My friend Ton Zylstra’s talk at Cognitive Cities, Spice Up Your City With Open Gov was a call to action for citizen hackers to catalyze the release and use of open government data. While Ton’s talk was full of useful memes, the most useful one was a call to find “The Man in the Blue Shirt” – a single advocate inside the public service to ally your efforts with.

My government data efforts over the years have profited from many such “blue shirts” – people working in government who “get it” and have the logistical and social skills to help you get things done. The halls of the municipal, provincial and federal governments are filled with people like this, just waiting to be asked to help.

So here’s my first “ask.”

The City of Charlottetown releases building permit, subdivision and rezoning approval data every week locked inside PDF files. It’s good that they release the information on the web, but because it’s released as data that, for all intents and purposes, is just an amorphous mass of text, it’s next-to-impossible for citizens to add value to the data.

Let’s say, for example, that I want to build an application to alert me when a building permit is issued within 1 kilometer of my house. Or an application that displays a map of the city showing where building permits have been approved. Or a report showing how long, on average, it takes the city to approve permits. With the data in its current form, I’m left to try to manually scape the data out, and it’s practically impossible to build these kinds of applications.

The stock answer at City Hall is that “we have no IT department,” which is true. But it’s precisely inside small bureaucracies like the City of Charlottetown where releasing data in an open, usable form is most useful: the City, in its citizens, does have an IT department, and it’s we the people. The relatively small engineering effort required to release data in an open form could have tremendous leveraging effect once we citizens get our hands on it and enliven the data in ways the City itself never could.

To get this effort rolling, I’ve created a github project called Charlottetown-Building-Permits and taken last week’s PDF file of building permit approvals and created an XML version of it along with a draft XML schema.

It doesn’t take much more effort to create this XML file than it does to create a PDF file (and, indeed, the XML can be used to create the PDF file if needed), and yet the XML file is revolutionarily more useful.

Consider this a call to action for a “man in a blue shirt” – yes, Councillor Rob Lantz, IT-savvy Chair of Planning and Heritage, I’m looking at you – to take this and run with it. I’m here to help.

In 1972 my parents moved our family – mom, dad, brother Mike and me, and twin brothers Johnny and Steve in utero – from Burlington, Ontario “out to the country” to the small village of Carlisle, about 30 minutes north.

[[Catherine]], who grew up on a bona fide farm, with sheep and cattle and guns and silage, has long-disputed my calling Carlisle “the country,” and she’s probably right. But, in their own way, my parents were going “back to the land,” and Carlisle wasn’t, yet, the suburbs: it was a small village with a post office, library, gas station, bank and store and about 400 people. Here’s a sketch I made of my childhood psychogeography a couple of years ago:

Shortly after we moved to Carlisle construction started a few miles north of us on something we always called, for a reason I’ve never understood, “the survey.” This represented the coming of the suburbs to Carlisle, with modern homes, central water, and a cookie-cutter architecture that has since covered most of southern Ontario. Here’s a map of Carlisle showing our land in red, “old” Carlisle in yellow, and the survey – surveys, really, as there have been several over the years – in blue:

The “central water” part of the survey, which required a central well and water tower, inspired my parents and their neighbours, the de facto “old time” residents of the village, to protest and I vivid have memories of petitions, meetings and rallies. Those are my earliest memories of “activism” of any sort.

The water situation got resolved somehow, and after a year or so the first round of houses in the survey were done, and new families moved in, and so the “kids from the survey” – we really called them that – started coming to school with us.

For all intents and purposes the survey kids were probably more like us than they were different from us – mostly middle class WASPs –  but nonetheless there were cultural differences that extended beyond their fancier houses and more exotic birthday parties: the survey kids had summer cottages and went to Florida in the winter.

Not all of them, of course. But if a kid at my school was headed to Florida for March break, dollars to doughnuts they were from the survey.

We didn’t have a summer cottage, and we didn’t go to Florida in the winter.

Well, once we went South Carolina, which was pretty close. But really “not going to Florida,” in our family, meant “not going to Disney.” Disney was, after all, really the only reason any kid would want to go to Florida.

I don’t have a strong memory of why the notion of Disney seemed so alluring – this was the Jiminy Cricket era of Disney, after all, decades pre-Pixar.

Maybe it was because, under the psuedo-back-to-the-land regime with the chocolate chips replaced by carob, a black and white TV when everyone else had colour, and my parents convinced that we boys needed to “learn the value of hard work,” going to Disney represented a sort of bourgeois heaven. Disney was alluring because to my parents it was completely unalluring.

