We watched on TV. A camera perched somewhere high above the street showed us the scene at the Fanzone on Georgia Street. Wall-to-wall people. We’re glad we’re not there, we murmured.

It was game 5 of the Stanley Playoffs, in Vancouver. I was at the Hurricane Grill in Yaletown — the first bar we’d happened upon showing the game when we hopped off our Aquabus from Granville Island — and I was with a group of urban planning PhD students visiting for a colloquium hosted by profs at my program. Up until now, my investment in the hockey game had been restricted to asking, “What’s the score?” when I passed upon someone transfixed by the sight of little green-blue men scrambling on a white screen for a fast-moving speck of dust. I clapped minimally and made small talk with the other students, asking what their area of focus was and where they’d come from. I know what an icing call is, but I really have little interest in Canucks bandwagonning.

Later, we walked down the Seawall to the Chinatown night market. “Where’s the stadium?” those visiting students asked me. “Where are those crowds?”

Over there, I pointed, vaguely northeast. About … 5 or 6 blocks that way? We later meandered through the downtown eastside — I mistakenly led the group around the block in search of the new 14 Hastings bus and settled for loading them onto a 7 Dunbar instead.

I tracked the mood in the small group I was with, as it shifted over the course of evening. There was a lot of high-fiving going on for the game, of course — people passing us on foot, jubilant after a win on home ice. Parts of our group were nervous but still desiring to see, feel, experience Vancouver. Others in the group wanted to see where the action was and be on the street — the closest we’d come was walking down Abbott near GM Place, but there was ambivalence — the desire to be part of the crowd’s energy, but fear of what it might become as well.

A couple of us mentioned the 1994 riots in passing. There was a sense that we were missing something, but also uncertainty about whether it was something worth missing, or something we would regret. We settled for beers at the Alibi Room, in the basement, the game crowd having long moved on. I left the group waiting in line at the Fortune Sound Club, took my trolley bus the 20 blocks home in my quiet residential neighbourhood, and tucked myself into bed without a care in the world.

These thoughts made watching the actual events of Game 7 that much more startling. To learn that all the civility and positivity of the celebrations would prove to be a rouse was a huge letdown. In its place, broadcast to a city in shock, what people claimed Vancouverites were really made of. Opportunistic, violent, disrespectful displays — doing it for the lolz, mugging for the cameras, the mockery of earned fame.

I agree with everything Alexandra Samuel says in her blog post at HBR.org about what we say about citizen surveillance when we condone its use for this horrific event. I think the key insight and the harsh lesson is that while the riots were not, collectively,  our fault — we have the actual instigators to thank for that, whether they number in the hundreds or the thousands — they are our responsibility to learn from, and to make sure never happen again. All the disowning and finger-pointing in the world based on age, gender, etc. is not going to get the root of the issues and to solve it. Only deep learning and reflection will.

There is so much speculation flying around as to the cause of this. I’m in no position to add to it, but this is the best and most level-headed thing I’ve read on the topic.

I am floored by the outpouring of support for businesses, and social media has proven instrumental in helping people organize themselves into volunteer clean-up crews. I’m also amazed at the stories we are seeing coming out of people who tried to stand up to the looting, smashing crowds. I think Vancouver’s fire and police services did their best, though they were not without fault. And finally, the whole trick with technologies and norms like citizen surveillance is that we can’t just let the cat of the bag when we think we are motivated by it being right. Jonathan Zittrain has made this argument fabulously (this summary makes reference to hockey riots in Montreal in 2008). It will be deployed on us when we like it this time — if we condone its use now, who will be the one to say it is right or wrong next time?

Anyway, getting off social media now sounds like a fantastic idea.

