I know on the one hand, he’s showing off the fact that his iPhone takes video. But it was also his way of pitching into my Blogathon, and I appreciated it. I am also decidedly curious about how we as social animals learn to negotiate the rules behind what to share, when it’s appropriate, and how much is just right.

People who over-share might seem, on the one hand, to be vulnerable to being taken advantage of, when it was sharing physical goods. But even when it came down to what could be held in hands, sharing was a way to curry loyalty. It became so central to our idea of how groups hung together. Now, it seems that many of us live in digital abundance – we have too many things to read, absorb, learn about, do, and we seem perpetually starved or longing for time to be. On the flip side, there are also people in my life who have an abundance of time and a paucity of passion for what they are doing.

In both cases, perhaps it is this that is the new generosity: not asking people to be what they are supposed to be, who we want them to be, but giving them space to be who they are – to help them remember that, and to meet them there before anything else.

As the bunch of bloggers are getting ready to wind down here at Blogathon, I want to remember what the blogging is for. Sure, it’s for remembering, it’s for showing off, it’s for sharing, conversation, it’s for all those things. But it doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t lead to more time being more of what I want to be for the people in my life.

One of the promises of Open Data (and I know this one well because I was the one who made it, during my presentation to Vancouver City Council) is that as citizens get access to the data about the services being provided to them and the state of the city that their tax dollars go towards running and maintaining, I proposed that we might be able to start having “conversations based in fact,” rather than speculation or anecdotal evidence.

To that end, I’m dreaming of something akin to a Civic Mythbusters website. Everyone’s got an urban legend or generalization that’s been passed around so often, it might as well be fact for the way people talk about it. But when the data to actually really truly verify the validity of a claim is made available and the analysis possible, well, why not do it?

Here’s one that speaks to my life as a resident: I live not too far from the future Canada Line. Many have speculated that once the line opens, crime will go up; it’s generally accepted as fact that this did in fact happen when the Expo Line opened.

Well, let’s subject this to some civic mythbusting:

• what is the change in crime levels? (down or up?)
• is the change consistent across the board for all crimes? (violent? property?)
• are there any patterns that can be observed about the new crime patterns? (crimes peak just before the last train?)

This, of course, assumes that the information will be made available. (For instance, is crime or incident data from the TransLink transit police going to be available to us?) Sure, criminologists can do this analysis and tell us the results, but why not step us through and have someone mirror the results, like duplication in all good science is supposed to work?

What other myths can you think of about this city are in need of good mythbusting? Immigration population distribution (touchy subject)? Arts and theatre funding in high schools across the city? I feel like asking these questions in an enlightened manner and making the answers available is one place where there could be a lot of value for people who don’t know the questions are there to be asked, much less that we have answers for them.

Definitely way up there on the list of things I was happy to learn about from Participation Camp and my trip to New York was The Open Planning Project, a New York-based services consultancy that convenes and cooks things like:

• the Streetsblog network for transportation advocacy;
• CoActivate.org, a suite of tools for social activist projects;
• open source in government advocates through projects like OpenGeo;
• shit-disturbers for civic engagement and empowerment through sites like Uncivil Servants, a logging and reporting web application to document abuse of government parking permits in New York State.

I’m going to be uncharacteristically upfront – I could really see myself enjoying working at TOPP or a place quite like it. I like working not entirely with technology, but at the edges where it meets the people that make up a technology’s systemic context. That being said, I’m really quite a n00b when it comes to policy analysis, and still pinning down precisely what it is I’m both good at and get a happy tickle from doing, whether that’s in supporting or nurturing an open source community in some capacity; blogging, or writing in some other kind of capacity; doing some kind of technology-based outreach (strategic partnerships?); or even project management, though the words still put an unearthly fear in me.

It’s been a long time since high school; maybe it’s time to take a career aptitude test one more time…

“The future of urban planning is open source,” declares Erick Villagomez, founding editor of re:place magazine, in the title of a April 30th article in that same publication. I certainly agree with him, though, having less experience working with municipal governments, I’m grateful that he can argue it a smidge more eruditely. He argues for more decentralized decision-making, decrying cities like Vancouver in the comments for essentially micromanaging the growth of their cities to their detriment. His ideal…

integrates the older, bottom-up flexibility of past cities with more specific top-down methods based on the handful of positive lessons we’ve learned within the past century. It is a model that must strive to make fewer, but more intelligent decisions.

I’m particularly fond of his point regarding community engagement:

It’s worth saying, as well, that open source planning goes beyond the community engagement workshops and urban design panels currently being practiced. While these are definitely a step in the right direction, they are still trapped within the larger outdated model of urban planning described above, and as a result are not being fully mined for the creative potential that this inclusiveness brings.

