Live tweeting #rebootab for Metro Calgary
Reboot Alberta 2.0 is underway! Granted so far all we’ve done is mingle and drink at the bar while watching Olympic highlights and the Canada/Slovakia hockey game.
As part of Reboot Alberta I will be live tweeting the event. As an added challenge, not only will I be tweeting for my followers and myself, but I will also be tweeting for Metro Calgary and their readers.
Last week I was approached by Metro Calgary Managing Editor Darren Krause (who you can follow on Twitter here) about my willingness to participate in a journalistic experiment for his publication. Coming out of the Manning Centre Conference on the Alberta’s Future he was looking a way to potentially integrate information about events such as that and Reboot into a format that is interesting to his readers AND allows for ongoing, in the moment, updates from the conference.
There is something very different from writing a post event review. Theoretically this will allow readers to get the feel of what the event was like in the moment. So, the idea he had – the idea we are going to try to implement – is that I will live tweet the event and Metro will publish a selection of my tweets that provide the feel of the event in their Monday edition.
This obviously provides a bit of pause for me. Not only are my tweets going out to my 1,300 followers but they are also going out to Lord knows how many Metro readers. Will this change what I write? Maybe. I guess time will tell. At the very least it provides a more serious attention to Reboot Alberta’s Chatham House rules. These rules, which Reboot operates under, state that anything you hear can be repeated, but it can only be attributed with expressed permission.
So look out what you say around me! Who knows, it may end up in the paper. Just let me know if you want your brilliance attributed.
Finally, a big thanks the Darren Krause and Metro Calgary for trying something new and different. Hopefully this experiment works and is interesting. Either way, credit is due for MSM trying to integrate a new kind of journalism. I’m looking forward to it!
Alberta’s proposed electoral boundary MAPS!
Yesterday the Alberta Electoral Boundary Commission released its interim report. You can download a full copy of it here [PDF]. But let’s face it, all you really care about is the maps section. What area do you live in now? What new constituencies have been created?!
Well, me and my mad Photoshop skillz are here to help you out.
Below are three maps I put together to help sort out the changes for you. I’ve layered the current (black) boundaries over top of the proposed new boundaries (red). Feel free to click on each of the images for a better view of the changes.
Alberta:
(Sorry, this one is big so it’s harder to see the changes without getting up close.)
Calgary:
Edmonton:
If you are looking for larger copies, I’ve uploaded them to my Flickr account. If you need still larger copies, I have those too. Just email me.
A political party that is willing to adapt!? Meet the Alberta Party
It is not very often you hear about a political party being willing to rethink all of its policies and principles. Somehow in the process of moulding themselves into representing what the majority of citizens want, these core ideals that formed the initial impetus for the creation of the party – sometimes decades old and potentially out of date or irrelevant – escape scrutiny. I believe in order to really affect change, we must all be willing to take a deep look inside ourselves to find what flaws may be holding us back. Without doing this, and examining our principles, we would really just be rearranging the deck chairs (policies) on an extremely poorly designed ship that runs the risk of sinking if it were to innocently graze an iceberg.
This is why I have to applaud the Alberta Party. After decades of near irrelevance, the party has lifted up its eyes and has publicly stated it is willing to temporarily suspend its policy document to entertain if there may be a better way.
In case you haven’t heard yet, the Alberta Party, which has been in existence since 1985, last month began having conversations with a group of political upstarts calling themselves Renew Alberta. The culmination of those discussions resulted in an announcement this past week of a “merger” between the two groups.
I know several of the Albertans involved in Renew Alberta. The one thing they share in common, is a passion to find a better path toward creating a better Alberta. While they, like the Liberals, Wildrose Alliance and Alberta NDP, believe we deserve a better government, what really sets them apart is their belief that there must be a more participatory form of democracy in our province. Their focus is not so much on what the other parties are doing, as it is on the 60% of Albertans that did not vote and those of the remaining 40% that felt their vote really didn’t matter. Engagement can be a powerful thing – and it something that the majority of Albertans obviously don’t feel.
The enthusiasm and work ethic of the Renew Alberta people is admirable. As is the vision of the Alberta Party to accept them into their fold to help determine if their policies really do connect with Albertans or if there is a way for them to course correct.
