You might be under the impression, from reading Local blogger eases immigrant investor searches, that I created OpenCorporations.org to, well, “ease immigrant investor searches.”

If you read my blog post about the service you would realize that this actually isn’t true: I created it in reaction to a specific personal need for information. Something that I told the CBC reporter yesterday during an interview, but that didn’t make it into the web story.

Yes, OpenCorporations.org does “ease immigrant investor searches,” and certainly, after creating the tool I became aware of that (it’s hard to ignore, as the participation in the program was pervasive). I don’t see the ability to search in that regard as being any different than the ability to identify any shareholder or director of any corporation, no matter their origin and reason for investing, so I’ve no issue with the site being used for this purpose. But it’s not why I created it.

Personally I have some strong moral quandaries about the notion of the Provincial Nominee Program, but my questions are grounded in broader issues about the appropriateness of recruiting new citizens based on ability to pay, not in the immigrants involved in the program, the companies they invested in, or the way the program was administered. There’s no question that the program has improved the economy of the province, and has increased the diversity of the Island population, both of which are laudable, and I think we should welcome our new investing neighbours into the Island family without reserve.

In the end, regardless of my feelings about the Nominee Program, I continue to think that, as citizens, we have a responsibility to understand the corporations we allow to exist in our midst, who controls them, and what their motivations and goals are.

I’m here in New England for a week visiting with my colleagues at [[Yankee]]. Aeroplan arrangements necessitated a Saturday arrival in Boston, and thanks to Hotwire I ended up staying overnight at the palatial InterContinental Boston on the waterfront for $119 (the rack rate printed on the back of the door, presumably the highly-inflated worst-case scenario rate, was $999). My room was perhaps the swankiest I’ve ever stayed in: three telephones, bathtub with sliding shutters to allow in-bath television watching, etc. Needless to say, I didn’t order the room service.

This morning I got up early and walked along the water to Caffe Dello Sport in North Boston, my favourite place to get a cappuccino and a croissant and sit with the old Italian men watching football beamed in on the satellite.

I took a swing through the deserted Quincy Market on the way back to the hotel, and was packed up and on my way by 11:00 a.m. I made my way on foot to the Hertz outlet on Park Plaza — about a kilometer away — just as it was starting to drizzle. When I got there my car was ready, although “car” is perhaps an exaggeration, as I’d been assigned a Chevy HHR, a horrible beast of a truck-slash-station wagon with almost no visibility of the road from inside. I took one run around the block and just simply had to exchange it, as driving it would have ruined my week and quite possibly resulted in the running over of small animals along the way. Fortunately there was a peppy Toyota Corolla in the garage, and 10 minutes later I was on my way north.

I stopped at the Burlington Mall to do some shopping, and then, a little farther up the road, at the plaza with Kohl’s and the L.L. Bean outlet just over the New Hampshire border. By the time I was done with my orgy of consumerism, I’d purchased:

• a Microsoft 4000 ergnomic keyboard to leave at [[Yankee]] so I don’t need to cart my own one down every time I visit — paid regular price at Circuit City,
• a Braun 340 electric shaver to replace the one I bought 10 years ago at the downtown Home Hardware store in Charlottetown — it was 20% off today at Kohl’s,
• a pair of black L.L. Bean jeans, to cure the problem of having no trousers to wear to Yankee this week — $13.95 on sale,
• a Western Digital “My Passport” 500GB portable Firewire/USB hard drive, to cure the problem of having only 500MB left on my 90GB internal drive on my MacBook — regular price at the Apple Store.

With the exception of the trousers, all of my purchasers were “oh the wonder and variety of it all”-driven, and had little to do with the “Black Friday” post-Thanksgiving selling season. Just doing my part to bring back the U.S. economy from the brink, something I’m happy (I think?) to report that I was joined in doing my untold hordes of shoppers — if ther Burlington Mall was any gauge, American retail will do just fine this Christmas.

By the time the spending was done, it was nearing dusk, and the rain had picked up; by the time I got to the 101A heading west the rain had turned to snow, and by the time I came to drive up Pack Monadnock traffic had slowed to a 30 mph crawl.

I got into Peterborough about 5:00 p.m. and went looking for a place to have supper. Unfortunately almost every place in town was closed on Sundays, even the venerable standby the Peterboro Diner. So I had to content myself with pizza at Grapellis just north of the Jack Daniels Motor Inn, which is where I’m staying for the week, and which is where I sit, on a dreafully non-ergnomic desk, as I type.

…things like this happen.

When I arrived in Prince Edward Island 15 years ago, I was terrifically shy. I could conduct myself in polite society, but small talk was a foreign language for me and casual social situations were something I would usually avoid, and certainly never actively seek out.