Last week was the second Vancouver Open Data Hackathon hosted by the marvelous staff of the City of Vancouver Archives in Vanier Park. It was great fun! So many people I hadn’t met interested or in the midst of doing awesome stuff:

• Vicky‘s story of programming in Processing and schmutzing Arduino boards with museum exhibitions for her Digital History class. Her work sounds terribly exciting and fascinating — the sort of left brain-right brain stuff that totally inspires me. Richard’s been dogging me for weeks, so I will more seriously consider the merits of learning Processing over the course of the next year. Her master’s in Ontario sounds terribly exciting.
• Jason McLaren, who’s looking to do a SkyTrain station walking-radius app, and who I introduced to VanMaps (I think the layer on intersections might have been helpful, along with some queries to Google on walking time estimates).
• Vince, who’s into that not-as-uncommon-as-you-think intersection between tech geeking (video games, for him specifically) and cycling. Seriously, the overlap in the two interests among both my Vancouver and Toronto friends is more than coincidental.
• Honeymae and Daniel McLaren did a neat quick wordle looking at words used in stories about the Downtown Eastside. Not too shabby for 2 hours work! (For those not familiar with Wordles, think a quick and dirty word usage frequency analysis, akin to content analysis but a little less methodological hand-wringing.)

And there was a whole other half of the room I didn’t get to talk to! But hackathons are as much about the work as the support, and Richard and I decided that the few hours at the Hackathon for a great chance to put down some of the details on paper for an idea we’d been talking about, which I’d coined “Adopt-a-Stop”.

Adopt-A-Stop: The Idea

“Adopt-a-Stop” is our idea for a web and mobile-enabled application for community members to find and share information about the five-block radius around each bus stop. As the name alludes, the service will encourage and empower individual community members to garden and curate and take ownership of an individual Facebook-style page for each stop.

Using each stop as an aggregation point, we can display news content both submitted directly to the site, as well as content from any third-party service (e.g. Flickr, Twitter, Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla, Tumblr) which provides geolocation as part of their metadata. Riders could subscribe to their ‘favourite’ or commonly-used stops anonymously or publicly, and community gardeners can help shape the conversations around the area.

Some other key points about our idea:

• The most exciting part for us is that the bus stop identifiers are already there, widely-deployed reference points, with a consistent identification scheme — we simply add the community interaction layer.
• The most valuable part for me — and the seed of the idea in my mind — is the importance of asynchronous and persistent interaction with the people who take the same bus I do, so that I can discuss the stop or their routes even when I’m not in their presence. I don’t envision it being the be all and end all of personal and community expression and information — just one more tool in enriching it.
• Finally, the geeky but super-important part — the bus stop IDs essentially are a geolocation interface for people without location-awareness in their mobile devices — like me and my Nokia 6020, using Twitter through SMS.

Luke pointed out the importance of a common metaphor — although I had described it initially as a Facebook page for a bus stop, prior to his comments (both in person and reflecting on the event on his blog) I don’t think we’d actually thought of incorporating Facebook’s actual interface into our design. That said, I think it might also be fun to let people, or the Bus Stop Adopter, to configure for themselves how they want to see Stop pages. Maybe all they really want to do is explore the Google Street Views through the lens of the bus stops. Or maybe they do want a “River of News” approach with videos, pictures, tweets and check-in’s mixed together.

I can also anticipate some other challenges — the pages around bus stops in more suburban areas, for instance, will probably have a lot less excitement around it, but I can still see people, for instance, arranging to have garbage cans put near suburban stops, or maybe someone putting and maintaining the schedule for the bus on the pole for those who don’t have cellphones (or who just can’t be bothered to waste the cost of a text message). Similarly, the residents of a place like Bowen Island might not take to it at all since they’re perhaps a bit less anonymous…in which case, it might be interesting for visitors to Bowen. I’m also interested in how the “community gardener” aspect will pan out, as I’m sure some system of incentives and disincentives will need to be in place to deal with things like vandalism, as certain to happen online as it does offline.