I’d like to mash up Erick’s points on urban planning with some inspiration from David Eaves, who argues that the primary determinant of success in open source software development communities is their success in community management. David’s also been a huge supporter of the recent Vancouver City Council motion for open data, open standards and open source.

Firstly, I think it’s instructive to compare the language. Open source and online communities generally talk about community management. Meanwhile, people working in communities tend to be known as community activists, community advocates, and (as popularized by the Obama campaign) community organizers. I think there’s something to this. While there’s more overlap between the terms organizer and manager than between any other terms, there’s still quite a salient difference. This is certainly debatable, but when I hear organizers I think that there is something more political or advocacy-oriented than something that is being managed, which could just be a matter of coordination or cooperation for all we know. I’m willing to concede that this might just be semantics, but community management sounds much more akin to something one does as a part of work, while organizing has associations with either unions or politics. It’s interesting to note that the conflation of these two terms may simply be a further blurring of the boundaries between one’s work and personal or community life.

I find this interesting to think about, because the prospect of things being “work” is what gives things their professional rigor: the domain of the planners. Open source currently has an image problem, where “free software” makes people think of contributors coding on their off hours, not coders contributing to a community development process as one of their primary tasks, as a priority of the company or firm.

I’d like to refer to an idea I’ve previously used, called participation on-ramps, which make multiple levels of participation and types of contributions readily available to users at any skill or commitment level. For something like open source planning, I can imagine that there will be agencies and planners who will be able to participate in a professional capacity, as well as other professionals (like cartographers, IT infrastructure specialists, user researchers, etc.) who will be there as part of their day job. But they will need to become adept with negotiating and accepting the contributions of non-professionals, who do it because they are passionate about it or because they have a vested interest in seeing the project succeed.

Open source communities (I must admit, I am most familiar with Drupal which I’ve heard from others is quite unlike most other open source projects) are for the most part struggling with how to integrate and properly recognize the contributions of non-coders. Coders have a pretty solid means-test for accepting whether something is contributing value. In other areas, these lines are less clear cut: the quality of a contribution might not be revealed until quite down the line in the process, and it may be very hard to identify early in the process without specialized talent.

Ultimately, I think the proposition of open source planning is not so much a lowering of professional standards, but a “getting down of brass tacks” about who is best suited to do what, and being actually and brutally honest about that, as well as finding a role for those in a non-professional standing, for the reason that they are participants and members of the community that may be affected by what eventual action is taken.

Richard and I, in full transit-geekery, decided to watch the updated remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, shortly followed after by a viewing of the 70′s original. Watching the two, it was striking to see the differences, which I saw as arising as interpretations of what the pressing issues of the time were. For instance…

• Pelham 1 2 3 in the ’70s was obviously dealing with issues related both to the civil rights movement, as well as that of the growing role of women in the workforce. Those tensions are played up for cheap laughs a lot, with the secretary and the staff, for example. There’s also the novelty of working with foreign cultures, as signified by the initial B-plot involving the Japanese subway executives.




• Pelham 1 2 3 in 2009 makes pointed references to terrorism, invoking, of course, the discourse of fear around foreign threats to Americans. There’s also significant reference to the role played by new communication technologies, the Internet, video phone, cell phones. Finally, I found the preoccupation with the stock market to be quite timely, given the recent economic downturn. Race also seems to play less an explicit, overt factor than in the earlier film.

The most apparent difference, however, is the restructuring of the plot and tone to give much higher precedence and facetime, in the 2009 movie, to the personal one-on-one interaction between Garber and Ryder. I can think of this as a shift from thinking of the large organization (the MTA) or small team dynamics of the hijackers, to a more individual-focused idea of a singular hero and singular villain, though the tensions with the other hijackers were in the 70s. It does seem to show an anticipation, on the filmmaker’s part, that the audience will want to be in on Garber and Ryder’s motivations as individuals for the actions and stances they choose. It’s a dynamic missing from the ’70s film that gives it a much cooler, almost mechanical air. What were the motivations of the hijackers in the previous movie? Did it matter to anyone, if they decided not to give any time to it? Did hijackers even have emotions back then? I also noticed that the 2009 film transposed the stresses between Garber and his co-worker that was mad at the hijackers – an internal tension caused by the hijacking situation itself, in the ’70s film – into the tension between Garber and his superior due to the reassignment and controversy.

Curiously, (and perhaps further related to the talk of recession) class struggle appears to figure more in the later film than in the earlier film, with Ryder seeming championing justice for those who work hard when they get “screwed” by those higher up. Issues of class where the hijackers are involved seem moot in the earlier film, since the mastermind was a military mercenary, and therefore beyond questions of class?

Finally, of course, the endings in the two films are similar but different. One of the subplots is eliminated entirely, rending the earlier film’s final ending from the scope of the latter film entirely. The instinct in the villain to not spend time incarcerated or in custody is transposed into the later film as a sort of fatalism.