I relate all this because next week, during March Break for [[Oliver]], he and I are flying down to Tampa to visit with my parents, who’ve been there all month. It was a last minute decision that we sprung on them only this week after a US Airways flight from Halifax that didn’t require a second mortgage on the house showed up.

On learning of our plans, my father emailed “I assume you’ll want to take Oliver to Disney World.” Which, to be honest, hadn’t occurred to me.

Assuming that the socialist fires still burned at the core of his heart and that he was only being nice, I emailed back and asked if they really wanted to go. “You bet! When would you like to go?” my dad wrote back.

We’re all older now and have shifted up in generational responsibility. We can eat all the cookies we want, all of we brothers have cupboards full of chocolate chips with no carob in site and deluxe colour televisions in our living rooms. And my parents have spent a few weeks in Florida for several winters now, so it’s no longer a mysterious promised land.

But somehow the notion of a family visit to Disney World seems like the toppling of a familial Berlin Wall. And in a strange and somewhat disturbing way, completely at odds with my deeply-rooted political beliefs, I find myself quite excited by the prospect.

Finally, after all these years, I’ve become a survey kid.

On my daily walk up the street from [[Casa Mia]] to the office I walk by the Shoppers Drug Mart on Queen Street. And more often than not I see two trucks, one from Coca Cola and one from Pepsi arranged in front of the store as their respective drivers refill the soda supply inside. I’m delighted by this spectacle every time I see it: there’s just something so concrete about this artful face-off that’s fronted by so much brand-building and advertising elsewhere. I wonder if the two drivers are friends.

Name the country described here by the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs:

Street crime can spill over into commercial, hotel, and entertainment areas. Riots, though rare, occasionally occur; these are usually confined to the poorer districts of major cities, but the violence can spread to central commercial and hotel areas. Full cooperation is recommended when stopped by police.

Violent crime remains a serious concern in …. Criminals have demonstrated that they will use violence with little or no provocation. Many attacks have occurred in the …. area, and others have taken place on rural roads and at interstate highway rest areas. Some rest areas have dusk-to-dawn security on site (which is indicated on the highway sign). Proceed cautiously when exiting a freeway (including …) into large urban centres, especially after dusk. Theft has increased, particularly from trunks of parked cars in the … area, … and at airports. Be alert, as criminals use a variety of techniques to steal personal belongings.

A letterpress work in progress. We’re starting the corporate migration from Subversion to git and it seemed like a good opportunity to learn-by-printing. Still working on the press makeready; currently too much ink, which is filling in some of the letters. Watch the store.

I imagine that, in an environment of tight budgets, limited staff and increasing demand, those involved in managing emergency rooms in today’s hospitals don’t have many spare cycles to consider the customer service aspect of what they do: if someone’s arm is falling off, or their heart has stopped, it’s probably a good idea that they’re focused on that, and not on the magazines in the waiting room.

And, if my eight hour experience in the Queen Elizabeth Hospital emergency room on Friday was any gauge, that’s exactly what they’re doing: focusing on the care, ignoring the service.

I was there because my family doctor sent me there: I’ve had a nagging cough for a month, and I was worried, waking up with a heavy chest, that it had migrated into pneumonia. It turns out that it hadn’t, something I learned after a 7 hour wait followed by a 3 minute consultation with a doctor and a quick chest x-ray. The wait itself didn’t bother me (okay, it did; but I understand the wait, and was happy to have babies with the croup triaged in ahead of me).

What was frustrating to see, as someone who cares about service design, is how small changes to the physical layout of the waiting room, the signage and the registration process could result in significant impacts on the “customer friendliness” of the process.

One example: on entering the emergency room I was faced with:

• a volunteer-less volunteer desk
• a large stand-up display marked “STOP” and instructions for what to do if I thought I had the flu
• a whiteboard with directions to walk-in medical clinics elsewhere in the city

There was, however, no suggestion, through signage or otherwise, as to what I should actually do on arrival. I wandered, at random, over to a window that said “Registration” and sat down, only to be told that I needed to go and “sit on the green couch and wait to be called.” Which I did. Ten minutes later I was waved over to the “Triage” window and given a number and told to go back to “Registration” and register. Which I did. I was then sent with a sheaf of paper back to “Triage” and told that I would be called. Thirty minutes later I was called in, had my vitals taken, and was sent back to the waiting room and told I’d be called back “when a spot opened up.” Seven hours later a spot opened up.

