serendipityoucity

Addendum:

There is a 48 hour grace period for submissions until midnight Tuesday.

I also submitted the following addendum to my earlier submission based on a discussion on CivicAccess List between Jennifer Bell and Russell McOrmond and public education work over at Visible Government. Thanks to both of you!

Another solution to improve Canada’s Copyright law is to abolish crown copyright all together and follow the lead of the NZ Government Open Access and Licensing (NZGOAL) framework. Wherever Crown Copyright would be used, Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) would be used instead. The proposal argues:

“Now more than ever is there a very present need to bring information the Government holds on behalf of its people into the public domain so that it may be used in ways that stimulate innovation, generate cultural creativity, social interaction and dialogue, while also kick starting economic growth.”

This is very interesting and could be very helpful for the dissemination of government data. Also, the 2009, UK government’s Power of Information Task Force final report found that Crown Copyright was a major barrier to the re-use of Public Sector Information, and recommended that Crown Copyright be changed to a ‘Crown Commons’ license to encourage re-use.

The creation of progressive unrestricted use licenses by some government departments has moved the access discourse toward citizen participation, these are not global enough across government, but are an extremely innovative and creative step in the right direction.

Today is the last day!

Below is my submission to the copyright consultation. I read a number of submissions, and clearly, I am more of a novice on the topic than I thought. I am not at all an expert in this area, but spoke about what I know, in my own language and hope other non experts will also add their view. I saw that many submissions are about art related content and have not yet come across science nor data topics. If you come across any can you point me to them?

Public Sector Information, Government Data, Government Digital Maps, Publicly Funded Research Data - belong to citizens.

Author: Tracey P. Lauriault

Contact information: tlauriau@gmail.com

I am a researcher and a geomatician. I have worked for many years with a number of community based organizations, not-for-profit groups, research groups and the private sector to create evidence based maps, indicators, tables, analysis, and reports for decision making. I have worked in housing and homelessness, environment, quality of life indicators, child care, education, public health, social planning, etc. I am also a founding member of CivicAccess.ca and a co-author of datalibre.ca.

The greatest impediment to my work has been the high cost of public sector data & information and restrictive licensing regimes that surround these. A few examples help illustrate this: Statistics Canada Data is cost prohibitive and data pricing seems arbitrary; Vital Statistics Data are very expensive; the database that links postal codes to electoral ridings is cost prohibitive; postal code base maps are very expensive; non-private health data from CIHI are very expensive again; there are arbitrary reasons for not releasing non private non security risk data from numerous federal governmental agencies, and there are very restrictive use licenses for public sector information in general and especially the aforementioned Federal organizations.

High costs, restrictive licensing, arbitrary policies and practices, and the government acting as a monopoly on access to public sector data - data citizens have already paid for with taxation - has greatly affected the kinds of research I can pursue, has strained the pocket books of charity organizations and has left citizens and community based organizations marginalized in democratic debates since they do not have access to the data they need to formulate their arguments.

I have tried, as a citizen to analyze the characteristics of my neighbourhood, compare those with others, develop a business plan, investigate the socio-economic profiles of school catchment areas and school closures, or do a spatial location analysis for a new park. I have the skill, knowledge and tools to do this work, however, the cost of the data and use restrictions either a) make it to expensive to do this work or b) restricts how I can disseminate the results.

There seems to be a lack of coherence from the Federal Government of Canada regarding access to and fair use of public data by the public. These are data that the public has paid for already. Crown Copyright and cost recovery for public data impede participatory democracy and puts citizens, community groups and small businesses at a disadvantage when it comes to evidence based planning. It also thwarts innovation since instead of focussing on value added activities, businesses, researchers, non-profit groups and citizens are scrambling to pay for and to adhere to multiply conflicting licenses as opposed to a license that makes it easy to use these data, share these data and add value to them.

To include citizens in the process of decision making I recommend an unrestricted user license such as that developed by two Federal Government programs GeoBase and Geogratis. Also, the government should act less as a monopolist regarding its public data and more as a public agency and abolish cost recovery policies, and create an infrastructure to share these data with their necessary metadata and licenses. We also need to consider the long term preservation of these to ensure they can be disseminated for the long term. This I believe will enable and facilitate the process of citizens and the Government working together. This will also provide a way for us to think together, particularly on troublesome issues such as homelessness.