Anyway, like many web apps I think our goal is to build it and to be responsive with however people choose to use it in the end, and to give people the space to experiment and make it their own, while doing as much of the heavy lifting to make it useful as we can. To this end, we’ve submitted the idea to the Knight Foundation News Challenge competition, which might help us get a bit of funding to get it off the ground a bit. If you like the idea, please help us out by:

1. Voting or leaving a comment on our proposal’s page at the Knight News Challenge website. We’d love to hear your suggestions how what would make it helpful to you or more fun to use.
2. Passing it on to any friends or colleagues of yours who might also be interested in it, through things like Twitter or Facebook. (Hint: short URL: http://j.mp/knc-aas)

Looking forward to hatching this more (…perhaps at the next Hackathon )!

Update (13 Mar 2010): Richard and I have received word that the Knight News Foundation has decided not fund this project…which really just means we’ll build it when the urge strikes us if this still continues to appear to fill a need. Thanks to everyone who supported our application!

That’s the backstory I have with Sunny Oh, one of the quirkest, neatest people I’ve had the pleasure to hang out with, who happens to know a boatload of other people doing neat things that I like (like former TA’s, independent news magazine editors, etc.).

She’s been offered an amazing opportunity to pursue her dream of writing for television, with a writing residency at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. She would be the first Asian-Canadian female from the West Coast, and, well, as a young, Asian-Canadian female myself, this strikes me as kind of awesome for getting stories on the small screen that are meaningful, interesting and reflect the experience of me and others I know… Hurray Sunny for getting accepted to participate in this excellent experience!

But, as the way of these things goes, her dream’s got a slight snag: monies. It’s one thing to read about arts cuts in a newspaper, it’s another to hear someone who’s being actively, really, affected by it. As Sunny writes,

However I have come up short financially, even with a scholarship from the Film Centre. In past years government agencies gave CFC attendees $3, 000 – $15, 000 in support. This year, because of budget cuts, nothing.

Sunny is staging a fundraiser to get her to Toronto – it’s got a bit of a twist. She’s writing a screenplay called The Midnight Gardener and is releasing and writing a scene for every fifty ($50) dollars raised. My friends over at newly-redesigned Schema Magazine are hosting the screenplay and collecting donations on her behalf, and she’s already been able to get a first scene up!

The tagline for the Midnight Gardener:

In a world where people have forsaken sleep in order to do more things, one girl, Nara, still sleeps. All her classmates make fun of her. But since she’s the only one who still sleeps, she’s the only one who still dreams.

Sunny is also blogging her writing-for-funds process as well. Which is deliciously evil for me, feeding my little film dream even as I have five gazillion unrelated things to do.

For those who have already donated, she’s also tracking her efforts on Twitter so you can get your fix from the new screenplay as soon as she posts it. Families and friends are also posting their support to her Facebook group.

I’m supporting Sunny because diverse Canadian stories are important to me, and I like to think of myself as an ardent enthusiast of Canadian film and television. In looking over the CFC wikipedia entry, I’m pleasantly surprised to see just how many projects and directors whose work I’ve loved and respected, have come about partly as a result of the CFC. Few opportunities to support Canadian projects as direct or close to me come along as this one.

So please, go buy a scene for the night owl/insomniac in your life, and help Sunny tell awesome stories!

I was particularly proud of the way it came together, although one commenter noted that it was highly unrepresentative of her own experience at the event.

Filming the Golden Ears Bridge Opening was some of the best fun I’ve had in a long time. As I tweeted, I had a Flip MinoHD camera in one hand, and a Super-8 camera in another, along with a Lomo Fisheye in my purse. The HD video came first, of course. I processed and had my super-8 footage transferred when I was on the East Coast earlier this month, and I’m happy to announce the “world premiere”, so to speak, of my super-8 Golden Ears Bridge Opening film, now on YouTube and, for your convenience, embedded below.

The last piece of the puzzle is the Lomo Fisheye pictures…which I shot on slide film and had processed (unmounted) last week. Does anyone have any recommendations for a service or film scanner on the cheap? I have access to a film scanner but its Digital ICE technology magicks choke on my round fisheye pictures and crops them all in the middle of the frame.

