Column 2

My LOL of the day

This morning, on arrival at the IT360 conference, I Twittered (via Blackberry) "at IT360 conference in Toronto. so far uninspired. no wifi."

Shortly after that, one of my Twitter peeps replied "yecch, I’d be tempted to pull an IT180"

IT360: Canada’s Networked Economy

Keith Parsonage, Director General of Industry Canada, gave a presentation this afternoon on the way ahead in Canada’s networked economy. A big part of this was stats and charts about mobile and internet usage, including the amazing figure that the world subscriber market for mobile phones is more than 3 billion people.

Canada has one of the highest rates of broadband penetration in the world, more than 70% even in rural areas, and over 90% in urban areas. We spend a lot of time online each month (especially in the winter), and Parsonage cracked a joke about that, wondering how much of that people are doing at work, seeming to ignore the fact that there are valid business reasons for using the internet at work. However, as he moves on, he talked about how ICT (information and communication technology) encourages our productivity, and we need to continue to invest in ICT in order to stay productive and competitive as a country.

Canada is home to world leaders in areas from communications (RIM) to computer animation (Alias, now part of Autodesk), but in spite of the growing demand for technically-trained people in the workforce, we’re seeing huge declines in undergraduate enrolment in IT-related degrees.

The Canadian government has had (and still has) a number of programs for promoting productivity and innovation in the ICT sector, and providing better access to information for more households and schools with 100% of our public schools and libraries connected to the internet.

Ultimately, this was a scripted, rehearsed speech that contained some interesting statistics about our ICT sector and Canadians’ use of technology, but came off feeling a bit like political propaganda. He also didn’t address two of the major impediments to innovation in our current networked economy: the excessively high price of wireless in Canada, where we pay more per GB (many times more) than just about any other country; and net neutrality, which is being threatened by the traffic throttling practices of Bell and Rogers, the duopoly that has their hands around the throats of the last mile of broadband as delivered to most Canadian homes and businesses. When I asked what Industry Canada is doing to address those particular issues, Parsonage gave (as expected) a bureaucratic response that didn’t answer the question in any way, in spite of his comment during his presentation that we need the ability to connect at broadband speeds in order to enhance competitiveness. Needless to say, the Q&A was cut off immediately after my question.

IT360: Social Networking for Business

I’m dropping in on a few sessions at the IT360 conference being held in Toronto this week — nice to be able to walk a conference for a change — and attended John Reid of CATA Alliance talking about the value of social networking for business. He’s a stand-in-the-audience sort of guy, and is standing about 4 feet from me, so I’m here for the duration. 🙂

He started with some pretty mainstream stats and information about social networks, such as a new blog being created every 2 seconds, then moved on to discuss the degree of risk that comes from publication and dissemination of information, starting with a bit of an obscure story about being threatened with a lawsuit for some information that he distributed in a spammy sort of fax operation several years ago up to how some companies are starting to ban Facebook access from inside the firewall.

He’s doing the presentation almost completely with audience participation; having first done an audience poll on whether we fell that social networks had high, medium or low value for business, he’s selecting people from each of the respondent categories to say why they feel the way that they do about social networking. We’re hearing about how social networks can be used to get closer to your customer, although this is dependent on the industry, the target audience and the company’s corporate culture. There’s a lot of old-school types in the audience, those who raised their hand for "low/no value"; more than one person said that they use no social networks at all, and these were people who appear to be considerably younger than me. One of them even referred to "this blogging thing" in a somewhat derisive tone. This is not, as Don Tapscott proposes, an issue of age; it’s an issue of culture and position. In fact, the most vocal supporter of social networking from the audience declared himself to be 59. There are a lot of self-declared skeptics in the audience who say that they’re going to wait and see what the value is; one person said that he could spend the 8-10 hours per week that he believes is necessary to maintain a Facebook presence; he has 70 contacts on LinkedIn but it’s never really come to anything; and he wonders what happens to all those blogs that have a lot of effort put into them but no one reads them. Get real: if you put effort into blogging about something that’s of interest to someone and put some effort into being a good citizen in the blogosphere, people will read it. This blog is proof.

