On Voting

I'm not voting against anything. I'm voting for what I see as the best opportunity to make things better in my community and the world.

I'm not voting to have "my side" win. I'm voting for us all to come together and work out our problems, challenges and opportunities, in open collaboration.

I'm not voting to have my voice heard. I'm voting because I want all voices to be heard - including the majority who are silenced by our current systems.

I'm not voting for this election. I'm voting for the long-term.

Keeping track of government & civic events in Calgary

After a too-long absence due to a mix of holidays, sickness, life stresses and burn-out, I’ve started loading up the Calgary Democracy calendar with relevant events again, especially meetings of our municipal government.

Stay up-to-date automatically

Near the top of the calendar page, there are a couple links you can use to add the calendar to your calendar application (on your computer, smartphone, or other networked device). If you subscribe to the calendar, you’ll automatically get updates without having to go back and check the website.

For example, I use this on my smartphone, which means I just need to go to my phone’s calendar to see when the next City Council meeting is.

The City’s challenging information

The City currently posts information about upcoming “Boards, Commissions and Committees” through a fairly minimalist calendar page. They don’t provide any way to take a feed of that data so it can be auto-loaded into your calendar, or shared on other websites.

Consequently, I’m currently manually copying and pasting (and cleaning up and reformatting) the listings from that website to create calendar entries in the Calgary Democracy calendar.

The agendas and minutes for those meetings are kept on a completely separate website (actually, 2 separate websites — one for archives of pre-October 31, 2010 meetings, and one for meetings since then). Their calendar site doesn’t yet link to the agenda & minutes site, and the latter only links to the former indirectly.

Agendas are often posted only a few days before a meeting, so it’s challenging for me to update the Calgary Democracy calendar with them.

Unfortunately, the full package of information being made available for the Councillors at the meetings is not yet being made available to the public (that I can find). So, we’re still missing a lot of crucial information about what is being discussed on our behalf.

yyc data, yyc cc, Calgary, Calgary City Council, calendar, events, schedule, open data.

Why ending fluoridation of our water is a good thing

Thankfully, Calgary City Council is looking at finally ending the fluoridation of our water supply.

Why is water fluoridation inappropriate?

The state has the (controversial) right to restrict access to certain consumed items (e.g., narcotics, prescription drugs, food additives, alcohol for minors, unpasteurized milk, etc.). It should not, however, have the right to impose the consumption of anything on anyone (with the possible exception of where an individual would otherwise be “a danger to society” such as forcing anti-psychotic drugs on extremely violent mentally ill individuals).

Putting fluoride in our water is a deliberate act of forcing involuntary consumption of that fluoride onto people. Some of the proponents of fluoridation will say “you don’t have to drink the water, then”. That’s true, if a person is wealthy. That is entirely wrong for the large percentage of low-income households in Calgary, as well as the growing homeless population. Do we really want a society where the rich are the only people who get to say no to what the government wants to put in their bodies?

To use an extreme example to illustrate my point: There are people who’s health and well-being would significantly benefit from receiving antidepressants they aren’t currently getting. Should we therefore put antidepressants in the water supply to ensure they get those drugs? Of course not. So, why are there people who think it’s a good idea to put fluoride in the water to benefit the fraction of the population who might benefit from it who aren’t otherwise able to get that fluoride?

Surely, in this “modern age” we can come up with far more targeted and efficient ways of providing fluoride access to those who might benefit from it but can’t otherwise secure it of their own means?

Should we just let this “little” issue slide?

On Twitter, Ron McMahon said “Fluoridation is a dead issue Calgarians have REPEATEDLY voted to keep this.” Well, before the imposition of fluoridation, following a plebiscite a couple decades ago, the pro-fluoride lobby lost many plebiscites where Calgarians repeatedly voted to block it.

So, by the logic McMahon suggests, we should have never brought in fluoridation in the first place. That logic might be taken to imply that we should never change our minds as a society — a notion with which I respectfully disagree in the strongest possible terms.

Zac Ryan, again on Twitter, suggested that ending fluoridation isn’t worth it because “there are bigger issues to tackle.” By that measure, we should just ignore anything that isn’t a big issue. Potholes? We’ve got bigger issues. Off-leash dog parks? We’ve got bigger issues. Home break-ins? We’ve got bigger issues.

It is the job and duty of our City Council and City Administration to sweat those “smaller issues” along with the “bigger issues.” It’s not either-or.

