Remember The Man in the Blue Shirt? That’s the single person inside government that Ton Zylstra suggested we all need to find to aid us in our efforts to open up government data.

Well, I’ve long wished that live data for provincially owned wind farms at East Point and North Cape was made available to the public. I’d like both the raw data (like an XML feed) and friendlier visualizations to illustrate how much wind power is being generated, how much it’s earning we citizen-owners, and how much of the total demand it represents.

What’s nice about living in a small jurisdiction like Prince Edward Island is that the distance between we regular everyday citizens and our bureaucrats and politicians is quite compact: in this case my “man in the blue shirt” was Hon. Richard Brown, Minister of Environment, Energy & Forestry: about a year ago Richard and I first discussed the idea, and today we finally got around to having a formal meeting on it, joined by Ron Estabrooks, the department’s energy adviser (and a guy who knows a lot about energy).

The result of our meeting: the data’s there, via VestasOnline Business and all that needs to be done is to pull what’s needed together and make it available in a web-friendly format. Ron and I are coordinating how this is going to happen. (North Cape is a little more problematic than East Point as there’s only dial-up access to the site right now, so it might come later).

By far and away the most interesting thing I walked away from today’s meeting having seen was the public New Brunswick System Operator real-time system information, which looks like this:

What this table reveals, simple as it may appear, is pretty amazing information: the “Net Scheduled Interchange” figure indicates how much power, in megawatts, is flowing to (positive number) or from (negative number) power companies in New England (ISO-NE and NMISA), Quebec, Nova Scotia and PEI from NB Power.

In the case of the example above, at the moment I grabbed the screen shot this evening PEI was pulling 127 megawatts from New Brunswick (earlier in the day, when the wind was blowing harder and more wind power was being generated, it was only 30) and Hydro Quebec was sending New Brunswick 476 megawatts.

Peak energy demand in Prince Edward Island is somewhere north of 200 megawatts – it varies with time of day and time of year – and so if you know something about the demand, this table can give you a pretty good indication of how much wind energy Maritime Electric is using.

I learned a lot more today about wind energy and the North American electricity market too, and I’ll be relating that here in the days to come.

And stay tuned for live data from the wind farms!

You may recall that when we spoke a couple of weeks ago we were heading to Disney World in Florida with my parents. Well, we’re back.

In our absence my friend Dan tweeted “The question that has been taking up a disproportionate amount of my mindshare lately: Will @ruk love or hate Disneyworld?” This is my attempt at an answer.

Truth be told, this was not my first visit to Disney in Florida: in the late 1980s I was courted by a business mogul friend of mine to come and work for him in a Disney-related venture in Toronto. Part of the courting involved flying me down to Orlando to experience a bit of the Disney magic. Which is how I found myself, at age 24, touring the Magic Kingdom and Epcot.

And I can tell you that there’s no better way to ensure that you don’t enjoy Disney World at all than to tour it alone in your mid-20s; which is to say that the magic didn’t take, and I returned to Canada chastened and ran as fast as I could away from the aforementioned venture.

So I was going to Disney World both with my communistic family values and my previous experience lending a strong bias against enjoyment of any sort.

To my surprise, I actually had a really good time.

Why?

Well, as much as I am an anti-corporate hater of big media, I am also passionate about customer service.

Disney might be big and faceless and populated by very annoying animated characters, but there is no better company in the world at customer service, and as the whole point of customer service is to disappear into the background and create a frictionless experience, that’s exactly what happened: a day that, while utterly devoid of anything real, was executed at such a high level as to be quite a lovely experience.

So, for example, as the day drew to an end we were standing in Liberty Square studying our Magic Kingdom map for a route to the exit. At exactly the right moment a smiling Disney “cast member” appeared before us asking if he could help us. He provided excellent routing advice and signed off with “Have a magical day!” And he said that in a way that was so completely sincere that we were left with the impression that he actually meant what he was saying.

From our arrival first thing in the morning, where we glided into the parking lot and were seamlessly shepherded, along with thousands of others, into the park, to the management of lines and crowds (it was one of the busiest days of the year in the Magic Kingdom, and yet it didn’t feel that way), to the efficiency of the food service, there was not a rough edge to the experience.

