Playing around with Ontario electoral geography

Posted on | August 11, 2010 | No Comments

I recently had a conversation with a friend who is volunteering for the leadership campaign of a candidate for the Ontario Legislative Assembly. While Elections Ontario (EO) supplies detailed information and a reasonable candidate support package to actual candidates, the information available to those participating in party leadership races is more limited. In addition, the IT skill levels of volunteers aren’t necessarily terribly highly developed, so it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task at hand – and the limited information to work with.

In particular, my friend – who is doing this in the Bruce-Grey-Owen South electoral district (ED) – was struggling with determining the precise boundaries of her ED. Knowing these would allow her to target her campaign efforts to potential electors that are actually part of the district. Since Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound is mostly rural, and rural mapping is notoriously problematic in Ontario, figuring out which side of an ED boundary a rural road or dwelling is on isn’t always easy (although it is, typically, quite precisely determined by Elections Ontario).

Elections Ontario is quite reasonable about making its data publicly available. While they’re certainly no poster children for open source government data, the materials available on their website can provide a sufficient amount of detail, provided one can figure out how to put the pieces together. In addition, I imagine the materials could be used to create mashups that would be of further public use, for example using Google Maps.

To start with, EO offers a “wall map” in PDF format for each electoral district in Ontario. While Acrobat Reader allows you to zoom in to a more or less sufficient extent, the challenge – especially in rural areas – is that the resolution of the underlying geographic information in these maps is so limited that even the wall map doesn’t really help. This is particularly the case for small towns that are on the border between EDs. The wall map doesn’t provide enough resolution in its underlying geographic detail to ‘eyeball’ whether addresses in small border towns are inside or outside the ED.

To solve the riddle, you need to download the actual ESRI geography shapefile, which EO kindly makes available for free. Here are the detailed instructions for putting it all together (instructions for Windows; Mac OS X version of the viewer app available here):

Since we now have ‘fully interactive’ geography at our fingertips, it becomes easy to see what’s what. For example, we can zoom in on Elmwood, Ontario, where the electoral district boundary runs straight through the middle of town, along Main St.:

And we can see that electors on John St. are in our ED while electors living on David St. aren’t.

I think the potential of these electoral data products is tremendous and am hoping that Elections Ontario might consider changing its restrictive license terms to allow users to create mashups and other derivative data products from the electoral geography. In addition, it would be fantastic to be able to access – freely, under a kind of open government data initiative – additional data sets that are related to the maps, for example, the number of electors in each polling district, etc. (the polling district geography is in the same ZIP file from EO, referenced above).

Full disclosure: I once worked, for the better part of a year, on a large-scale IT project at Elections Ontario on behalf of my employer. While I didn’t specifically work with electoral geography or elector data myself, my familiarity with some of the business concepts and available artifacts helped me understand and solve my friend’s problem.

HelTweetica for iPad

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | No Comments

Quick shout-out to the only decent Twitter client for iPad, at least so far: HelTweetica.

It’s interesting to see how few iPhone app developers have adjusted their software to date. Three and a half months in, and there’s still only a handful of serious Twitter clients for the iPad. Twitter’s own has not yet been upgraded, TweetDeck, in typical TweetDeck fashion, crashes all the time, and HootSuite, as usual, is about 6 months behind where it should be in its development cycle. Of course, all of the usual iPhone Twitter clients are available in ‘compatibility mode,’ which basically means you get a tiny little app window in the middle of your big, beautiful iPad screen. Not going to happen.

Despite its naff name, HelTweetica does an admirable job. The objective seems to have been speed and stability, and it excels on both counts. I get the sense that the developers decided to create something out of the basic UI controls that are already available in iOS4 — as opposed to creating entirely their own UI. The benefit of this is that it’s fast and actually works (when compared to other contenders whose fancy UIs but otherwise poor code regularly make them crash).

There’s little not to like. HelTweetica has a competent time line, a good way of displaying a user profile, an integrated browser window with a ‘Done’ button so you can easily get back to the app, and — best of all — seamless Instapaper integration so you can save links for later.