YYCcc, fluoridation.

Data Visualization video

I watched a very cool (and relevant to local open data efforts) video on web-based data visualizations. It’s from Apple’s developer conference earlier this year and covers recent (and some experimental) web standards for doing dynamic, interactive, data visualizations, including on arbitrary shapes like maps.

Unfortunately, you have to login with a (free) Apple ID (and possibly register for a free developer account) on Apple’s Developer portal, and then get linked in to iTunes (which is free, but you need it installed and I don’t think they have a version available for open source platforms) to get access to this video. But, for data geeks — especially those interested in the possibilities of Open Data — this is probably worth it.

The license restriction on the video doesn’t seem to restrict me showing it to others on my laptop, so maybe we can get folks together for a group viewing some time (it’s about 45 minutes).

Technologies Covered

• Javascript and dynamic loading of data from XML and JSON sources.
• CSS effects (including touching on the newer animation effects).
• HTML5.
• HTML5 Canvas: Dynamic graphical drawing in HTML.
• SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics.
• Inkscape: Open source vector drawing tool (generates SVG).
• Raphaël: Javascript library for dynamic vector graphic handling.
• WebGL: Experimental dynamic 3D rendering in web code.

Getting the Video

If you are keen to see it now, and willing to jump through a bunch of hoops, here’s how you get to the video. This is all free, but a bit of a pain if you’re not already registered with Apple’s developer programs:

At every step of this, login, or create a login, if you need to:

1. Go to Apple’s Developer videos page for WWDC 2010.
2. Choose between the HD (big) or SD (small) video format, and select the appropriate “View in iTunes” link.
3. Once the “WWDC 2010 Sessions” page is open in iTunes, select the “Internet and Web” section (last one in the list)
4. The video is for “Session 509 - Creating Info Graphics with Standard Web Technologies”. Click the “Get” button to download it.
5. Once it’s done downloading, you can watch it in iTunes (it’ll probably be in the “iTunes U” section in your iTunes player), or open it with another video player.

If someone figures out an easier way to get at the video, please let me know!

#yycdata.

Don’t just vote — engage

Just getting yourself out to vote, while necessary, isn’t going to be enough to get a better city council and school boards for our city. If we are to achieve that, we all need to get out on the last few days of the campaign to engage our friends, neighbours, colleagues, etc., in getting them out to vote. The more people who vote, the greater the odds of getting a more representative result from the election.

Please tell everyone you know that you are voting (or have voted if you did the advance vote). Nothing encourages behaviour in people more than seeing others engaging in that behaviour. “Primate see, primate do.”

However, I strongly recommend against saying things like “you should vote” — nobody likes being told what they “should” do (and it often triggers a rebellious response leading to the opposite behaviour out of spite). Far more effective, in my experience, has been things like “I’m voting on Monday, have you thought about your vote?”

If that hook catches them, I then say something like “there is a website with links to all the candidate information if you want to know more about what the choices are,” and then give them the link to Calgary Democracy.

Support your candidates

If you have a candidate you really like, please try to volunteer a couple hours with their campaign over the next few days. They really need to make a big final push to get their name out as much as possible. With so many of the races being very close this year, it genuinely could make the difference in determining who wins.

Those who choose not to vote still have the right to complain

I’ll start off by saying that I’m an avid voter. Not only do I vote in every government election I can, but I’ve voted in a school board by-election, for my credit union board, and more. If I had had the chance, I would have voted before I was 18 (I’ve been politically conscious for most of my life). I can not, in any way, be considered a non-voter. Further, I actively engage people with resources intended to support their voting, have moderated candidate forums, been an election station worker, and run workshops to help people better understand the voting process.

Please keep that in mind as you read the rest of this.

I’ve often heard people say around election time “If you don’t vote, you don’t have the right to complain.” That’s wrong on more than one level.

On a basic freedom of speech principle, people have the right to complain no matter what they have or haven’t done.

There are more than just a few non-voters who see voting as an endorsement of a system they object to (I object to the current system, too, I just think that voting can help reduce some of its harm). Not voting in a system they disagree with should in no way limit their right to complain about that system and its actions and consequences. In fact, those people are often the ones with the most to say in complaint of the system.

There’s a quote on a button someone gave me years ago: “If 10 minutes every 4 years is all you put into democracy, that’s all the democracy you’re going to get.”