Sincerely Tracey

I was discussing the use of remote sensing images for a variety of purposes with my academic advisor who recalled a book about magicians who staged a variety of illusions to fool air photographers during WWII. We also discussed the time stamps on remotely sensed images and how some were nefariously used during the first Iraq war to show how the Iraqis were encroaching on Kuwait - photos going to the border but not the photos showing a turn around and move away from the border that were taken shortly after.

Things are not always as they seem and you cannot believe everything that you see!

Tawang became part of modern India when Tibetan leaders signed a treaty with British officials in 1914 that established a border called the McMahon Line between Tibet and British-run India. Tawang fell south of the line. The treaty, the Simla Convention, is not recognized by China.

This is a border dispute in India’s North East, a region I pay attention to as I have many friends from a state in the region called Nagaland. The McMahon Line and the Simla Accord are lines and rules that India seems quite able and vigorously keen on respecting. Interesting that accords signed with Nagaland are largely ignored! While it all sounds honourable that the Indian Army is mobilized to protect its territory, while the untold story is that the armed forces special powers act provides military personnel with the right to do whatever they want with complete immunity. In Nagaland, Manipur and Assam this means torture, rape, harassment, the burning of villages and disappearances carried out by the Indian army against local indigenous people. It also means, there is restricted access to the entire north-east region as India calls it a protected area and an area of border disputes. It also restricts communication infrastructures, disabling people in the region from communicating with the Nation and the rest of the world. And it controls very carefully what is said about the region by the locals. When people build mesh networks, try to set up cellphone towers or other wireless networks these are immediately torn down in the name of national security!

While India has filled the place with military personnel, it neglects this area socially and economically. It provides little or no national support to the region by way of schools, libraries, infrastructure, health care, internet connectivity, telephones, roads, trains, and so on.

So what is the point of protecting a border when you fail to protect and in some instances terrorize the people on the side you are protecting?

I went over to experiment with ManyEyes. And I really liked the following output of the addendum intro text I tested earlier. It is interesting that this is ManyEyes’ inclusion of wordle in their repertoire of visualization tools.

Here is the tag cloud version for two word series of the same text as above. I find it less visually interesting but users can scroll over a word to see its use frequency times. In the end both are useful as they help you interpret text in different ways.

Here is the proposal introduction using the same tool.

and again using tag clouds

I am going to have to see how I can incorporate this way of seeing text into my work. It was useful to experiment with a text that I know well. I am guessing this might be a nice way to look at paper abstracts, or if writing a proposal one image could have the call for proposal text and the other the answer to the call and compare the two. Might also be handy when writing to see where one is focusing as one is moving forward. Hmmm!

I am looking at Many Eyes and some of the NYTimes multimedia interactive reporting visualizations, and well, they are producing truly wonderful stuff. What an awesome team (sigh no girls though!)!

Here are links to some of their work, each and everyone is beautiful and tell a story with data:

• Election Results
  
• Faces of the Dead
• The Election Day Word Train 
• "I Hope So Too."
• Innaugural addressess
• Republican Debate: Analyzing the Details
• A Year of Parking Tickets
• Represent
• All of Inflation’s Little Parts

Here are a few articles:

• A conversation with Gabriel Dance and Shan Carter about interactive graphics at the New York Times (jon Udell)
  
• Talk to the Newsroom: Interactive News Collaborative
• The New Journalism: Goosing the Gray Lady
• Making sense of data at The New York Times
  
• Old Media Interview: Aron Pilhofer, interactive guru, editor at The New York Time

Ecology Ottawa is encouraging the following:

It’s time to let city council know that we want an end to the transit strike and we want it now! So Ecology Ottawa is launching an on-line petition calling on Councilors to get the city moving again. The petition is short and to the point:

"Dear City Councillors, Enough is enough! Public transit is an essential part of a productive, healthy and environmentally sustainable city.  We need all parties to sit down at the negotiating table and produce a fair deal that will end the transit strike and get our city moving again."