Again, I don’t dispute the seven hour wait, but as someone sick and exhausted and thinking he might have pneumonia, the first hour of the process, with its mysterious dance among windows seemed designed to confuse and perplex me. Even if the process itself cannot be re-engineered, simply informing me how it works immediate upon entry would go a long way to reducing stress.

Ironically, while I was waiting for my “spot to open up,” CBC’s [[Compass]] came on the television in the waiting room and aired a story about a plan to install “wait-time monitors” in the self-same waiting room. While this would certainly help, I’m not convinced that it really gets to the root of the issue, for I can’t imagine that the current process was designed by people with any notion of what it’s actually like to be an emergency room customer, and it’s only when that happens that the process and the approach to service can really be changed for the better.

This is hard to do: it’s almost impossible for people “on the inside” to see customer service from a customer’s point of view. Hospital administrators cannot arrive in the emergency room with fresh, naive eyes. And so what appears, to we customers, as a confusing maze of process likely appears well-laid-out and completely logical to them, especially if they’ve optimized the logistics for staff efficiency and not for customer service.

Certainly medical outcomes have to remain at the forefront, and I’m not suggesting that the doctor who treated me needed to be friendlier or should have spent more time with me. But I’m convinced, after having spent 7 hours watching people arrive in the emergency room and take on the same glazed look of confusion that I did, that by listening and watching customers, and by engaging someone with an eye to service design, medical outcomes could remain paramount but the front-end of the process could be redesigned with clear, up-front, customer-focused information and systems that would decrease confusion, reduce stress, and make putting up with the necessary wait times more bearable.

Last week in Berlin I overheard my friend Morgan recommend the book Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager to several people with enough enthusiasm that I figured I should look it up. So this afternoon I popped over to IslandLibraries.ca – the union catalogue of Holland College, the University of PEI and the Provincial Library system here in Prince Edward Island – and searched. And what should I find but:

In other words, not only did the University of PEI library have Managing Humans in its collection, but it had it in both print and digital forms. A few minutes later, after logging in with my UPEI campus account, I was at MyiLibrary printing myself a PDF of the entire book.

Sometimes you just gotta remember to look.

Since Christmas this year I don’t think there’s been a single day when one member of our extended family here on the Island hasn’t had one illness or another: it’s not been a good winter for staying healthy.

Other than the annoying cough that has held me in its grip for a month and has [[Catherine]] in the thick of dread right now, the illness of the week at our house was a so-called “stomach flu” that, says the word on the street, is making its way through Prince Street School this month. It lasts about 48 hours and involves enough diarrhea to move our household to full “poovalanche” status.

Which got me thinking, again, about the area of health information that exists between the family doctor and “public health” and the kind of widespread mostly-not-too-serious illness that sweeps over a community that, because it’s not killing anyone, doesn’t cause the pandemic alarms to fire, but that is still life-affecting for a lot of families, and likely causes a lot of (perhaps unnecessary) doctor, walk-in clinic and emergency room visits.

What’s most distressing about this kind of illness is that, short of talking to teachers, friends and neighbours, it’s hard to get any information about what’s happening, what the best treatment is, and what practical steps should be taken (keep kids home from school? go to the doctor? wait it out?). For serious illnesses like the flu we’ve got information coming out of our ears, but for short term cold, cough and poovalanche episodes we’ve very little.

Oddly, the single most useful piece of information I received mid-poovalanche at our house came in this tweet from Stephen B. MacInnis: “the bug seems to last 48hr in acute phase. Then a week of Queasy. We are just getting over it.” he wrote, in reply to my original request for information on Twitter. In this case it was simply comforting to know that some other family was going through this too and that an end might be in sight: I wasn’t looking for treatment information or medical advice, just for moral support.

I’m the last person to suggest that “social media” should be applied as a technical solution to any societal problem, but this seems to be a situation where a “crowd-sourced” set of data supplemented by expert advice could be combined to provide a useful data set that would not only help individuals and families, but also assist schools, workplaces, walk-in clinics and others in capacity planning. And it may also allow some home-brew epidemiological work to take place that would help mitigate the impact of these “casual illnesses” in future.

What do you think?

[[Catherine]] will tell you many tales of our travels over the years that involved episodes – long, significant, “to the exclusion of all else” episodes – of driving about the countryside looking for open wireless access points so that I could slurp in my email and do other various Internet things for a moment or two. Part of this was a practical need to run a business remotely from a foreign land, but mostly it was a fish-without-oxygen feeling that all geeks get when we’ve been unplugged too long.

