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Visualizing change

Feb 28, 2005 |

Friends Ben Banky and Linda Rae pointed me to a web site with amazing panoramas of Vancouver's changing urban landscape, 1978 to 2003. It's a terrific example of how somewhat abstract issues like urban planning can be given an immediate and apprehensible visual...

A quick view of e-consultation

Feb 22, 2005 |

I just came across a very succinct take on the advantages of online consultation. It's from a 2003 paper Beyond Civil Society: Public Engagement Alternatives for Canadian Trade Policy (PDF) by Josh Lerner. Here's how he summarizes the case for e-consultation: Online...

Is podcasting the death of discourse?

Feb 19, 2005 |

Tod Maffin sees podcasting as a way of letting people create “vertical” audio feeds; instead of listening to general interest radio shows like As It Happens, listeners can create their own personal streams of audio, based on their own particular interests. This is just the kind of scenario that makes Cass Sunstein worry about the future of democratic discourse.

Wiki-love

Feb 15, 2005 |

...but the joy of Wiki is that I got to fix the misleading instruction myself, right away.

Down for maintenance

Feb 15, 2005 |

Kudos to the team at Wordpress for their foolproof scheme for backing up Wordpress databases before upgrading. Did I say foolproof? Let me be the fool to take that back. If you're missing all the juicy e-engagement news that's usually here -- not to mention the usual...

Yak shaving etymology

Jan 24, 2005 |

I've finally done something to earn true geek credentials. No, not writing my own applescript (not that hard, actually). Not installing and terminating my own in-wall ethernet network (with brilliant foresight, just 6 months before wireless went consumer-grade). Not...

Conference on Online Deliberation: Stanford, May 2005

Jan 23, 2005 |

The 2nd Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice will be held May 20-2005 at Stanford University. (Full disclosure: I'm on the organizing committee). The call for proposals asks for abstracts by March 15. A peek at some of the details: We...

Technological leapfrogging

Jan 17, 2005 |

I have a story in today's Toronto Star on Leapfrogging the Technology Gap. The story looks at communities or even whole countries in the developing world that are using information and communication technologies to leapfrog directly from being an agricultural to an...

From diatribe to dialogue

Jan 14, 2005 |

It's been an exciting 48 hours here on alexandrasamuel.com. It's been swell hearing from all the folks who were shocked, outraged or otherwise engaged by my digressions (in November, and this week) on the subject of Condoleezza Rice's political science career, but I...

The technologies of citizenship

Jan 13, 2005 |

I had lunch today with Sanjay Khanna, a fellow Vancouverite who shares my interest in the social and political impact of information technology. We had a mind-blowing conversation that stimulated a whole bunch of new ideas about the relationship between technology and...