hans peter meyer

Thrivable - Gardens for Soul + Sustenance

2011-10-22T16:42:00.001-07:00

Thrivable - Gardens for Soul + Sustenance, a set on Flickr.These are pics taken from a recent visit to Hollyhock on Cortes Island. They're part of a collaborative project on gardens as places that nourish the body and the soul. It's all about the place of beauty in our lives. Enjoy!hanspetermeyer22 October 2011

How are you connecting to your support base?

2011-06-19T21:44:00.000-07:00

Questions to local governments and NGOs in small towns and rural areas: How are you connecting with your constituents? How are you building support in age groups outside your existing support / constituent base? Are you effectively bridging your reliance on local print media (still the best way for you to connect with your existing voter / support base, ie. middle-aged and older adults) to new

Citizen Engagement and Communicative Responsibility in High Expectation Environments: Outline and 1st Thoughts

2011-06-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

There is considerable cynicism in our communities about local government “engagement.” We’ve had great processes, but very inadequate – even profoundly disappointing – results. And we have limited or no feedback mechanisms. Voter participation is very low among youth, but it is dropping rapidly in all age cohorts. The perception is that government (at all levels) isn’t listening, that engagement

Updating 5 Words Parents Use to Describe Themselves

2011-05-30T19:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I published a static image of what a survey of a small sample of Canadian parents looked like when put into a SayZu™ word cloud. Today I posted the question on Twitter – What 5 words describe you as a parent? – and asked people to tweet their reply, adding the #ParentCanada tag. Here's what the cloud looks like today on Twitter... again, thanks to SayZu™ sayzu.GenerateCloud({'uid':'

Surveying Canadians: 5 Words About Yourself as a Parent

2011-05-29T22:08:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on research related to Canadian social issues that effect young families. As part of the current iteration of this research we've been asking parents between the ages of 25-45 with children under 12 to give us 5 words that describe themselves as parents. It's a "fun" bit of our survey, but it also tells a story. Here's the SayZu™wordcloud from their words (this is a

Disappointment, partisanship, building a common future

2011-05-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

I just tweeted my continued feelings of disappointment about the results of the May 2, 2011 general election here in Canada. As I said, I was hoping for a bright "orange" future; instead I got a "blue" Monday. Most of my work I avoid partisanship. In this election, it was hard not embrace the simple path of the party way, ie. orange is right, blue is wrong. There is so much that is damnable

Judy Estrin 06/04/11

2011-04-06T17:50:00.001-07:00

Judy Estrin 06/04/11, originally uploaded by hanspetermeyer.ca.p, td { line-height: 1.3; }p { padding-bottom: 1em; }a { color: #3697b3; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; }a:hover { color: #000; text-decoration: underline; }a:active { color: #000; text-decoration: underline; } From Evernote: Judy Estrin 06/04/11

#Squamish. Thursday. For #EstrinApr67 event...

2011-04-04T16:04:00.001-07:00

#Squamish. Thursday. For #EstrinApr67 event..., originally uploaded by hanspetermeyer.ca.p, td { line-height: 1.3; }p { padding-bottom: 1em; }a { color: #3697b3; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; }a:hover { color: #000; text-decoration: underline; }a:active { color: #000; text-decoration: underline; } From Evernote: #EstrinApr67 Clipped from: ht.ly/4sZ6x

What are people saying about "Comox" on Twitter?

2011-03-08T00:11:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time working on Facebook related projects, but every once in a while my attention gets drawn back to Twitter. People "get" Facebook, but Twitter eludes most folks. In many places, Twitter is where the "food and beverage" conversation takes place. I did a survey of "coffee" tweets in Vancouver recently and came up with 500 comments about the beverage within a 48 hour

Tweeting about #Coaching555

2011-03-05T12:33:00.000-08:00

The work I do involves a lot of coaching – supporting people as they work their way through the thicket of learning about social media and communications technologies and practices. I think I'm a pretty good "coach," but I've never done any formal training. Yesterday, Friday March 4, 2011, I got a chance to taste what a more formal approach to coaching looks like. Because of health issues, I

Visualizing online marketing: looking at the online foodie conversation

2011-02-22T23:56:00.000-08:00

Because I write about food, and am involved in the promotion of the food industry and food enjoyment generally, it's useful to see what the conversation about food looks like online. The same is true for other industries and topics I write about: there is a conversation online; it helps me, and people in the industries I write about, know what's being said, what the general "picture" is, and

SayZu and making sense of the "firehose of information"

2011-02-19T16:47:00.000-08:00

Sites like Yelp and Local.Yahoo.com are a rich trove of information for businesses and organizations. The problem is making sense of it all. If you've got a high-profile business or organization (and if your marketing campaign is working), you'll probably be struggling just to keep from being washed away by the proverbial "firehose of information." That's good news. It means your marketing is

Observations on starting the online #conservation conversation

2011-02-18T10:40:00.000-08:00

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px 'Lucida Grande'; color: #333233} There is a growing gap between 'on the ground' activists who are struggling to get their word out and those at the leading edge of the new technology who often don't realize that they talk a language we don't understand. (from a recent Facebook post) The digital divide. This means lots of things to

When posting a link on FB...

