The Government of PEI is seeking input on a proposed update to Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy legislation, with a deadline of this Friday, February 23, 2018.

Here’s the submission, sent today:

Please accept the following comments from me in response to your call for feedback in the ”Modernizing the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act” paper.

I am a longtime user of the FOIPP mechanisms afforded by the provincial and federal governments, as well as, more recently by the University of Prince Edward Island. I’m also a longtime practitioner of, and advocate for, open data use.

I have two general comments to make, focused on the intersection of open data and FOIPP legislation.

1. While the Government of PEI, in recent years, has begun to establish the technical and policy groundwork for a more open approach to data, there remains an attitude in the public service that the role of a public servant is, writ large, to act as a gatekeeper for data. This role is only reinforced by the dynamic of the access provisions of FOIPP legislation which, by carefully defining the mechanisms for access, serve to enhance the notion of the public service as guardians of a bank vault of data that is only to be parcelled out carefully, on a cost-recovery basis, in response to specific requests. A truly open and transparent approach to data would see public servants mandated to release as much data about what they do, how they do it, and how it went, as often as possible; their job performance should be judged, in part, by their success in doing so, in much the same way as academics are rewarded for the volume of their publications.

2. In a similar vein, it is at our peril that we continue to regard open data and FOIPP as in opposition. The public service, because of resource constraints, is often faced with the question of where to turn its open data efforts first: tremendous benefit would come from using access requests themselves as semaphores for public interest, and to use access requests as the trailheads of proactive disclosure. Not only would this be an effective use of resources, but it would also result in a change, on a technical level, from treating access requests as one-of technical jobs to treating them as prompts to build systems that are open-data-enabled. For example, if I submit a FOIPP request for a list of survey markers, the likely response currently would be that a technician would prepare a one-time data export of survey markers from an internal system, and I would receive this by email or on physical digital media; a more effective response, in contrast, would be to use the same resources to extend a bridge between the internal survey marker system and open data infrastructure so that the data becomes open to all as a regular course of action, without the need for additional FOIPP requests.

In addition, I have some specific responses to points you raise in your paper:

Information and Privacy Commissioner: In 2006 I submitted an access request to Health PEI for information related to financial transactions related to my personal health care. Health PEI denied my request, and I appealed to the Information and Privacy Commissioner. The adjudication of this appeal was delayed multiple times, over the course of several years, and it was not until 1007 days later, in 2014, that I received the information I’d requested. In letters from the Information and Privacy Commissioner regarding the delays it was made clear to me that the reason for the delay was simply that her office did not have the capacity to deal with its workload. As such, I believe that effective administration of the FOIPP Act requires that the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office be sufficiently resourced to carry out its duties under the timelines laid out in the Act.

University of Prince Edward Island: The University of PEI updated its own FOIPP policy last year, and I find it problematic in two ways. First, there is a $25 non-refundable processing fee for each request, which I find onerous (especially when contrasted to the more reasonable $5 established under provincial FOIPP legislation). Second, the policy does not apply retroactively, so that information and data gathered before May 2015 is not subject to the policy. While I can appreciate that there are limited situations where this might be appropriate, I believe the starting point should include retroactivity, with only specific limitations to this. Ultimately, I believe that it would be more sensible and efficient to have the University of PEI covered by provincial FOIPP legislation.

Municipalities: As a longtime resident of the City of Charlottetown, I have found access to information and data maintained by the City to be effectively unavailable in many situations. This is particularly problematic as the City holds data that in many ways is the most relevant to the day-to-day life of citizens, data that could most effectively be used by citizens to advocate and analyze. While the Province of PEI has made progress on the “open data culture shift,” in my experience the City is still working in a “tell us why you want this data, and what you’re going to use it for” era. For example, several years ago I asked the City for a digital copy of the GIS layer for its Zoning and Development Bylaw, and this request was arbitrarily denied at a bureaucratic level (ultimately I was given a copy by a City Councillor, something no less problematic). As such, I believe strongly that the FOIPP Act should be extended to municipalities. 