Together we can send the city a strong message that Ottawans want action. We are asking you to please:

1.      Forward this message to your friends, family and co-workers in Ottawa.

2.      Go to http://www.ecologyottawa.ca/take-action/sign-on/  and sign the petition.

3.      Pick up the phone and call the Mayor (613-580-2496) and your Councillor. You can email too! (Contact info here: http://www.ottawa.ca/cityhall/mayorcouncil/councillors/index_en.html),

4.      And let them know that you want action to resolve this strike.

We’ll be sure to let City Councillors know as the number of signatures rise, and if the strike isn’t over by January 28th, we’ll march down to City hall and put them directly into your Councillors’ hands.

Please help get the city moving again.

I just read the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) The Geospatial Dimensions of Critical Infrastructure and Emergency Response White Paper Series No. 1 - Infrastructure Interdependencies.

GITA defines infrastructure as:

all fundamental services, activities, and operations that sustain our communities and way of life. 

The paper is very specific in its objectives at mobilizing the GITA constituency to understand how they can work together to map, share data and to respond to a crisis whether human made or a natural disaster that affects infrastructure.  They will produce a series of white papers targeting specific GITA constituencies. Infrastructure interdependencies, according to the white paper fall into one of four types:

1. Physical Interdependencies: involve disruptions that physically impact one or more other infrastructures. The risk of failure from normal operating conditions in one infrastructure will be a function of risk in another infrastructure.
2. Cyber Interdependencies: occur occur when the operation of one infrastructure is dependent upon another infrastructure via information or communication links. This is the type of complex system whereby control of a networked system is dependent upon the transmission of information.
3. Geographic Interdependencies: involve the physical proximity of one infrastructure to another. An event such as an explosion of a gas main in an urban area could create correlated disruptions with other infrastructures, such as water and electric services to a community.
4. Logical Interdependencies: mean that the state of one infrastructure is dependent upon another, due to some economic or political decision. An example of this is the logical interdependency between the cost of fuel and the number of vehicles using the transportation infrastructure.
   

Geospatial aspects of critical infrastructure depencies are also:

1. Scale: Hurricane Ike impacted a relatively small area in September 2008. Failure of local infrastructure (roads, bridges, water systems) had the largest effect on response, yet occurred at the smallest geographic scale and its restoration will take the longest period of time. Further, failure of regional infrastructure (electric) proved to be the basis for a potentially overarching threat of national significance—failure of 25% of the petroleum industry.
2. Time: how long can we go without power to those refineries (not long, and so the restoration period will likely be much faster than that of local infrastructure). In other words, we’re not just talking about interdependencies of infrastructure, but their corresponding interdependencies of scale and time.
3. Scope: Ike was a small area but the scope of the impact was large.

But my favorite is about Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration:

breaking through this barrier of data sharing and collaboration between emergency responders and private utility and telecommunication companies is the primary purpose of another of GITA’s infrastructure-oriented initiatives.

Mapping the Internet initiatives stopped when utility companies made it more and more difficult for cartographers to access data.  Public broadband mapping has pretty much been at a standstill since.  GITA however, may be able to overcome this sharing issue since they are neither government nor private sector, they are an association of powerful members of a constituent communities of geomaticians from many sectors.  I look forward to their next Critical Infratructure white paper!

So I am in a tavern on election night civicly watching the election on the tele with a bunch of girls and a few boys in a rough part of town! Signs on lawns were red, green and orange but nay a blue one!  There was some booing, hissing and a few hurrahs at the tavern!  We were drinking Canadian, eating fries and onion rings! A coupla gals lived in a blue riding and really did not want to go home!  Poor things! As we were watching we observed that no maps showed up on the screen!  Not one! Wazzup with that!  I put some examples I found up on datalibre.ca for you geo types!

Amy Winehouse’s song comes to mind - I don’t wanna see no torries!  I say ah no no no!

Radarsat-2 article in the Walrus. 

How losing a Canadian satellite to the US would be like losing our eyes on the North

by Michael Byers

via SDI Asia Pacific List

Myanmar: Forecasting Worked, Mitigation - Response Failed Again, Vector 1 Media.  Bref, we can model til the cows come home, and the models can be great, but if the people on the ground do not have the capacity to understand or want to hear what is being told, the warnings and the forecasts, then we see rising death tolls, just like in Burma right now.  It is not a math or science problem, it is a people problem.

• JAXA
• DLR
• GLIDE
  
• PDC, a
• Prevention Web
• Sentinel Asia, a
• ADRC
  
• CIDI
• ReliefWeb 
• WHO 
• USAID