The Big Listen is what the Alberta Party is billing as the focus of this collaboration. And again, I think it is commendable that a political party is willing to let the public at large dictate what their policies should be, instead of a small group of members who may or may not represent the views of Albertans.
Will the Alberta Party be right wing or left wing at the end of The Big Listen? Who knows?! But that’s the thing that excites me. If done right and fair, the one thing we will know for sure, is that they represent the ‘average’ Albertan. If they can build a regular feedback loop into their governing structure, this could make them… well, dare I say it?, the perfect party. One that is not governed by petty politics or the whims of its caucus, leadership or members; but instead one that is directly governed by the average citizen.
Of course all this utopian talk is more than likely ‘pie in the sky’ dreaming. Let’s be realistic for a moment and not get too far ahead of ourselves. Many folks out there appear to be skipping over this step. Jane Morgan, the former executive director of the Wildrose Alliance has raised some very good questions about how this merger came to be within the structure of the Alberta Party’s constitution. Alberta Party board members have done a decent job of responding to her criticism, but at the end of the day it is the current Alberta Party membership who will have the final say. Either they will embrace this new way their party will operate in the future, or they re-trench and leave. I certainly hope it is the former, and that they, as well as their board, improve their governance structure down the road. They will have to to be able to control the beast they could potentially be releasing by putting policy decisions in the hands of the public.
A few people have also questioned the merger of these two groups: The Alberta Party previously dismissed as a ‘right-wing’ fringe party, and Renew Alberta as ‘lefties’. How could it be two groups of people, so different in make up, could come together so seamlessly to work for a better future? Well, if the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ can, in this instance, put aside their differences and come together in the ‘centre’ – which is by definition where the majority of Albertans reside on the political spectrum – then their may just be hope for intelligent discussion free of rhetoric after all.
(Another thing that excites me about this new party: the diversity. The Alberta Party stereotypically is seen as older and rural, while Renew Alberta, rightly or wrongly, is seen as younger and urban. How nice to see differing people getting along for once.)
I think the ground work for this partnership is laid out very well in the Alberta Party’s (now temporarily suspended) policy document entitled, “Reforming Alberta”.
From the introduction to the Alberta Party’s Policies and Procedures document we can see what the two groups may share in common when it says: “We demand accountability and responsibility from our elected officials and civil servants… [T]he Alberta Party has created a bottom up organization in which the power resides with the members…”
Even it’s mission statement could be seen as something the two groups might commonly share: “To protect and promote the freedoms and best interests of Albertans.” One of the tactics outlines for how the Alberta Party will fufill this mission is “increase citizen participation in democracy by improving the process.”
I for one, can’t wait to see where this new group may go with lofty goals such as these. Either way, it will certainly be a thrill to watch.
Comparing Budget 2010 to Budget 2009
Did you know you can download the ministerial business plans from Alberta.ca? With today’s Budget announcement and everything available at budget2010.alberta.ca, I thought, “I wonder if budget2009.alberta.ca looks anything alike?”
Well it turns out not only do the sites look and function the same, they have much the same information. Meaning it is VERY easy to compare one year to the next. (Open government FTW!)
As a result, here is a quick PDF comparison I just did of the Ministry of Culture and Community Spirit business plans from 2009 and 2010: Acr1649115.tmp. It makes for a quick side-by-side comparasion that shows you exactly what has changed. I may do a little more research into this, but for now, I thought I’d write a quick blog post inviting others to do the same with other departments and, with perhaps a little re-formatting, make the comparasion even easier.
I makes it very easy to see that on page 5 the vision and mission for the department have changed. There is also the addition of a “Clients and Stakeholders” section. To me however, the most interesting part is to see how the performance measures have changed. For example in 2007-08 “participation in arts activities or events by adult Albertans” was 87.4%; for 2008-09 it had gone up to 91%. In 2007-08 “Level of community volunteerism by adult Albertans” was 68.6% with a goal for 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 of 69%; for 2008-09 it had blown past it’s targets for the next 3 years and was already up to 81.4%!
See? Fun with numbers! I invite you to do the same. Go, enjoy; hold your government accountable and expose their successes and failures.
