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Today, tomorrow, I am grateful

I have a huge chip on my shoulder about thanking people. It’s been a long and arduous journey (mostly having to do with my family) that I recall every battle scar for. I’m coming to the realization that this is a big problem, for which I currently lack the resources to get proper therapy for, so I’m just going to have to do this here, on my blog, until I get a little better at doing it elsewhere.

I’m grateful for the chances I get to connect with people. Whether through work, school, or whatever strange situations life puts me in, it makes me who I am, and I’m glad I get to be me, and I can only hope I give as much value to others in conversation as I know they give to me.

I’m grateful for the chance to do work to advance the things I believe in. I believe in listening. I believe in making things better together. I believe in living without diminishing the ability of those around me, or who come after me, to live themselves. I’m grateful to everybody who has supported me in order to give me this chance: my parents, my friends, their friends, the many generous people who have materialized this support in some way: a letter; a vote of confidence; a hug or some well-placed words during a hard time.

I’m grateful I’m able to get the things I find it hard to ask for, like really, really good feedback. I’m striving to learn how best to receive this, as well as to ask for it. My ability to improve is severely limited without help on triangulating the truth. Thanks to those who’ve got my back.

I’m grateful for the wisdom conveyed through life in so many strange and funny ways, and I’m grateful for the people, the ideas and the spirit that open my heart and mind to receive (or, as the case more often is, to observe) this wisdom.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

Twitter in Transit, take 1, at BarCamp Vancouver 2009



barcamp YVR

Originally uploaded by rocketcandy


Last Saturday, the grid at BarCamp Vancouver was too compelling and I pitched a seat-of-my-pants talk to share some upcoming research I’ve been working on, looking at the use of Twitter by transit agencies (focusing on TransLink here in Vancouver, the Toronto Transit Commission in Toronto, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in San Francisco). The trick is that it’s almost entirely quantitative, so it’s serving as a nice bridge between my planning and communication work, and stretching me quite a bit in my quantitative analysis capabilities.

I’ll be presenting this research in a more fully-formed and rigorous way at an academic conference in November 6-7 happening in Vancouver called Interdisciplinary Themes — The City: Culture, Society, Technology.

I’m going to save my exhaustive, comprehensive blog post on the topic for after that presentation, when the kinks have worked themselves out more fully; in the mean time, Miss604 Rebecca Bollwitt captured some quotes from me and others at the session in her BarCamp Vancouver 2009 liveblog. Thanks to Bryce, Liz and Stephen Rees for their pictures of my session; this conference is also the first time I’ve taken notes on a projected tablet during question period, and here is the final image of my notes.

My observation thus far, wading into the transportation research literature, is that social media seems inherently to a challenge for it as an industry, because quantitative methods are baked into its decision-making and knowledge-making structures to the core. And this extends to the marketing of transit. And while social media is, on the one hand, about normal distributions about as much as everything else, there’s been a constantly niggling feeling to me that everything I’m learning about sampling is also profoundly off mark in some important ways when it comes to social media and personal expression.

But for now, back to work.

Open311 – opening the city like we really mean it

Last Friday, due to a great stroke of fortune, I got to visit the Vancouver 311 call centre and hear a presentation from two of that project’s key figures: the person who championed the project within City Hall, Barbara Pearce, and the Operations Manager, Darcy Wilson. I didn’t know too much about the 311 project beyond the barest of details, so it was very exciting to learn from them, the process they underwent to plan and implement 311, as well as their results to date, since the centre went live in February of this year. I asked a gazillion questions, and they were patient in answering them, and I wasn’t able to stump them on much of anything.

Coincidentally, I stumbled across this from my Planning Innovation Heroes down at The Open Planning Project: naturally, it’s called Open311.

Open311 Dev Camp in New York, Oct. 24 2009

[The Open311 website] is meant to facilitate an international effort to build open interoperable systems that allow citizens to more directly interact with their cities. Many 311 systems provide a broad range of information and services, but currently the primary focus here is coordinating a standardized, open-access, read/write model for citizens to report non-emergency issues.

…and, what is a movement without a time and place to dig our heels in and make it so? Open311 DevCamp (register here) is happening on October 24th in New York City — but accessible to 311 teams across the world through the magic of the Internet. The event is free to attend, physically or virtually.

This is a DevCamp style un-conference to coordinate a standard specification for 311 services. Washington D.C’s 311 API will be a major case-study for developing a more universal 311 API. In general, this DevCamp will be an opportunity to discuss and develop what’s needed to make 311 services more accessible and for cities to share knowledge for mutual benefit. The event is intended for developers, project managers, and policy makers involved with 311 services. We encourage those involved with 311 services from all cities to take part.