This post been contributed for Blogathon by Farzine MacRae, who writes for Planning Pool, self-described as “a thought repository and incubator for all things relating to the planning field [...] A multidisciplinary, multimedia-focused blog that focuses on activities generally related to urbanplanning and urban issues”, from current students at the School of Community and Regional Planning at The University of British Columbia.

As part of an on-going research project conducted by UBC urban design professor Maged Senbel, students in SCARP’s Digital Video and Planning course prepared a few short films on development issues facing the south Vancouver neighborhood of Marpole. This particular film, created by An Minh Vu, Silas Archambault and myself seeks to engage the community in a conversation about how they would like to see Marpole address inevitable development pressures, brought about by a new Skytrain station, among other things.

It was originally screened at a community meeting where students from other classes, mostly design, presented their own projects. Among these was an impressive scale-model of the area around the new station, as well as a series of 3D computer models. After each viewing each demonstration, community members were quizzed about how well they felt the efforts of the students informed them about the potential Marpole had for growth, and more importantly, how well these films and models succeeded in encouraging citizen participation in the planning process.

Anyway, here is what our group did:

Marpole Grows from Planning Pool on Vimeo.

This post was originally published on Planning Pool. Thanks, Farzine and the Planning Pool team, for helping out with Blogathon!

I’m pretty happy with the resulting article., which also had quotes from David Eaves and local Freebase guru Jim Pick. This is the part with my quotes:

“If we bring this idea of open standards and open data to [City] staff, and this is the first time they’ve ever heard about it, they can take a very confrontational approach to it,” says Fung, who is also a master’s student at the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning. “If they have a chance to think about it systemically and really get a sense of why it’s a good thing to do… then they’ll be much more ready to be on board.”

Bridging the gap between early and late adopters to new technologies, Fung says, will be key to the success or failure of Vancouver’s open-data efforts, and, as with anything, the best learning will happen through experience. In response to the “To Twitter or Not to Twitter” question, Fung recalls an article she read that likened the microblogging service to sex. “You can talk about it, but you really just don’t understand it until you’ve actually done it,” she says.

As for skeptics — or “conscientious objectors,” as Fung calls them — to new ways of using technology, she maintains that times, and people, will change. “When we make those projections of the worst… we’re assuming that what we’re proposing is going to come to fruition in a world that looks exactly like ours,” she says.

Here’s the much less concise but slightly more nuanced version of what I think about open data, as Jackie and I discussed it:

• My thinking is very much informed by my internship at a large organization. Based on that experience, I expressed concern the impact on staff of a top-down directive for opening up through a motion like this, versus a bottom-up dispersion of the idea of being more open, and the precise mix of these factors being key to how well staff take to the idea. (This is pretty hard to get across in an article.) I’m also not in any position to gauge this, however, but that’s where things could possibly get dicey.
• As with the general population, there will be a range of attitudes towards the merits of the motion. There will be some city staff who will be more technological adept or who immediately see the potential of weaving principles of openness into their work, and some others for whom those benefits aren’t obvious, or who have reservations about what the impact on their daily work will be. With that, generalizing the impact across teams and departments will be troublesome at best.
• Especially with technologies like Twitter, individuals come to their own understanding of the enhancements, drawbacks and oddities of a tool, even as friends or media may draw attention to some features over others. Staff will be the same with having their data open, just as they undoubtedly currently are about e-mail.
• That said, none of these factors are commentary on the spirit of the motion of itself — which is that as citizens, we’ve paid for the collection of this data and the services that are delivered using it; and if we are able and willing to innovate alongside staff in improving the quality and impact (GHG-speaking) of these services, data should not be the obstacle to that (where it does not violate the rights of citizens, such as those to privacy).

I’ve obviously been hanging around the Master of Nuance too long. Next time, more snappy!

