A guide to the Plan It amendments
I’m on vacation right now and not able to provide my full comments on the Plan It amendments coming back to Calgary city council on Monday.
Instead I invite you to take a look a this ”Guide to the Plan It Amendments“ compliled by CivicCamp Calgary. (Specific credit looks like it belongs to Bill Morrison, Neil Keough and Naheed Nenshi.) In the document each of the amendments proposed are given a grade. In each case a non-favourable grade is given suggested changes are proposed.
I wish I had the time to do this kind of work! Well done!
I hope you will take the time to voice your support for these changes to your alderman.
Plan It, round 2: The most important decision facing Calgarians
Next week is a BIG week in Calgary. As Naheed Nenshi correctly states in his Calgary Herald op-ed today, “On Monday, Calgary city council makes a decision bigger and more important than all the other decisions it has made since being elected . . . combined.”
Plan It – the document that lays out how Calgary will grow for the next several decades – is coming back to council for a second reading.
Plan It has been the hard work of many years of public engagement, determined to define how Calgarians want to manage their city’s growth. In short it is all about the kind of city we want Calgary to be and how we will ensure it becomes that.
In June, after the final public hearings, council made about 100 suggested amendments to the proposed Plan It document and gave it first reading.
The city’s administration (the author of the document) went back to their desks and poured over the amendments to determine which were good ideas and strengthened the document, and which were poor ideas and weakened the document or contradicted other pieces of legislation. The results have been released here. But I’ll break it down for you a bit.
A summary of Administration’s recommendations are as follows:
That Council:
1. Receive for information Attachments 1 and 2, which summarize Administration’s response to key issues brought forward by Council in the proposed amendments to the MDP and CTP.2. MDP Amendments:
a) Adopt Administration’s Recommended Amendments to the MDP (Bylaw 40M2009) as proposed in Attachment 3.
b) Receive for information Attachment 4, which lists suggested amendments to the MDP that are not recommended by Administration.
c) Receive for information Attachment 5, which contains red-lined pages for the entire MDP (based on amendments proposed in Attachment 3).
d) Amend Bylaw 24P2009 by deleting Section 4 in its entirety and substituting with “This Bylaw is effective February 1, 2010”.
e) Renumber and format the sections in the MDP (Bylaw 24P2009) required to account for the inclusion of all Council-approved amendments.
f) Give second and third reading to the proposed Bylaw 24P2009, as amended.3. CTP Amendments:
a) Adopt Administration’s Recommended Amendments to the CTP by Resolution, as proposed in Attachment 6.
b) Receive for information Attachment 7, which lists suggested amendments to the CTP that are not recommended by Administration.
c) Receive for information Attachment 8, which contains red-lined pages for the entire CTP (based on amendments proposed in Attachment 6).
d) Renumber and format the sections in the CTP required to account for the inclusion of all Council-approved amendments.4. Direct Administration to report to LPT no later than January 2010 with the terms of reference for a MDP/CTP Sustainment Committee, implementation program and an ongoing monitoring framework.
Okay. Now what about the attachments? What’s in those? Answer: a whole lot of reading that we all have to do. Here’s a summary about what attachement includes (all links are PDFs):
1. MDP Key Issues Summary
2. CTP Key Issues Summary
3. Administration Recommended Amendments to the MDP
4. List of Council-proposed MDP Amendments Not Recommended by Administration
5. Red-line Amendments of the MDP (as per Attachment 3)
6. Administration Recommended Amendments to the CTP
7. List of Council-proposed CTP Amendments Not Recommended by Administration
8. Red-line Amendments of the CTP (as per Attachment 6)
I encourage you to click on the links above and learn more about what Administration recommends including and not including. These are what will frame the discussion on Monday at Council. A discussion that WILL change the future of Calgary forever. If ever there were a time to know what your council is doing, this is it.
And we all have a lot of reading to do between now and then.
I’ll provide my comments here and to the Aldermen once I have read the documents. Please do the same.
The one thing that excites me is the 4th recommendation – the creation of a Plan It “Sustainment Committee”. The idea behind the goal of this group was laid out in my comments to council during the June public hearing. At the time I said to council, “It will have to be a living document… Personally I’m more concerned with the City’s track record of follow through on ambitious plans.” This was also the theme of the questions I was asked by Ald. McIver following my presentation. I then followed up with some more detail in a two part blog post on Alberta Venture’s Think Alberta blog the next day where I said:
The good news – or bad news as the case may be – is that the success of Plan It will fall directly on the shoulders of the City of Calgary and how the plan is implemented. Calgary City Council has done a very good job over the years looking down the road and helping set a vision for the city’s future in motion. Plan after policy after plan have been enacted, but clearly the citizens of Calgary feel unaffected for the most part by these plans and policies…
I’m glad the City is taking this seriously and I think a sustainment committee will be a great addition. After all, it is almost exactly the kind of “Citizen Response Team” my group at the first CivicCamp in April suggested was needed.
