serendipityoucity

Last night a heterogeous group  of people (Alex, Nathalie, Eric, JP, George, Masa et moi) gathered at a new Taiwanese Tea shop in my neighbourhood - Cuppa - to discuss developing an interprovincial BILINGUE community wireless group - OGWifi. C’est formidable!

It was lovely to introduce bubble tea with pearl, Hotpot soup, Asia style café culture and my neighbourhood to a new group of people.

And, it was really fantastic, over tea, to discuss the formalities of setting up an organization, social technical issues, community infrastructures, models of cooperation, logos, gadgets, collaboration, banking, community building, and AP, authentication, routers, wifidog, chillispot and infrastructure determinism.

Afterwards, George discussed the possibility starting up a group in Ottawa modeled on the Social Tech Brewing Company which is

an informal gathering of people working on, or interested in, the intersection of technology and the not-for-profit community in Canada.

My favorite! 

There is more! We also chatted about a new pixel purchasing fundraising scheme where for 10$s you can replace a pixel on an image of lets say the current prime minister, and participate in the creation of a whole new picture!  Crazy!

Next thing we know we are chatting with our wonderful host - Daniel - at Cuppa who showed us the newly renovated upstairs space that is really quite perfect for meetings, presentations and discussion groups.  Guess what… & stay tuned cuz something fun is cooking in my hood!

My evening ended with a great conversation on Somerset street, under the urban stars with George and Eric about the work of Amnesty International in Canada, Bill C36, Arar, and the work of challenging stereotypes, perceptions and assumptions of freedom in Canada. 

Serendipitously an OGWifi executive meeting reminded me that I should not take personal freedom for granted, further, that it is a priviledge to work with a great bunch of new people and to learn & apply skills to build a new creative socio-technical real-virtual community.

Sometimes great stuff happens accidently on purpose in the most unexpected ways & places!

Check out - Cuppa - 814 Somerset 4 shops west of Booth - their mandate is: "to bring people together, create closeness and coziness in the community" Right around the corner from my house - the best!

The report from the YMCA - BUILDING A COMMUNITY ARCHITECTURE FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD LEARNING -  discusses the warrant for a national childcare program in Canada.

Myself and the rascals have been out of the childcare system now for almost 3 years, I remain active on the periphery in this movement to thank all those womyn who came before me to set it up, those who took care of us while we were in it and those who continue to push for a program for other men, womyn and children in the future. 

Imagine - redirecting some road infrastructure money toward daycare! We would have cleaner air, less pavement and happier families!  

Today at 1:26 PM EST it became spring equinox! 

Spring equinox is a religious / spiritual holiday in some parts of the world and to celebrate, the shed got cleaned and all of my garden pots, hanging baskets, gardening shoes & tools have been pulled out.  The front entrance’s wooden barrels, giant clay pots and old milk jugs are in their respective spots looking for flowers (I held back on pulling out the hose!).  So now I wait and hope for a melt real soon!  Spring Please!

Tips to the urban traveller:
Before walking about on a -16C sunny day in Ottawa it is best to burn incense and make offerings to these babies!

Ya gotta love the geographers of the world!

This time they  - The Confluence folks - are asking anyone in the world to take a pictures at the location of each latitude and longitude integer degree intersection in the world. Can you believe that! We will have a mosaic of the world in images!  They wanna image sample the world.  They have pictures at the antipodes, special places like the centre of the world, the modes of transport used to get to locations, and so on.

You know what would be really fun! Is to go back avery 5 or 10 years and to the same location and take the picture again! We could monitor change.

Thanks for sending this Amos - you will see he is a groooooovy guy! 

There are so many realities to abstract into maps.

This Design Institute never ceases to amaze me with their selection of map themes (Scent, Community Gardens, Sonic, Gustatory, Spriritual Places, pamlimsets, Ethnicity and so on!).  Perhaps some day multisensory technologies will enable the DI to create online sensory themed maps so that we can scent, taste, touch and feel the sensousness of the geographies we are immersed in.

They also have a wonderful new book ELSE/WHERE: MAPPING — New Cartographies of Networks and Territories just released and hopefully the postie will bring it to me real soon - my favorite lots of pictures, pages to flip and brought right to the door!

Just look at who they design for -

we commission, publish and implement innovative design ideas for the public realm.

Childcare is more revolutionary than the Internet! 

The day I got daycare spots for my two rascals was the day that a 6′3" big & burly & bearded CUPW negotiator cried on my front porch! He knew how hard I worked, what I was trying to do for my young family, my struggle, the constant systematic set backs, I would soar if only I could get childcare! He experienced catharcism and I got to go to university & work and the boyz got club med for kids everyday!

The daycare the rascals went to for 10 years was not just any ole daycare, it was the Glebe Parent Daycare, a unionized non-profit cooperative right by the Rideau Canal on 5th Avenue in Ottawa.  The first daycare building in Ottawa specifically designed for the little ones.  The teachers remain near and dear to my heart, and the boyz remain best friends with those they drooled on as babies and I have a great new community of friends.  Daycare is liberating and a community building experience!

So, now that the Tories are in, the 30 years of hard work to get so close to a national daycare program is on the rocks again!  Quite frankly lobbying to marry a same sex partner in Canada was an easy win compared to gaining universal quality childcare!  Us babes have so much work to do still! Below is some info & links to a petition - so please sign & learn about the issue! 

_______________

MORE THAN 1,000 PEOPLE a day are signing on to save the child care agreements

Sign the letter: http://www.buildchildcare.ca/BE_petition.php/honourthem

Since Feb. 24th, more than 8,000 people have signed our online open letter to the prime minister and provincial premiers asking them to honour the child care agreements.

Many have been leaving thoughtful and brilliant comments on what child care means to them and how they see the Tory government’s actions.

We need to tap into more of the commitment to child care that exists across Canada on this issue.

Please forward this message to your friends, family, relatives and anyone else who shares your views on child care.

Invite them to go to www.buildchildcare.ca to sign the open letter.

HERE ARE SOME COMMENTS from people who have already signed the open letter

Spend our $$$$ on Babies not Bullets!" — Craig Cramm, St. John’s, NL

You have no idea the importance and diverse needs that rural licensed child care can provide to a community. We continue to be full, we continue to have waiting lists, we continue to need more funding, BUT most important WE NEED MORE ECE’s.– Deanna Way, Souris, MN

The health care act is one of the great things that make Canada what it is. Just think of the legacy left if we instead had given every Canadian a small amount of money to subsidize thier health care  costs. — Ray Brinkman, Coquitlam, BC

Surely, with the collective wealth of this country, we can combine a small direct payment to parents as proposed by Harper with funding a comprehensive daycare program for the country." — Thomas O’Shea, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC

No childcare means parents can’t work, welfare & unemployment rates go up. Some solution Mr. Harper!"  Jeannie Lanzaderas, Brampton, ON

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE ISSUES

Ken Battle of the Caledon Institute had analyzed the Conservative government’s election child care plan. See what he has to say. http://www.caledoninst.org/Publications/PDF/564ENG%2Epdf

 

John Jacobs has written an excellent article called Conservative child-care plan comes at high price Alternative Link: http://tinyurl.com/jkn5d

THERE’S STILL TIME TO SIGN the open letter - http://www.buildchildcare.ca/BE_petition.php/honourthem

Childcare-appeals mailing list - http://lists.cupe.ca/mailman/listinfo/childcare-appeals

ps-Chris Lawson who manages this list, taught me how to turn on a computer! thanks Chris!

There are many ways to see things and well here are a few provided to you by Visual Complexity - http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

…intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.