Posts

Showing posts from April, 2017

Will the Conservative Party choose to fail like the US Democrats?

As a current Conservative party member I have received fundraising calls from the Conservative party.  The worst so far was from someone who started by talking about the leadership race, and I mentioned I have made a donation to my candidate.  She then spoke about how this increases the donation limit for the year : that I can donate to the candidate and to the party. She then proceeded to list the party talking points, one of the first was how the Liberal carbon tax was a tax on everything.  To be honest, I didn't hear anything else she said as it was clear that there was no possibility I would be donating to my candidate -- Michael Chong -- and a party that was apparently campaigning against the only candidate that has resonated with me so far.  Michael Chong's revenue neutral green tax shift (from income to carbon) was the policy that made me take notice of the leadership race, and to learn about other policies we agreed on. As politely as I could I hung up on her. I also s

Making a living as an author vs. off of authors.

Two articles crossed my desk today that I thought were interesting contrasts. Hackers, Amusement Parks, and Activism: Where to Start with Cory Doctorow is a review on Tor, a site for SF and fantasy readers. Cory is a science fiction author that I'm a fan of both for his fiction storytelling as well as his political views that are well grounded in science and evidence-based thinking. John Degen: On Creative Commons and the future of the sharing economy is a familiar angry rant from John Degen about how the "free culture movement" is trying to make it hard for authors to make a living. I put "free culture movement" in quotations as his (ab)use of that term wouldn't be recognized by those who are part of the movement, such as Cory Doctorow. The two have a few things in common: both have released some of their own under creative commons licenses, and both are people I've sat down and spoken with in person (not surprisingly, copyright came up -- see notes f

OSI model layered approach to CRTC policy required to get quality of service

Re: Telecom Notice of Consultation CRTC 2017-49 : Review of the competitor quality of service regime While the consultation is in the form of a series of questions, my intervention requires context. While necessary at this time, I consider the "competitor quality of service regime" to be a transition policy to deal with problems caused by the way we managed convergence in Canada.  My recent submission to the Canadian content in a digital world consultations  was focused on convergence policy. If we are to solve the underlying problems on a more permanent basis we need to adopt policy that mirrors the OSI model layered approach of the underlying digital communications technology. The digital transition involved moving from purpose-built networks to a layered approach, and our regulations should have adapted from regulating as if the underlying technology were still purpose-built. In short, this would mean: Municipal layers 1 and 2 (or rather, what is now often called layer 2.5

Next steps for the Canadiana.org platform: IIIF, JHOVE

This is a new fiscal year.  I'm excited to discuss some of our current plans, and hopefully get some feedback and help from the community. Some related Internal Projects for our 3 person DevOps team include adoption of IIIF APIs, JHOVE , and updates to associated METS application profile and schemas. A quick note about when? The Phoenix Project describes how IT Operations only do 4 things . This work falls under Internal Projects, and will be bumped by Business Projects as well as Unplanned Work. While this work may be exciting to the DevOps team, other work will take precedence.  This means that while I can say we are working on it, we can't offer any useful idea of when there will be something other people can use. International Image Interoperability Framework The name gives an impression much less than what this community is doing.  It isn't only a common way to access images, but a community that is working on common APIs and documentation for institutions like ours