‘All Stars’ mode is a curious value-added feature: it arranges the pictures of people on your time line into a big grid. Then, it randomly displays their last tweets every few seconds. It’s sort of a big Twitter screen saver. It’s mildly entertaining once or twice but that’s about it. Maybe I’m just not seeing it yet. Could be the next big thing.

And — best of all — HelTweetica is free. (Sadly, I only discovered it after I had already paid for Twitteriffic, which is anything but.)

Ultimately, I am waiting for HootSuite’s iPad-upgraded client. Not because I think HootSuite’s client is head and shoulders above the rest (it isn’t) or because I need multiple users (I am just me), but because I believe in the integrated stats loop it offers. Between a pretty good web client (which doesn’t work on the iPad! Grrr!), a more-than-decent iPhone client, the ow.ly URL shortener and integrated click stats tracking, HootSuite is the only integrated environment that actually helps me understand what my followers are clicking on. And that, in turn, helps me figure out how to tweet better.

(I find myself wondering if HootSuite would offer an API into its services and stats tracking to other mobile clients, sort of like there are now iPhone/iPad RSS readers that integrate with Google Reader for synchronization. That would be a good piece of business development to try, HelTweetica people.)

Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | No Comments

The more you ‘live life transparently,’ the more you post to your social networking life stream, the more ‘friends’ and acquaintances you pick up along the way, the more you invite trouble. Well — that may be stating it strongly. But you do attract a small group of social media hecklers, bullies and office chair pontificators whose apparent sole raison d’être is to leave sarcastic and clever (to them & nobody else) comments about your status updates. You know the type who encourages you to post more observations about the coffee you drink and the sandwiches you eat? And the type who just feels compelled to comment on everything, simply everything, regardless of whether he has anything to say? Sure you do. You’ve encountered them, too.

The problem has been irking me more lately. The busier I get at work, the more I look to increase the quality of my social networking time. Facebook — that melting pot of personal and work family, friends and acquaintances — has the answer, even if it’s not immediately obvious.

When the big Facebook Privacy Scare hit earlier this year, I carefully divided my < 400 friends into a number of different groups to whom I decided to disclose different things. Most of these decisions were about really personal information, like address, mobile and home phone numbers (I do tend to pre-edit myself fairly well when it comes to photos). I also disconnected almost all of the applications I had in my profile, un-liked everything, un-joined most groups and put some tighter controls around what Facebook profile information the outside world got to see via Google.

This weekend, when the hecklers and pontificators finally pushed me over the edge, it became clear that Facebook’s updated privacy controls can also be used to exert a kind of content distribution control, a sort of personal censorship. So I created another Facebook privacy group for my hecklers and pontificators. And then I removed that group’s right to see any of my updates. To them, my wall will basically appear empty from now on — nothing to leave comments about. (People are free to follow me on Twitter. They’d get to see essentially the same content there. But the fleeting nature of Twitter — and the sheer number of spammers that I ‘gong’ every week — makes me less concerned about managing the problem without upsetting the delicate social ecosystem that is Facebook.)

Another option would have been to de-friend or ban them. But it’s not that I have something specifically against these people; I just don’t enjoy being incessantly bombarded with their opinions about my opinions. And for their comments to be preserved, together with my updates, for eternity.

All of this has made me think about the connection between privacy and censorship in social networking. What I have just done is censored a few people, exercised a sort of digital Nimbyism. It’s a pretty mild form of censorship in that I haven’t muzzled them anywhere other than on my Facebook wall by preventing them from commenting on my status updates. But it forces me to consider my views about openness, freedom of speech and censorship.

Like most people considering freedom of expression, my internal dialogue is one about personal limits and the public good. Lawmakers need to balance the concepts of freedom of speech and personal protection daily. Where I net out — for now, anyway — is that in my small portion of social networking, I have the right to decide what’s inside and outside my personal limits. My policy is that I’m open to positive and negative feedback, to other perspectives, and to humorous commentary. But I’m not open to criticism of what I say couched in a quasi-humorous ‘heckling.’ That’s just bad behaviour. I’m also not open to web diarrhea. Just being in front of a computer and having the time doesn’t qualify you to comment on my stuff. You need to actually have a point.

