del.icio.us tagging

[Daniel Haran]

Hi folks,

I just decided to tag a del.icio.us bookmark with civicaccess

And lo! several other list members have already been doing this:
http://del.icio.us/tag/civicaccess

Hey, there's mtl3p and tlauriau!

For those who don't know about bookmark sharing- it's a way to keep
your bookmarks on a server so they're accessible from any computer.
You can "tag" your bookmarks with keywords, which are then accessible
to others who can subscribe to the bookmarks for a certain tag.

Cheers,

Daniel.

[Hugh McGuire]

Hi folks,

Met with Mike Lenczner the other day and we had a long talk about
civicaccess.ca; he encouraged me to share these thoughts.

As a "founding member" of civicaccess, I still have great difficulty
understanding what the exact objectives of the project are, and why the
objectives are important. I have my own ideas about that, but in my
opinion what we have written is not yet clear enough - to me, and
certainly not to a beurocrat in ottawa.

This is really important for several reasons:
1. attracting people to the project: a clear objective will help people
decide whether they wish to join
2. focusing the project:  in asking whether we should do this, or that,
it's nice to have a clear objective which lets you decide which project
is more important.
3. selling the idea to the people in power (ie government & beurocrats &
media) - to convince them that gov't should let go of their data. To me,
this will be the MOST difficult task. We need to have a clearly
articulated objective; and a convincing case, to beat the tendency in
government for cost-recovery.

So, what is our objective? and why do we have that objective. I would
say our objective is:

OUR OBJECTIVE:
1. to get free and open access to all civic data from all levels
(federal, provincial, municipal) of Canadian governments

OUR REASONS:
1. the data belongs to citizens
2. to foster innovative projects and uses of civic data among citizens
3. to alllow citizens to help build solutions to probelms themselves
4. to generate more citizen engagement in the democratic process
5. ???

OUR CAVEAT:
1. we want access to aggregate/anonymous data, not to information about
private citizens. We have no interest in violating the privacy of
citizens.

Note these are just my thoughts/proposal. I know we went through
something like this already, but to me the end result on the wiki was
not clear enough.

Hugh.

[Robin Millette]

On 3/17/06, Daniel Haran <[hidden email]> wrote:

> I just decided to tag a del.icio.us bookmark with civicaccess
>
> And lo! several other list members have already been doing this:
> http://del.icio.us/tag/civicaccess
>
> For those who don't know about bookmark sharing- it's a way to keep
> your bookmarks on a server so they're accessible from any computer.
> You can "tag" your bookmarks with keywords, which are then accessible
> to others who can subscribe to the bookmarks for a certain tag.

Hi,

I was using the coacid tag - like was discussed before.
http://del.icio.us/tag/coacid
I've promised Mike before I would have the bookmarks posted
automatically to the list everyday, but still haven't done that. Sorry
- I'll get to it tonight.

I'll be searching for both "coacid" and "civicaccess" tags for now.

--
Robin 'oqp' Millette (aka Lord D. Nattor)
http://rym.waglo.com/wordpress/

[Michael Lenczner]

Hey Hugh - thanks for posting that.  I've been talking to Tracey about
it a bit (our conversations our good because I can represent the geek
side and she groks the academic / community planning side).

I agree with you that the message needs to be clearer, more
straightforward.  I think:

"to get free and open access to all civic data from all levels
(federal, provincial, municipal) of Canadian governments."

sums it up pretty well.  But I never imagined Civic Access being
*just* about pushing for better policy. It's also about web-scrapping,
about teaching community planners how to use the latest gis tools,
getting geeks excited about mucking about with existing civic data,
and then taking this stuff back to the government and saying "See!
Look what we can do with the crumbs you throw us.  Now give us more to
work with and watch us go!"

But I would be happy with making that sentence the 1-line description
of Civic Access.  I think it would be very helpful to get people to
understand what we're up to.  Because telling people that we're trying
to build a community of practice around new technologies + civic data
makes many an eye glaze over ;-)

my 2 cents.


On 3/17/06, Hugh McGuire <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> Met with Mike Lenczner the other day and we had a long talk about
> civicaccess.ca; he encouraged me to share these thoughts.
>
> As a "founding member" of civicaccess, I still have great difficulty
> understanding what the exact objectives of the project are, and why the
> objectives are important. I have my own ideas about that, but in my
> opinion what we have written is not yet clear enough - to me, and
> certainly not to a beurocrat in ottawa.
>
> This is really important for several reasons:
> 1. attracting people to the project: a clear objective will help people
> decide whether they wish to join
> 2. focusing the project:  in asking whether we should do this, or that,
> it's nice to have a clear objective which lets you decide which project
> is more important.
> 3. selling the idea to the people in power (ie government & beurocrats &
> media) - to convince them that gov't should let go of their data. To me,
> this will be the MOST difficult task. We need to have a clearly
> articulated objective; and a convincing case, to beat the tendency in
> government for cost-recovery.
>
> So, what is our objective? and why do we have that objective. I would
> say our objective is:
>
> OUR OBJECTIVE:
> 1. to get free and open access to all civic data from all levels
> (federal, provincial, municipal) of Canadian governments
>
> OUR REASONS:
> 1. the data belongs to citizens
> 2. to foster innovative projects and uses of civic data among citizens
> 3. to alllow citizens to help build solutions to probelms themselves
> 4. to generate more citizen engagement in the democratic process
> 5. ???
>
> OUR CAVEAT:
> 1. we want access to aggregate/anonymous data, not to information about
> private citizens. We have no interest in violating the privacy of
> citizens.
>
> Note these are just my thoughts/proposal. I know we went through
> something like this already, but to me the end result on the wiki was
> not clear enough.
>
> Hugh.
>
> _______________________________________________
> CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://civicaccess.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss_civicaccess.ca
>