Island life is lubricated by copious amounts of small talk, however. And as such the Island is a sort of crucible for the socially averse and has forged me into the kind of person who can, as I just have, spend a pleasant two hours talking about minimally invasive surgical procedures and the like with a stranger met in the Halifax airport. To say nothing of the discussion of Island real estate I had with the Coop Taxi driver who took me to the airport.

Fifteen years ago these episodes would have been unimaginable. Ten years ago they would have been possible, but would have felt like hard terrible work. Today it’s effortless and a pleasure that feeds my inveterate curiousity.

Indeed you could say that the greatest gift the Island has given me, through rigorous practise and considerable patience, is the revelation that all people are interesting if you give them the chance, and that if you sublimate your social terrors long enough, eventually they will disappear.

In the November 24, 2008 issue of The New Yorker is an article Garden of Contentment by Fuchsia Dunlop concerning The Manor, a restaurant in Hangzhou, China. The restaurant is remarkable for its attention to the ingredients it uses and, to this end:

Guests can look through a “purchase diary,” a large leather-bound volume containing copies of each day’s contracts with the farmers and artisans who supply the kitchens, along with photographs of them picking vegetables, making rice wine, and slaughtering pigs.

I’m convinced that transparency and accountability are going to increase in value in the near future, to the point where we’ll consider it foolhardy to eat out at restaurant that doesn’t provide an audit trail for all of its offerings.

I released the OpenCorporations.org site into the wild yesterday. Here’s what happened in the first 17 hours of its life:

• 17,046 searches in total
• Maximum rate of 34 searches/minute during the busiest hour.
• 1,368 distinct keywords searched for (“Ghiz” was the most popular).
• 1,896 distinct corporations viewed (29% of the total in the database).
• 1,583 distinct shareholder/directors viewed (10% of the total in the database).
• Visits from 254 distinct IP addresses.
• Total searches from IP address 24.222.12.124: 2856.
• Total searches for “Peter Rukavina” from that IP address: 724
• Top ten identifiable Internet domains of computers used to search:
  • Eastlink
  • Aliant
  • Government of PEI
  • CBC
  • silverorange
  • Island Regulatory and Appeals Commission (IRAC)
  • Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency (ACOA)
  • TD Bank
  • Ruranet
  • Wifi Charlottetown
• Email thank-you messages received from news organizations: 3 4.
• Maximum sustained bandwidth (5 minute average) for the webserver: 50 kB/s (i.e. not very much).
• Delay after my release blog post that Google started to index the site: 15 minutes.
• Delay for the Yahoo spider: 68 minutes.
• Page weight of OpenCorporations.org main page: 28.4K
• Number of graphics used on the OpenCorporations.org website: zero.
• Number of pageviews of the FAQ: 249.

You can see some additional statistics about popular areas of the database on the Search Statistics page. To counter the effects of multiple identical searches for the same item (i.e. IP address 24.222.12.124, as above), I’ve modified the statistics page to factor this out.

There was a temporary flurry of concern today when the official Corporate Register operated by the province showed a “The Corporation Search is temporarily unavailable” message for the balance of the workday; it’s back in operation now, however, and it was likely simply a coincidence.

Before heading off-Island for a week I needed to print 80 copies of something. I had a PDF of the something on my phone, and so I went out to Staples on the outskirts of Charlottetown hoping they’d be set up to let me email the PDF and then print it out.

The clerk at Staples gave me a business card with their email address on it, and asked me when I needed it. I said “right now.” She said “I’m taking bookings for next Tuesday.” I said “But I only need one copy and I can print the rest myself on the self-serve machines.” She said “I can’t put you in front of the other people with bookings.”

I can guarantee you that if I walked into a local independent print shop I would have walked out 10 minutes later with my 80 copies: simple human decency would have prevailed. By the “systems malaise” of Staples meant I left a disgruntled customer, frustrated enough to tell the world of my woe.

Solution to problem: next time plan better and go to a local independent print shop.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something I’ve come to call funfrastructure — community infrastructure that has no purpose other than to bring fun into the lives of the citizenry. Brother [[Johnny]] came up with the excellent name.

Funfrastructure is infrastructure that’s not built to enhance the economy. Or to allow easier access to shopping. Or increase tourism numbers. Or to better dispose of sewage. It’s not roads or bridges or sidewalks (unless they happen to be otherwise needlessly beautiful). It’s not educational, or healthy. Well, it can be. But that’s not why it’s built.

Funfrastructure is infrastructure that exists just to let us have fun.