So what did we actually do?

• Rides: My father and I started the day on Splash Mountain, where we were trapped in a line in a tunnel for 30 minutes so baby ducks could be cleared from the way (whether this was true or not I don’t know, but as a “why you are stuck in line” explanation it’s a pretty good one). We got wet (just the right amount of wet), were thrilled (but not too thrilled) and came away happy. Over the course of the day we rode Peter Pan’s Flight (enjoyed by all, especially my mother), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (enjoyable, but probably the least-enjoyed ride of the day), Buzz Lightyear (maximum fun, especially because you could spin your cart around and around and around under your own control), the PeopleMover (my favourite: a simple tram running through Tommorland), the Speedway (tiny go-carts on a track; weird and pleasant in a “reminds me of the 1970s” kind of way). Other than Splash Mountain, which he wouldn’t even consider going near, all of the rides were [[Oliver]]-friendly (and Oliver really, really doesn’t like rides in general).
• Shows: I don’t think of myself as a “shows” kind of guy, but I enjoyed all of the shows we saw: they were well-executed, and had the added bonus of being an air-conditioned place to sit down out of the sun (it was 84 degrees the day we visited). We saw Mickey’s PhilharMagic (3D movie well smell-o-vision), Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor (probably the highlight of the visit: you SMS in jokes while you’re in line and they’re integrated into the show; Oliver’s joke – “why is 6 afraid of 7… because 7 ate 9” – was selected first!), the Carousel of Progress (my favourite, mostly because it represents the pre-Pixar Disney attitude of my youth; I was also pleasantly freaked out by the animatronic actors).
• Walking Around: There’s a lot to entertain the eyes just by walking around: we toured Tom Sawyer’s Island in Frontierland, got pictures taken with President Mickey Mouse in The Hall of the Presidents, joined in (well, Oliver joined in) a dance show in the courtyard in Tomorrowland, rode the Walt Disney Railroad to Frontierland and walked through Cinderella’s castle on our way out.
• Ate: My friend Paul, a Disney enthusiast, had one big piece of advice for us: as soon as you arrive at the park, he emailed, call WDW-DINE and make lunch and dinner reservations. Of course we ignored him, and so we ended up eating lunch at a burger place in Frontierland. The food was basic, the service quick, but given the crowds and lines it was hardly relaxing. For supper I reasoned we needed a good break so, 8 hours after I was instructed to, I phoned the WDW-DINE line on my mobile and walked my way through making an automated reservation at the Liberty Tree Tavern, a “family-style” restaurant in Liberty Square made up to like a ye olde American tavern. I was happy I made the reservation when I did because appearances suggested the had I waited a few more minutes we would have been eating at 8:30. The meal was great: excellent service, tasty food (turkey, ham, flank steak, stuffing, all served on a platter for the entire table) accompanied by string beans, mashed potatoes, and macaroni and cheese with apple crisp and ice cream for dessert.
• Didn’t Shop: While Oliver’s a casual reader of Mickey Mouse comics and is in the heart of his Suite Life of Zack and Cody-viewing years on the Disney Channel, he’s never been a merchandise consumer, and so we didn’t need to buy, or even look at, a single thing in any of the myriad gift shops in the park.

In addition to the “make your lunch and supper reservations” advice that I really do suggest you follow, here are some other pointers we picked up along the way:

• Derek pointed us to TouringPlans.com, a Disney-specific website full of valuable information on how to tour the parks, what days are busy, etc. It was worth the $10.95-per-year subscription price just to get a third-party lay of the land, and we ended up choosing Wednesday to visit because the site predicted it to be the least-busy day of the week (of course we had no way of knowing whether it worked out this way, but it was a way of narrowing our decision at the very least).
• The Fastpass system is your friend. Rather than lining up for a ride or attraction, you can insert your park ticket into a machine and get a “Fastpass” that allows you to return later in the day and skip the queue. It’s free, and with a little planning it can save you hours of time in lines. One point that’s worthy of special note: your Fastpass will give you an hour-long window in which you can return, but, in truth, you can use the Fastpass any time after that as well. So if you have a “Return between 2:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m.” Fastpass, you can actually use it a 7:00 p.m. too
• It’s expensive. Our one-day, one-park admission was $82 each (Oliver, being 10, is an adult in Disney’s eyes). Add on lunch and supper and parking, and it was close to a $500 day for the four of us. I’m not complaining, but you need to know that Disney’s not a cheap way to spend the day.

