Here are the slides I’ll use for my talk Planning in Secret: Effective Strategies for Keeping the Public Out of the Planning Process tomorrow morning at the Atlantic Planners Institute Conference here in Charlottetown.

Oliver Duncan Lowell Rukavina was born on this day 13 years ago. A so today I become the father of a teenager. Happy Birthday, Oliver!

It’s “Architecture Week” on Prince Edward Island, a fact that the crafty architects of the Architects Association of PEI have (again) worked hard to prevent the public from realizing by updating neither their website nor their Facebook page with any hint that it’s anything more than a regular old week. Fortunately The Buzz steps into the breach and you can get the lowdown there.

I have my own little role to play in the festivities this year: the Atlantic Planners Institute 2013 Annual Conference is taking place here in Charlottetown this week and I’m on the program on Friday morning in a plenary session called “Engagement and Collaboration” where my contribution is labelled “Citizen Engagement”, an attempt, I guess, to boil down the full title, “Planning in Secret: Effective Strategies for Keeping the Public Out of the Planning Process,” into a couple of words.

Here’s how I’ve described what I’ll be talking about in the conference program:

Effective public engagement in community planning in the digital era requires that citizens be equipped with access to a richer set of tools and data about their communities, how they are planned, what is planned, and the success or failure of planning decisions.  What have previously been regarded as proprietary tools, techniques and data inside the planning priesthood must be thrown open to (and explained to) digitally literate citizens, and creativity must be applied to developing new techniques for managing expectations, leveraging citizen input to good end, and harnessing the energy and imagination of newly-engaged communities. I will examine the status quo with an eye to pointing out opportunities for simple steps planners can take to improve engagement, and will review the kinds of tools I envision that, in the near future, will enable an entirely new methodology for citizen participation in planning.

All that in 15 minutes or less! My goal is to present planners with a handful of easily implemented open data initiatives they can undertake without spending a lot of money or changing any bylaws. I approach this as someone who knows (next to) nothing about planning: I’m just a citizen with a MacBook and a desire to help broaden the citizen toolset when it comes to making communities.

I’ve been chewing on these ideas since I first proposed the topic a few months ago; this week I’m banking on them being ready for harvest and conversion into a Keynote presentation.  I’ll post the slides when there are slides to post.

In the meantime, look at The Buzz and plan your Architecture Open House tour for Thursday: there will be lots of opportunties to drink wine with the talented architects of PEI and learn more about who they are and what they do. I enjoyed myself immensely in 2011, so much so that the switchboard here in the Reinventorium was flooded¹ with calls asking where I was when I went MIA for the 2012 edition.

1. I received one call.

The first unit in Oliver’s grade 7 science curriculum is “Life Science: Interactions within Ecosystems,” summarized, in part, like this:

Ecosystems such as forests, croplands, rivers, lakes, estuaries, and oceans are inhabited by different organisms that are well adapted to their environment. Each ecosystem is biologically and physically unique, yet all ecosystems function as a systems model. Energy from the sun is fixed by plants and then transferred to a variety of consumers and decomposers. The ecosystems themselves are not independent of one another as energy, biotic and abiotic factors can move from one ecosystem to another to involve even larger relationships.

We have, as a result, had ecosystems on the brain in our household for the last couple of weeks, and Oliver and I, on our morning walks to school and our evening walks around town, have been talking about ecosystems and interdependence and sustainability.

Now the city is an ecosystem, and our household is an ecosystem, and the school is an ecosystem, but there’s nothing like a walk in the woods to get hit over the head with “interdependence,” so after our Saturday visit to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market we headed out to the Winter River to do just that.

I have been helping Bryson Guptill from Island Trails with some mapping work in preparation for Uncover the Island, a big project the organization is undertaking next year, and this work has exposed me to the work of the organization through its website. The Confederation Trail I knew all about; the work of Island Trails to establish and maintain smaller woodland trails across the Island was new to me, and the extensive trail network along the Winter River near Suffolk was something I knew nothing about.

Bryson was one of the participants in the OpenStreetMap Mapping Party I organized back in 2009 and he took to open mapping like a duck to water, using OpenStreetMap to transform the Island Trails website (and OpenStreetMap itself) into a considerably more useful resource by working to include all of the Island’s trails on the OpenStreetMap basemap.