The business owners who are speaking up really seem to be in command-and-control mode: one stated that they’re blocking Facebook because they’re concerned that employees will put confidential information on it; doesn’t he know that if he hires untrustworthy people, they’ll do that from their home computer, so that blocking Facebook at work doesn’t solve that problem? He also said that people will spend too much time on sites like this if they’re allowed to do so, but you have to consider that people do have to take breaks sometimes, and allowing them to read their personal email or check Facebook while they’re on a break is no different than allowing them to make a personal phone call on their break. If you have sufficient technology to block specific sites, then you likely have the ability to monitor the usage and raise flags if people appear to be abusing the privilege rather than just blocking things outright.

Keith Parsonage from Industry Canada (who is speaking later today) popped up and admitted that he can’t access Facebook or a personal email service like Gmail from his office, but that the federal government is on a campaign to hire young people. This is definitely going to come back and bite them, since people who expect to be able to access sites like Facebook and Gmail while on their break at work aren’t going to be happy in an old-school corporate environment where they’re treated like irresponsible and unprofessional children.

Reid is really trying to get to the key points of how to incorporate social networking into business in terms of outward-facing communications, such as blogs; it’s unfortunate that this turned into too much of a discussion of who does and doesn’t use Facebook, and whether they’re allowed to do so at work.

Unfortunately, there’s no free wifi at the convention centre; in fact, the only available wifi is that geared for exhibitors and priced at an extortionate $395 for access for a single computer. I grabbed a couple of 30-minutes online passes in the press room, but I’m tempted to boycott it just so that MTCC doesn’t get the conference organizer’s money for this.

MTCC wifi ripoff

Aside from the really poorly scaled logo graphic at the top that looks all squished, does anyone see anything wrong with this website that pops up when I try to access the wifi at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre?

That’s right, $395 for access for a single computer. No, there’s no missing period in that number, it’s three hundred and ninety-five dollars. I realize that this is targeted at exhibitors, but seriously, this is flat-out extortion.

Note to anyone attending or exhibiting at a conference at MTCC: you’re in range of Toronto Hydro’s One Zone wifi, which is $10/day.

TransitCamp: Moving the Metronauts Community Online

Metronauts already has a website, of course, but there’s more to an online community than a website: it’s about enabling and fostering collaboration. The Metronauts site is a place for people who are passionate about transit in the greater Toronto area.

There are a three main collaboration features on the site: conversations, projects and events. Conversations and projects are similar to blog posts in that you can create one, add tags (using your own folksonomy), and add comments to one started by someone else. You can vote for your favourite conversations to improve their karma (popularity). Events are a bit more structured, in that they have information such as date/time and location that can be fed into calendaring formats.

This isn’t just for "official" (if there were such a thing) Metronaut website people to add conversations, projects and events; anyone in the community can participate, such as Rannie Turingan’s project for a visual essay contest. Events can be big ones like today’s TransitCamp, or smaller events focused on specific transit topics. Any other page on the site can include embedded video, photos, slides and other multimedia.

Ideas for publicizing the efforts:

Flash mob of Metronauts on a busy transit route in order to raise awareness of transit issues.
Volunteer advocates to help distribute transit information at major stations: the Metronauts Ground Crew.
How do we engage drivers in the conversation to get them involved and interested in transit?
Create Facebook events for things such as "take transit to work day", where you can invite your Facebook friends who typically drive to try out transit.

Outstanding questions about the site:

What should the Metronauts site be? When to use the Metronauts site directly versus linking to a social networking site such as Facebook?
What is the role of a Metronauts site moderator?
How do we syndicate or blogroll external blog posts onto the site?
How do we involve people who aren’t particularly tech-savvy, both in terms of presenting simplified interfaces and training/mentoring? This is a classic problem with any sort of user-generated content site, where more than half of the population isn’t even visiting the site, and a large portion of the remainder are spectators or occasional commenters.

Metrolinx is also seeking engagement with the community, both through the Metronauts site and through other venues that they might use to allow community involvement in the transit planning process.