Fees: Pursuant to my comments above related to using access requests as a semaphore for public interest and an opportunity to build open systems, I believe that processing fees should be eliminated entirely. They are a barrier to access and, ironically, are highest for information that is, from a technical perspective, the most technically challenging to make accessible. Citizens should not be punished financially for requesting information that is, by dint of history, buried the deepest, so to speak. FOIPP requests should be looked upon as a gift from citizens to the public service, and the technical expenditure an investment in openness.

If you have thoughts about FOIPP legislation in PEI, I encourage you to submit something before the deadline at week’s end is up.

Longtime readers may recall that two years ago I wrote about the 25 subscribers to The New Yorker magazine on Prince Edward Island.

At the time I wrote:

Perhaps I can cement up the list and organize some sort of gathering for us all. We could find a big wooden table in a corner somewhere and chat for hours about William Shawn and Tina Brown and our feelings about the reordering of the front matter.

The time has come.

Next Wednesday, February 28, 2018 at 7:00 p.m. I’m organizing a little gathering of Prince Edward Island New Yorker subscribers in Charlottetown.

If you’re in that group, and you’d enjoy an informal drink with fellow New Yorker readers, please contact me for details.

Oliver and I took Ethan for a walk along the boardwalk yesterday, and I took this photo while standing in front of the Culinary Institute facing Government House. Google Photos automagically transformed it into a striking black and white photo, so I can’t claim any credit for that.

There were two Senator McCarthys, one (Joseph) from Wisconsin, the anti-Communist, and the other (Eugene) from Minnesota, a candidate for President in 1968.

I had long-conflated the two; realizing my error, suddenly American political history makes a lot more sense.

It was a day off school for Oliver today, so we walked from downtown to the Charlottetown Mall to see Black Panther. Added to the rest of our walking around today, Oliver’s Fitbit counted 11,849 steps. That’s a new record for him, since Christmas.

Such a long walk was more possible today because of the mild temperatures: it hovered around 2°C for most of the day.

A side-effect of of this was that the sidewalks and trails were very muddy: by the time we arrived at the mall Ethan the white dog was almost solid brown in places, and Oliver and I had trousers caked with mud.

We avoided a repeat performance by taking the bus home. Ethan got a bath, and our trousers went into the laundry, and things have just about returned to normal now.

Surely the brand book for Pepsi has some sort of “advertising that appears to suggest mixing gasoline with our beverages is to be avoided” guidance.

The Island’s record store, Back Alley Music, has a new home at 257 Queen Street, between Fitzroy and Euston, and the expanded space has afforded it the opportunity to welcome a vegan take-out, called Stir It Up, to its midst.

This places Charlottetown in the remarkable position of having, along with My Plum, My Duck, two vegan restaurants. Our corned-beef-and-cabbage-eating ancestors wouldn’t know what to make of the place.

I’ve been by Stir It Up for lunch a couple of times now, having the “FLT“–a vegan take on the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich–both times.

I’m not 100% sold on the sandwich–if their goal is to recreate the BLT faithfully in vegan form, they’ve a ways to go on issues like “lettuce crispness” and “fake bacon snappiness”–but I laud the effort. And the space, the staff and the idea of the place are enough to bring me back again.

The service is a little pokey, for which I’m willing to hand them a “good food, well-prepared takes time” get-out-of-jail-free-card. Fortunately, the environs are pleasant enough, and when you run out of energy for flipping through the vinyl record bins, there’s a comfortable mid-century modern chair to set down in, complete with a view of Stompin’ Tom.

It was a year ago today that I cleared out my Twitter archive, emitted one last Tweet, and decamped from social media altogether.

In the same way that it took me a while to kick a sugar habit, it took me a while to deprogram my brain from its Twitter-dependence. For weeks afterward I continued to think in the pithy ironic thoughts that Twitter demands, and, without an outlet, would get momentarily frustrated.

But like the jones for a Snickers, this too passed, and I’ve never looked back.

All the “oh my, I’ll have no idea what’s going on!” fears that my mind stoked up for me didn’t come to pass: I didn’t leave the Internet, after all, didn’t retire to a cabin in the woods. And Oliver is as voracious a citizen of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook as I ever was, and he keeps me in the loop on things I really need to know.