As a result of this work, I was able to call up a detailed map of the Winter River trail system and a description of the various routes on my phone’s web browser once we got to the trail head, and we opted, after reading the trail descriptions, for the shortest trail, one maintained by the Queens County Wildlife Federation, described like this:

This is a short trail, (about an hour walk), through a mature pine and hardwood stand.  Three short loops converge at the Winter River, which at this point will satisfy anyone’s conception of a “babbling brook”.

“Babbling brook” sounded very ecosystemy. And so off we headed:

After a slow, easy start, the trails enters the woods and heads downhill toward the river; you need sensible shoes for this part of the walk, and you need to watch out for tree roots, but it’s by no means arduous. After about 15 minutes you come to the riverbank and, true to its description, there is much babbling:

As planned, the walk provided much opportunity to talk about ecosystems.  Trees fall, decay, provide food for moss and insects, homes for small animals and, ultimately, turn back into the earth that feeds new trees. And so on. Even more powerfully, though, the Winter River watershed is the source of all of Charlottetown’s drinking water and so in addition to supporting plant an animal life along the walk, the water also supports us.

Now it was my plan, going in, to take a short jaunt down to the river and back. An hour or so, I thought, with a route something like this:

Other than the information signs at the trail head, however, the trail isn’t signed at all, and the GPS in my phone wasn’t working well enough to pointpoint our location as we walked, so that actual route we ended up taking was something like this:

In other words, we missed the turn when it looped back toward the trail head and kept walking along the river until it met up with the end of the East Suffolk Road.

Fortunately the trail along this section was obvious and in relatively good shape so, beyond a thin veneer of being lost, it was a happy diversion, and one that allow us to construct our own bridge from felled logs when we came to a small tributary of the river that offered no other way to cross.

It also allowed us to talk more about threats to ecosystem health when, at the end of the East Suffolk Road, we came across an “excavation pit”:

The walk ended up taking about two and a half hours, but we enjoyed it nonetheless. Much was discussed about ecosystems, and I think Oliver emerged with an innate understanding of interdependence of biological systems.

Going back to read more of the grade 7 science curriculum, filled with outcome statements like “describe interactions between biotic and abiotic factors in an ecosystem” and “explain how biological classification takes into account the diversity of life on Earth,” it occurs to me that the curriculum has a glaring hole it it: what we really need is for our children to understand ecosystems in their guts. I’m pretty sure you can’t do this justice when confined to a classroom, no matter how much time you spend on describing “how energy is supplied to, and how it flows through, a food web.”

Walk along the banks of the Winter River: “if you pee in this river, eventually you’ll be drinking little bits of pee when you brush your teeth at home.” Ecosystems understood.

The Winter River trail system is an easy 25 minute drive from Charlottetown: drive out the St. Peters Road and Rte. 2 toward Mount Stewart. Drive past the Rte. 25 to York and take a left on Rte. 229 toward Suffolk. Just before the road crosses the Winter River, turn right on the East Suffolk Road and at the sharp right to the Millcove Road keep driving straight. The trail head is on your left just as the paved road turns to clay.

You can also cycle or walk to the trail head on the Confederation Trail: take the trail out of town and head east at Royalty Junction, over the Union Road, through York to Rte. 229; turn left onto Rte. 229 and proceed as above. Google Maps clocks this as a 23 km, 75 minute cycle ride.

There’s parking for 3 or 4 cars in the lot and a map that shows the Island Trails map is posted in the parking lot (the route we walked is missing from this map, but you can see it on the Island Trails website). Enjoy.

There is a shop in the heart of Kreuzberg in Berlin that sells nothing but tiny instruments. I’ve walked by it several times, over several trips to the city, and each time I do I become more interested in tiny instruments.

Most especially the “banjo uke” (aka “banjolele”), a ukulele-sized banjo (or is it a ukulele in with banjo clothing?). It ticks all my “strange hybrid” boxes, it’s portable, and it sounds (I imagine, for I’ve never heard one) like a banjo, the most sweet and mournful of the stringed instruments.

And so, ever since, I’ve had my eye out for a banjo uke of my own: every time we’ve been to Halifax in the last couple of years I wander into the Halifax Folklore Centre trying to look all cool and musiciany and inevitably panic and flee before any of the clerks have a chance to quiz me on pentatony or fret management before they allow me to touch anything.