What we can learn from gear porn

Posted on | May 31, 2010 | 1 Comment

Nerds get a bad rap. We are being made fun of for our love of, and intimate ways with, our gear. When I say ‘gear,’ I mean computers, musical instruments, stereo equipment, cameras… anything that only reveals its depth when engaged with properly, and anything where there’s always a ‘step up,’ a better version that can be bought, configured or hacked. New, better gear fills us with desire, partially because it enables us to pursue some greater cause more effectively; partially because owning better gear than the next nerd gives us a certain gearhead cachet.

While I’ve been reading the big gear blogs for years — Engadget, Gizmodo, Tom’s Hardware, Computer Audiophile, Create Digital Music and the like — a recent addition to the field has kept me coming back consistently. What sets The Setup apart is that it consists of a series of interviews with real-life gearheads, the tech industry famous and not-so-famous, talking about the gear they own and the gear they’d like to own. They’re also asked to imagine their ideal future gear (“What would be your dream setup?”).

What makes The Setup special is that it accurately describes the almost symbiotic relationship nerds have with their gear. The most interesting aspect of it is the fluent, almost poetic voice with which most of the interviewees describe their equipment. This blog doesn’t dumb anything down for anyone: every contributor assumes that you are already a gearhead and that you’ll understand the language. This is not a blog for those who don’t already have at least the same tendencies. A lot is taken for granted here, and every interview asserts a common set of assumptions. There are no Mac versus Windows slinging matches, either; it’s clear that at this level of gearheadness, you’ve tried everything, understand it well enough, and have arrived at your preferred configuration.

There is something fundamentally inspired about presenting tech workers and their equipment in this way. It relates most closely, I think, to what we know about artists, artisans and craftspeople and their tools. There is an intimate connection between artists and their brushes and canvases; between goldsmiths and their forming tools; between an artisan potters and their wheels and kilns; perhaps even between roofers and their hammers. In each case, an intimate knowledge of the tools is required in order to deliver quality work that others will pay for. Such mastery is obtained in the course of what are often long formal training programs or apprenticeships (or informal learning and ‘working your way up’).

Why should it be any different in the computer industry? I think that my long history with being an actively engaged, enthusiastic and analytical advanced computer user uniquely qualifies me to be good at my job. I know intrinsically how things work; while I’m not an engineer and have never designed any hardware, I understand hardware concepts very well. I’m even better at software: my work revolves around designing commercial software for my customers, and I take an active interest in my field. Yet, if I weren’t also a passionate, frequent, long-term user of all manner of software, I’d only be half as good at my work.

I think the popular view of the nerdy gearhead comes from the fact that a large percentage of the general population now also uses computers (not to speak of stereo equipment, digital SLR cameras, etc.). And for all those who use a computer merely as a day-to-day tool to achieve something else, it seems incomprehensible and ridiculous that there are some who engage much more deeply with their equipment.

In order to really create something great on a computer, you need to achieve a certain ‘symbiosis’ with your equipment that’s exactly the same as learning how to mix oil paints and successfully apply them to a canvas.

The nuances in The Setup are also revealing. Everyone’s got their own hobby horse, their own foible: Maggie McFee keeps talking about backing up; Jason Rohrer takes great pride in using an old Dell laptop that his sister was going to throw out. Only people whose understanding of a particular field is very highly developed are permitted to have eccentricities, and these folks are near the top of the heap in this regard.

I also thoroughly enjoy following the evolution of someone’s gear-related pursuits. For example, Tim Bray talks quite a lot about his high-end digital music setup (which is not unlike my own, to some extent). It’s inspiring to follow a true nerd’s passionate inquiry into a ‘related’ field and then see the finished product.