Overall, I would say I enjoyed both films for different reasons, and they both capture different elements of the social realm in the earas in which they are based. There is certainly a distance in the earlier film that seems passé compared to modern films, but I can see how it might have been marketed as a “thinker’s” film, the same way the 2009 film has an edge of being a psychological action-thriller in its trailers.

Jason Vanderhill is a local art enthusiast/supporter and photographer. In addition, he also serves as the Communications Coordinator for the Vancouver Public Space Network, and makes a mean set of transit and civic pride 1″ buttons.

Earlier today I crossed paths with Karen and I’ve taken the opportunity to provide a guest post for the cause! What cause you ask? The VPSN of course!

I wanted to take a moment to attempt to describe exactly what “Traces: Projecting Neighbourhood Stories” was all about, because it’s a great example of the type of public space event that the VPSN heartily endorses (even though the VPSN wasn’t officially involved in this project).

How can I best describe this event?

Briefly, I will attempt to provide you with a recipe for the event. Take a number of large, blank outdoor walls, a sidewalk, a side street, and an unused urban space. Add some story-telling, film, animation, music, and popcorn. Insert lots of volunteers. Combine with imagination, inspiration, and some good old fashioned socializing to create a fantastic event. “Traces: Projecting Neighbourhood Stories” was presented on July 24-25 (so yesterday, Friday, as well as today, Saturday), 9:15-11:00pm at various venues along 400-block East Hastings between Jackson and Dunlevy.

Without requiring admission, pedestrians could wander from venue to venue, absorbing the sights and sounds, taking in the stories, and chatting with friends and newly acquainted neighbours. After a hot summer’s day, it made for a truly artfully inspired evening. I caught the event on Friday night, and assuming it wasn’t rained out/canceled this evening, I imagine much of the success of the evening was repeated again Saturday night.

This photoset that seeks to give you an overview; here are a few highlights.

Animation projected on the wall @ Chapel Arts

Crowd gathers by the Patricia Hotel front window to watch shadow puppets retelling local stories

Projected film in a reclaimed community garden

Spontaneous stories told with shadow puppets

Should you want to know more about Traces: Projecting Neighbourhood Stories, an article about it also appeared in the Georgia Straight: Traces projects Strathcona’s hidden stories.

Traces: Projecting Neighbourhood Stories was produced by MediaUndefined. If you missed it, it will be presented again as part of the Powell Street Festival on August 1, 2009, 9:15-10:30pm in Woodland Park.

All photos by JMV. Thanks Jason for the re-cap of this incredible community art event!

My previous post was a review of Where Strangers Become Neighbours. I’d like to engage with the content of some of that reading through describing and working through a recent experience I had, which qualifies, heads and shoulders above any other comparable experience, as the clearest instance of racism I’ve experienced living here in Canada for 20 years.

But let me qualify that further: it’s the clearest instance I’ve encountered, to speak nothing of my mother, who came here 20 years ago as a working-class immigrant raising two children mostly on her own. That says a lot about the shift in attitudes between the people my mother would have considered her peers, and the people that I have been calling my peers.

But first, the story.

One night, I received some email notifications of comments on some of my YouTube videos that I had put up around 6 to 8 weeks prior. Then, as now, most of my YouTube videos have to do with transit. What I saw turned my stomach.

“Welcome to TRANSTINK! A fucking useless system praised by a fucking asian! Welcome to HONGCOUVER!”

“ALL CHINAMEN LOOK THE SAME!”

Typical, fucking chinks speaking about this fucking skytrain. But then, chinks are so fucking stupid. Welcome to HONGCOUVER!”

Once again the fucking idiots in the lower mainland think skytrain is such a great system. But it is the fucking shits. It is always breaking down, the cars are too small for the amount of people in the lower mainland and with the amount of chinks riding it, it is the oriental express. A fucking useless system.”

Worse still, it was not just my videos that were on the receiving end of this hate. Several other videos posted by the Buzzer Blog‘s account, maintained by Jhenifer Pabillano at TransLink, also received these comments. Since I had to wade around the YouTube site for about 90 minutes to find out where to report his comments, I ended up deleting them without keeping a record; aufumy obtained a record of them through a mutual contact who saw my first tweets about dealing with a racist troll, and has republished them in a blog post for posterity, which I appreciate, as otherwise I’d be left with no clue what was said that upset and scared me so much.

The comments themselves are seemingly easy to explain away: some guy felt the need to vent about the state of transit, and for some odd reason decided that the problems with transit were somehow the fault of Asians. We can go forward in two ways with this analysis: we can decide that this guy is an isolated case, and that the community is generally tolerant and does not share the sentiments of this particular person. Or we can overreact, and say that this is indicative of deeply-seated racist attitudes that still persist through the populace, here in BC as well as perhaps elsewhere, and take it as a call for ever-vigilence. These two choices, funny enough, were also the ones available in the wake of the beating of a black man in Courtenay, British Columbia, which was famously recorded by an outsider and uploaded to YouTube.