Administration has echoed mine and Ald. McIver’s concerns by stating:
Two of the issues raised by Council and stakeholders that apply to both the MDP and CTP are ongoing stakeholder engagement, and plans for implementation and monitoring.
The Draft Implementation Framework included with CPC Report M-2009-012 provided high-level actions The City will need to undertake in order to enable achievement of the Plan It Calgary goals and objectives. Some of these actions are already underway, and Administration is currently developing more detailed implementation plans. These plans will be complemented by an ongoing monitoring framework that will provide useful data to aid in growth and investment decisions. Both the implementation plans and ongoing monitoring framework will be brought forward to the Land Use Planning and Transportation (LPT) Standing Policy Committee no later than January, 2010.
Administration recognizes the critical role that external stakeholders will play in achieving the goals and objectives of Plan It Calgary. In order to facilitate effective communication between The City and stakeholders, Administration proposes the creation of a MDP/CTP Sustainment Committee. This committee would require a broader stakeholder group than the Advisory Committee for Plan It Calgary. Terms of reference for this committee will be developed in consultation with stakeholders, and will be submitted to LPT along with the implementation plans and monitoring framework by January, 2010.
That’s all for now, but I’m excited by the direction this is all heading. Time to go do some reading…
My tweet was in the paper! Wait… am I okay with that?
On Tuesday I was informed that one of my tweets from the previous day had been published in the Calgary edition of Metro Daily.
“That’s cool,” I thought. And it escaped my mind for the rest of the day.
On my way home I started thinking about some of the conversations I’ve had with Metro editor Darren Krause over the past year, as I pondered “Why that tweet?”. And slowly I began thinking about Canadian copyright law.
I’m a big proponent of the Open Data movement, but I’ve never really jumped on the ‘net neutrality’ bandwagon or the participated in discussions earlier this year and last about the proposed changes to the Canadian copyright laws. The concept never really ignited a passion in me as other technology issues have. But here I was wondering to myself if someone just stole my work.
It’s important that I note I’m not upset Metro reprinted my tweet. I probably wouldn’t be opposed to them doing it again. (Hopefully something less innocuous.) But hear me out as I chart my own journey into the world of the internet and copyright.
So, the first question I asked myself was: “Did they have a right to re-print my tweet?” I’ve often thought of Twitter as being a way of sharing information – whether it be an important link or something goofy that happened to me – with my ‘followers’. When I thought about Metro re-printing the tweet, I found I had this feeling that a communication between me and my ‘followers’ – a formal, structured relationship that comes with certain understandings – had been violated. Suddenly there are other people paying attention.
But Twitter by nature is a public forum. There is nothing stopping the casual observer from simply going to my Twitter page on a regular basis and reading what I’ve written. In fact, if one were to do this you would see much more content than any official ‘follower’ because of the limitations of Twitter’s @replies introduced a few months back. (A follower will only see an @reply I send to another follower if they themselves are following the other person. It sounds more complicated than it is, but I digress.) So the question begs, “Did Metro really do anything that the average person would not have been able to do by facilitating the stumbling across of my comment?”
I did however post my comment in full knowledge someone might stumble across it online. I also had the knowledge this had a very low likelihood of happening unless the tweet were about something specific that person was searching for. In which case I would probably welcome their attention as completely in context. This is where the idea of ‘permission’ comes in. By posting a tweet I have given my permission for people to read it in any one of these potential situations. But permission was not ‘given’ – expressly or indirectly – to Metro, or Metro readers, to read what I wrote.
This of course leads to the big question: How would someone feel if it wasn’t just a 140 character sentence Metro published? What if it was an entire article used without obtaining the author’s permission first?
Knowing Darren and many others in the print media, this is the kind of thing they would not stand for. It is the single most repugnant and offensive of thoughts to writers and editors. As a group they value their product – their writings – more than you could possibly imagine. What they write is their livelihood and it bears the kinds of protection you would place on your own job. They certainly would not have reprinted, say, a blog post I wrote. It would be sacrilegious. So why is it okay to reprint a tweet?
Do I even own the words I wrote?
I suppose I could turn to the Twitter terms of service to answer the latter question. In the post from Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, that came with the recent update to the user terms, he says in no uncertain terms, “your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter”. However the terms do say:
By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).
You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.
By my reading that means Twitter, the company, can do most anything with my content, even though I own the thought behind them. But under what terms do I allow others to view or use my tweets/writings/thoughts? This is not part of Twitter’s terms of service as near as I can find.
Twitter is often described as ‘micro-blogging’, so perhaps I can look to how I might tackle a similar issue if the information being reprinted was coming from there instead of Twitter. On my blog I have no confusion in this area at all. I have added a Creative Commons license that appears on every page of the site. If a reader clicks on it it let’s all readers know that they are welcome to share or adapt my work so long as they attribute the work to me.