Which is why I knew I had to spring into action this morning when the following Kijiji alert hit my inbox:

It was a banjo uke. In Prince Edward Island. In nearby Vernon River, no less.

I phone.

Still got it? Yes! Can I see it? Come any time! How about 2:00 p.m.? See you then!

I pile into the car at 1:30 p.m. and head east toward Vernon River. Take the second left turn after the bridge as instructed. Locate №176. Pull into the driveway. Brave the rain and dash to the side door.

“You Pete?” asks the wealthy American industrialist renovator (assumptions on all but the last point).

“Come on in,” he says, “this is Sam. Want a coffee?”

The banjo uke is presented. Purchased at auction somewhere near Vinalhaven, Maine. It’s a Le Domino brand, made in America, with a domino pattern on the front and back. In not-bad-shape.

I do a round of My Dog Has Fleas. Hold it up to the light.

“I’ll take it!” I proclaim.

For how often does one find a domino-pattern-emblazoned banjo uke for sale in Vernon River?

Back out into the rain.

In the car it occurs to me that, relatively speaking, I’m not too far from Georgetown where I recall there being a business, across from the Kings Playhouse, in the business of repairing stringed instruments. “The Guitar Man,” it was called. I had ice cream next door last summer. Unable to track down a phone number, I decide to brave the rain and drive up for a visit.

“Maybe he’s a reclusive luthier with no phone,” I reason to myself.

I arrive in beautiful downtown Georgetown 30 minutes later. No sign of The Guitar Man where I remember him. The personable administrator in Georgetown Town Hall spots me looking confused and asks if she can help. I tell my story.

“He moved to Charlottetown in the spring,” she reveals.

I am ushered into Town Hall and she offers to give me the new address in town. Unable to find it quickly, she simply raises the luthier on the phone, chats for a second, and then hands me the phone.

“You’re not the first person to drive to Georgetown by accident looking for me,” the luthier explains.

We make arrangements for me to visit his new in-town shop; as it happens I walk by every day on the way back from Oliver’s school drop-off and pay it no heed.

“Be sure to go to the Maroon Pig while you’re in Georgetown,” the luthier recommends.

This recommendation is seconded by the personable administrator.

So I go to the Maroon Pig. Which is an art gallery and bakery. I feel compelled to purchase things, as on this rainy day it seems like customers will be rare. I purchase a sticky bun, violating my don’t-eat-sugar habit of late, and some dessert for the family and a loaf of bread.

I almost drop the sticky bun on my way out the door but I catch it at the last minute. It is very good but, having a don’t-eat-sugar habit of late, it immediately sends me into a bizarre sort of sugar mania. It’s not unpleasant.

I drive back to town. Find the luthier: AMJ Guitars he is called. “Your Downtown Guitar Service Shop” says his website. Amazing. We have a downtown guitar service shop in Charlottetown. I should have been buying banjo ukes years ago.

Adam, the luthier (Adam M Johnston) is the least pretentious luthier I have ever met. Yes, he can breath some new life into the banjo uke, he tells me: clean it up, lower the (insert technical term for the thingy that holds up the strings) and re-string it. $40 plus strings. Seems like the deal of the century.

He’s got a lot of work queued up, so it will be a few weeks. “Fine,” I tell him, “I’ve gone 47 years without owning a banjo uke; I can wait another couple of weeks.”

So, other than My Dog Has Fleas, I’ve still yet to play my new banjo uke. But already it’s taken me to Georgetown for sticky buns and made me aware I’ve a luthier just 3 blocks from my house.

I should have been buying banjo ukes years ago.

I have found myself in the happy happenstance of having my very own researcher. Scott Bateman, a colleague from back in the www.gov.pe.ca days from a decade ago, is now a assistant professor in the Computer Science and Information Technology department at the University of Prince Edward Island.

Scott’s research interests include “collaborative and social computing, information seeking and visualization, and interaction techniques for video games” and in that light he approached me with an idea earlier this year: knowing of my interest in electricty generation and load monitoring (here, here, here), Scott was interested in the possibility of investigating how everyday devices in the home might be used to influence personal “energy behaviour.”

Although he didn’t put it this way (and would likely speak of this work less dramatically, being a more sensible person than I am) what he was essentially talking about was doing some work on the problems that Bruce Sterling outlined in the Viridian Manifesto in 2000. Like this:

The stark fact that our atmosphere is visibly declining is of no apparent economic interest except to insurance firms, who will simply make up their lack by gouging ratepayers and exporting externalized costs onto the general population.

