dose

Michael Geist has a nice long bit on Canada’s take on Net Neutraity, and here he summarizes the Conservative position:

We think blocking or prioritizing content may be acceptable, we recognize it is inconsistent with the recommendations of the Telecommunications Policy Review Panel, and we don’t care because we plan to the leave the issue to the dominant telecommunications providers. This is not - as some suggest - about letting freedom reign. It is about leaving Canadian consumers and the Canadian Internet vulnerable to a two-tier Internet and providing tacit approval to those telecommunications companies that actively engage in network discrimination.

Some time ago I sent out emails asking about positions on net neutrality to the Conservatives, Liberals (federal), Bloc, NDP, Liberals (provincial), and PQ. Here are responses I got:

Conservatives:

Dear Mr. McGuire:

The Office of the Prime Minister, has forwarded your electronic correspondence of November 9, 2006, concerning net neutrality to the Honourable Maxime Bernier, Minister of Industry. I am pleased to reply on behalf of the Minister and I regret the delay in relying to you.

The Minister of Industry is responsible for the Telecommunications Act, which sets out the objectives of Canadian telecommunications policy, while the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), an independent public authority, is charged with implementing these objectives through its regulation of the telecommunications industry.

The CRTC determined that the market for retail Internet access was sufficiently competitive to forgo economic price regulation. Nonetheless, the Commission has residual authority to address some issues of discriminatory and anti-competitive behaviour with respect to such Internet services should they arise.

The issue of net neutrality is also being deliberated in other countries. Industry Canada is monitoring domestic and international developments to determine the need for future domestic policy initiatives.

I appreciate your having taken the time to bring this important matter to our attention.

Yours very truly,

Leonard St-Aubin
Director General
Telecommunications Policy Branch

Parti-Quebecois:

Monsieur McGuire,

Au nom du chef de l’opposition officielle, je confirme que nous avons bien reçu votre message. Je vous en remercie.

Je me permets de le transmettre à Monsieur Daniel Turp, porte-parole de l’opposition officielle en matière de culture et de communications, afin qu’il en prenne connaissance.

Je vous souhaite une agréable fin de journée.

Mélanie Malenfant
Conseillère politique
Cabinet du chef de l’opposition officielle
Assemblée nationale
418.643.2743
mmalenfant@assnat.qc.ca

The other parties (NDP, Liberal-fed, Bloc, Liberal-provincial) did not answer. Which tells you how high this issue is on their priority list.

(tip to patrick)

For the hardcore info junkie, there was no better feed for your veins than diggdot.us: a feed of the purest quality, distilled from a mix of digg.com, del.icio.us/popular, and slashdot.org.

Cease and desist letters sent. diggdot.us is now doggdot.us. No harm done I guess, but digg are jerks.

Explains what the hell is going on on the web in a pretty compelling way. If you know all this, its fun to watch. If you don’t know all this, it might be too fast to follow. But entertaining nonetheless.

So it’s registered and up and running: http://visiblepolitics.org/

VisiblePolitics is a project to create a complete listing of Canadian federal politicians, parties and ridings, with information about policies, funding, voting records, public statements, press, among other things. VisiblePolitics is a source of information; it is NOT a source of, or forum for advocacy of any kind.

A totally open project if anyone wants to join in to help out. Doesn’t have to be wiki I guess, but I just cant see another way to get the info in so easily. I guess project discussion should happen here: About the Project. There’s a short list of things that could use some help, but I didn’t think very long or hard about it. No idea if this’ll work or not…

The one thing I REALLY want is someone who can help me install/figure out how to use this:
XFeed-RSS Aggregator

HOW YOU CAN HELP:
1. Find out who your Member of Parliament is
2. Visit the site: http://visiblepolitics.org
3. Add some info about your MP (you can copy some stuff from Wikipedia, some from the Canadian Parliament website, and ideally from the mess that is Elections Canada’s financial info site).

OR:
4. Help with layout, wikiness, project direction, and tools (RSS aggregator in the wiki!!)

