their bicycles in the winter. On the streets of Copenhagen you could see clear signs of the bicycle parking crisis: two-level parking stands:

Emil Tin, who works for the Municipality of Copenhagen's traffic division in the bicycle department told me that 35% of all trips to work/school in 2010 were on bicycle. The city has the ambitious goal of raising this to 50% by 2015. Emil in fact pointed me to the Social Lab web site where ideas were been sought and collected for achieving this and other goals related to bicycling in Copenhagen. You can find the details by clicking here.

In his spare time Emil (who is also a graduate of Kaospilot) among many other things is part of a group that drums, plays music and sings together that participated in the Copenhagen Carnival. Although I had scouted part of the carnival, I did not know at the time about Emil's group and so missed their performance. I just caught a glimpse of various carnival activities like this one:

When we met with Emil on a holiday Monday, the group members (who were very multicultural) had just spent two days playing at the Copenhagen Carnival, were exhausted and just relaxing around a barbecue in the back yard of the Samba School.

In typical danish way we were simply invited to join in and engaged in an interesting conversation with Emil and his friends. A young man to my left was on an MBA program. When I asked him what his research interest was, he said he wanted to understand how Islamic financial principals worked. Seeing the surprised expression on my face, he smiled pointing out to his lovely girlfriend next to him, who turned out to have an Iranian background.

Professionally, Copenhagen was also a rich experience. I visited Mindlab, which with 10 years under its belt is probably the longest standing centre dedicated to public sector innovation. There, I was able to ask many of the questions I was seeking answers to courtesy of Christian Mason, Director of Mindlab, who granted me generous time despite his busy schedule. I also attended a session with Tom Bentley, Deputy Chief of Staff to the Australian Prime Minister, in which a range of topics related to public sector innovation were discussed and the dynamics of relations in the triangle of politicians, civil servants, and citizens were deeply investigated. I left with new connections, much learning and stronger ideas on how sLab could contribute to this movement.

In Copenhagen I also had opportunity to meet the Managing Director of the Niels Brock Copenhagen Business College, who had just returned from China, and the college's Executive VP International. I was pleasantly surprised by the strength of the College in China and breadth of its educational spectrum that could open interesting collaboration possibilities between the College and the SFI program at OCAD University.

Our last meeting in Copenhagen got cancelled despite the valiant efforts of Ian Choo, a true citizen of the world, to link me with another innovation group in the city. Ian is helping organize a large music festival in Nepal in an attempt to support peace efforts in that country. I am very grateful for his support and generous time and wish him the best for his Nepal project. My colleague Jeremy and I used the couple of hours idled by the cancellation to take a bus tour on one of those double-deck tourist buses. We discovered that despite our (very) extensive walking through the city over the long weekend there were still many many beautiful places to see and discover in Copenhagen.

All in all I can say that I fell in love with Copenhagen and its people. I definitely want to plan another more leisurely trip with my better half to explore it further.

Euro Diaries - Germany (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 31 May 2012 20:48:00 +0000

After the activities of the reunion, I was booked for some quality time with my friends Jan and Heidi. They probably recognized what I need. The next two days were a wonderful and serene tour of the many castles surrounding Dresden. All have been refurbished and renovated. Some of the blue-blooded original owners of the castles had returned to live in them, opening the castle gardens to the public. Many have become again sophisticated wineries and hosted fine restaurants.

For me it was a rediscovery of the beautiful surroundings of Dresden and as the weather warmed up and became sunny, the leisurely touring was exactly what I needed to recover from the tumults of the preceding travels and celebrations. But it was time to continue the journey. The next stop was Berlin.

I took one of the modern electrified Inter City Express (ICE) trains driving frequently between German and European cities. It displays rich information on the screens of each wagon, including speed. I noted a sustained speed of 226 kph for good stretches! We could use an ICE between Toronto and Montreal and Ottawa for sure.

After its reunification Berlin has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis. It is a city that I have come to love not only because of its revival and character, but also because it has become the location of many good friends. I was invited to a "senior" dinner of the Sandbox network hosted by Hans and Ida. Along with homemade Pasta Arabiata, wine, a healthy dessert and fabulous conversations the time flew away and I made several new friends in the city. Ida is a graduate of Kaospilot and together with Hans they are working on a start-up in the reproductive health area that could have tremendous implications globally if successful. Interestingly enough, two of the people attending the dinner are also working on projects related to incubation/acceleration of new companies. This topic seems to be popping everywhere and is encouraging me to complete my new concept for incubation/acceleration.
Mostly I was inspired by the energy of these bright young people and their quiet determination to change the world. It restored some of my optimism in the future. When it was time to take my leave, my host ordered a taxi using an app. It showed all the cabs in the vicinity, flagged which one accepted the order, displayed the driver's photo and registration number, provided the ETA of the cab and showed the cab in movement on the map towards us. Very cool. Toronto, wake up from your slumber!

In Berlin I linked up with my friend and colleague Jeremy Bowes, who teaches systems at the graduate Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) program at OCAD University. Jeremy is a practicing architect, and being married to one myself, I had also developed interest in aspects of architecture and urban planning. He was on a similar tour to mine and had just visited Vienna. Together we set on a discovery tour (not withstanding the ubiquitous construction works literally on every street!) culminating in a boat cruise on the Spree river, which provides an interesting perspective on the architecture of the city, both old and new. Berlin is known for its Spree beaches and for integrating art works in many aspects of the city, such as the sculptures on the bank of the river below.

Another interesting discovery in Berlin was my visit to the Heinrich Boell Foundation. There I discovered a world of peer-to-peer (P2P) activities and among other things an interesting study on the reasons international oil companies are pursuing unconventional oil sources. Much food for thought (and a separate blog probably).

Between the various work events there was always opportunity to enjoy a drink, a good meal, or just a good conversation over "Kaffee und Kuchen" in one of Berlin's uncountable cafes and restaurants. In the process Jeremy introduced me to the fad of documenting your love to your partner by adding a lock with (and sometimes without) inscriptions of the names or initials of the lovers. It is usually affixed to the railing of a bridge. I was to discover later that the same fad is popular in Copenhagen as well. It is probably a better idea than sinking coins in every water fountain or river lovers encounter, but I suspect a very clever person from the lock industry must have had a hand starting this. You can see a small sample of a huge collection encountered on one Berliner bridge below.

We parted company as we each headed to our next destination. Jeremy was heading to Helsinki and I was bound to Copenhagen. My next blog would be from that city.

Euro Diaries - Germany (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 30 May 2012 21:37:00 +0000

This whole travel project started with an invitation I received to a class reunion at my University in Germany. We were celebrating 40 years after graduation (yep, that much time has already gone by). The idea emerged that if I am going to be in Europe for the reunion, I could plan for a little longer visit. From there the idea developed into using that longer visit to explore some of the centres doing interesting work in innovation. What followed was a long and complicated process of planning and logistics. Finally, I had itineraries, tickets, reservations and meetings more or less lined up. And off I went.

The first stop was in Dresden. After the long transatlantic flight I could have used a nap, but arriving in the morning, there was no chance of getting into my hotel room before noon. Luckily had my friends Jan and Heidi this situation predicted. They picked me up at the airport and drove me direct to their lovely house out in the green fields surrounding Dresden. The weather obliged with 28-30 degrees and I was seated in the beautiful sunny garden with drinks and light conversation. The sunshine helped me adjust faster to local time and after lunch I was driven by my gracious hosts to my hotel.