Kings Castle Provincial Park in Murray River is pure funfrastructure: how could a park filled with concrete fairy story animals, off the beaten tourist track, be considered anything else:

Victoria Park, in downtown Charlottetown, has fitness and nature overtones, but it also allows for a lot of straight-ahead fun, even if it’s just going for a walk:

In Frederiksberg Have in Denmark a few years ago we stumbled across an area of the park filled with experimental park furniture. It’s art, of course, but decidedly not of the paintings-on-walls variety, and anything you can climb on is more fun than art:

Playgrounds are almost always funfrastructure. And walking trails. The water slide at the CARI Pool in Charlottetown is funfrastructure: while the pool itself can be educational, therapeutic, or used to increase fitness, there is no other reason to go down a water slide than for the massive amounts of fun it involves.

Even a simple place to sit by the sea can be funfrastructure:

Museums can be dull and educational. But good museums — childrens museums, science museums — can be funfrastructure. Any place you have to take off your shoes, or that involves huge amounts of Lego, is probably a good candidate:

It’s important to think about funfrastructure right now because it’s the hardest kind of infrastructure to guide through the political process. And it’s extra especially hard to get built during times of constructed financial crises when we’re all supposed to stop having fun, and eat more turnips.

But funfrastructure is important: without it, well, there’s less fun. And we need more fun: it’s what builds communities, brings people away from their televisions, cures a heavy heart, and, in the end, makes life worth living.

For the past month I’ve fallen into the habit of dropping around the corner to the [[Seatreat]] for a bowl of chicken and rice soup for lunch. A descendant of Louis’ famous soup from The Town & Country, it is a cure for whatever might ail you.

Earlier this month came the announcement of a proposed tunnel under Grafton Street to connect the Confederation Court Mall with the Confederation Centre of the Arts.

The news story about the proposal mentioned “Mall owner Homberg [sic] International,” and, knowing that the same developer was associated with the Fitzroy Street skyscraper that’s going up next door to my office, I wanted to know more about this “Homburg International” company: who controlled it, what else do they own, and so on.

My first stop was a search for “Homburg” in the PEI Corporate Register. The only results there, however, were registrations for five “extra-provincial companies,” none of which was called “Homburg International.”

My suspicion was that Homburg International was likely a shareholder in an Island company that went by another name. My problem was that the Corporate Register doesn’t allow search by shareholder.

My solution to this quandary led me to create a new public-service website that I’m calling OpenCorporations and I’m opening the doors there this morning.

OpenCorporations scrapes the public data from the Corporate Register and makes it searchable in novel ways: in addition to being able to search for corporations by name you can now search for shareholders, directors and officers by name or address, by trade name, and by “nature of business.”

There’s no new information in OpenCorporations — anything you find there you could, eventually, find in the Corporate Register, albeit after a lot of laborious searching — it’s just a wrapper around corporations data that makes searching easier, and establishing connections between corporations possible.

It also allowed me to answer my Homburg question: an OpenCorporations search for “Homburg” showed me three shareholders. This led me to figure out that a Nova Scotia company called Homburg LP Management Incorporated is a shareholder in a PEI company Hardegane Investments that, in turn, is the sole shareholder in Dyne Holdings. Dyne Holding owns the Confederation Court Mall.

Why is this important? The synopsis to the film The Corporation puts it this way:

In the mid-1800s the corporation emerged as a legal “person.” Imbued with a “personality” of pure self-interest, the next 100 years saw the corporation’s rise to dominance. The corporation created unprecedented wealth but at what cost? The remorseless rationale of “externalities” (as Milton Friedman explains, the unintended consequences of a transaction between two parties on a third) is responsible for countless cases of illness, death, poverty, pollution, exploitation and lies.

While I’m not suggesting that Island corporations are necessarily responsible for the scale of negative consequence that can be found elsewhere, I think it’s incumbent on we citizens to have a better understanding of the corporations in our community, for it’s these corporations that control the places we shop, live, work, the buildings that are built in our neighbourhoods, essentially all aspects of our daily lives.

Key to this understanding is being able to understand the ownership structure of corporations, for it’s only by having a complete picture of the web of corporate inter-ownership that we can begin to truly understand how to counter their “personality of pure self-interest.”

I don’t think corporations are bad, at least not all of them — I control one myself after all — but as it’s we the people, through our government, that give license for corporations to exist in the first place, we all have an obligation to be vigilant about their activities and their motivations.

All of which is what’s led me to spend time cobbling together OpenCorporations and releasing it as a free public resource. Use it wisely.

Disclaimer: The Island being the Island, I was also the programmer that created the online version of the official Corporate Register. I have not had a relationship with the project, nor access to the code or data, for several years, however, and OpenCorporations scrapes data from the public web pages just like anyone else would. The OpenCorporations FAQ for background and to grab the raw data and scraping code for yourself.