TransitCamp: How Do We Leverage Worldwide Transit Knowledge?

Mark Mulholland organized a session on leveraging worldwide knowledge about transit, since there’s more and more groups everywhere who are trying to improve their transit systems. Why not use the wisdom of the crowds to leverage good ideas that have been proven elsewhere to get the most bang for our limited bucks? There are also opportunities to collaborate with other transit-focused groups, as opposed to just picking up their ideas, to develop new ideas together and potentially create open source solutions that can be shared.

Ideas for fostering collaboration and idea exchange with other transit advocates from around the circle:

Exchange programs for staff in transit organizations (opposition to this idea: "I don’t want to pay for politicians to travel around on my tax dollars"). The current problem is that it’s mostly politicians who are doing the travelling to look at other transit systems, not the staff at the transit systems who can actually implement the solutions. An interesting discussion of Metrolinx’s recent trip to the UK and Madrid, including a link to their report, is here.
Important to look at the context: what works in one country won’t work in another because of political and economic conditions.
Ability to share stories from transit experiences around the world, both from the point of view of visitors and residents.
Need to find transit expertise worldwide and incorporate that into our local projects.
Look at our needs, and find places in the world that have had to address those same needs. In other words, work from the needs rather than a presupposed solution.
Leverage local bi-national chambers of commerce (e.g., Indo-Canadian, Australian-Canadian) to find similar groups in other countries.
Add links to other TransitCamps and transit-related groups to this wiki to make it easy to find other like-minded groups.
There need to be links from the community back into the transit organizations to ensure that the ideas generated are considered for use. In general, how do we cross-pollinate between the community and the transit organizations?
We need to consider ideas from other transit systems about customer service standards, and understand the customer service problems that we have now with our local transit systems.
Public online forum for collaboration and capturing information (such as this TransitCamp wiki, Vancouver’s TransitCamp which is supposed to be here but isn’t, and San Francisco’s TransitCamp links), and for publishing research and findings from transit authorities such as Metrolinx. For example, transit geeks in San Francisco are using Get Satisfaction as a forum for discussions about transit in a very user-friendly question-and-answer format rather than a more free-form (and sometimes more intimidating) wiki format.

The wiki page for this session, which includes these notes of mine plus other attendees’ contributions, is here.

TransitCamp: MyTTC

My friend Kieran, as a result of last year’s TransitCamp, got together with a couple of other transit/technology geeks to create MyTTC, a community-driven site for Toronto transit information that will launch in about two weeks, in time for the next TransitCamp event. They did this in response to the deficiencies of the official TTC website, which is famously bad for providing decent information about actually using the third most heavily used transit system in North America.

MyTTC is focused primarily on routes and schedules, and contains all of the route and schedule data that they’ve gleaned from the TTC site and other sources. Each route is mapped using embedded Google Maps, with individual stops marked and the arrival times expected for surface vehicles at each stop. There’s also transfer information for each stop and route, so that you can see which other routes connect to that route and stop, and other context-sensitive information about stops.

But it’s more than just a static information site; it has a lot of wiki-like aspects for user-generated content (although it’s built on Ruby and Merb rather than a wiki platform). Users can add stops to routes — the TTC routes/schedules only show main stops, not every stop — and the scheduled time for the newly-added stops will be interpolated from the existing data. Users can also add other context-sensitive information about stops, such as typical delays at certain times of day, points of interest, and places to wait out of the weather where you can see the bus/streetcar approaching. Users can also bookmark their favourite stops, which will appear on their personalized home page when they’re logged in.

One of the largest issues that they’ve had, and are likely to continue to have, is getting data from the TTC: many transit authorities are notoriously miserly with their data, in spite of the fact that it’s created mostly with public funding. For MyTTC, they used the route and schedule data that’s available on the TTC site, much of it captured manually (and painfully), but TTC hasn’t been willing to share any data in a more easily-ingestible form, or to share the data that will soon be generated by global positioning systems on surface vehicles. This, of course, is a political problem rather than a technical problem, and likely others will need to be involved to help resolve this.