My first challenge was with getting an Internet connection. The hotel's system requires that you register through your laptop's browser including providing your mobile number. You then receive an SMS message with a code that you need to enter into the browser to gain access to the Internet. One small problem: my European cellular number needed to be activated and I needed the Internet to do so! There was no way to break this vicious circle without outside help. Luckily some of my classmates, who were staying at the same hotel, arrived soon after and I finally achieved connectivity courtesy of the “handy” (as the mobiles are called over here) of my friend and then class president Uwe.

Soon it was already time to go to the initial gathering of the class. I met the first group of three classmates at the hotel lobby. Two I could recognize immediately, but for the third I needed a while (and some hints) to do so! We took the streetcar (tramway) to our destination, a restaurant near the landmark Blaues Wunder (Blue Wonder) bridge over the Elbe River. The public transportation is excellent and Toronto could learn a few things from the Germans in this respect. Just as we were stepping out of the streetcar a violent shower erupted. We took refuge in the entrance of a bakery/café and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw hail rebounding from the street’s surface. So much for my weather expectation mid May!

After the storm passed we finally got to our destination, a pretty restaurant overseeing the Elbe river. The other classmates were already there. Big round of greetings and hugs. To be completely honest, after 40 years I recognized 4-5 right away but could not recognize many others. Time had taken its toll on all of us and a few had even passed away. At a certain moment in the evening (and with my jet lag kicking in) I wondered what I was doing there among these almost strangers. But with the bier flowing and the taste of German food, long-lost memories emerged suddenly. Speaking in German became easier and easier. And by the end of the evening, I felt almost back among peers and friends. Then the first product of the meticulous preparations of this reunion was unveiled: a beautiful bound volume titled "Kompendium der HF2/68" with highlights from our student years, main reunions, two pages for each class mate summarizing their path in the last four decades. A nice touch: pages were also produced for those mates who were not among us anymore. Leave it to the Germans to organize something; the book was high-quality production with many photos in black & white and in colour. Many of the moving life stories told were also a witness of the turbulent times that followed the reunification of Germany and what they meant to an entire generation.

The next day had a full program. We started by walking through the garden of the Zwinger palace to the anchoring place of the river cruise ships. On the way I caught a rarity from the old GDR days: a limousine made out of 3 old Trabant cars!

There we boarded a steamship aptly named "Dresden" for a short cruise towards Pillnitz. The conversations around the tables started removing the fog of time and replacing it with concrete persons, names and events. We steamed under the new bridge that for the sake of economic development has cost Dresden its UNESCO designation of "Human Heritage Site". The discussions were still very passionate about the subject. The steam machine was made visible to passengers and it was a jewel of mechanics

In Pillnitz we disembarked for a hike through the green hills where we sang our first song from the songbooks (two no less!) produced specially for the occasion.

Our destination was a local winery. There we settled for a tasting of the wines with cheese, olives and copious amounts of freshly baked breads in a hall decorated with remarkable sculptures by an artist, who happened to also be the wine master's wife. The sculptures were beautiful and everywhere including the winery. The one displayed here is also a fountain; water drips leisurely from the woman's hair.

I wasn't sure what served as a muse to the other: the beautiful sculpture to the wine master or the good wine to the artist. Probably a case of mutual inspiration :)

The way back was punctuated by stops at a few Biergarten and ended at another nice restaurant on the bank of the Elbe river, where we enjoyed a merry dinner (with some more folks songs authorized by the restaurant personnel) and a celebration of life.
The next stages of the trip follow in Part 2.

Nurturing the Next Generation of IT Workers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:22:00 +0000

In an age where technology seems to drive everything and where information & communication technologies (ICT) are at the heart of most if not all of technological advances, both female and male enrollment in ICT disciplines in Canada, believe it or not, is declining!

One reason behind this complex phenomena is the perception of high-school students of what an ICT career looks like. Mostly, students envisage a geeky type writing code on a computer. These perceptions are amplified by the challenges faced by many high-school teachers in understanding and teaching ICT. It is also supported by the outdated occupational titles used in the federal government's National Occupation Classification (last updated in 2006), which do not reflect the radical changes that ICT professions have undergone in the last few years.

The changes happened gradually. Initially ICT was one of the lines of business and the repository of ICT in the organization. But as ICT became more and more integral part of other business functions such as accounting, sales, operations, marketing, human resources, customer relations etc., they transformed into a horizontal business function spanning all vertical lines of business. As a consequence ICT managers had visibility to all enterprise systems and processes and became therefore the prime candidate for innovating to improve the performance of the enterprise. This in turn required a different type of manager, one that along a sound understanding of technology can also bring deep understanding of the business and the ability to efficiently communicate with the various lines of business in their own jargon.

Another aspect of the same problem can be observed in a number of industries that have recently become heavy users if ICT. Although workers in pharmaceuticals, genomics, or bioinformatics use primarily ICT, when asked about their occupation, they would rarely classify themselves as ICT workers.

Many changes need to happen to address this situation. One is obviously to update the occupational classifications. More importantly there is a need to change the perception of high-school students about the professions available in an ICT career. A number of CIOs (Chief Information Officers) from a variety of industries are volunteering their time to visit schools and tell students about their profession and their career path. Another activity is to sponsor ICT students and recognize excellence in their work.

As part of the latter, the CIO Association of Canada in collaboration with Ryerson University participates yearly in the Awards Program of the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management through offering the Dr. Catherine Aczel Boivie Scholarship awarded to a student achieving a high standing in the Business Process Design course at the end of the third year. This year I had the privilege of representing the CIO Association in presenting the scholarship to the 2011 recipient, Mehran Vahedi.

I was also thrilled to discover the Dave Codack Academic Achievement Award offered to two students. Dave is a member of the CIO Association and holds the advocacy portfolio on its National Board.

It was a real pleasure to meet many of the brilliant recipients of this year's Award Program during the reception preceding the ceremony. It gives one hope that change is slowly happening but it also highlights how much more work needs to be done. Many more people from all walks of life should get involved to sponsor this and similar activities for the benefit of their children, their organizations and their country.

The follies of our Charities

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 21:34:00 +0000

A few years back around Christmas time, I was discussing with my kids the importance of charity and how to choose who to donate to. The kids got interested and wanted to participate in making such choices. As a result we ended splitting up the amounts we had earmarked for charity among a number of organizations serving various social needs.

A short time after we sent our donations I noticed a substantial increase in mail soliciting donations, not only from those organizations we donated to, but from many others we never dealt with. This started me thinking on the lax ethical standards of organizations that promise not to share your address, but then feel they can do so under the pretext of a "good cause". From there I got thinking about the efficiency of those organizations in fundraising and started a small experiment: over a period of 2 years I collected all soliciting mail from organizations I had stopped donating to and analyzed the contents.

The first surprise was the sheer volume of soliciting mail we received, which indicates to me the scale of donor address sharing going on in the charitable sector. Here is a picture of just a year's worth of these solicitations.

The next surprise was the scope of unsolicited gifts and print materials we received: calendars, planners, tot bags, pen, paper pads, key chains etc. Here are some samples:

While paper pads and calendars could find some use, there were also items that could be useful if it weren't for the excessive quantities we received. Here are 2 examples - greeting cards and address labels:

In an age where regular mail use is declining in favor of electronic communications, the greeting cards we got were way more than my team of 10 people at work needed for ALL occasions. The address labels were just a humongous waste, not to mention other labels of even rarer use like these:

More ridiculous were things that didn't make much sense at all such as "Supporter Cards" that can't be used for much, or nickel coins:

Some thought that overwhelming donors with multiple mailings will do the trick!

All of this made me realize why the charitable sector is so inefficient and vulnerable. Others may enjoy the continuous flood of unsolicited junk. For my part I'd rather see the organizations I support avoid the waste and offer donors choices of electronic communications as well as choices of what gifts they'd like to receive if any at all for their donations.