I’ve learned a lot from The Setup and — if you’re a nerd — you will, too. I think it’s time that the gearheads took back the legitimacy of their pursuits from popular culture’s disdain. If it’s true that (for better or worse) digital workers are like artisans (some more like artists, some more like craftspeople), then we should be allowed to have deeper relationships with our tools just like other, similar professions. I enjoy the ironic “taking back geekdom” movement that started as early as 1995 with Douglas Coupland‘s Microserfs as much as the next guy. But the irony only serves to mask our underlying suspicion that maybe, just maybe, everyone else is right, that these digital tools don’t deserve the same kind of respect, and that our deep, emotional investments ultimately won’t be paid back.

I say get rid of the irony and commit to being a gearhead. Embrace it.

Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional?

Posted on | May 27, 2010 | No Comments

[Direct link for non-Flash devices]

Johanna Blakley‘s research concerns itself with the impact of intellectual property rights on cultural production (she also researches the entertainment industry and celebrity culture).

In this really interesting TED talk, she looks at how the fashion industry has been affected by its complete lack of IP protection (you can protect your trademark but not your design, as the courts consider clothing utilitarian and therefore impossible to protect).

Surprisingly, fashion is a vibrant, creative, ever-evolving and — above all — highly profitable field. Its deep segmentation into high-end and low-end buyers ensures that high-end suppliers don’t do all the creative work for none of the profits.

Blakley interestingly points out — using a highly effective and amusing comparative graph — that industries without intellectual property protection, such as food, cars, fashion and furniture, generate significantly higher revenues than those with stringent copyright laws, such as movies, books or music. While this may not necessarily prove anything, it does strongly suggest that it is in fact possible for creative industries to survive — and prosper — without a legal framework to protect their intellectual/creative outputs.

I think Blakley’s point is primarily that creativity and intellectual property rights may be inversely proportional; yet I found myself wondering whether profits and intellectual property rights are, too. That would be the exact opposite of the common position that ‘knowledge societies’ require strong intellectual property rights protection in order to be successful.

Comparing the tech giants

Posted on | May 2, 2010 | No Comments

Apart from finding yourself wondering, “why these four specifically?,” this is a handy comparison put together by the New York Times back in January.

It’s a sort of “completeness check” comparing each of the four contenders’ line-ups in fields as diverse as gaming hardware, browsers and online music stores. What it leaves out is an assessment of the relative success of each product or service offering in comparison to the others, and so Microsoft – the completist but stumbling giant – looks a lot ‘fuller’ in this chart than anyone else. Apple’s showing, of course, is primarily characterized by the absence of the typical advertising-driven online business and social networking plays of the others (search, news, maps, etc.).

The New York Times’ commentary suggests that this chart helps us speculate on the directions these businesses might seek to expand in. Which – at the surface – is a reasonable idea, and yet I find myself wondering whether these four really are playing the same game, at the same table, in the same casino. I neither see Microsoft suddenly develop its own desktop hardware nor do I really expect Apple to launch search and news sites.

What was interesting to me was to attentively parse through Microsoft’s very complete-looking column to see if I could figure out what each of those products and services are (and whether I’d seen or used them). Frequently, I found myself having to search Microsoft’s website (or live.com) and then going, “Ah. Okay…” A lot of these offerings are painfully “so what?” – usable but forgettable.

Microsoft’s policy of spending its vast resources on copying first-to-market players isn’t really working anymore, or at least not in the same way. The pace of innovation has sped up, the technological barrier to entry has been lowered, and Microsoft’s big company politics and hiring practices are hurting more than they’re helping. By the time Microsoft had copied Dropbox with its own Mesh, Dropbox was already part of the public conversation and Mesh won’t ever catch up regardless of whether it’s baked into a future version of Windows or not.

Google is beginning to act similarly in some ways – the launch of Buzz brought us a poor ‘social networking’ product that nobody uses and many people distrust deeply (and whose content is apparently 80% generated by other services like Twitter and syndicated into Buzz).

On the chart above, Apple at least seems somewhat focused on developing its core businesses – PCs, tablets, phones, music players and music services. Comparing it to some of the other players still feels like comparing General Motors to General Electric. Not quite the same thing.

What’s missing on this chart is Facebook. The picture isn’t emerging clearly yet, but Facebook is obviously thinking bigger than people had anticipated with its universal “Like” button and other new features. Here’s hoping the New York Times plans to update its comparison chart quarterly.