Having advocated and obsessed over open civic data the way I have for the past 6 months, open311 is nothing short of astounding. A couple weeks ago, after my previous post regarding how open civic data can and (IMHO) should change the way the City thinks about putting resources online, a conversation with a friend got me thinking about how open data has been interpreted (this was prior to the city’s data catalogue going public-beta). One interpretation is that the City is simply making accessible information that is already available to members of the public willing to hit up a desk at City Hall — and indeed, much of the information that we think shouldn’t be publicly available might only seem private due to security by obscurity.

But I’ve always thought of it as something much more: that cities might even start proactively disclosing things they never had thought of doing before. Open311 strikes me as just that: the walking of the talk, beyond the baby steps of giving access to what’s most obvious.

Are 311-using cities in Canada (Vancouver, as well as Calgary and most recently, Toronto) able and willing to realize this next step of open data? I’m the last person able to provide an educated opinion on that, but I’ve certainly got my fingers crossed.

City of Vancouver’s Data Site goes beta

I’m currently writing from the Vancouver open data Hackathon tonight! It was a lot more hopping a couple hours ago but me and a few other hardcores are chewing the fat at the City Archives. I’d like to take this rare blogging opportunity to bring your attention to a couple of items:

  • Happy news! Yesterday, the City of Vancouver “soft-launched” a beta of its Data Catalogue of publicly available and re-usable data. It’s a key milestone for those of us who have been waiting, with baited breath since May, when the city passed its motion on open data, open standards and open source. Within hours, friend Tylor has already rolled up a map with the city’s water fountains, along with a screencast of how he made the mashup, from scratch, in Drupal.
  • But the most exciting part of all this awesome stuff? For me, personally, it’s the accompanying survey that the City of Vancouver has made available, asking the public which layers to free from VanMap next. And yes, you can only choose 10 from the ginormous shopping list.
  • In the lead-up to the launch of this site, Carlito Pablo from the Georgia Straight wrote an article exploring the possibilities of open data, and included quotes from Councillor Andrea Reimer, and advocates outside Vancouver (and myself) working in open data.
  • The Vancouver City Archives are kinda awesome. For a city that’s so young, I suppose it makes sense that we’re extra-picky about what little history we’ve got. Some examples? They make their videos available in both WMV and Ogg Theora formats on their website, and they’ve got a small selection of their moving images on the Vancouver Archives YouTube account. All their videos on YouTube and on their website are also available in higher resolutions as MPEG-2 files for $17 a file. And also awesome? The Vancouver Archives building has one of the oldest green roofs in the city.
  • VanTrash is the other fun story coming out of the open data movement. Based on one of David Eaves’ blog posts, Luke Closs and a band of merry hackers have started to put together the VanTrash site.

I’m stoked that this is taking off and can’t wait to see what comes next.

Your new best Milestone-tracking friend: Google Calendar CSV Import

Over the past 4 days, I’ve been marinating lovely in a sauce of grad program information, while also gearing up for classes starting next week. I’ve been inundated with deadlines: dates to submit forms for everything from membership in a professional organization, to the last day of dropping classes, to ever-important funding application deadlines. And I haven’t even mentioned the other 16 hours of my day: keeping track of my health, lunch dates and dinners with friends and families, meetings with volunteer organizations, and the things going on around town that I absolutely cannnot miss.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, I seem to have decided a couple weeks ago that the only way to survive the next 20 months of graduate school is to absolutely frontload my calendar – and by calendar, I mean Google Calendar. It’s become my dashboard of sorts – my first stop when I ask myself how to make my day most meaningful for the goals I want to achieve. I’m able to create gazillions of private calendars for every project or group of projects I want, and I can quickly visualize how milestones and events like meetings, unfurl into prep sessions and deep-dive blocks leading up to it. As my group projects start to pick up, I can imagine this getting even more intense, as I use meeting software to coordinate times with my equally-busy group project colleagues.

In order to make it the calendar view valuable, however, it has to actually have all the information, and in the past, I’ve struggled with how exactly to get it all in there. I’ve become a whiz at tailoring a perfect Quick Add entry in Google Calendar, using recurring events, and making the best use of public event calendars. I’m even blessed with a university registration system that allows me to download an importable iCal file of my class schedule for the next 8 months. But when it comes to batch importing of irregularly-timed project deadlines into a Google Calendar, nothing seemed to be “just right,” in the sense of being dead simple and a clear time-saver.