Until I see such behavior that indicates some financial rationality and responsibility for our environment as well, the bags of soliciting mail is going straight to the blue box.

We have no choice but to dare to be great

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:57:00 +0000

In September I had blogged about some of the stories told at BIF-6 and the random encounters of unusual suspects at the Collaborative Innovation Summit. In particular I wrote about Keith Yamashita's story and how it impacted me.

Since then I have reminded myself and others when we are planning or considering action, that we should dare to be great, and have found often that this simple sentence often ignites imagination and inspires the conversation to steer towards more ambitious goals and more significant change. The power of collectively imagining a "greater" future never ceases to amaze me and I am grateful to Keith for planting this seed in my mind.

Now the video recording of Keith's presentation at BIF-6 is available online. I highly recommend that you view it, and that you do so in a quite uninterrupted moment to enjoy the full power of his story.

New Ways for Citizen Engagement

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Citizen initiatives are transforming the discourse, even the relationship between citizens and their governments. The most recent installment of evidence of this transformation came at this month's Unfinished Business Lecture at OCAD's Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) on October 20, 2010.

SeeClickFix Platform

The invited speaker of this lecture was Ben Berkowitz, CEO of SeeClickFix. I had the pleasure of attending Ben's presentation about the story behind his organization at the Collaborative Innovation Summit (BIF6) in September of this year and was happy that he could tell this story to a Toronto audience. Kudos to Michael Dila and his team at Torch Innovation for taking the initiative of inviting Ben to speak at the Unfinished Business Lecture that they sponsor. The series has been exceptional in the selection of topics and the quality of speakers.

Ben told the story of SeeClickFix. It started as an initiative to fight unwanted graffiti in his neighborhood, morphed into a web application for reporting pot holes that needed repair, grew into a tool for alerting government officials to public works needed (pot holes and others), and blossomed into a global web 2.0 platform for citizen engagement and for citizen self-organized action.

Government Evolving

What I found interesting is that what started as an application to collect information locally about unwanted graffiti evolved rapidly not only as a platform for the distributed collection of needed public works, but also as a tool for governments to cut their cost (roaming inspectors to identify needed repairs). Even when governments were short of resources to address the needs, they found open communications with citizen to provide transparency about the allocation of resources and to help dispel perception of preferential treatment of particular neighborhoods. The tactics of subscribing government officials to receive alerts generated within their jurisdiction without first asking for their permission, have increased pressure on officials to engage their citizens. Those who resist and resent the service provided by SeeClickFix are quickly identified by their citizens as non-transparent bureaucrats who are providing inadequate service. In return, the site's ability to display the status of reported issues (open, acknowledged, and closed) on a Google map is providing public works staff with a capability to publicly display their own work and performance.

Self-Organizing Citizens

Furthermore, citizen started using the platform not only for reporting issues but for peer-to-peer communications in order to organize their own actions addressing the issues reported. Examples ranged from a woman, who spray-painted the fading stripes of the pedestrian crossing on her street to Washington citizens posting what resources they can offer and organizing in small groups to help neighbors clear their driveways and sidewalks during the snow storms of the past winter. Some local governments are starting even to offer "civic points" for citizens reporting required works and organizing to help with addressing them.

Toronto's 311 Service

In the Q&A following the lecture, Peter Rose, a graduate student in OCAD's Strategic Foresight & Innovation program, asked Ben if Toronto, which has a 311 service, is using SeeClickFix. Ben mentioned having a phone conversation with someone in the Mayor's office. That person (Ryan) turned out to be among the audience. Peter then put Ryan on the spot asking him to provide the audience with an update on Toronto's government activities in that space. Ryan did not have detailed information (being away for 6 months and at the end of his term with the elections on October 25th), but he deferred to Dave Wallace, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the city, who was also attending.

Sure enough, Dave came forward and provided an interesting insight into Metro Hall's plans and activities around open government and the open data movement. One of the new applications of open data is Toronto's road closures information to help you plan your movement around the city.

What followed was a lively and informative conversation, typical of the Unfinished Business lectures. This and other open-data city activities will be the subject of another posting in the near future as I get more details, so stay tuned.

Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:47:00 +0000

Last week I attended the Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, RI. Called BIF-6 in reference to it's organizer, the Business Innovation Factory and it's sixth occurrence, the two-day event exposes participants to thirty exceptional storytellers in a intimate theater setting. I had attended last year's BIF-5 and found it inspiring and energizing, so I went for more.

An even greater value in attending BIF-6 is really in the networking that takes place before, after and between the stories. BIF founder Saul Kaplan calls it "random collisions of unusual suspects" because he and his team use diversity and diversification as a core principle to enrich these collisions. Storytellers as well as participants are from every walk of life imaginable: from serial entrepreneurs, to educators, technologists, business executives, high-school students to a twelve-year old girl that set up a domestic grease collection and reprocessing into bio fuel that helped heat the house of needy families in her town.

Daring to be Great

The last presentation of Day 2 of BIF-6 was by Keith Yamashita, titled originally "Change, to the Power of Ten". Inspired and moved by previous storytellers and encounters with participants, he changed his title to "Is it worth daring to be great?" As he was reflecting on the role of trust between two people in the larger context of teams and organizations, he recounted an incident, when a business partner and mentor (Alan Webber) vested his full trust in him. For 10 seconds he became very emotional and a tear ran down his cheek. He quickly recovered and continued his presentation, but in those 10 seconds I learned about trust and its importance in personal relations and in social networks small and large more than any books or courses could teach.

Random Collision

Later the next day, in the coach taking us to Providence Airport I happened to sit next to another participant, Monika Hardy (@monk51295). With a long wait for our flights, we settled in one of the airport's seating areas, opened our laptops, intended to get some work done. But the conversation started in the coach did not want to go away. I was still reflecting on my learning experience from Keith's presentation, and found myself in an amazing deep-dive conversation with Monika, who turned out to be an innovator herself in the field of children education. I was fascinated and encouraged that in a public school system, a space has been allowed to experiment with new methods and ways. Monika described how children choose what they want to learn and are then guided by a different kind of teacher, a facilitator of learning that connects the dots of the child's interests without imposing an unnatural regiment of learning. In fact, the children go through a "detox" to unlearn some of the old behaviors learned in school.

Emotional Learning

As I was listening to her passionately describe her work , it occurred to me that the "detox" approach might well be applicable to business. We need to unlearn behaviors drilled into us by the existing system, before we can innovate new ways and structures to do business. I am planning on following up on this conversation.

So, what else did I learn? We seem to be wired for absorbing a significantly higher volume of knowledge, when we are emotionally engaged. Traditional learning, however, focuses primarily on information supply, without much of an emotional component. The result is that we learn the information without the full context that gives the information so much richer meanings in multiple dimensions. We do the same in business. As Keith said: "The biggest fallacy of business is that it's only rational. All business is personal and all business is human". That's why one random encounter with an unusual suspect can teach you more than volumes of HBR.

So as I am soaking up all the learning from these two random BIF-6 collisions, the question swirling in my head is: Could we design emotional components to our learning processes at every level? That's a very intriguing idea particularly as we witness the emergence of a new system of learning based on modules of knowledge that learners can pick and choose from. Imagine if each of these modules was designed to enlist an emotional component of learning.

I'll be trying to write about the many other encounters that sparked my brain at BIF-6, so stay tuned!

Policy Innovation - What's the Urgency?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 18:56:00 +0000

A few months back I had written a blog about the ups and downs of policy innovation. Since then may things have happened.

First, Change Camp 2010 has taken place and I was there as one of the on-line scribes that facilitated the 30 break-out groups of this remarkable event. It was an interesting experience that taught our team a lot about facilitating engagements at this scale (240 people).