We arrived at the Magic Kingdom at around 9:30 a.m. after a 2-hour drive from St. Petersburg; we left 10 hours later at 8:30 p.m. and that we lasted that long was, I think, a surprise to all of us. We saw a lot of the Magic Kingdom, but not all of it: we missed Adventureland, with its Pirates and Swiss Family Robinson, entirely, and probably hit about half of the attractions and rides we could have if we’d been more manic about it.

On the 2-hour drive back to St. Petersburg I can honestly say we were all happy and content after a day well-spent.

Apparently I like signs a lot, as it seems as though it was mostly signs that I took photos of during our trip this week to Florida.

Here’s a sign in the Glazer Children’s Museum in Tampa that seems entirely at cross-purposes with children’s museum philosophy:

Outside on the plaza in front of the museum is a “spray deck” – a sort of water fountain that you can walk through when it’s hot. It’s one of the oddest signs I’ve ever come across, especially point number six, which would seem self-evident:

At the condo where my parents are staying there are two elevators, one of which bears this sticker (the elevator is nonetheless in operation):

Around the corner is a statue of a pirate. You’re not allowed to climb on it:

Between my parents’ condo and the pirate is a boulevard with a suggestion that pedestrians should thank drivers for not running them over:

And on the main street you’ll find a series of non-signalized pedestrian crossings that are outfitted with bright yellow warning flags that pedestrians can wave to reinforce to drivers that they are crossing:

In the airport jetway in Terminal F in Philadelphia is a place where you pick up your “gate checked” luggage. There are obviously some issues that need addressing from the perspective of the luggage handlers, so they’ve modified the sign:

Back in the 1970s I bought myself an iPod Touch almost as soon as they first came on sale, and it’s been an off-and-on part of my digital toolkit ever since. Apple’s done a commendable job, especially when compared to other mobile device vendors, at maintaining software compatibility over the various iPod Touch generations, but in the past couple of months, with iOS now at version four and their modern devices have cameras and gyroscopes and microwave ovens, my ye olde iPod Touch has been left out of the game.

Ditto, for example, wouldn’t run on it (and who wants to feel left out of a Jyri Engstrom social object party). Nor would the new Foursquare client. Or the neato Google app that lets you point a camera at something and automagically identifies it. The FOMO, in other words, was getting to me.

The logical upgrade path, given that I’m carrying around an ancient [[Nokia N95]] in my pocket, would have been to chuck both the N95 and the iPod Touch and get an iPhone. But something buried deep inside me – fear of tribalism? complete vendor lock-in? simple iconoclasm? – prevented me from doing that. And so I bought a brand new 32GB 4th generation iPod Touch last night up at Future Shop (which almost lost the sale; actual conversation: “I’d like to buy an iPod Touch.” “Oh, he’s in a meeting. I can tell him to find you when he comes out.” “But I just want to buy one!” “Okay, I’ll find someone else”).

The effect of just a dramatic upgrade is akin to having just discovered the automobile after riding around on a horse all my life (okay, so maybe that’s over-emphasizing the importance of a mobile device in one’s pocket; let’s just say “it’s considerably faster”). Not only is it faster, but it’s got more gizmotronicness. Like the two cameras, the ability to tell where it is, and so on. The cameras have been widely derided by the technorati for being so poor as to not be worthy of a “megapixel” rating. And that’s true. But I think it misses the point: I’m not taking photographs with an iPod to blow up to 8 by 10 prints, I’m taking ephemeral shots meant to be viewed at 500 by 350 pixels. Like this:

Those aren’t photo-studio-quality photos, but they’re more than enough to suit the purpose, and considerably better than not having a camera at all.

Of course in many ways the last thing I need is another device forcing me into Twitter updates, Foursquare check-ins, compulsive email monitoring and so on. And maybe that’s why I got an iPod Touch instead of an iPhone: at least there are still places on earth free from wifi, and so I’ve bought myself a device with naturally limiting tendencies. That’s probably a good thing.

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.