In Building Ethical Organisations, Cerys Hearsey writes, in part:

Here are some of the most important steps that leaders and employees can take to ensure that grass-roots ethics and organisation-wide actions meet in the middle:

• Create psychological safety: if employees are safe to speak out, they will feel safe to stand by their principles. This is essential for creating an environment where questions can be asked about long term impact without the fear of long term consequences for careers.
• Explore long-term impacts in a dedicated sprint: building in an ethics sprint (or at least an ethical element to user stories) can help teams new to the concept of voice these concerns focus on long-term, unforeseen impacts.
• Gather signals from customers in real time: in the event of a breakdown inside the organisation, customers also act as an early-warning sensor network to issues and potential resolutions.
• Multi-disciplinary, diverse agile teams: different mental models and ways of working help combat groupthink and echo chambers around developing products and services.
• Transparent by default: challenging the need for closed communications, collaboration and co-operation communities is an excellent step towards ambient awareness across silos.

While not specifically written about government, these steps also seem like excellent ones to apply to public service culture.

I’ve been on the list of witnesses to speak to the Public Accounts Committee about open data for almost a year; when the committee finally meets to consider this issue, the core of my testimony will involve the suggestion that open data is not primarily a technical issue, but rather one of culture.

What Hearsey calls “psychological safety” is something largely missing from the public service, where the information one manages and controls is too often treated as trade secret; I’d like to see us move toward a culture where public servants are rewarded not for keeping the data safely hidden in the vaults, but rather for telling any and all, as often as possible, what they do, how they do it, the metrics they use to measure success and failure, and the data that describes their work product.

Sometime last year I resolved that if I was going to link to a business, institution, or anything else with a geographic location from one of my blog posts, I’d link to OpenStreetMap, and I’d use the opportunity either to create missing entities on the map, or to update those already there.

This approach has several benefits: it means I’m linking to real, useful information, as opposed to a business’ marketing websitem and it builds OpenStreetMap updating into a regular, natural habit.

Take this blog post about salted capers, for example, where I mentioned Riverview Country Market.

On my Mac I have an Alfred search set up that allows me to quickly get the URL on OpenStreetMap for something, just by pressing Control+Space and then typing map and then the name of the something, like this:

This search showed me that there was already an entity for Riverview Country Market on OpenStreetMap:

While Riverview was on the map (put there, as it turns out, by me, 2 years ago), the metadata about Riverview was incomplete, so I set out to enhance it by clicking Edit and logging in to OpenStreetMap (this is free, and anyone can do it).

Using the panel on the left, I did the following:

• I corrected the address, from “Riverside Drive;Arterial Highway” to just Riverside Drive.
• I added the missing city, province and postal code.
• I added Riverview’s opening hours, website, email address and a brief description.
• I moved the point for Riverview down slightly to allow me to also add a point for KJL Select Meats, which occupies the same building, and I added details for KJL as well.
• I added the parking lot and driveway.

Once I saved my edits, and waited a few minutes for the map tiles to get re-rendered, here’s the result of my changes:

Now, granted, the rendering of the metadata for Riverview is more utilitarian than beautiful, but remember that I’ve just updated the the OpenStreetMap data from which all derivative products that use its data are drawn, from mobile apps to hiking maps to sites that show opening hours. So, for example, this website that draws an “open hours layer” on top of OpenStreetMap has already been updated:

Will you join me in this blogging habit?

We picked up a bottle of Delicias Salted Capers yesterday during our weekly shop at Riverview Country Market: it was the sheer absurdity of the product that drew me to it, given that regular capers already seem to be maximally salted.

I used the salted capers later the same day: I cooked up some rotini, and then added sliced spiced olives, olive oil, and about a tablespoon of salted capers. It was very, very tasty.

Edward Hasbrouck took a New Year’s Eve opportunity to publish a summary of his European travels this year. He writes, in part, about a very bicycle-friendly Best Western hotel in Bremen:

A comfortable and well-managed but otherwise unremarkable hotel, the Best Western Hotel Bremen City earns my mention for being the most cyclist friendly hotel I have ever seen. Through a separate locked door next to the pedestrian entrance to the lobby are a self-service laundry room, a bicycle storage room with a work stand and tire pump, and a bicycle cleaning room with a large sink, faucet with sprayer, rags, bicycle cleaning detergent, and mechanics’ hand cleaner. Best Western is a marketing franchise for independently owned hotels, and there’s more than one Best Western hotel near the main train station in central Bremen. At one of the others, the staff at the front desk looked at our bicycles askance!

Edward is one of my favourite writers about travel, and it was a highlight of our 2014 trip to the Netherlands when we arranged to have supper with him and his partner when we converged on Utrecht.

It was warmer than it’s been all week today, which made for a nice 90 minutes of sketching beside the Tryon River while Oliver was in Crapaud with Jennifer Brown.

From William Denton I followed a link to this recording of a Royal Academy talk by David Cannadine on Churchill and art.