So does this mean that by Metro highlighting my tweet as by “@djkelly”? Or that the Calgary Herald could reprint a blog post by saying “by DJ Kelly”? I’m not sure.
I found myself eventually wondering if my tweets and blog posts are more like a comment made at a town hall meeting by a politician being reported in the paper the next day. Certainly the politician did not expressly give permission for his words to be reprinted, but there is an understanding that once it is in the public domain it may be repeated and attributed to him or her. Good, bad or otherwise.
As you can tell, I’m just “thinking out loud” here. I don’t have any answers, just as I’m not complaining about Metro re-printing a tweet. What I’m trying to sort out is how I feel about where we are heading as a society as more and more information becomes more and more easily accessible. Who owns my thoughts? What processes should be followed to ensure what we are doing is ‘right’ or ‘moral’?
These are all important questions that need to be answered. But for now I’m going to just think about how cool it is that Metro is printing tweets. Awesome.
Please feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
PS – I purposefully did not include the text to the tweet in question because it has little bearing on my thoughts around this issue. However if you are insatiably curious like I am, here is a link to the reprinted tweet.
What the heck is Leadership Calgary?
As those of you that follow me on Twitter have no doubt wondered – or even asked me – over the last couple of months: what the heck is Leadership Calgary and why is DJ talking about it so much?
After attending a luncheon about the program, completing an application process that included writing three essays, and a lengthy interview that asked some of the toughest questions to answer I’ve ever heard, I was accepted into the program. I feel very honoured to have been accepted along with with 30 other Calgarians who make up the class of 2010.
I first heard of the program from a friend of mine, JoAnn Reynolds, in 2006 when she was taking the course. Shortly there after I started having others – such as Dani Deboice and Terry Rock – recommend to me that I should enrol. After doing some research I found that so many of the Calgarians that inspired me were graduates of Leadership Calgary. (Leadership Calgary is a program of Volunteer Calgary.)
The time wasn’t right though as I had too many volunteer projects on the go. Until this year, when I just bit the bullet and made it a priority but cutting back to just two major volunteer jobs. And so began my journey into… whatever it is that Leadership Calgary teaches.
I mention this in a tongue in cheek manner because any alumni of the course will tell you it is complicated to explain what Leadership Calgary is. At the opening three-day retreat this past weekend I asked how we describe the program to others. The answer was: thinking about thinking. A longer explanation might be: exploring the decision making process and learning the patterns that result in people making stupid decisions so we may learn from those failures. (I’m only 3 days in so I certainly don’t know these patterns yet!)
But this explanation doesn’t give much detail. So instead I was pointed to this official video that explains things better, and in more detail.
I think that sums it up well. (Although the voice actress is a little TOO earnest if you know what I mean.)
I’m looking forward to the course over the next 10 months, and learning exactly how little I know about the world around me. 
Alberta Health Services has an image problem. Again. (Still?)
I don’t know much about the current state of Alberta healthcare. There are people who are much more knowledgeable in this area than I. All I really know is what has been reported in the press. As a result I don’t feel I can comment one way or another on these two recent stories coming out of Alberta Health Services (AHS). I do however know a little something about marketing and branding. And this is not good for them or patients.
Yesterday the Calgary Herald ran the main article on the front page with this headline:
Alberta health board to close 350 beds
On the exact same morning Metro Calgary ran the main article on their front page with this headline:
AHS under fire over CEO bonus
Do you see the problem here?
On the exact same day, two publications in the same city are running their main article about you. In addition both articles are negative. AND they’re not even the same story! With this as evidence I think it is fair to say that clearly there are some major problems afoot in AHS.
I don’t think you need to be an expert marketer to read between the lines on this one and come up with what the problem is here. Or at least what the perceived problem might be.
What makes for good marketing is the same thing that makes for good business: consistency. Or, synchronicity. (As a matter of fact, good marketing is nothing more than effective communications about good product.) This is where AHS is having a breakdown. The board is handing out bonus packages while cutting back services. These two items are not in sync. They are not consistent.
And people are going to get angry because of it.
So what do I recommend?
First off I recommend asking someone other than me for the answer to our health woes. But secondly I recommend when following through on whatever great advice the first person gave you, you apply that approach to ALL areas of the organization.
AHS has tried all kinds of reorganization; obviously that is not the problem. The issue is far deeper than that. It’s more fundamental. It’s time to get deeper into the organization and start your rebrand from the inside out.
- Step one: Set some basic goals using triple bottom line expectations.
- Step two: Work with the ground level service providers to find ways for them to achieve those goals. (This approach always works better than a top down system because the ground level people will always know more detail regarding the barriers they face than the top level people.)
- Step three: Don’t be afraid to change EVERYTHING, especially the most precious and basic assumptions or institutions.
- Step four: Repeat until reporters can’t find anything bad to write about you.
Do this instead of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and AHS could be the most efficient health system in the world. The only thing stopping them, is themselves.
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