Then I organized XCAMP, the unconference discussing the XCLINIC project. With the support of several peers from the Design with Dialog (DwD) practitioner group that meets monthly at OCAD's Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) this smaller event was a great crowd-sourced co-design experience pushing the project a big step forward.

The most important time investment over the past few months (the one that took me away from blogging all this time) was put into developing a brand new graduate course "Business Model & Policy Innovation" and teaching the course to the first class of the MDes program in Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) at OCAD. This has been an exhilarating and learning-rich experience, which we're about to wrap up with project presentations and critiques over the next 2 weeks.

Emerging Trends

During the course I hosted a number of guest lecturers including Toronto City Councilor Gordon Perks and Change Camp co-founder Mark Kuznicki. From the lively discussions throughout the course and the guest lectures, I came out with a renewed sense of urgency for policy innovation. Everywhere we looked (enterprises, government, academic institutions, NGOs) the trend swelling from the grass roots up was towards more collaborative and participatory mode of working. And in most instances that trend was clashing with the vertical decision-making hierarchies and structures that characterize the 20th century.

Towards a Solution

I had highlighted the inherent risks of not addressing this gap in my previous blog about policy innovation. What has emerged through these various events is the beginning of a discourse about how to do so. In a conversation with Dr. David Wolf, Royal Bank Chair in Public and Economic Policy at the Munk Centre for International Studies, about how to address this gap, he envisaged governments shifting implementation efforts significantly towards grass-roots organizations and NGOs. Karl Schroeder, a Sci-Fi author, future scenarios writer, and graduate student at the SFI program suggested exploring a sequencing of these two different modes of organizing: horizontal networks and vertical hierarchies. Each of these modes excels at certain aspects and could be used at specific times in the process of policy making for example.

Mark Kuznicki provided real examples of how tremendous engagement and creativity by grass-roots initiatives in Toronto got stifled due to infighting between vertical hierarchies in Ontario. Everybody agreed with Mark, that how we address this fundamental issue is the conversation all who seek positive change must engage in. This could easily become a cornerstone of research in strategic foresight and innovation.

The Ups and Downs of Policy Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:55:00 +0000

One of the defining characteristics of change of the past decade has been without doubt the growing trend towards collaboration. Assumed by many to be driven by technological advances in information and communications technologies (ICT) this trend has reflected itself in many aspects: from an abundance of collaboration tools using voice, video, white-boarding tools, desktop sharing etc. to the more interesting appearance of collaborative production models such as open source software, open source hardware, co-creation, crowd sourcing and the many other names assigned to various aspects of this phenomenon.

Policy - The grass roots road

The policy development area has not escaped this trend. We witnessed the proliferation of grass root movements aiming at reclaiming control of at least certain elements of the policy articulation and development processes. This was the decade of Orange Revolutions and of the Obama campaign that redefined citizen engagement in the United States. One example much closer to home of such movements is Change Camp, an "unconference" organized in Toronto (Canada) in 2009 with the stated goal: "Re-imagine Government & Citizenship in the Age of Participation".

The ideas and methods of Change Camp Toronto quickly spread to other geographies and became a full-fledged movement advocating radical improvement in citizens engagement, change in how policies are developed, and building tools that enable better organization and mobilization of citizens. These grass root movements constitute a new and innovative bottom-up approach to collaboratively articulating needs, developing solutions and defining policies.

Policy - The Hierarchy Road

Meanwhile government institutions at every level continued their traditional century-old top-down planning approach to policies development, and while some efforts were made to increase consultations with constituents (the traditional town-hall meetings or the occasional costly public hearings), it can be argued that no significant systemic improvements in the participatory nature of these processes were achieved.

A Dangerous Gap

There is an inherent problem in that no one has figured out yet how to link the bottom-up approach with the top-down one. These two processes are currently not sufficiently communicating and have definitely no designs for convergence or integration. In his recent Unfinished Business lecture at the Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) of the Ontario College for Arts and Design (OCAD), David Eaves summed up this problem as "digital citizenry trying to work with analog government". He warned that this gap is dangerous and cannot continue. The question is whether it will be closed peacefully or violently.

Changing Government from the Inside

Not everything is bleak. In July 2009 the Canadian federal government published a report titled "Canada@150: Towards a New Era of Collaboration & Innovation in Government". In it are the findings of a year-long internal initiative "to help build cross-cutting, horizontal networks that could unite people, issues, expertise, and departments in new and innovative ways". While this initiative provides some hope for the evolution of government, it is clearly limited to internal multi-disciplinary government collaboration.

Making Ends Meet

Still, Eaves gap analysis resonated well with me. In the context of developing a syllabus for a graduate course on Business Model & Policy Innovation, I have been discussing with Mark Kuznicki (one of the founders of Change Camp) and others how to connect these two fundamental approaches to policy development and innovation. We will have an excellent opportunity to advance our thinking on this issue in the upcoming Change Camp 2010 which is being designed in the context of the Ontario municipal elections scheduled for late October of this year.

I am looking forward to Change Camp 2010 and to participating in finding solutions and designing processes to close this gap, at least in the City of Toronto.

Web 2.0 - Beyond the Hype

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:21:00 +0000

On December 3 the Ontario Chapter of the CIO Association of Canada hosted an event and social under the title "Web 2.0, Collaboration, and Social Media: Beyond the Hype". The event was aimed to be an intimate gathering of peers (attendance was limited to 25) listening to practitioners and discussing the subject among themselves away from vendor and media hype.

I was invited by Samantha Liscio, CIO of Government of Ontario's CAC to participate in a speaker panel she organized and tasked with framing the subject and providing the basis for the conversation. My colleagues on the panel were: Kyle Reid, CEO of Deep Caliber; Bobby Singh, Director of Information Security at eHealth Ontario and John Sutherland, President of Ennova Inc. The panel was facilitated by Craig Ballance, Director of the IT Leadership Program at Ryerson University.

Discussion topics included:

How Web 2.0 and social media tools have successfully delivered on business goals
Key lessons learned from real implementations (the reality behind the hype)
What some unanticipated outcomes of the implementation of Web 2.0 and social media have been (pitfalls to avoid)
Why it's important to CIO success (moving from 'hype' to 'value')
What constitutes success in the practical application of Web 2.0, Collaboration and Social Media
What to watch for in the next waves of implementation

For me the main insight is that web 2.0 is much more about organizational change than about marketing and sales. The social aspect of new media and more importantly the increasingly social production of content and knowledge, all imply engagement of participants and active conversations. True conversations require not only active listening but also a readiness to change your position based on the conversation. Not many organizations are ready for such commitment, and of those who would like to be many don't know how to adapt their policies, protocols and culture accordingly. Preparing an organization for the collaborative modes of operation needed to thrive in the new economy will require therefore significant changes to the organizational structure and culture before such engagements can yield any significant result.

There was a discussion about how to introduce web 2.0 technology and applications to the C-level executives to win their buy-in. colleagues pointed out that it is perhaps not different from winning support for any major project. In my experience spending an hour of quality time with the CEO on a well prepared demo of such applications could work wonders.

The discussion also touched on the risks of web 2.0 deployments as well as on risks to organizations that are ill prepared to engage in the conversations about them taking place with or without their approval. Many examples were discussed.

All in all it was a great way to spend a pleasant evening with peers, network, and learn about our profession and business in thoughtful conversation.

TU Dresden Regional Ambassador

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:14:00 +0000

It's official: I am now a Regional Ambassador of the Technical University Dresden (TUD). Many years ago, I earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in information technology from TUD. Throughout my career I found the education provided to me at TUD to be very valid and valuable in a variety of settings and thought that could be of interest to many North Americans unaware of the excellence in education provided by this university. So when the opportunity presented itself to become a regional ambassador of my university, I applied.