MyTTC is attempting to create a platform where the data is fully open (although they are not, at this time, making the code open source): they will be providing full XML and JSON APIs, SQL dumps of the data, and GTFS (Google Transit Feed Spec). In fact, their contacts at Google have said that Google Transit will accept their data in place of TTC’s, likely because it’s more accessible and complete. They don’t plan to monetize the APIs, but would rather have other sites export the data and use it for their own purposes directly.

The platform itself is transit system-agnostic, and could be used for any transit system. There’s explicit support for the iPhone, and other mobile platforms such as Blackberry will be tested — in fact, I think that I just volunteered for that. There are plans for some SMS interfaces, such as being able to send an SMS message to the site with your current location and get back related information, and we discussed the use of Twitter including direct access (like the BART experiment last year) and Twitter-based applications (like CommuterFeed). They also want to add a trip planner to MyTTC before the launch.

The wiki page for this session, which includes these notes of mine plus other attendees’ contributions, is here.

TransitCamp!

Most of the unconference "camp" type events that I attend are technology-related, but today I’m attending TransitCamp in Toronto, originally conceived by a few of my TorCamp friends and now happening in other cities as well as becoming a vital part of the greater Toronto area transit planning process. What started out a year ago as an informal collection of people interested in transit has evolved into a much more mainstream channel for sharing the conversation about transit amongst the providers, consumers and any other interested parties.

One of the general managers of Metrolinx said a few words in the opening session; it’s great that they’re participating directly although this isn’t their event. This is the first in a series of events that will happen around the greater Toronto area, since transit is not just about downtown, but also about how all the regional transportation options tie together.

If you’re attending TransitCamp or want to follow along with the sessions, they’re all on the wiki (or will be, once all the notes are entered).

If you’re interested in transit in Toronto, join the community at the Metronauts site.

You can follow a collection of the conversations on the Onaswarm Metronauts swarm, or through Twitter on the #metronauts or #transitcamp hashtags.

What did Earth Hour do for us?

I’ve heard a lot of criticism of Earth Hour over the past few days, mainly that it was a token public effort by people who aren’t really committed to any permanent change. Whether that’s true or not can’t be determined from last night’s behaviour alone, although I have read that some local businesses were using this as a test for how they can reduce their energy consumption on a regular basis while still maintaining safety standards.

In looking at last night’s behaviour specifically, consider the expected power demand curve for today (Sunday) in Ontario: pretty low at 8am when I grabbed these from the Ontario Wholesale Electricity Demand and Price Information site, expected to climb before noon as people start to make lunch and do laundry, then increase to a peak around 8pm when the sun has just set, the dishwasher is on after dinner, and people settle down to the TV or computer for a couple of hours. The green curve is actual demand, the darker step graph is the projected demand, and these guys are usually pretty accurate.

Now here’s what happened yesterday, which included Earth Hour at 8pm (20 on the horizontal axis):

I wished that I had captured the projected demand curve earlier in the day for comparison, but I suspect that the expected curve would have been much like today’s graph shown at the top. We see a higher demand midday than today, due to more businesses open on Saturday than Sunday, but then an interesting phenomenon: long before Earth Hour starts at 8pm, power consumption drops off, and stays well below the midday peak for the remainder of the evening, even after Earth Hour completed at 9pm.

So what’s the story here? This is only my hypothesis, but I think that businesses and individuals started lowering their power consumption much earlier in the day (around 3pm, when the usual evening demand would normally start to build) and maintained the lower power levels longer than the designated hour (until 10:30, when the usual evening demand would normally start to drop off) because of the awareness that Earth Hour raised; in other words, Earth Hour actually had an impact seven to eight times longer than planned.

During the actual hour of 8-9pm, a lot of us were sitting around in the dark or out on the street gawking at the lack of lights in some of the buildings, but what were we doing all afternoon until 8pm, and after 9pm, that also made a difference? Obviously, we were all going about our normal Saturday lives, but somehow using much less energy than usual. That gives me hope that this isn’t just a placebo, and we can reduce energy consumption if we take yesterday’s lessons to heart.