Until now! Last week, when I was importing the aforementioned class schedule iCal, my curiosity was piqued when I saw that Google Calendar also accepted CSVs. CSVs have become a bit of a secret magic key for me, having spent more time than most non-programmers working with regular expressions. But it was the Google Calendar documentation on the CSV format that proved the most awe-inspiring. As it turns out, you can import almost any kind of Google Calendar entry just by entering its information with commas separating the field, line by line in a text file. (As you can see, the regexp thing has made me a little peculiar.)

But the best part? You can define the format of the CSV, because Google allows you to tell it how to interpret the format of the file you want to upload. So, if you…

  • Need several 1-hour events sprinkled through a week or month with links in the Description field? You can specify it to have all those fields, in the order that’s easiest for you to work with.
  • Need only All-day milestone notifications with a subject? The minimum requirement for an entry in Google Calendar is a subject and a start date, and it assumes that it is an all-day event.

    Which means importing just this:

    XXX: Individual Assignment 1 draft posted, 09/20/2009
    XXX: Individual Assignment 2 draft posted, 09/27/2009

    will create two entries for you. Nifty!

This opened up a whole new world for me, really. I ended up writing a script to convert a schedule in a Word document distributed by my department into a Google Calendar that I could share with my fellow graduate students. And putting milestones simply by entering a list of titles and dates? For a compulsive command line user, I’m really struggling to wonder if any other tool could get closer to ESP. (Well, Twitter’s probably close.)

The other advantage of CSV import (which you can learn how to do in the GCal interface) is that you can choose to create a new, empty calendar, and import it into there (which is also great for sharing) — or you can import into an existing calendar. Word of caution (!): if you’re at all uncertain about your CSV because you’re doing any kind of automatic generation or parsing of a differently-formatted file, or if you just want to be able to undo what you put in, go with creating a separate calendar — it will be very difficult to select your imported events from your previously-existing entries if anything goes wrong, which, depending on how complex your file format is, could go from being a cinch to fix, to being a real pain in the neck. (Especially if your entry titles or descriptions have commas in it, for instance.)

I hope this has revealed as many new possibilities for your use of Google Calendar as it has for me! Combined with my discovery of Helvetical, I’ve never been more happy with not relying on a paper planner. If you have any other tricks and tips with Google Calendar, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Support Sunny in telling diverse Canadian stories

In the course of my random goings-about around town, I’ve been blessed to meet some awesome people, and lots of times, I get to talking (or sometimes, if I’m even luckier, I get to add them on Facebook) and happily discover that, in actuality, all the cool people in my life already know each other!

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!

TransportCamp: dancing in the professional divide

A few days ago, an upcoming unconference known as TransportCamp came across my radar. It’s being organized by The Car Co-op (perhaps better known as the Co-operative Auto Network), and has a number of sponsors, such as VanCity, TransLink, The Cooperators (the insurance company), and BCAA. There is a $25 admission fee, and it’s happening Friday, October 30, all day at BCIT.

The theme for this unconference is:

How can transportation be a catalyst for building more vibrant communities in the Lower Mainland?

The Car Co-op is putting this on “in the spirit of” but not exactly like a BarCamp. I can see many benefits to their approach – for instance, many of those who will be attending (helpfully listed on the TransportCamp Eventbrite website) are those who I certainly approached and wanted to see at Vancouver TransitCamp in 2007. The more traditional event planning workflow has likely allowed those groups to commit to attending.

I hope the organizers will be putting some more material online ahead of the conference in order to give the rest of us some kind of idea of what kind of conversations we can expect to see at the event. I’ve e-mailed them to get some more information.

All the best to the organizers with their unconference and I hope to be able to make it!

Autumn, The Familiar Season

tree in Stanley Park

Autumn agrees with me. Or more accurately, I agree with autumn.

Mostly, I guess, it’s because my birthday is September 13th — timed perfectly to coincide with the start of the school year. As a kid, I’d look forward all year to being a year older, rounding up over the summer. This trait has persisted into my adulthood – many years now, still, I wait and claim to be the age I’m going to be, as early as less than 6 months after my birthday the previous year. And of course, as a bookish sort, I’m also dying to dispense with the anticipation of school and to actually get down to the nitty-gritty and nuts and bolts of making pretty things with my mind.