Manning Centre’s Conference on Alberta’s Future
When I first heard about the Manning Centre’s Conference on Alberta’s Future, as someone who values ANY conversation about a better path forward, I eagerly signed up. No conversation is bad conversation.
I then spent the next month being extremely excited about the prospect of the discussions this – no doubt – smart group of people was going to have. Then, about a week before the conference, we were emailed the agenda for the conference and my giddiness began to wane.
The agenda had set out something extremely prescribed. The format was to be six topics with the same order:
- Presentation by the speaker offering an assessment of Alberta’s current performance along with ideas to improve our performance (20 minutes)
- Question period with the speaker (15 minutes)
- Small group discussion led by moderators (15 minutes)
Someone please correct me if I got the times for each section slightly wrong. (Note: Normally I wouldn’t make a big deal about maybe getting these small a detail incorrect, but given the moderators singular focus on not going overtime, it seems important to have accuracy in this area. Several times he shouted for “ORDER!” and at one point refused to let a questioner ask her question because of time limitations. In response to her saying, “That’s not fair!” he seemingly with callousness said, “That’s the role of the chair. Next time come to the mic earlier.” At the end of the day he did apologize to everyone if he seemed gruff on the time issue. Agree with him or not, you can’t argue he did a great job keeping things moving forward and ending on time, despite the group’s best efforts to turn the day into solid side conversations.)
After hearing the speaker’s suggested solutions the 15-minute group discussion at your table of 8 people was focussed on answering three questions:
- Do we accept the speaker’s assessment of Alberta’s performance in this area? If not, what is our assessment?
- Do we agree with the proposed solutions and alternatives? If not, how would we alter them?
- What additional ideas, solutions, and alternatives do we think would improve Alberta’s performance in this area?
The group answers to the questions were recorded and handed in as the next speaker was introduced.
Our ambitious schedule for the topics and speakers was as follows:
- 09:00 – 09:50 Fiscal Responsibility – Mark Milke – Director of Research, Frontier Centre for Public Policy
- 10:00 – 10:50 Balanced economic growth – Michael Percy – Dean, Business School at the University of Alberta
- 11:00 – 11:50 Environmental Conservation – Marlo Raynolds – Executive Director, Pembina Institute
- 12:45 – 13:35 Democratic Participation – Peter McCormick – Professor of Political Science, University of Lethbridge
- 13:45 – 14:50 Health & Education – Peter Cowley – Director of School Performance Studies, Fraser Institute, and Nadeem Esmail – Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
- 15:00 – 15:50 Leadership on the National Stage – Monte Solberg – Former Federal Minister
Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the “unconference” model. Recently I’ve attended CivicCamp, TransitCamp (in Edmonton), CivicCamp 2, Reboot Alberta, #yegdata (in Edmonton) and Calgary Conversation 2, all of which have used the unconference model where participants are asked to ‘leave their hat at the door’ to engage as equal citizens and to set the topics of discussion themselves through a quick democratic process. Even when the format for the day is highly prescribed the participants at these events felt engaged because they were controlling the topic of conversation. This is why my giddiness began to wane after seeing the agenda prepared by the Manning Centre. We, as a participants, had no say in the topics we felt were of importance for discussion, and out of a nine and half hour day, participants were only scheduled one and a half hours of time to express their opinions. And even then, two thirds of that discussion was focussed on the speaker’s points, not the participants.
I guess the reason I was disappointed with the format boils down to this: I thought the Conference on Alberta’s Future was occurring, in the words of Nicholas Gafuik, Executive Director of the Manning Centre, “because Alberta is in a time of change and there is a need to generate ideas, proposals, and plans for shaping a more positive and inspiring future for our Province” and I didn’t feel like participants were given much of an opportunity to help achieve any of these goals. Instead the Conference was a conversation about the solutions put forward by the six speakers. Which is still valuable, it just doesn’t help achieve this inspired goal.
Please take a look at the format again: speaker talks for 20 minutes, questions for 15 minutes, followed by a 15 minute small group discussion complete with written notes, then about an hour later it’s on to another session with a different topic. That format reminds me more of school than anything else. And I’m confident very few people would argue school was a place that oriented students to come up with solutions in their classroom. School was about learning – taking the knowledge of the speaker and distilling it into your own life. This certainly is not a bad thing! As a matter of fact, it’s vital! It’s not, however, the format best oriented to “generate ideas, proposals and plans”.