• Pete Quily got several quotes and a URL mention, in an article about his passion: ADD and adults, particularly how it can be underdiagnosed and how little attention is given to the strengths of people with the disorder. He’ll also be at Mental Health Camp this weekend; I’m looking forward to his session on “ADHD – Busting the myths, breaking the stigma, showing reality, one post and tweet at a time”.
• Ifny Lachance was representing for Free Geek in their article on the environmental impacts of computers and how planned obsolescence of hardware is driven partially by proprietary software’s tactics of bigger-better-shinier. The Straight even got some phone time with RMS to talk free software as well.
• Lara Honrado from Mango Communications was quoted on a piece about responses to the climate crisis, weighing in on something I know she’s quite passionate about: sustainability and ethnic diversity.
  

  “I’m trying to make the case for diversity within the environmental movement. I think if the environmental movement doesn’t seriously start to do that, then, at least in Canada, you’re just not going to connect with a lot of diverse Canadians, and that’s too large and important of a group not to engage with.”

• Stephen Rees, transportation blogger and Green party candidate in Richmond East, got to put in his two cents in the Straight Talk section regarding the Gateway program and, more broadly, the Liberals’ record on the environment with regards to the Gateway program. Peripherally, The STraight has also since published an an online-only piece on Obama’s announcement of high-speed rail improvements to the corridor connecting Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. As someone who’s actually taken that Cascades Train that connects it now, all I can say is, please for Pete’s sake make it better because it is screamingly awful right now.

Seeing as the paper’s been out for almost a week, this is pretty slow with regards to timeliness. Still, it’s nice to see some friends getting traction for their awesome work.

Last week, I attended four meetings:

• Vancouver Public Space Network meeting
• Car Free Vancouver (Main Street) organizer meeting
• Richard Stallman’s lecture at the Maritime Labour Museum
• Free Geek Vancouver Volunteer Orientation

I was doing this to get some good feedback and support for Busker Idol, which I felt pretty good about.

This week, I continued with:

• Screenwriting workshop with Jana Williams
• A Free Geek Vancouver monthly meeting
• ChangeCamp organizing meeting (the meeting notes are, um, in Microsoft Word format at the Google Group. I will put those on Google Docs for an HTML(link) version when I am on a computer that is mine for a bit more browser-friendlines…)

There were some interesting things that surfaced for me at the ChangeCamp meeting. I’m interested in exploring the idea that whatever happened in Toronto need not necessarily be prescriptive of what happens here in Vancouver for a ChangeCamp to happen. I’ve heard some arguments to the contrary – that, in fact, we should be dissecting the Toronto experience much closer, to see how the steps built upon each other to lead to a successful event. I agree to an extent. I think it’s important to reflect on the fact that in some was, Toronto is still becoming aware of exactly what’s they’ve done. Connecting the seeds sewn with what’s happened is something that can only happen on a group level on some ways, even though every individual can likely easily name when or how they heard about a camp, and how they came to the position of wanting to go to one.

I was also very interested in the perspectives of people who had attended the oganizer meeting purely based on the CBC Spark interview with Mark Kuznicki and had no connection with other camp communities in the city. Their perspective is helpful, but it brings home the fact that the nebulousness of ChangeCamp presents both a challenge and an opportunity. It is a challenge, in that we may find very few things in common or little to connect with these seemingly random interested people that have been drawn to the idea of ChangeCamp based on the artifacts around it, be it thorugh a website, knowing someone who attended it, or an interview (or all of the day’s bounty). The opportunities are a bit harder to define, and has its roots in serendipity – the fact that, in my opinion anyhow, if you impose a singular vision too strongly around the ownership and use too heavy a hand in defining expectations around the event, it can result in an alienation that can dampen enthusiasm and stop the thing from making use of the passion, emotion, excitement and willingness to participate that make events like BarCamps so interesting. It’s the tension between the “thing we want to do” and the awesomeness of that serendipity that is the cause of the fretting. Too much concentration, and it almost doesn’t seem to be that devoted to learning or sharing. Too much serendipity, and there’s nothing tangible at the end of the day. (This is probably, in my perception, one of the primary weakness of Vancouver Transit Camp, even though I really had no goals in mind except for it to be Generally Awesome. People have been encouraging me to aim higher.)