Corporate applications and content on smartphones

Posted on | March 21, 2010 | 2 Comments

Barack Obama’s former BlackBerry, and the highly secure clunker it was allegedly replaced with, seem like an apt encapsulation of what enterprises are facing with the glut of new smartphones their users are connecting to corporate networks everywhere.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, one thing that’s becoming clearer is just how deeply the web, the cloud and the ‘app’ are affecting enterprise computing. Of course, as is always the case with these sorts of seismic shifts, very few people in enterprise IT departments are seeing it coming. Most are content to focus on their in-house application development, their multi-million-dollar enterprise content management solutions and their secure, private and expensive Exchange mail and BlackBerry Enterprise Servers.

Consumers – and we’re all consumers, whether we work for an enterprise or not – are, of course, voting with their dollars and buying the smartest and most desirable smartphones they can afford. Because buying a mobile phone is still primarily a personal choice. Yes, I’m aware that many organizations buy their managers and IT staff BlackBerrys, but the vast majority of us can actually choose which phone we’d like to use.

And that means there’s an increasing number of iPhones, Android devices, Nokias and – starting later this year – many will choose the new Windows Phone 7, just announced and ready to launch in November or December 2010.

Microsoft seems to be focused on following Apple’s model to the fullest extent possible. The recipe goes something like this: Start with a portable media player and add phone capabilities to it. Then, enable application developers to create rich apps and provide them with a closed-system online store. (Silverlight 4 does look like it has great capabilities to at least seriously rival Apple’s Xcode.) Ensure broad interoperability with POP3, IMAP and Exchange Server email, various calendaring standards and make sure it has a decent browser.

One thing that no smartphone manufacturer is seriously including in its product road map is ‘enterprise compatibility’ (other than RIM, perhaps). No particular attention is being paid to enabling employees to securely access enterprise applications and content outside of email and calendaring. This is interesting when compared to even ten years ago, when the future appeared to include devices like the BlackBerry accessing not just email and calendars but also custom, private line of business applications. I distinctly remember thinking the potential was huge for xRM and logistics applications for salespeople, service and field workers.

But that potential was never fully realized. Instead, smartphone software has followed the agile economic pattern of “web 2.0,” and smartphone application developers have been most successful offering single-purpose applications with rich user experiences that are tightly coupled to social networking sites.

And while enterprise IT departments are certainly interested in exploring the potential of offering purpose-built private mobile apps, there are fewer and fewer desirable phone platforms that would allow private applications to be deployed. For a variety of reasons, Apple does not offer an ‘enterprise channel’ in its App Store that would allow corporate IT departments to roll out private applications to limited groups of users. And you don’t really expect them to.

Now that Windows Phone 7 looks set to launch with a closed Marketplace (just like the iPhone), only BlackBerry and Android allow private enterprise applications to be deployed to users’ smartphones with any ease. It seems interesting to me that Microsoft would choose this approach given its deep (and growing) investments in the enterprise. While Windows Phone 7 does include the “Office hub” (an aggregate UI for Microsoft Office documents and certain, limited SharePoint repository contents), enterprise IT departments will likely be disappointed with its lack of customization features. In their current email-centric incarnation, smartphones are in fact exacerbating the enterprise’s compliance problems by contributing to the proliferation of crucial business information being captured in email.

Of course, maybe all this “enterprise” talk is ultimately irrelevant. Enterprise applications are already not able to keep up with what’s commercially available in mobile app stores. And with each passing generation of smartphone, the disconnect between the rich, agile, desirable application functionality of social networking, augmented reality, and voice note-taking client apps and the increasingly insular enterprise applications we are forcing our users to use behind the corporate firewall becomes bigger.

Information workers ultimately won’t stand for it. They are already rearranging their digital lives by using Evernote instead of OneNote, Dropbox instead of SharePoint and Twitter instead of Office Communicator. And smartphones are merely accelerating this trajectory. At this point, CIOs who aren’t thinking about comprehensive, easy, multi-platform mobile access to internal applications aren’t helping their business, they’re hindering it.

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