I did feel this was really what I, and the other participants, got out of the Conference on Alberta’s Future too. There was a HUGE amount of learning going on. The speakers were fascinating and provided a litany of information. In some cases, the speaker was providing so much information they needed to skip forward in their notes/slides because they couldn’t even pack everything they wanted to share into 20 minutes! Personally, I learned a lot on each of these six topics this past Saturday, and for that I consider the Conference an un-mitigated success. Unconfrences may be great for coming up with solutions, but someone still needs to drop the knowledge so others may absorb it and come to their own conclusions. And right now, outside of universities, I can’t think of many other venues through which this kind of information is being shared.
My only hope is that the Manning Centre does not try to present the information contained on those sheets handed in at the end of each topic as anything other than a distillation of what the speaker talked about. To present it as consensus or policy suggestions would, in my opinion, be disingenuous. The format for the day was not conducive to that kind of an outcome.
A result of a potential mismatch in goal and format, I think can be seen in the last session of the Conference. During this session, summaries of what was written down by each group on each topic were presented. Following this, attendees were asked to vote on whether or not the summary accurately depicted the conversation had at their table. From what I saw, for the first couple summaries the majority of participants meekly put up their hands for the affirmative, almost to say “yeah, kind of, I guess so, that looks pretty accurate for the most part”. However as things went on, more participants began to realize they had no idea if the information they were being presented with was accurate or not because they were only sitting at one table – they had only participated in approximately 1/16 of the overall discussion. Each conversation was obviously different at each table, so the information on the screen that was different from their conversation just as easily could have been from another table as it could have been made up out of the blue. (The good news is the Manning Centre had previously stated they would make scans of each topic sheet available online. This will allow for verification of discussions, but it still does not make the votes meaningful.)
Another issue with these summaries goes back to what I spoke of earlier in this post: they did not reflect many of the beliefs of the participants, mainly they reflect the discussions we had about the speaker’s talk. So a statement such as “Alberta should invest in technology to help solve the democratic deficit” only means, the speaker mentioned this and we talked about its pros and cons as a potential solution; it does not mean we thought this was the best solution or that it should not be explored in favour of other potential solutions. The questions we were asked did not ask us to rank or make recommendations, instead they simply asked us to discuss the speaker’s solutions and to offer some of our own. The result of this format is that two thirds of the ideas on the summaries are the speaker’s ideas – regardless of whether the participants agreed with those ideas or not – because two thirds of the discussion was geared toward discussing those ideas.
This becomes a major issue when you consider there was only one speaker per topic – one set of solutions proposed. The summaries being highly weighted to the issues that speaker spoke of, and a casual observer can be forgiven for thinking these are the ONLY solutions being offered. This result could already be seen in the discussions being had on Twitter during the conference. When someone writes “new taxation model being explored”, it’s hard not to think the participants are suggesting a new taxation model be explored, instead of taking the statement at face value: we talked about it, no suggestion is being made. If more than one speaker had presented on each topic (something that logistically would have been impossible give the broad-range of topics being addressed) then the line would have been “taxation model A versus taxation model B being explored”. That can no longer be misinterpreted as a simple statement of fact; it is clearly a debate that will result in a suggestion.
In some cases ideas were put on the summary because “one table mentioned” it. Meaning, at best, that idea was discussed by 1/16 of the participants, and even then, they may not have reached consensus it was worth exploring let alone endorsing.
Despite the easy to misinterpret outcomes of the Conference on Alberta’s Future I am incredibly glad I attended. As I said above, we have an understanding deficit and more events like this that are focused on passing on knowledge will only make Alberta an even more well-rounded province of engaged citizens. Something we certainly could use much more off.
I pass on my congratulations to Nicholas and the entire staff at the Manning Centre for putting on an engaging and superbly run event. As I imparted to Preston Manning at the conclusion of the Conference, I hope this is not the last one the Centre does. There is much more to be explored and many more solutions to be discussed. We need more groups and individuals such as the Manning Centre and its namesake who are willing to host events to do just that.
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