Next week will be craziness:

• I was invited to attend Ukelele Night at Our Town Cafe (at Main and Kingway) on Tuesday. Starts 7:30. Ukes all the way!
• Northern Voice is happening on Friday and Saturday. For my picks on sessions, see my post on Northern Voice at Social Signal.
• After MooseCamp Day, I’ll be catching the 44 Downtown to watch Us Now, a film about government in the age of collaboration from Mass LBP. Register for the Vancouver screening at their Eventbrite site. Bonus: Alexandra Samuel will be on a panel after the film.
• After the Saturday conference day at Northern Voice, Richard and I will be heading downtown for illuminate yaletown, described as Vancouver’s first “light-as-art” show.

…and, very shortly after that, Richard and I will be heading down to Portland, Oregon, for a few days! We have some ideas of what we want to do there (Powell’s, the gondola, the farmer’s market, the Free Geek) – but if you were in Portland for 4 days, what would you absolutely positively no-questions-asked have to do while you’re down there? We’d love to hear it!

The thing I will likely find most terrifying is to explain how social media links to transit links to not shouting at public open houses. I’m finding that the longer I stay in the space, the more challenging it is becoming to explain it, though I have a few metaphors and stories that I haven’t overused just yet, and that I hope I can use to good effect. How do you explain people who go online and write up regional transportation plans? How do you explain why you have a t-shirt with the BC Electric Logo?

That, and I never really went into the SkyTrain Unconference project gearing for this kind of coverage in mind – but life wouldn’t be what it is if it weren’t surprising.

I do think it’s very interesting that I am entirely clueless as to how television interacts with social media, because I haven’t had cable since 2004 or watched anything outside of CBC Newsworld since 2002. That, perhaps, was the self-imposed intellectual isolation that comes with really studying Communication. And so I found myself asking the producer, “Who watches Breakfast Television?” because it’s not me or the people I surround myself with.

Why is CityTV doing this? They’ve recently recognized that they need to start adding information on the status of transit as part of their morning traffic information. I haven’t done the morning SkyTrain commute in years but I imagine that it’s still mostly Broadway and Commercial from 7:50 to 9:15 that is the big kerfuffle, and Burrard Station at that same time. But it’s interesting to think that there are lots of other parts of the system that may need this information that I may not be aware of in the slightest – for instance, buses late or stalled in the suburbs. But I can see how for some people, even hearing, “Transit moving along well,” serves to legitimize it for the people who don’t see the thousands and thousands of people on transit every day.

Though to be fair, I don’t envision a huge shift to traffic as a result of this starting to happen, mostly because of the service levels…but I think it’s indicative more generally of what the challenge of sustainable transportation is, which is to give people ownership on the choice by empowering them with information. Securing the capital for it is but one part, if we’re in fact serious about wanting to be sustainable. (Judging by the cover of yesterday’s Province, I think we’re still a bit uneven.)

• Having recently developed a bit of an eye for the curious world of urban design, transportation and city planning; and
• Having a really, really excellent camera to take pictures with. (Thanks to Richard for the generous loan!)

iPhoto – which I only started using at the start of this trip, out of frustration with Flickr Uploadr and a lack of anything more professional, like Adobe Lightroom – says that I’ve taken 1164 photos since June 6th. Of that, I think about 350 of them have made it to Flickr publicly in total. I even bought a 4 GB Compact Flash card when I was there, since I didn’t have my laptop in Thailand.

The pictures that I took on my trip can be grouped under these broad themes (some tagged like so, conveniently, in my Flickr):

• Night
• Streetscape
• Tall Building
• Transit (mostly under tram)
• Food (entirely Roland‘s fault, BTW)

Shooting from moving vehicles seems to be one of those things I’ve done quite a few times, so I’ll be blogging about the fun logistics involved in doing that a bit later on. Meanwhile, here is one of my favorites from each of the above types:

Transit

(click through for more, RSS readers….)

Night

Food

Streetscape

Tall Building