The city itself, Dresden, is a well kept secret. It is a vibrant city with several universities and colleges attracting a large population of young people. It has a long cultural heritage with some of the world best museums and galleries as well as a long track record in arts and culture. It's location on the Elbe river and proximity of the beautiful nature of Saxon Switzerland provides many opportunities for outdoors activities, nature exploration and entertainment.

Study in Dresden is a multilingual web site with rich information about the opportunities offered to Canadians by TUD. It can answer most of your questions. For additional information you can always contact me or the TUD directly.

Rogers Choco Promo

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 05:38:00 +0000

I recently went in the morning to a major Rogers location for updating the hardware of my daughter's cell phones. The first contact with staff was on the cool side. The person assisting us was sitting behind a long counter and did not stand up and join us as I am used to in that location (must be some new "stay-put" policy!).

Once we explained what we needed the rep started typing on his computer. His body language and terse responses communicated annoyance. I thought for a while it was because we disturbed their peaceful morning rumination, but it turned out that he was stuck trying to retrieve the account information.

Long story short, we selected the new phone (BB of course) and started the process of settling, which involves committing to a 3-years contract with exit penalties in order to get the subsidized cost of the phone. As soon as we signed on the dotted line a magic transformation in the attitude happened. Two bottles of water were offered. The contract was briefly explained, particularly the checklist of what a customer satisfaction survey to be expected in few days will be asking us.

Then, with the phone and papers we got handed two CD jewel cases. I was expecting the usual promotional materials, perhaps a manual in electronic format, or even a music selection like Nissan does sometimes.

To my surprise each case contained a thick CD made completely out of chocolate!

Now I don't know about you, but I am quite a chocolate fan. So I was initially pleasantly surprised. On second thought, however, and having eaten the chocolate, I have the following to say to my friends at Rogers:

Thanks for the promotional chocolate; its quality was medium, but hey, it's free.

While I am a chocolate fan, I would have much preferred a friendlier service before sale.

I was not happy that despite being a VIP customer with significant spending with Rogers for many years, a hardware upgrade had to reset the account lock for another 3 years.

I realize I am hostage to the only GSM carrier in Canada for the time being. All the chocolate of the world will not stop a hostage from seeking freedom. So I'll be seriously looking for alternatives as soon as other GSM carriers become available. Customer service is not post-sale token rewards. It starts with genuine and fair value of the products and services you offer your customers.

Oh and by the way: After 4 months I am still trying to remove a Rogers monthly charge for web hosting that I canceled over six months ago for a web site that never ran on Rogers servers. I assure you, you can remove our web domain from your servers while keeping our (hosted exchange) email domain.

Building Bridges for Peace

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:06:00 +0000

I had a few queries over twitter about the "Building Bridges for Peace" that I am attending in September. As it would be difficult to explain in 140 characters and I would hate to flood the timeline with multiple tweets on the same subject, I decided to provide the information here on my blog.

This event is the 4th in a 6-parts series of events organized jointly by the Mosaic institute and the Canadian Centre for Diversity (which used to be called Canadian Council for Christians & Jews - CCCJ). The full official title of the series is "Building Bridges in Canada: New Perspectives on People and Peace" and its purpose is to create a venue for a better discourse about the Middle East peace for Canadians in general and the Canadian Arab and Jewish communities in particular. The short name is therefore "Building Bridges for Peace".

Statement of Values

The organizers of this series of events declared that they subscribe to the following values (quote):

Canada is a country committed to peace, and diaspora communities resident in Canada have a tremendous opportunity to contribute to Canadian peace building efforts around the world.
While governments are vital contributors to peace building, citizens who are informed, and particularly those from diaspora communities originating from regions of longstanding conflict, have an equally important role to play in building peace.
It is important for communities of concerned Canadians to enter into difficult discussions about topics as important as the achievement of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. As Canadians, an discussions we have should be polite, respectful and involve listening with open hearts and minds.
Any effort that results in increased mutual awareness of the history, perceptions, hopes and struggles of the Canadian Arab and Jewish diasporas is a valuable one. If that effort results in a shard commitment to even one tangible peace building initiative in the Middle East, or in a joint recommendation for enhancing Canada's foreign policy towards that region, Canada's mosaic will show its true value.
Achieving a lasting peace in the Middle East will require unrelenting goodwill and creativity of good people who believe that it is never the wrong time to pursue peace.

(End of quote)

Session Themes

The six session themes are:

Diaspora Diaries - A Panel Discussion in Cultural Duality (March 4, 2009): The panel featured 4 prominent Canadians (2 from each community) and was moderated by journalist and commentator Noah Richter, author of This is My Country, What's Yours?: A Literary Atlas of Canada.
The Business of Peace in the Middle East (April 6, 2009): Keynote address by Sir Ronald Cohen, who among many things is the Chairman of the Social Investment Task Force. He was then interviewed by CBC host/correspondent Susan Ormiston.
Making Peace Personal (June 3, 2009): Featuring as speakers journalist and author Janet Wallach and founder of the Canada International Scientific Exchange program (CISEPO) Dr. Arnold Noyek as well as two special guests, Nousha Kabawat, the first Syrian-Canadian to ever participate in the Seeds for Peace program and Inbal Marcovitch, an intern with CISEPO and founding member of the Health as a Bridge to Peace student club at York University. the event was hosted by Evan Solomon of CBC "one of the top 100 people to watch" according to MacLean's magazine.
Where Are We Now (September 16, 2009): a scholarly assessment of the current status of peace building in the Middle East hosted by Margaret MacMillan, author of best seller Paris 1919.
Where Do We Go From Here (November 4, 2009): A diplomatic assessment of the current opportunities for peace in the Middle East, hosted by Ralph Benmergui.
Bridging the Cultural Divide (TBD): Special concert celebrating a shared experience, hosted by Sheilagh Rogers.

In a previous attempt to a dialog between the Arab and Jewish communities in Canada, which was sponsored at the time by Liberal MP Carolyn Bennett, I had proposed to establish a list of Canadian values common between the two communities before starting the dialog, and to commit to resolving differences in views based on such values and principles. Although that first dialog attempt did not progress far enough, we did establish among other things common values that all agreed to, as well as ample historic precedence for harmonious coexistence and even creative collaboration between these two communities. Not many of these made it through to the values stated above unfortunately. The need for such common ground will be felt when it is time to resolve core differences.

Format

The format of the events held so far has been panels or speakers presenting followed by either interviews and/or question period managed by the host. The attendance is approximately 100 guests mostly from the Canadian Arab and Jewish communities. The events are sometime attended by the Israeli General Consul and the Syrian Honorary Consul in Toronto. After the event there is opportunity to linger a bit and engage in conversations (refreshments are served).

After the first session participants were asked to complete a survey designed by The Strategic Counsel. The survey measured audience perceptions of a variety of issues relating to the Middle East. Surveys will be administered again at various points in the series to track changes in the attitudes of attendees over the course of the series.

The sessions are held at University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.

My Take So Far

The initiative to bring the two communities in a well designed setting is to be applauded. The profile of the speakers and hosts has been generally high and the perspectives presented interesting. There is also an element of novelty as the content presented is not well known in main stream media.

There have been no dialogs between the attendees as the format consisted mainly of listening to speakers or panelists. While a limited Q&A has been allowed, the format was strictly limited to questions and commentary or multiple-exchange discussions were discouraged.

The attendees from the two communities do not mix enough in their seating order. Many seats are reserved by name and clustered by community, creating a perception of tiered audience and discouraging mixing with the opposite community. After the event a few good conversation across community lines have been possible, but were limited in time and scope due to the constraints of a brief post-event reception.