If you’re a regular traveler, one thing you’ll have noted is that the availability of open wifi is gradually shrinking away to nothing: whereas it was once almost impossible not to find an open access point by walking a few blocks in any direction in any major city, it’s not almost impossible to find any open wifi anywhere. I suspect that this is due to an industry-wide change to send wireless access points out of the factory already closed (whereas they were once sent out open, and you needed to figure out how to close them), and also partially due to paranoia about sharing Internet (i.e. terrorists use your wifi, etc.), with some of the pressure that might have mitigated either of these relieved by increasingly faster and cheaper cellular network-based wireless Internet.

I’m told that in Germany now it’s actually illegal to run your wifi wide open, which means, for example, that cafés and other public places that want to offer free wifi to their customers now have to involve complicated “chit” systems in the equation, and the wifi ain’t so “free” as it once was.

I lament the passing of the age of ubiquitous open wifi: sure it was mostly an accident, and only a small portion of open wifi was based on an intentional decision to share on behalf of the owner. But it was perhaps as close as we’re ever going to get to a free and open Internet everywhere. And that was nice.

But, fortunately, all sharing is not dead, something I learned last week in Berlin at the Cognitive Cities Conference.

On day two of the conference I join some old friends in a scavenger hunt that took us through parts of Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg on a quest to answer cleverly-conceived questions that would guide us ever-forward to a finish line. It was fun, the company was good, we ate well, and the weather was nice.

But I didn’t plan ahead and found myself without any mobile Internet participating in an activity that was greatly enhanced by the ability to use Google Maps to, say, find the name of a café in Prenzlauer Berg that started with the first two letters of a popular product sold at a nearby flea market (we failed abjectly here: we thought “sch” for “shoes” where it was “bo” for “boots,” and thus we ended up at Café Schwarzsauer when we should have been at Bonanza Coffee Heroes).

After fiddling around on the fringes of my more-digital-ready colleagues for several challenges, I suddenly remembered that my friend Pedro (that’s him on the right-hand back of the photo, sitting beside our friend João; note how two people are using three devices between them) was carrying an Android-powered phone with a “create a mobile wifi hotspot” capability. So I asked him, sheepishly, if he would mind sharing and he was only too happy to do so. And so all of a sudden the iPod Touch in my pocket, previously starved of wifi oxygen, was back online and I was in the thick of it, ultimately helping guide us to Auguststrasse (“street in Mitte named after a month”).

Over the course of the rest of the afternoon I asked Pedro, who switched off the wifi hotspot to save battery and data once I was done, to turn things back on a few more times, to allow for more research or, at one point, to let me top up my prepaid SIM using a web front-end.

Pedro is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and so was happy to help a guy out of a jam.

But it also felt a little uncomfortably like he was my heroin dealer: he had the stuff that I needed, and he could switch it off at any point, leaving me jonesing for a bandwidth fix. I found the dynamic interesting, and projecting forward it’s fascinating to imagine how this hotspot-conjuring ability begins to acquire a sort of social cachet: being the guy with the hotspot becomes being like the guy who brings the basketball to the outdoor court, or the guy whose parents have cable TV.

I also found the experience interesting because it seemed like magic.

I know that it’s not magic, and indeed it’s not much more complicated that any of the gizmos that I use everyday. But someone Pedro’s ability to conjure up an Internet from his pocket – out of thin air – was amazing to me, and imbued him with great power and prestige.

We ended up losing the scavenger hunt to another team – how exactly we lost I was never sure, as it seemed to me that we did quite well – but it was fun afternoon nonetheless, got me out into the Berlin sunshine with old friends, and turned Pedro into a little but more of a magician than he was before.

I was buying myself a Fruit & Nut chocolate bar this afternoon — the king of “chocolate bars with things in them” in my eyes – over at the tobacco shop in the Confederation Court Mall. Standing at the cash, with my mind on 34 different things, I saw a label on the candy case that I took to read “Joe Sherman’s Friends” and thought to myself “wow, that’s a great name for a candy – I wonder what it is.”

As it turned out, I was looking at a somewhat distressed label for Fisherman’s Friends, and so I’ll never know the answer to that question.

In any case, it turns out that the late great Joe Sherman is, for some reason, flickering around the edges of my mind these days.