With business hopeless and government stymied, we are basically left with cultural activism. The tools at hand are art, design, engineering, and basic science: human artifice, cultural and technical innovation. Granted, these may not seem particularly likely sources of a serious and successful effort to save the world. This is largely because, during the twentieth century, government and industry swelled to such tremendous high-modernist proportions that these other enterprises exist mostly in shrunken subcultural niches.

Scott proposed that he become a contract researcher for Reinvented Inc. under the Industrial Research Assistance Program of the National Research Council, investigating opportunities for the creation of what we have taken to calling, shorthand, “thingy development.” The “thingy” being, well, a thingy in a house that, in some way, modifies the owner’s energy-using behaviour in a positive way.

This seemed like a good idea to me: ideas I’m interested in both personally and “corporately” could be forwarded, Scott’s research interests could be forwarded and “market opportunities” for Reinvented might manifest. One imagines this is exactly what IRAP is supposed to do.

Scott and I are on the same page as regards to intellectual property for this enterprise: we’re both believers in the power of openness, and neither of us had any interest in keeping this work secret.

The paperwork for the IRAP funding has been wending its way through the system and this week Scott received and NDA – non-disclosure agreement – for the project from the NRC. He rightly assumed that no such NDA was required, given our commitment to openness, and replied as such.

But this got me thinking: what about, instead of an NDA, we sign an MDA, a Mandatory Disclosure Agreement. This agreement would stipulate not only that the results of this project will be made public and open, but also compel us to explain and interpret these results. To make an effort, in other words, to disclose what we’re up to.

Happily again, this aligns with another one of my research interests (if that’s what you call them), expressed most obviously in this letterpress-printed broadside from last year:

That broadside, in turn, had its birth three years earlier in a lecture I gave to a Philosophy of Technology course at UPEI called Privacy and the Obligation to Explain.

So, in other words, ideas born in a philosophy lecture spring to life on the letterpress and then later give rise to a “working philosophy” in a computer science project that eventually might reach the “market.” I’m pretty sure that’s how a university is supposed to work.

While it’s possible to argue that Mitch Podolak’s greatest invention is the Winnipeg Folk Festival, an equally compelling argument can be made that it’s actually Home Routes, the Canadian “house concert circuit” that he co-founded.

Here in Charlottetown one of the stops on the Home Routes trail is the Elmwood Heritage Inn on North River Road. By chance I ended up on the mailing list for their series when my old friend Eve played there two years ago and I’ve had the pleasure of returning to Elmwood 3 or 4 times since. It is a wonderful tiny venue for music, and Carol and Jay are warm and generous hosts. It makes seeing music in larger venues seem cold and barbaric by comparison.

Yesterday was the opening of the 4th season of Home Routes concerts at Elmwood and it was a wonderful afternoon: Red Moon Road from Winnipeg, fresh off the ferry from Cape Breton, set themselves up in the living room and played to an enthusiastic crowd of about 15 people from the neighbourhood.

They had me from the opening line of their tune Come Home:

Little Wilhelmina was abandoned,
in circumstances imagined to be tragic,
maybe magic,
was involved,
Like her parents met an evil witch,
who took the baby and made a switch,
for cabbage,
and so managed to escape.

The song is, despite the wit of the opening, a rather tragic one. But so well told, and with such musicianship:

It’s difficult to convey in words how much joy effuses from this trio; they may be the happiest band I’ve ever seen play; they genuinely love playing and it shows. Each is an accomplished musician and storyteller and each brings something to the mix; they are a trio in the truest sense of the notion, and to watch them interact is a thrill.

You’ll have two more chances to see Red Moon Road on Prince Edward Island this fall: they play a Home Routes concert in Summerside on September 24 (email tim@homeroutes.ca for details) and then the Trailside in Mount Stewart on October 3rd.

You really should make an effort to see them.

I’ve extended my code that interacts with StudentsAchieve to allow the harvesting of attendance data for your child. There are now methods in the class to support grabbing attendance for a given date or range of dates and I’ve built a sample script, get-attendance-ical.php, that will grab attendance data for a range of dates and output an iCalendar file suitable for import into an application like iCal or Google Calendar.