In the introduction to the talk, Christopher Le Brun, President of the Royal Academy, mentions Lord Leighton:

And I immediately thought of my predecessor, Lord Leighton; that’s a slightly sad story, because he is the possessor of the shortest hereditary peerage in history: he was raised to the peerage on the 25th of January, I think 1896, and he died the very next day, so there’s not much material there, but there’s certainly plenty of material when it comes to Churchill. 

Being a lapsed student, and a dilettante with regard to the arts, I’d never heard of Frederic Lord Leighton, but I was prompted to learn more.

Perhaps Le Brun was being sarcastic when he said “there’s not much material there,” as the more I learn about Lord Leighton, the more I am fascinated. While I will leave you to pursue your own curiosity in this regard, this catalogue from an exhibition of his works, held the year after he died, is a good place to start. My favourite part of the catalogue, what with me being me, is this note from the introduction:

You might also start with this 1996 article from The Independent that makes a compelling case for Lord Leighton having had an unrecognized son.

(And also, if some kind student of the British peerage would care to shed light, I’d love to understand more about what being “raised to the peerage” means, why Layton was a Lord in the first place, and why Leighton isn’t known as Baron Leighton today).

In the late 1980s Canasta scene in Peterborough, Ontario of which I was an active member, it was tradition to believe that it was required to say “partner, may I please go out,” when ready to do so. The definitive The Complete Canasta suggests a slightly less formal “Shall I go out?”, so I’m not sure from where we derived the wordier version, but it persevered.

We certainly played more than our fair share of Canasta during the summer of 1987, and it remains the primary waypoint by which I mark that heady season.

I thought of “partner, may I please go out?” when I spotted this sign posted on the wall of the Queen Charlotte Armoury while attending its New Year’s Levee:

I appreciate the formality of the requirement to shout “FIRE, FIRE, FIRE!”, and also the seemingly strange suggestion–perhaps because this is a military installation where people have skills–that in step three  one should “proceed to fight the fire” (standard civilian signage practice is, I believe, something more akin to “retire to a safe distance and allow professionals to put out the fire”).

Following on from my late-2018 prototype, I’ve taken the book of “perforated notes” forward to the next level.

Yesterday afternoon I set and printed some covers (Perforated Notes in Tourist Gothic 36 pt., using the alternate capital N, and the credit in Gill Sans 18 pt.) on 4” x 4¼” brown card stock, and cut, folded, and perforated white 20 lb. paper to the same size.

This morning I bound the first copy, punching four holes through the covers and signatures, and then binding them with green cord using a Japanese style stab-binding:

Here’s what the finished notebook looks like:

Copy number one goes to Katherine Burnett, who expressed interest in having one all her own.

At the end of October I purchased a lovely Baron Fig hardbound dot grid notebook and, eager to take both it and some new fountain pen ink out for a ride, I put it beside my bed and set out to write a brief summary of the day every night before I went to sleep.

I’ve succeeded in doing so every night since then; I generally fill a page or two with banal notes about what I had for breakfast and lunch, my main work activity, a note or two about Catherine and Oliver, and I always finish up with noting my bedtime and the outside temperature.

I’ve modified my daily routine a little to write the heading for the current day when I get up, which presents me then with a blank page to represent the unending promise of the day ahead.

The other resolution-like activity I’ve been engaged in since the fall is making my bed every morning.

Although I came up with this on my own, my reasons mirror those of that great guru of routine, Tim Ferris, who mentions this in a video about morning routines:

Number one: making your bed. I know this sounds odd. It was first recommended to me by an Indian monk; he convinced me of the merits. Because you are accomplishing one thing at the beginning of the day, no matter what happens with unforeseen variables for the rest of the day, you will return to a made bed at the end of the day, and as a bookmark, beginning and end, it sets you up psychologically to be more productive, and also to feel better even if things go sideways later.

Although I don’t worship at the altar of productivity as Ferris does–and I certainly don’t have it in me to adopt other aspects of his morning routine, of the “do 3,000 yoga sprints while yelling out Tony Robbins’ aphorisms for life” ilk–making my bed every morning has done exactly as he describes, and it’s now an inviolable part of my daily routine.

January 1, 2019 saw Prince Edward Island receive a 20 cm dumping of snow and, later in the day, an increase in the wind; as a result, many of the scheduled New Year’s Levees were cancelled, especially later ones.

The irony, for me, was that I was kept so busy updating the levee schedule web page in the morning that I didn’t manage to make it out to the Lieutenant Governor’s, to City Hall, or to any of the other earlier levees that did go ahead (this was, in part, because I was at home and not in the office, and so I was editing the website with my phone, which is never a quick proposition).

Oliver being both a creature of routine and as fine a student of the levee as me, insisted that the day not be left entirely a bust, so we donned our coats and scarves and hats and gloves, suited up Ethan the Dog, and trudged through the snow to the Haviland Club and to the PEI Regiment, both of which were satisfyingly bustling.

Keen observers will be able to identify more than one person in this photo I took from the balcony looking down (look for an outcropping of Green Party adherents, and at least one Pendergast and one Leo Cheverie).

The Prince Edward Island Regiment Band was as crack as it’s ever been (did you know that “musician” is a recognized trade in the Canadian military? I didn’t), the conviviality was strong, and the museum–always opened for the levee–was as interesting as ever.

Happy New Year!