Pie Palace

Why you shouldn’t ask your graphic design friends to do stuff for free: Missing Missy. (Via mj3clark)

PiePalace reader Gawp offered a fantastic comment on my post about GJ Hagenaars‘ assertion that the city should have exactly one staffer in every library branch. He starts out: “I know, lets use Mr. Hagenaars’ argument for other city services. They make just as much sense!”

what we truly need are small, local SNOW REMOVAL, with one SNOW REMOVAL PERSON (making less than six figures) and volunteer staff from the community to keep SNOW REMOVAL going. Let people vote with their SHOVELS if they want SNOW REMOVAL. If there are no volunteers (i.e. not enough interest), one SNOW REMOVAL PERSON is already too much.

Not to keep harping on Mr. Hagenaars, but I thought that was funny.

I knew that OC Transpo had been making their route/schedule information available to Google Maps for a while, but I wasn’t aware that the information was publicly available. Even better: the spec is available too! (via DataOtt.org)

Today’s a good day for Capital Ward. The incumbent councillor isn’t running for re-election, which opens the field for newcomer David Chernushenko.

I’ve volunteered with David in the past, and I’ve been impressed by what I’ve seen. He’s good at building consensus and working with others, and exudes competence. Over the past few years, David has extricated himself from the federal Green Party, been appointed to the National Round Table on the Environment, and produced two documentaries. He gets stuff done. And non-Glebe residents of Capital Ward (yes, we do exist) will be pleased to know he’s from Old Ottawa South.

The current councillor, Clive Doucet, is running for mayor. Even though I agree with some of his ideas, he’s the wrong candidate for the job. He was right to argue that we should consider multiple routes for the O-train, and he was right that OSEG should have had to compete against other bidders for redeveloping Lansdowne. But both of those pushes were hampered by Doucet’s inability to build a coalition around his ideas, and apparent problem with deadlines. As a councilor, he’s been a poor representative of the Ward: he consistently doesn’t show up to his public meetings at the Wild Oat (according to his column in the Glebe Report), and his previous election pamphlets have taken credit for work done by community organizations.

I hope that Doucet’s exit from Council will make it possible for David to win. But I worry that Doucet will split the anyone-but-O’Brien vote.

The City of Ottawa has released its first open data. It isn’t too exciting – just maps of rec. facilities. But it’s a step in the right direction. I look forward to seeing financial info up there.

Finally! Someone’s implemented a Canadian TheyWorkForYou. You can find it at OpenParliament.ca. Frigging awesome, if you ask me. (H/T to Darrell for pointing this out)

How do you define success when it comes to a protest? Two weeks ago, when I hooked up with Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament (CAPP), I would have defined a successful protest as having a bunch of people show up.

In that case, today’s protest against Stephen Harper shutting down Parliament was epic. Sorry, EPIK!!!!1. 3,500+ folks turned out. Speakers spoke. Fists were shaken. Signs were waved.

So what?

Let’s geek out a little bit here. Why hold a protest?

1. To scare the bejesus out of your opposition. Imagine your company pays kids in Sri Lanka to chew asbestos to make iPhones. Everyone likes iPhones, nobody cares about cancer kids overseas. Life is good. Until one day when you show up at work and there are a thousand people burning you in effigy. You may start to consider other ways of making iPhones.
2. To impress the pundits. Media, commentators, bloggers, and other self-declared arbiters of importance will pooh-pooh your cause when they think it’s just you and your mom who care about it. When you and your mom organize a rally that brings a couple of thousand people out, those commentators will change their position. And if they think you’re important, that helps scare your opposition all the more, and draw more folks into your movement.
3. To attract more supporters. It’s really disheartening to feel like you’re the only person who feels something. A rally can help solve that. It’s shows potential supporters that they aren’t alone and they have a group to plug into. Hopefully, it will swell your ranks, and enable future (metaphoric) asskicking on your issue.

All of this said, we’re in a weird place. We have certainly have an opposition: Harper and every power-grubbing prime minister from the past 30 years. But we don’t have an “us”. Yeah, there are 213,178 people in a Facebook group, and three opposition parties doing everything they can to ride our momentum; but there’s nobody at the head of CAPP waving a sword and yelling “CHARGE!”

So what did our protest accomplish?

1. Scared the opposition? Hard to tell. Intrepid PiePalace reporters are busily peeking in the windows of 24 Sussex to see if a night-light was left on. When we find out, you’ll be the first to know.
2. Impressed the pundits? Maybe. Mostly? Definitely.
3. Attracted more supporters? Again, hard to tell. The Facebook membership seems to have plateaued, but it seems unlikely to grow, since it was explicitly aimed at this weekend’s protest.

A sympathetic observer might call that two out of three. An unsympathetic type might call that one out of three. Either way, it’s better than a fail. We’ll know the real result when we see the responses from MPs, the government, and the public.

I just got home from Ottawa anti-prorogation rally. 3,500 braved sub-zero temperatures for two hours to show their support for our Parliamentary democracy. Nothing short of awesome. Well done, Ottawa! (I’ll post pics once I warm up)

To be “winning”, for once. I started refreshing the anti-prorogation Facebook group’s web page. Every few seconds, when I refresh, another few people have joined the group. It’s gone from less than twenty thousand when I saw it on Monday, to 98,840 now. Yeah, it’s just a Facebook group. But it feels nice to be part of something verging on a majority.

And no, that isn’t a membership card in my pocket. I’m just happy to see your new catalog. Your FANTASTIC new catalog.

The crunky old catalog has been replaced with a shiny new BiblioCommons website. With a bit of searching, I managed to track down some info on BiblioCommons:

1. They have a terrible website.
2. Their founder, Beth Jefferson, appears to be a mix of volunteer-ist and entrepreneur (imagine that!).
3. Beth talks about BiblioCommons in a podcast I haven’t listened to yet.
4. They seem to snarf information from Amazon. (Their images come directly from Amazon)
5. I am addicted to annotating books.

As far as I can tell, they don’t have an official API. I managed to find a Drupal module that professes to do BiblioCommons stuff, but I don’t know enough about Drupal to tell what it’s up to.

And their login pages confuse cURL. Boo!