I just (this minute) registered: visiblepolitics.org … the idea came up in discussions in the CivicAccess.ca mailing list ages ago, and someone should do something about it. Maybe me. Here’s the proposal (anyone want to help?):

A wiki project, with objective to list all Canadian federal politicians (this could happen anywhere, and could be municipal/provincial as well), and include the following information:

-Party
-Picture
-Riding
-Previous experience
-web site
-political experience
-main issues of interest, and their position on such issues (eg. copyright, climate change, iraq, afghanistan, healthcare)
-voting history (maybe a feed from howdtheyvote)
-funders/financial info (and relationship to policies …)
-links to news items about them (could do it automatically by scraping google news, cbc, globeandmail etc).
-links to blog posts about them (could do it automatically by scraping technorati)
-other things?

NOTE: the information should be objective and not editorial. The purpose is not to be an advocacy site, but an information site.

Most of this info is in the public domain, but available only to those who dig diligently. Eg the financial info is buried in difficult to access government docs, and definitely not all this stuff is in the same place. It should be.

Some people I think might be interested in this: Evan, Robin, Paul, Mike L, Tracey, Sylvain. Others too.

The main problem, for everyone on that list, is time. There must be more who are interested.

My experience with this kind of project, is that once it gets up and running, with an active and committed community, it’ll more or less run itself. But to get there there needs to be tons of work on creating the ground rules, policies, fundemental principals, and just encouraging input, keeping things in good order until a healthy group of contributors evolve their own culture and way of doing things. Then it autoregulates.

So getting this set up should be easy enough. Making it work will take lots of interest and input.

(I keep registering domain names, using Julien’s GoDaddy discount codes for projects that pop into my head. Some are commercial sorts of things, but others are more alturistic projects… I’m going to start trying to be more vocal about what some of these project ideas are).

From Slashdot:

“Nature.com is reporting that the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which includes the companies that publish scientific journals, is becoming concerned with the free-information movement. A meeting was arranged with PR professional Eric Dezenhall to discuss the problem. Dezenhall’s firm has worked with the likes of ExxonMobil ‘to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace’, among other campaigns. The publishers are worried that the free exchange of scientific information may be bad for the bottom line, as it might cause the money from subscriptions to their journals to dry up. Among the recommendations: ‘The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as “Public access equals government censorship”. He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and “paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles.’ The AAP is trying to counter messages from groups such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS), an open-access publisher and prominent advocate of free access to information, or the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) PubMed Central.”

More from the great TED Talks series, here is Wade Davis talking (National Geographic explorer in residence) about the loss of language and ethnodiversity.

Opening up government data, along with open communities/priojects, will create a whirlwind of creative solutions to the problems we, as societies, face. In fact, I think such a move is essential for sensible solutions to the increasingly complex problems of the world: governments seem to be getting worse and worse at solving the problems we want them to solve. They seem less able and less willing. (Think health in Quebec, climate change, urban planning, to name 3).

I am one of the founding members of civicaccess.ca (though my participation was and remains minimal), which I hope might turn into a central space for making this happen in Canada.

Austin pointed me to a fantastic data talk (a TED video) by Hans Rosling at TED. Tracey points to the same place.

Here is Rosling’s blog. Here is his data/deisgn software project, gapminder.

And here is Free Our Data: Blog, a “A Guardian Technology campaign for free public access to data about the UK and its citizens.”

Which reminds me of a similar campaign from the Globe and Mail (ha ha ha! right.).

Another fine vid about Net Neutrality from the good folks at savetheinternet.com …and while you are at it, you complacent Canadians you, get ye on over to (the extremely wordy) neutrality.ca … at the bottom of which there is a petition you should sign.

Nora points to a wonderfully cool resource, called worldmapper, that makes maps sized based on various socioeconomic attributes of countries (rather than their geographic size).

So, for instance, here is a map based on Meat Exports:

and here is one based on Meat Imports: