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)

J’ai l’intention de participer à ces evenments:

• WikiWednesday (aujourd’hui, 16h30)
• Yulblog (aujourd’hui, 20h00)
• petit déjeuner des entrepreneurs web Montrealais (le 13 fev)
• podcamp toronto (le 24-25 fev)
• democamp montreal #1 (le 27 fev)
• democamp montreal #2 (le 29 mars)
• barcamp montreal #2 (april 28)

Net Neutrality: A Public Discussion on the Future of the Internet in Canada

Date and Location:
Tues, February 6, 2007 , 7 pm
Admission: Free
Ottawa Public Library Auditorium
120 Metcalfe St.

Moderated by:
Pippa Lawson: Executive Director, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa

Panelists:

* Michael Geist: Professor of Law, Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law, University of Ottawa
* Ren Bucholz: Electronic Frontier Foundation Policy Coordinator, Americas
* Andrew Clement: Professor, Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto; Principal Investigator, Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking
* Bill St-Arnaud: Senior Director, Advanced Networks for CANARIE, Inc.

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!!)

Julien has unleashed a storm of comments about montreal’s web community. Evan, Patrick, Sylvain, and Robin have weighed in, as have I. Julien followed-up.

But in all that, I think Boris (comment on Julien’s site) hit on something important. In my crazy-project-starting-life, I have learned you need 3 things for a web project to work:
a) an idea
b) a designer
c) a back-end coder

a) and b) are well covered in Montreal. c) is the one where we seem to have problems - at least within the community of people I know. You can’t do anything without a good back-end developer/coder willing to hack some stuff together. We could use more of you, if you’re out there, let me know!

So coders: Where are you? Anyone want to do a couple of projects? I have some.

UPDATE: if you’ve got a project on the go, send me an email at hugh AT dosemagazine DOT com or comment here & I’ll add you to the list below.

Julien’s bitchin’ cause Montrealers aren’t talking up their projects, I think, or because we don’t have a more “official” community of geeks. (Not sure what the advantage is to that). I think the main thing is we have no fluoride in our water, so we’re less prone to zombie-like following. There’s tons of cool stuff going on, here is just a list of people I know personally who are doing great things, in no particular order:

• Brett Gaylor, vlogger making a movie about creative commons and remix culture
• Mike Lenczner, free wifi implementer, civic data guy, and location-based portal person…
• Julien Smith, Canada’s most popular independent podcaster
• MC Turgeon, Canada’s most famous podcaster
• Sylvain Carle, semi-pro blogger, open source guy, and almost-launched start-up worker-oner
• Austin Hill, dot-com dinosaur and soon-to-be newly-minted 2.0 fellow
• Patrick Tanguay, (yul)blog evangelist, CSS wizard, and soon-to-be-publicized project partner of mine
• Paul Shore, indie news pioneer, political get-active-ist, and film-maker
  
• Evan Prodromou, puttin the wiki back into wikitravel
• Boris and Jeremy, bringing international blogging and news together
• craig, shining an eye on media errors and corrections.

UPDATES (I don’t necessarily know these folks):

• AJ Kandy’s transcribing podcasts.
• Casey and Rudy who are Canada’s best-known videobloggers

There are many more, some of whom I know and forgot to mention; others I don’t even know. So, for my money anyway, there’s no lack of activity here, and I seem to run into people doing interesting stuff all the time.

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.).

Let me count the ways. Christine’s computer (Dell, XP) basically stopped working, so I figured it was time for a full Windows reinstall (at a certain point, it just has to be done, this was 2 years since last resinstall).

It went badly, and so I had to get some help. All is well now. Re-installed Office.

Then thought I should install any updates, security etc. Opened up Firefox to do the downloads. Nope… IE only. Opened IE to do the downloads. Started. Crash. Restarted. Crash. Restarted. Crash.