Having said that I do appreciate that the first 3 sessions have been building up towards the tougher questions. The next session will provide a realistic assessment of where the peace process stands. The 5th session will tackle where do we go from here. That's where any commonalities achieved in the previous sessions will come to bear.

I have suggested a few things to the organizers such as changing the seating design to encourage mixing and cross conversations, designing time and space for smaller deeper conversations about specific sub-topics, and setting tangible objectives for the outcomes of the series. Come to think of it, my peers at the Design with Dialog group could offer a lot to some of those activities. Greg and I had a brief conversation about setting up a similar dialog. But this is a more complex issue than organizational transformation, and we would need to have a few serious conversations about approach, methods and capabilities. That's material for a few months of DwD right there, but peace is so important that we must try everything possible all the time. I am in. Who wants to join, DwD Team?

I

The not-so-secret Overlap Unconference

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:25:00 +0000

Business Week published on August 3rd, 2009 a guest blog by Venessa Wong titled "Inside the Secret Overlap Conference". Being an Overlap 2007 participant, I felt the Overlap concept would be best served and explained through a post I wrote immediately following my participation. That post is published on the Ning Network's Overlap site, which is accessible only to members. Although membership is open, it may be an inconvenience to have to register in order to read my writing from June 17, 2007. I am therefore providing it here for convenience:

From Overlap 07 to Overlaps

Just got back, fully charged, from Geneva Park where Overlap 07 was held over the weekend. I must admit, it exceeded all my expectations. And no, it's not the post-conference or post-vacation euphoria that often befalls people who extract themselves from their busy lives to attend an event. My enchantment has its roots in the unique blend that characterizes the concept of Overlap: An invitation only event, where a limited number of participants with a broad range of backgrounds, specialization and experience, selected carefully to have vivid minds and an overlap in their interests, are brought together in a pleasant and relaxed environment to engage in a conversation about a chosen subject.

The limitation of the number of participants provides the intimacy required for meaningful conversations and deeper understanding of the various contributions. The broad range of backgrounds and experiences available ensures that those conversations are inherently interdisciplinary and at the frontiers of each specialty. The pleasant and relaxed environment optimizes the collaborative potential of the group. The declared (initial) theme of the gathering provides an easy starting point for the various conversations, which are allowed to evolve the theme further by mutual agreement. Last but not least, the very thoughtful selection of participants guaranteed high caliber conversations (literally) every minute of Overlap 07. I believe I speak for all participants when I congratulate the organizers of Overlap 07 for the exceptional job they did.

This year's theme started with the overlap of design, business, and innovation and expanded in the process to include communities and sustainability. So what was the outcome? Here is my personal take on it. I am sure that many of the friends I made at Overlap 07 will be writing soon their own conclusions.

For me Overlap 07 is a new form of intellectual exchange, firmly anchored in a peer-to-peer model. Contrary to traditional conferences and symposiums with static structures and deterministic outcomes, Overlap 07' agile and dynamic structure results in a broad range of outcomes. Peter Evans was the first to point out the agile nature of this gathering. Like the other participants I will take out those elements of knowledge and insights that fit best my own interests and needs. Some of the knowledge and insight obtained at Overlap 07 I will use immediately in current projects; some will be the subject of collaboration with one or more members of the gathering; others will only come to bear in time or in indirect way, cross pollinating my own thinking and my future projects.

Overlap 07 was a wonderful journey full of wonderful discoveries. As Manuel Toscano pointed out, we are nomads thirsty for knowledge and wisdom. We discovered this magic place we didn't know existed. Could there be others waiting to be discovered? Well, the mystery of the recipe for this magic place is starting to unravel. Perhaps many others will try their magic wands and build many other wondrous Overlaps. I can't wait until I meet some of my fellow nomads on the next journey.

What's Happened Since?

Now two years later, I am glad to observe that many overlaps have indeed emerged. The yearly Overlap event continued in New York in 2008 and California 2009, quite a feat considering there is no organizational structure or set leadership. More interestingly, an Overlap Toronto chapter emerged few weeks after the 2007 event and has evolved since into a persistent and dynamic community in Toronto, centered around the two organizers of Overlap 2007: Michael Dila and Robin Uchida of the Torch Partnership.

Not many people realize that many of the creative initiatives and activities in Toronto are emerging from that community: OCAD's sLab (Strategic Innovations Lab), the famous Torch Lectures series, the Innovation Parkour concept, Unfinished Business project, the Wicked Brown Bag Lunch events, and the situate.us initiative to name a few.

I am certain similar activities and results were generated by Overlap participants in other geographies and areas of activity. I would love to hear from other participants about the impact it had on them and their communities.

So the "Secret Overlap Conference" is inviting you all to organize your own Overlap Unconference and start your journey of discovery. Every true "Overlapper" will be willing to help you in your efforts because the rewards are in the learning created by new overlaps and the opportunities generated by intelligent conversations with other creative minds.

Overlap has been kept "secret" on Ning, Google Groups, Facebook, Twitter (#overlap09), on a web site and who knows how many personal blogs! Take a peep at the secret. Perhaps that will inspire you to some action of your own?

Social Media & Revolutionary Change - Reflections

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:04:00 +0000

Another popular uprising by people wanting their voice heard. This time in Iran and draped in green but also in black, mourning those like young Neda, who died pursuing her dream of freedom and human rights.

Once again social media are hailed as the tool for the revolutionary masses revolting, challenging the established powers of government and its police apparatus, helping people organize and communicate, and informing the world about their struggle. The stream of information coming from Iran through Youtube and Twitter is defining this particular struggle much more than the traditional media, who have been "subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures in Tehran" as Reuters' editors disclose at the begin of each news item from Iran.

What's new this time around

This time around we have seen some new developments: The social networks carrying these social media have taken proactive action.

Twitter rescheduled maintenance down-time of its systems after the U.S. State Department intervened to keep the service up and running for the Iranians protesters using it (and the Americans and many others monitoring).

Facebook released an early version of its platform in Farsi (the official language of Iran) in direct response to the Iranian crisis. This allows Iranians to navigate Facebook in their national language instead of English. Google hastily introduced Farsi support for Google Translate quoting "ongoing events in Iran". You can read more details about these actions in several places including on Rahaf Harfoush's blog "The Foush".

As Rahaf wrote, these unprecedented actions raised many questions. Is the neutrality of the networks waning? Were these actions driven by ideological, philosophical, political factors or simply by opportunistic self interest of these corporations (for PR or rapid alpha testing of a product in development for example)? Were these actions triggered by internal corporate thinking or through pressures from powerful external parties? or all of the above?

These are reasonable and complex questions. I will leave it to others to come up with answers to them. The aspect I would like to explore further is the following:

Social Media as Revolutionary Weapon

The Iran uprising like the preceding ones (The Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, etc.) is an attempt to change the existing balance of power. Whenever such an attempt is made a struggle between the incumbent power and those trying to change it ensues. External parties join rapidly the fray (if they weren't already involved or behind the attempt). In the course of this struggle all sides will use the full range of tools/weapons at their disposal to achieve advantage and victory. Technology is but one, albeit an important one, of these tools/weapons. It is therefore interesting to observe how this battle unfolds on the social media front and draw further conclusions.

On the revolt side the main advantage of social media is its distributed nature both from a content creation and distribution points of view. Individuals with cellular phones or small video cams are able to generate multimedia content and broadcast it through social networks like Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. These social networks are also used for communications and organizing based on the perception that they are outside the traditional telecommunications networks usually controlled by the incumbent powers.