Fortunately for me (but alas not for him), [[Oliver]]’s back-to-school cold caught up with him on Thursday, so he was absent, giving me useful data to test my regular expressions for parsing status data out of the StudentsAchieve HTML. So here’s the resulting calendar for him, loaded into iCal, showing attendance (taken twice a day) for the last week:

When I spoke about Applications vs. Capabilities back in 2009 at the Access Conference, it was this kind of thing that I was talking about: I want the entities in my life to participate in an open data ecosystem, not create “destination portals.” Don’t make me login to proprietary systems: instead, allow me to exchange data with you, using open standards, so that I can integrate you into whatever collection of tools I use to support my own particular information management needs.

In other words, build capabilities, not applications.

I’ve been hearing about the StudentsAchieve system used by Prince Edward Island schools since I first started working with the PEI Home and School Federation. In elementary grades StudentsAchieve is only used for tracking attendance, and there’s no provision for parent access to the system, so although I’ve been actively engaged in advocating for improved access to and use of StudentsAchieve it wasn’t until today that I actually got to use it myself.

Oliver’s in intermediate school now, and starting at grade 7 the system is used to record marks and share information about homework in additional to tracking attendance, and there’s provision for online access by parents through a web system. We got our username and password for Birchwood’s StudentAchieve system this afternoon, and so, at long last, I got to take it out for a ride.

The system was first implemented on PEI in 2006, and its design and usability make it clear that it has its roots in an era in web history not particularly concerned with the niceties of either. It works, yes, but its ugly and confusing and makes me feel sad.

Fortunately all is not lost: the web is open, and web systems, by their very nature, are open to reinterpretation through code. The data, in other words, is there: if I want it to be beautiful, I can do so myself.

By way of starting this process, I’ve started to code a PHP class for automated interaction with StudentsAchieve. All this code does is to mimic the same actions that a parent takes using a web browser – logging in, clicking on things, etc. – it just does it all automatically and takes the information it finds and makes it available in “machine readable” form that can then be reimagined.

The code is primitive right now: all it does is “login” to StudentsAchieve using your parent username and password and retrieve a list of classes, teachers and email addresses (and even then it only works, as far as I know, for households with a single student).

But the heavy lifting of getting a script to login to StudentsAchieve is done, and as a sort of “proof of concept” I used the code to create a PHP script to create a vCard file of all of Oliver’s teachers. Using the script I can do this:

php get-teacher-vcard.php username password

(substituting my actual parent username and password) and then this happens:

Logging in to StudentsAchieve...
Making a vCard file...
Saved a vCard file called 'BirchwoodIntermediateSchool.vcf'.
Load this into your address book.

And, sure enough, when I open that BirchwoodIntermediateSchool.vcf file in the Contacts app on my Mac and then search for “Teacher”, I see all of Oliver’s teachers:

Given the hullabaloo last year about unauthorized student access to StudentsAchieve it’s important to note that this code doesn’t take advantage of any capability of StudentsAchieve not exposed to the web: you still have to be an authorized parent with a username and password to use it, and you only have access to the same information about your child that you have in an interactive web browser.

I am deeply, passionately, monogamously, long-term lovingly committed to The New Yorker magazine. It’s the only magazine I subscribe to, a subscription that, against my character, I simply set to auto-renew in perpetuity.

I adore absolutely everything about the magazine (except the poetry and, with some rare exceptions, the fiction). If you told me I’d be sent to a desert island but could take a stack of New Yorkers with me (and, probably, some food), I’d be happy. Lonely, but happy.

So when The New Yorker redesigns parts of itself it’s a big deal in my life. And thus when I watched this video announcing some of the changes I held my breath and felt both giddy anticipation and a sense of foreboding: what if they get it wrong, I thought.

It’s not that the magazine need never change (although it’s glacial pace of change is one of its most endearing qualities), and I’ve enjoyed some of the small unannounced design touches that have been introduced in recent years. But. I. Still. Hold. My. Breath.

The September 23, 2013 issue, where the “Goings On About Town” changes will be introduced, won’t arrive in Charlottetown until sometime next week (the magazine’s cover date is the date it goes off sale, and it’s a rare week that I receive an issue before that date). I took a peek online to see what’s in store (something I almost never do: The New Yorker is about print for me, and reading it online makes it seem soulless). I don’t dislike it.