I think autumn is easily misunderstood. Children are often thought of as loathing the end of long sunny days and dreading the drudgery of returning to school. Not me. For me, the year, and life, really starts when the summer ends.

This year is particularly special. Here in Vancouver, it has very quickly transitioned into a blustery autumn. I’m living in the neighbourhood where I grew up as a child, when I first developed my taste for reading. I’m about to embark in the academic tradition of pursuing graduate studies in community and regional planning. I’ve had just enough time to survey the mountain of effort in front of me, and am about to plant my foot down for the first step on the path, savoring the last few unencumbered moments. My jaw is set. My eyes are ahead.

Do I sound like I have a bone to pick with summer? Maybe I do a little bit. It’s taken me a few years to grok it – fittingly enough, in what many might call the summer of my life. I get the sense that summers will continue to make more sense as I inch, ever-so-slightly, towards grokking how to live in the moments, and to enjoy things for the sheer heck of it. I have some cruft around that. I’m generally suspicious of the whole proposition and anything that has to do with it.

Autumn is gorgeous. Simultaneously, both a surprise and the slow sigh of a held breath. Look at what we never expected. Look at what’s to come. It’s a reckoning, a settling into the task and travails. It’s birthdays crashing on a shore, one after another. It’s the ideas and the love and the stories that persist long past our obsession with perfect and primes.

Days for tomorrows. Let’s harvest.

Image by jarek69.

Forking BarCamp Vancouver

This is going to be the first of two posts I’ll have with my recent thoughts on BarCamp, unconferences and the fascination I have for watching this movement unfold.

The slight hubbub on Twitter yesterday was Joe Bowser’s post announcing BazCamp, an “anti-”BarCamp of sorts. His announcement came with some strongly-worded critiques. I’ll draw your attention to these passages particularly:

Anyone can attend, BUT to give a talk, you have to actually do one of the following:

  • Show something that you made (Video, Craft or Hardware Hack)
  • Write some code that actually runs

If you can’t do one of those two things, you’re out. You also can’t say “I make Companies” or “I make Buzz” or anything that’s not quantifiable. This is strictly about turning down the suck and cranking up the awesome. It’s time that Vancouver did something cool instead of puking in the toilet that is the Echo Chamber.

This is particularly interesting for me to read in light of my recent interest in diversity in Open Source. Joe later says that if you can’t make something physical or virtual, if you can’t “sling code, wires or art,” they are not welcome to speak at the event though they are welcome to attend. I find this interesting: the mechanism within open space that’s designed to keep people true to the will of the crowd is the Law of Two Feet. Joe Bowser’s two feet kept him out of most sessions at BarCamp, he said, and if we are to believe that everyone else at BarCamp followed the rule, others got enough value from the other sessions to stick around contributing to other conversations. I personally don’t think he needs to make that big of a deal that his two feet are removing him from BarCamp altogether. Saying it needs to change by referencing his own sense of suck and awesome is, as Zak pointed out, narrow-minded, because what BarCamp is or will be is not up to a single person, even those in the organizing committee — but only if the crowd is willing to self-organize, facilitate, and take responsibility for shaping their experience of the event. So maybe that means inviting a friend to make space for a conversation you want to have, or blogging your idea publicly ahead of time to gauge interest from other attendees.

I do think it’s also an interesting point, when you consider recent conversations I’ve also been involved in regarding diversity and inclusivity in open source. Joe’s comments reinforce the already-prevalent view: that you are valuable and interesting and worthy of speaking (at his conference) only if you make things. Whether he intends it or not, or believes it or not, this is blatantly what he is stating. It is his right, as it is also our right to disagree by describing the benefits that we as BarCamp attendees get in nurturing and respecting diversity.

From generalities come new specialities, says Jane Jacobs. The history of BarCamp is that FOOCamp (meeting now, incidentally) led to BarCamp, then BarCamp led to camps of all different purposes and forms, which adhere more or less to open space principles and convene members from different communities to solve myriads of problems. It struck me while reading Joe’s post that the event he was describing sounded like a CaseCamp to me – which I enjoyed thoroughly when I attended one in Toronto. Meanwhile, Toronto’s also had its own trials with figuring out what and who its DemoCamps are for.

My personal thoughts on forking is that I have no problem with it. I don’t quite understand why it has to be done in an antagonistic manner (I suppose human nature dictates that it’s a convenient and ready mechanism for action), and I agree with Kellster in their comment on Joe’s post (no comment permalinks, alas): BazCamp stands better as an alternative to BarCamp than an anti-BarCamp. I salute Joe in his attempt to nurture the values he wants to see and promote through his event, and direct a pinch of “Live and Let Live” his way.