The distributed nature of social media is very appealing to the external parties interested in the conflict but wishing to intervene only covertly. In the case of Iran it became obvious that the State Department is monitoring closely all Iran related social media transmissions when it intervened with Twitter to postpone the planned upgrade that could have brought the systems down during the "active" hours in Iran. There have been reports about Israeli involvement in an infowar operation in support of the Iranian protesters. This could well be part of Israel's already existing covert operations in Iran and other countries in the region (a number of spy cells were uncovered in Iran and more recently in Lebanon). Iran has accused the BBC Farsi service of interfering actively in internal affairs and expelled its correspondent Jon Leyne from Iran.

The Empire Strikes Back

Given all of the above, it would be naive to believe that social media tools or counter-measures won't be used by the incumbent power. Case in point: The Iranian government shut down cellular service, blocked social network sites, and used power outages to disable uploading through proxies. It also engaged in its own social media counter- offensive. This battle is still raging at the time of this writing with list of "infiltrator" accounts being posted and updated by supporters of the protesters, misinformation is being planted by multiple parties, and even a guideline for cyberwarfare in this crisis has been published.

Social media undoutebly democratizes content creation and distribution. But distribution can only happen where and when social networks are available. So the fundamental question becomes: who actually owns or enables the infrastructure required by social networks (SN) to function, i.e. the SN servers or "cloud", the storage, and the pipes connecting users to them. The answer is sobering: in almost all cases these are owned by governments or large corporations, who have the capabilities to monitor all content and to stop the service if deemed necessary for their interests.

So we have a wide spread ownership of content production means on one side but a tightly controlled ownership of or influence on distribution channels on the other. This means that social media can be severely impeded through disablement of its distribution networks if the changes demanded by people are too radical or undesirable for the entities controlling the infrastructure.
A good example for this is the global battle for open proxies in the Iranian context brilliantly shown in this visualization, and the people unfortunately don't seem to be winning it. Preparing safe proxies (as the renesys blog suggests) may help, but I don't think it is the answer.

What Is Missing

For social media then to fulfill it's promise of change reflecting people's needs and desires, it would seem that we need a distributed technology and ownership for SN. Conceptually, this is what the peer-to-peer technologies provide: a decentralized network of independent nodes connecting as and when needed in constantly changing topographies that no one can shut down easily.

Michael Lewkowitz (a.k.a @igniter) of the ChangeMedium initiative has been writing about Public Micro-messaging Medium (PMM) like Twitter "as the most participatory public medium in history." He is proposing coordinated research to accelerate the evolution of this tranformative medium. I tend to agree with him on the potential of this emerging "real-time internet", but am convinced that for such potential to be reached, we must have fully distributed technology which would enable distributed ownership of the SN, that are so crucial to social media in general. Substantial R&D has been done on so-called ad-hoc networks (initially for the military, first responders, conference organizers etc.). I am interested in learning about any technologies that could enable such decentralized messaging systems for the crowds.

Incumbent powers are resisting anything peer-to-peer or trying to "incorporate it" into their institutional structures. The next great battles are going to be around these issues. Stay tuned for interesting times.

YES WE DID Book Launched

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:24:00 +0000

On June 4, 2009 the Rotman School of Business hosted the launch of the book "YES WE DID - An Inside Look of How Social Media Built the Obama Brand" written by our very own Rahaf Harfoush and foreword by Don Tapscott.

The event was sold out with over 450 people filling the Fleck Auditorium and the balconies above it.

After introduction by Alex Manu and foreword by Don Tapscott (Adjunct Professors at Rotman co-sponsoring the event), Rahaf presented highlights from her book including the 7 lessons learned from her experience as a volunteer at the Obama campaign headquarters that could be applied to the corporate world. A Q&A session was followed by a book signing session and a reception for attendees.

The event was tweeted live by several people in the audience. If you'd like to read what people said about the presentation and the book just enter #yeswedid in the twitter search field on your browser or twitter application.

The book is now available at major book stores as well as online on Amazon.

Single Sheet Creativity

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:47:00 +0000

A contest in Washington DC had only one condition: you are allowed to use a single sheet of white paper as your material. So how much creativity can be displayed around one sheet of white paper? Take a look at these amazing 26 pictures and judge for yourself what can be achieved with vision, knowledge and imagination!

Of Permaculture and the Second Renaissance

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:20:00 +0000

Through a tweet by my friend Mat Milan (@mmilan) I got to read Robert Paterson's interesting post "Is this the time for a New Renaissance and Reformation", in which he discusses Permaculture vs. industrial food production and extrapolates to other areas of human civilization.

While I agree with Paterson's analysis on how we got ourselves into this mess and was thrilled to learn about Permaculture as an alternative, his post triggered a number of questions in my mind, mostly about why we developed industrial production methods and if the transition to a Permaculture society is reasonably possible.

Root Causes

Let's consider the first question. Yes, human ego is still at the center of the universe and we still largely subscribe to the notion that we are masters of nature and we can form it to our will with our technology. But the continuous drive of labor division and specialization had started long before medieval times and is still going strong. One of it's roots is the consumerist culture that has become the expression of this iteration of human civilization. Another is the unchecked growth of population, which demands ever higher productivity in goods and services, and particularly in food production. This in turn leads to industrial-type agricultural and animal production with high-yield single-crop/animal multiple harvests requiring high levels of energy input (fertilizers, machinery etc.). This need for continuous productivity improvements drives the necessity for specialization in knowledge and skills.

As the population and consumerism pressures continued unabated, further productivity gains could only be achieved by expanding the level of specialization from local to national, to regional, and ultimately to global scale; hence what we refer to as Globalization. The structures that developed for this labor division and specialization were mostly hierarchical in nature with the unavoidable centers of wealth and power that are integral to hierarchies. As Ronald Wright describes in his book "A short History of Progress" these civilization structures emerged in a particular location of Earth, grew rapidly until their natural resources were exhausted and then faltered or moved to a different location.

As long as these structures operated at the local level they had a possibility to move to a different location. As the structures became global in scope they had less and less options to relocate. hence the current global crisis. The central hierarchical system is reaching its limits because it cannot consolidate to less than one center!

The Emerging New Structures

As the old system reaches it limits a new system with a fundamentally different structure must emerge, which most probably will not be hierarchical. Recent events seem to confirm this trend: traditional global systems are failing while decentralized, peer-to-peer, and local systems seem to succeed overnight: Skype, Twitter, Craig's List, micro financing, eat local, open source concepts, creative commons, community initiatives etc.

The catalyst in this transformation seems to be the Internet. At the recent Toronto Planners Unite 2009 event Mark Earls author of "Herd" spoke about the crucial role of copying in human behavior. Copying requires seeing what's to be copied; and if nothing else, the Internet is making all sorts of new ideas and initiatives visible to a global audience. The flock behavior can only accelerate and the importance of communities will explode.

Values Convergence

Interestingly, the values embodied in these emerging new structures seem to be converging. In a recent Twitter conversation with Alexander Osterwalder, Peter Jones and others about how a sustainable business model can be defined, we converged that it is the sustainable value that an organization provides to its "stakeholders, the community at large, and the environment". I was pleasantly surprised while reading about Permaculture to find out that its core values are "Earthcare, Peoplecare, and Fairshare". Do you recognize a pattern?

We could be at the cusp of a major transformational step in our evolution, which we usually call a revolution. The changes coming are going to be radical and difficult, possibly violent. I hope they will lead to a New Renaissance and Reformation!

Of Business Models & Innovative Projects

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 02:12:00 +0000

Hard to admit but empirical evidence shows that I haven't blogged in March at all! Don't ask me why. Let's just say that I am becoming more convinced that time is not linear and runs exponentially on occasion, like this past March?

In that exponentially elapsed period I have been mostly in a learning and thinking mode developing my knowledge and my ideas about innovative business models and what is needed to develop radically different ones. I will be writing more about some of the stops along my journey in the past few weeks. But for now I'd like to report on one project that I came across with an intriguing business model.