Those of you who’ve known me at length (or ever had the tedium of having to mark a paper written by me) know that the third way is always most appealing to me. I don’t think this person’s behaviour was a complete anomaly – he’s just the first one to say it in a highly public place in a long time, and “to my face” in a sense through the mediation of YouTube comments. He didn’t even take the words he was uttering seriously to get a fake YouTube account: he used one in which he had posted videos identifying where he lived and with his own face. There’s also the non-zero possibility he’s being framed, though it would seem a funny way to do it. But I also don’t think we can deal with it in a ham-handed way, demanding purity of thought, recompense and reprogramming of the populace; I feel this just completely shuts down the fact that some people may have legitimate experiences supporting their opinions and beliefs, and those same people have abstracted it into prejudices as a knee-jerk reaction, or simply intellectual laziness.

Most of the responses I see to attitudes of racism seem utterly inadequate, but I cannot cast any stones because I’ve seen enough of it on the other end to know that for some, practicing racism used to and still might serve some kind of functional purpose. It is a zombie cultural artifact, unable to die because we won’t let it, and much of what we do helps encourage it to go underground.

This is a Blogathon post, so it has to end eventually. I find hope in concepts like xenophilia (described and encapsulated in this story that appeared on Worldchanging) – that as closed-mindedly as some seek to confirm their own view of their world, there are others actively seeking to be exposed to as full a range of human experience as possible.

The space between our ears is not public space. But how do we have the conversation about how to deal with the anger and frustration in ways that don’t hurt women, minorities, children, and anyone else who often bears the brunt for this sort of thing?

In Where Strangers Become Neighbours, Giovanni Attili and Leonie Sandercock focus their attention on the integration of immigrations into Vancouver’s Collingwood neighbourhood. They set the scene with regards to Canada’s history, Vancouver’s experiences with immigration, then delve into what Vancouver did at a policy level that made a tangible difference in the experience of immigrants in this particular neighbourhood, describing the role of transformative learning in the diversity and cross-communication training of staff at the Hastings Institute. One thing that caught my eye about transformative learning is its aim to affect change at both the societal and individual levels through deep experiences of questioning and meeting of Others (in the archetypal sense).

They also discuss the centrality of storytelling and dialogue in giving voice to the experiences of those who are often not acknowledged by official discourses, which tend to “legitimize fears of the bourgeousie.” I’ve had the opportunity to see Sandercock’s other work on Mongrel Cities, where she goes into more detail on the way fear operates in the urban context, where ideas of home and safety are tested and twisted between the forces of past experience and everyday reality.

Her work in asking the tough questions about pluralist and multicultural societies is deeply important to me, because these issues continue to be very important and yet still receive only a fraction of the attention I think they deserve as major issues concerning our future as a society and as a country. The diversity of how someone comes to say, “I am Canadian,” and the tone and meaning with which we say it, is expansive in scope and interacting with all the other issues around demographics, whether that’s age, gender, occupation, skill and education level, or distance from a major urban centre. Sandercock and Attili, in describing minorities’ struggle for recognition, write,

[...] The claims are claims for more than minority recognition and minority rights. Theirs is a claim for the mainstream, for a metaphorical shift from the margins to the centre, both in terms of the right to visibility and the right to reshape the mainstream. It is nothing less than a claim to full citizenship and a public naming of what has prevented that full citizenship.

In the last 3 chapters of this book, Sandercock and Attili describe their process of getting their students to participate in dialogue with subjects through storytelling through digital video, and the relationship between participants and the camera, as well as the powerful reflection that can result and is captured when the camera is running.

For my part, I am looking forward to delving a lot more into this – my current film experiments have really been focused around just me getting a handle on performance of me as a sometimes critical, other times positive commentator on the issues I see. Oh, and we must not forget the heavy use of sarcasm and irony…if I may be so bold as to analyze myself (though this likely has little to do with the topic of diversity at hand), it’s an attempt to send mixed signals, in order to throw the light off the barbs I actually wish to throw. When I think about the communication I wish to engage in, I really would not prefer this, of course, but it’s difficult not to re-enact the sense that I am being told I am powerless and that my opinion has little if any bearing (if it is even being heard by anyone in a position of power at all). I feel forced to veil my intent, because those intentions can be used as a reason to not take my input as legitimate.

What Sandercock and Attili speak of has a great deal of resonance with some recent experiences I’ve had, as well as the work of others around Vancouver that I am very supportive of. I will describe this in my next blog post.