The Future of Microblogging and/on Transit

I don’t listen to the radio (or watch TV or read newspapers much, frankly), so much thanks to John Bollwitt for passing along the news over to Twitter:

JohnBollwitt: Just heard @kenhardie say on @talk1410, 100+ twitter accounts coming to various #translink routes to follow for constant updates.

My first thought? Oh noes, fail whales! Twitter’s architecture has gotten much more robust in the past year, but over a hundred Twitter accounts? Even the MTA in New York has a mere total of 22 Twitter feeds, which are all listed at the 511Ny Twitter website.

There’s a couple of threads to my thinking here, so please bear with me. This first thread is about technical infrastructure. While I’m an enthusiastic user of both Twitter and Facebook, I think there’s a certain line to be drawn when it comes to using (or more accurately relying on) them, for functions that can easily be considered “mission critical applications.” We don’t have to look very far in the past to find instances where this can be disruptive. Not so long ago, Twitter made a controversial change to the way their users received @replies (now called mentions) to their timelines, so that I could no longer see messages mentioning people that I’m not following on Twitter. And let us not forget, that not that long ago, Twitter updates had been discontinued so that they weren’t being sent to cellphones in Canada!

Twitter’s model and community are amazing resources to take advantage of, but they’re more important to me as a proof of concept of the value of mobile and ubiquitous web applications. As I implied in my follow-up to John Bollwitt’s tweet, I think we need to ask some serious questions about whether we want our transit system’s information distribution and notification service reliant on a Silicon Valley-based startup with no readily discernible business plan. There are many smarter and more articulate people who can talk circles around me on how this is both or good bad, so I’m just going to advocate more thinking here.

There’s a second thread here, which is about TransLink’s use of Twitter more broadly. Make no mistake, I unequivocally think TransLink’s use of Twitter is an excellent, innovative and amazing thing. While Twitter is undoubtedly a huge part of our personal, and, increasingly, our professional lives, and I certainly think it’s important to go where the members of our community already are, I also fundamentally believe that the provision of the information that makes our transit system usable should not be contingent upon a rider or (Canadian) citizen’s registration with a third-party, American service.

That said, I think what I really want to ask is, is “what Twitter is for” inclusive of what TransLink wants to use it for? Is it for distributing information (yes)? Is it for sharing our thoughts in real-time with members of both our communities of interest (yes) and communities of location (yes)? How finely should we dice the feeds in order to ensure the technological resources to keep these services running are stable? Where do we cross the line from “nice to have” to “really f*&%ing important”?

If TransLink goes forward with this (which, really, I’m ready to admit I know next to nothing about at this point) I think the very least that TransLink needs to do is to be somewhat transparent about its relationship with Twitter. Are they working closely with Twitter to manage the traffic that may result? Could large amounts of traffic resulting from global Twitter usage (such as a large, social media noisy event like, oh, the Olympics or a hurricane) impact information being delivered to riders? Would our transit information service be vulnerable to DDoS attacks like the one that affected Twitter a couple weeks ago?

I would love to hear from the fellas at Handi Mobility (though they are down in SF right now), since I know they do a lot of thinking on mobile, its underlying infrastructure and end user experience, and have worked with TransLink on their SMS and mobile applications. I don’t think I’m freaking out unnecessarily, but I think it’s important to be wary of the centralization of all our short message information needs into a single application and Twitter particularly. It may save money for application developers like TransLink, and make managing feeds easy for end users, but it personally makes me a little queasy to think that a whole bunch of decisions that TransLink can make about the backend, would be made by Twitter on an ongoing basis.

Another event that speaks to this is the recent spam API incident on the TTCU_Community Twitter account (more info at TTCupdates.com). This account automatically re-tweets messages from Twitter with the hashtag #ttcu, and up until now it seems that the service has been used and maintained by community members without incident for allowing Toronto riders to share their observations about transit service. A couple days ago it all of sudden started sending out spam messages, which the developer is now looking into.

Logically, this is a scaling up of what the CMBCTransit account already does. While the prospect of getting a Twitter account for the #15 bus I ride everyday is exciting, I think I’d be much more interested in having TransLink maintain a separate service rather than relying on Twitter, which SFBART already does to some extent.

As you can see, I’m mostly asking questions in this post. If you have more questions, or any methods of answering the ones I’ve got, I’ve love to hear it in the comments and/or trackbacks.