Project BRANDAID

The vision of this project is helping developing world artisans bridge the markets divide by providing world-class "micro marketing" enabling global e-commerce for the branded artisans. The business plan is based on a three-way partnership between a for-profit operation, the BRANDAID Project, a non-profit operation, the BRANDAID Foundation, and an international culture organization, UNESCO.

The combination of these three distinct elements is somewhat of a novelty in the public-private partnerships arena.

The Concept

In a recent event at the Spokes club in Toronto on April 9th, Tony Piggot, CEO of JWT Canada and co-founder of BRANDAID Project explained the concept of the venture. Leveraging UNESCO's Award of Excellence for Handicrafts (previously knows as Seal of Excellence) for identifying artisans of the highest quality, BRANDAID Project supplies a complete branding service including a micro-site and e-commerce platform, to such artisans. The project purchases selected artisan collections at asking price. It offers them with healthy mark-up in select North American markets appreciative of the artistic value and developmental objectives of the project. 35% of the profits flow back to the artisans community: 25% directly to the producing artisans and 10% to the BRANDAID Foundation, who invests back into the artisans communities

Where is it at now

The first brand "Croix des Bouquets" is from Haiti and the first collection has already been purchased. BRANDAID has already been launched in California with sponsorship from Dior and Vanity Fair magazine in an event attended by Director Paul Haggis (an early investor in the project), Hollywood stars Diane Lane and Josh Brolin (who are patrons of the project), and many film celebrities including Charlize Theron. Apparently, all displayed pieces were sold out in less than three hours.

BRANDAID Project is continuing to raise investments, in order to expand its activities to other countries in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. As of the Toronto event of April 9th there were only 4 investment units of US$ 25,000 each left. The project is looking into some gallery space in New York

My Take

I liked the premise of this project, so I have been advising BRANDAID on its web site development and hosting contracts as well as on the operational logistics (e-commerce platform, order management, and fulfillment). What I find promising is the potential for expanding the vision of the project to create a complete ecosystem around each of the branded artisans in the developing country by engaging and where necessary training graphics designers, web developers, hosting companies etc. If this can be scaled properly, it could not only become a sustainable venture, but also achieve some of the things that my friends in the Toronto betterment movement aspire to achieve.

.

Google Portrait - under the internet magnifying glass

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:35:00 +0000

On January 7th, 2009 the french magazine Le Tigre published what it termed the first Google portrait of Marc L. a pseudonym for a randomly selected 29 years old young man. Using information publicly available on the internet and common sense an amazingly accurate and detailed profile of that person was constructed. The magazine wanted to illustrate the dangers of collating personal information spread all over the web.

The french daily Le Monde picked up the story on January 17th, giving the subject the pseudonym Jule. The young man was told about the article by a friend. He initially did not take it seriously, but once he started reading, he was shocked. There were so many personal and even intimate details (his travels, his love affairs, his friends etc.) that he contacted Le Tigre and asked that the article be removed. Legal opinion told him that there wasn't much to achieve through courts, as all information was from public sources. Le Tigre sanitized the web-based article by anonymizing further details other than the name, but for the paper based article not much could be done. But even after the sanitizing the article makes for interesting reading (if you read French or like Google translation).

Some juicy extracts

Here is the English translation of a short section of the lengthy article, addressed in letter style to the subject:
"Let's get back to you. You are single and heterosexual (Facebook). In spring of 2008 you had an affair with Clauda R***, who works at the French-Austrian Culural Centre in Bordeaux (I did not find her immediately because the character ü has to be spelled ue for Google). In any case I can confirm, she is charming, small breasts, short hair, nice legs. You give us the address of her parents, V*** Boulevard in Bordeaux. (...) Please note that I have her work telephone number (opening for a pedagogic assistant position at the Cultural Center; she works in recruitment)."

What an innocent message reply can do

Another section is revealing of how easy personal information on Facebook is released. The reporter accumulating the profile created a fake ID on Facebook and asked to become friends with Marc or Jule. The young man was suspicious and did not accept. However, he replied with a message "Hi Who are you? Regards, Marc". The reporter was about to reply with some invented story, when Facebook alerted him that when he sends a message to someone on Facebook they gain access to his list of friends, his core, work and education information for a month. The reporter realized he did not even need to reply and gained access to Marc's information!

Morale of the story

As The Foush recently recommended, you should do self audits on the internet, not only for the sake of verifying correctness or reputation management, but more importantly from a security perspective. Look at all information (text, pictures, videos, tags by third parties) and ask yourself, what can a third party do with it. Clean up where possible, although with more and more sites including in their agreements (yes, those you don't read and just click "accept"), "perpetual and irrevocable" rights to anything you post on them it is becoming increasingly difficult to remove your information.

The 27 European CNIL (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés) are debating some safeguards including imposing guidelines enabling web users to erase their personal information when they so desire. My take: even if legislated, it's going to be a long up-hill battle, as information moves across systems and jurisdictions globally. That's not even taking into consideration the drooling marketeers, organized crime, and intelligence services all over the world.

Arguably, you always give up some privacy when you join a community, but the surrender of private information that we're witnessing is a "strange phenomenon of shared exhibitionism and mutual narcissim" as Alex Türk, president of the French CNIL puts it in Le Monde. So, where to draw the line when you are part of multiple global communities, when public spaces are increasingly privatized, and private spaces are shrinking continuously?

Crystal, Arrogance, and Beauty

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 01:28:00 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure of reuniting with a dear friend after 3 years of absence. He is an architect, engineer, artist, and a brilliant mind. We had wonderful conversations. One of the things he wanted to do before leaving again was visiting the ROM and inspecting the new Crystal building designed by Daniel Libeskind.

Strangely enough, I hadn't had the opportunity to visit it myself. Just a week ago my friend MJ Braide wrote on Twitter: "Spent afternoon doing my best to like the ROM. I failed. Building is troubling and presentation totally old-school. How did this happen?". This made me curious and so after a good brunch on Sunday morning, off we went to the ROM.

We parked the car west of the ROM and walked towards it to take in the view of the new building. We inspected some of the external features then went in. To make a long story short, the four of us tried to appreciate the building's architecture...but we failed. The building is not only troubling as MJ wrote; it is depressing. Space without purpose or harmony, shapes striving to be weird, corners whose design looks like the failed project of a first year student, vicious encrochments on the older ROM building, bad finishing of many details, and already serious signs of deterioration on several parts of the building.

My ultimate feeling after the visit was anger. Anger at the amazing eliticist arrogance that this design expresses; anger amplified by the boundless disrespect it displays for the space and buildings surrounding it and the communities living in them. Also anger that something like this went through unchecked because someone sold the city on the need for a tourists trap, a "signature" curiosity to attract visitors, and the design decision was left in the hands of the same elite, self-absorbed with its own exclusivity and fame. What a waste!

We left, crossed Avenue Road, and looking for a place to recuperate we ended up in the restaurant of the Gardiner Museum just facing the ROM. It was redesigned in 2006 by Kuwabara, Payne, McKenna, Holmberg and the design has won the International Award of the Royal Institut of British Architects (RIBA) in 2008. The Kuwabara lines, familiar from other designs, like the Noor Centre on Wynford Drive or his Richmond Hill ex-residence, were clean, elegant, and sophisticated in an understated manner. It was like a breath of fresh air, soothing all the troubled feelings induced by the Libeskind design. The building as a whole respected its surroundings and engaged them in a harmonious conversation. What a contrast to the ROM Crystal!

On the way home I thought of the Crystal design as the mother of all failwhales and decided to blog about it. Cheers!