2011-02-16T08:11:00.001-08:00

This may seem obvious to some of you, but to most people it's not. I'm working with several clients who are keen to use Facebook as a community organizing tool, and every once in a while they do things that inspire me to make a note about what to do, and what not to do. This is one of them (thanks to the Comox Valley Land Trust for creating the occasion for this post – all of us learn by doing).

A tale of two communities, marketing food + beverage events

2011-02-14T10:37:00.000-08:00

This post is about the food and beverage and lifestyle industries in my region, from the perspective of the online chatter I'm watching unfold. I'm using Twitter as my source, and SayZu as my tool for analysis. At this point SayZu is just giving me visuals. In this blog the images are static. I've provided links to the "dynamic" clouds. You can "drill down" on a word and read the individual

The Comox Valley on Twitter on February 3, 2011 - the SayZu version

2011-02-03T23:08:00.000-08:00

Taking a break from Google searching, Mozenda scraping, and early-onset madness to play with SayZu™ some more... Here's what people are talking about on Twitter around the Comox Valley (my home region). What do you see? The bigger the word, the more often it's used. Generally that means it's more important in the conversations taking place. The second image is of an interactive SayZu cloud. More

Working the SayZu mojo at #2WillAllen

2011-01-28T12:54:00.000-08:00

I was in Vancouver last night for the Will Allen "Growing out of Hunger" presentation, hosted by SFU's Centre for Dialogue. The event fits under a number of issues / topics I work on: food, community development, and sustainability. But the reason I made the trip is because I work with Angus McAllister (McAllister-Research.com), and I'm one of the people who's been testing the SayZu™ software

Winter scene at the farm, Merville

2011-01-21T12:50:00.000-08:00

Most of my work recently has involved media strategies, social media content development and coaching, and writing. Every once in a while I have a pleasant change from these tasks. Most recently I was asked by a client to produce some photographs to illustrate a project she's working on. That meant I was out with my camera, just taking pictures, something I don't do enough of. Which is how I got

SayZu word clouds and Adrian Dix: the conversation online

2011-01-17T16:35:00.000-08:00

Today I was supposed to be working on a project that has basically parked all other work due to tight timelines. Then the client suggests I take a sort-of detour and test some "web scraping" software, and run the scrape through SayZu™ If you've been following me at all you know that: I love to be distracted from pressing deadlines by things that are bright and shiny; SayZu™is one of my current

Making our own Conservation “News Channel” 101

2011-01-13T17:18:00.000-08:00

The Conversation about Conservation campaign is about creating a “news channel,” one that’s all about conservation related topics in the Comox Valley. Here are my directions to clients, client member organizations, staff, board members, and volunteers – if they want to make a difference in the 8 months or so leading up to the civic elections in November 2011. Join the conversation Wherever it’s

The Conversation about Conservation is the Conversation about Quality of Life

2011-01-12T22:43:00.001-08:00

I'm working with the Comox Valley Land Trust and the Comox Valley Conservation Strategy on a media awareness/profile building campaign. My clients are in the "conservation and stewardship" (C+S) sector, and they've been doing great work that's well-known in small circles. Our job: to bust out of these circles and connect with other circles, with bigger circles. Our goal: to make conservation and

Bev McPhee talks about Revolution 3.0 (repost of our May 2010 talk)

2011-01-06T20:14:00.000-08:00

hpm note:Due to a podcast hosting service shuttering it's site a month or so ago I'm reposting this interview I did in May 2010 with Bev McPhee. It was one of 2010's favourite interviews at hanspetermeyer.com and it's still a good listen in 2011. Enjoy! Bev McPhee is a Senior Managing Consultant at IBM Global Business Services and Associate Faculty at Royal Roads University. She is interested

@AgainstAging ... and #AgainstArtists too?

2011-01-03T16:40:00.000-08:00

I really should be taking a walk right now. Breathing some fresh air. Taking a nap. But I'm a little too pi$$ed right now. Why? Because someone tried to take money from the pocket of a friend of mine, a guy who's very generous and has given away lots for good people and good causes. Here's the story. I've lifted it from his Flickr post, which is ironic, because what he got bent about was someone

Sustainability, the Comox Valley, and the online conversation on December 30, 2010

2010-12-30T14:44:00.000-08:00

I'm at it again: playing with this beta version of SayZu's ability to visualize the online conversation about - stuff! In my case, the focus has been on what's being said about things like (and these are the key search terms): Comox Valley, sustainability, conservation, stewardship, snow. I'll include links to recent experiments at the end of this post. These links show me using SayZu "word

Being a creative 11 years into the millenium

2010-12-27T22:44:00.000-08:00

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} "i’ve found that in order to sustain the creative work that i want to do i focus half my time on jobs in and around canada and the other half of my time on jobs in the US and beyond. it’s a hodgepodge of creating, writing, talking, teaching, sharing, strategizing & hustling. it’s creating assets now that can be used to create