It turns out that the much-vaunted “continuous partial attention” isn’t all its cracked up to be, and I’ve discovered that the thin simulacrum of “connection” that Twitter afforded was meaningless from a practical and spiritual perspective.

I say all this not to proselytize–those still inside the matrix won’t believe anything I’m saying in any case–but simply to mark the anniversary, and to remind myself that it’s a good idea to stand up and pay attention once in a while to the habits, especially the digital ones, that are so easy to get lost in.

Meanwhile, I wrote more here in 2017 than I did in any of the eight years previous. And I started to draw. And I set and printed more. And paid more attention to those around me.

There’s a tiny “return to blogging” movement that I’m happy to see in progress (Ton, for example, and Dries) and to be a part of.

I’m into 33rd year on the Internet this year, and I continue to be fascinated by it as a medium for writing and making connections; we’re not done yet.

I was back in the classroom at the University of PEI this week, guest-teaching two classes of Philosophy 105, Technology, Values & Science, the same course I audited in 2009 and guest-taught for two weeks in 2016.

It was a shorter stint this time than last. And of course the world has changed, and my interests have evolved. So rather than simply carting out the PowerPoint presentations from two years ago, I created two entirely new lectures from scratch. Which was exhausting. But, after the fact, extremely satisfying.

There are about a dozen students in the class, from several different disciplines. I dropped round to Main Building № 116 last Wednesday for their regularly scheduled lecture by Prof. Neb Kujundzic, introduced them to some of the terrain I planned to cover, and got a sense of their interests and Neb’s approach.

This Monday at 3:00 p.m. I was back, this time at the head of the classroom.

Monday’s topic was an exploration of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping update to Europe’s access and privacy regulations that takes effect in May. I used my own challenges in requesting access to my own healthcare spending data as a jumping off point, reviewed the main pillars of the GDPR (consent, breach notification, right to access, right to be forgotten, data portability, privacy by design), and then had the class break itself into small groups for discussions on a website of their choice that collected personal data, where its data collection process might be problematic under the GDPR, and what concrete steps could be taken to improve compliance. Before we finished for the day, we reconvened to summarize their small group discussion: two groups had selected Instagram, one YouTube, one Google and one Facebook. The students raised interesting points, and came up with some novel access-and-privacy-increasing solutions. The slides for Monday’s lecture are here.

We reconvened on Wednesday for an exploration of the technical and cultural shift from hardware to software. Again, I used some stories from my own experience–OpenCorporations.org, for example–as a jumping off point, and then we returned to small group discussion, focusing on the implications of this transition, on who’s getting left out of this transition, and whether we could make it stop if we wanted to. The slides for Wednesday’s lecture are here.

Teaching is, at its heart, equal parts performance and listening, and I find the run up to the experience to be all-consuming: it’s all I think about for the week leading up, and I’m forever refining my thoughts and my slides. I don’t really realize exactly how all-consuming it is until it’s over and I regain the cycles that I’ve been expending full-tilt. By that all-consumption is worth it for the opportunity to discuss interesting issues with curious young minds.

If nothing else, the experience reminds me yet again how much we owe our teachers for their dedication to the craft; I’m certain it’s not a profession I could take on full-time, but I appreciate the opportunity for brief windows into it every year or two.

There was a long, long period after Apple Maps launched during which it showed Charlottetown Harbour to be land rather than water. And in my experience, it’s remained the perennial also-ran of the web-based mapping game: it never seems as accurate or up to date as Google or Bing or OpenStreetMap, its map styles hearken to a 2005 map aesthetic, and its satellite layer, at least for Prince Edward Island, looks like it was photographed through a sock. Oh, and it’s also not a web-based map at all: you can only use Apple Maps through its Mac or iOS applications.

True to this form, when I happened to check in on my house at 100 Prince Street this afternoon in Apple Maps I found that its location was identified as the home of the East Wiltshire Cafeteria. Which is odd, because East Wiltshire Intermediate School is located 9 km away. In East Wiltshire.

Granted, its address is 100 Kingston Road, which bears passing resemblance to 100 Prince Street as an address. But that hardly seems reason enough to conflate the two.

I’ve filed a problem report with Apple.