On My Mind and In My Tabs

Some really excellent links that I can’t resist sharing, many from Twitter:

• DIYcity – people make groups to “mak[e] their cities work better with web technologies.” There’s a group in Toronto and there’s a section for Transportation Informatics.
• John Bollwitt at sixty4media muses on how local governments can make use of social media. It runs down the gamut of tools – Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc. – and sprung from a comment made at a Parks Board meeting. My reaction? It’s one thing for a politican to say it should happen for the good reasons we think it can happen (”budget”, “free and easy”, and “direct contact” are the reasons John highlights)…it’s another thing for city staffers not to find 10 gazillion reasons not to do it. Granted, a handful of them may actually be valid, and the part that interests me the most, personally, is the part where it can be integrated and streamlined into their already (undoubtedly) hectic, overloaded plates of processes.
• Via a comment on the above post, MetaGovernment is an initiative around open source government. Their current thing is developing MetaScore, “the software to aid and manage community-based open source governance systems.”
• Vancouver ChangeCamp has a date! June 20-21. I’m horribly out of the loop at the moment. Right now the action’s been happening mostly in the Google Group – hopefully (as part of the tech logistics committee!) we’ll start freeing the details from long, obscure URL-land.
• Friends from Toronto, Tom Purves and Rohan Jayasekera, are quoted in this excellent piece about IT departments and their shifting role as gatekeepers to productivity-making applications. It’s become almost a cultural trope, among the people I’ve talked to, to view IT as an irritant or an obstacle rather than a partner or enabler, with people I have talked to in large organizations (though there are some notable exceptions as well, and having worked with security folks I know often have good reasons for saying what they say). I have no firsthand experience, but what I’ve seen of SFU since I’ve left, I’ve been impressed with (blogging platform, Mediawiki). To contrast, I hear getting a Drupal website for a department website at UBC can be a small nightmare.

Happy Monday!