Voting is not democracy. Voting is a tool which can be applied in some contexts in support of certain aspects of democracy. However, democracy itself is a much, much, bigger pie. Just because someone doesn’t participate in one aspect of our society does not mean they must give up any right to participate in the rest of it.

So, to all the non-voters out there: Please keep bringing your voices to the democratic dialogue we need to be having as a society.

Who gets to decide who the “legitimate” candidates are?

There is a lot of talk online and in the media about the “front-runners” in the election. Various individuals and media are pushing for a “front-runners-only” mayoral debate.

What the gosh-darned heck (to be honest, the words I’m actually thinking are much more graphic and vile) gives anyone other than the voters at the voting booth the right to narrow the choices of the voting public?

If a candidate is on the ballot, they should be able to be a full part of every candidate forum (applicable to the office they are running for) and have fair opportunity for equal coverage in the public media. Anything less is a taking away of access from the voters and is a violation of democratic principles.

Yes, it can make things tedious and messy, but democracy is worth every single bit of effort it demands.

Yes, it is often painful to have to sit through the speeches of some of the more “interesting” candidates, but the alternative in our present setup is to shut out the diverse voices in our society from full meaningful participation. That is not democratic.

The problem is not too many candidates, or “fringe” candidates. The problem is our archaic electoral system.

Workable alternatives

Our current electoral system doesn’t provide a fair way to narrow down the selection from a field of many candidates. The way our ballots are set up (“first past the post”) really only works well if you have no more than 2 choices. The solution to the problem comes in getting rid of our current system and putting in place something that actually allows for more refined selection processes.

Some good possibilities include things like alternative balloting systems, or multiple run-offs in the lead-up to the final vote, or something like the primaries held in the U.S.

So, rather than damaging what little semblance of democracy we have in this society by cutting out candidates from full participation in the public dialogue, let’s all step up our efforts to transform the system to allow for a more refined process than the archaic single “X” on a ballot.

Polls are not an expression of democratic will

The main thing used to excuse the exclusion of candidates are the polls that have been made public. Election-time polls typically show strong leads for just a few of the candidates on a given ballot. This is then used to justify excluding the non-leaders from further attention (thereby ensuring they are eliminated from having a chance of winning).

Published polls end up pushing public opinion in favour of those already in the lead. That’s the main reason I’m opposed to polls being made public.

Some try to present the poll measurements as something we can use in place of actual votes (such as in run-offs). That is not legitimate. The only way you could have a poll that truly represented the will of all eligible voters would be to poll every eligible voter. Otherwise, you’ve always got a margin of error greater than zero.

Some argue that our voting would also not be considered legitimate on those terms because so many eligible voters don’t vote. That argument is wrong. Those who choose to not vote have a fair opportunity to participate and choose not to. They are saying “this is not important enough to me to expend any effort on, so I’ll just accept what everyone else decides.” That is still an expression of their opinion, so fulfils (although quite poorly) the requirement that their voice have an opportunity to be expressed within the democratic system.

Inching closer to democracy

I am very excited by the tangible increase in accessibility, accountability and openness in this election which is countering, at least a bit of, the traditional biases that traditionally serve to diminish our efforts at democracy. Some encouraging examples from the current election:

We have seen multiple lists of candidates in commercial media, and on advocacy group websites, reordered from biased ordering to alphabetical or random in direct response to complaints raised on Twitter.

We’ve seen ads for one candidate removed from CTV’s page listing their interviews with all the candidates, again in response to complaints on Twitter.

Due to a mix of citizen-led pressure, peer-pressure, and media awareness, we have many candidates pre-disclosing their donor lists — for the first time ever (that I’m aware of) in Calgary politics. This has made for some interesting, and sometimes quite telling, reading.

We have increased awareness of, and some tentative early actions for, accessibility for people with varying needs (such as disabilities and English as a second language). Many event organizers are becoming aware of the need to have wheelchair access. Some online videos are being subtitled for the hearing impaired and translated into other languages. There certainly remains much still to be done to ensure equal access for all, though.

We’ve had much increased — although still far from perfect — awareness of rules restricting campaign signs on public land.

We’ve had (or are having) public all-candidate forums for every ballot in the election — thanks in large part to significantly increased civic engagement with groups like (and especially) CivicCamp. We’ve got more people aware of and attending those forums thanks to the calendar on Calgary Democracy (shameless plug), increased social media “word of mouth”, and increased coverage from traditional media (increased relative to previous elections). And we’ve got more people exposed to the content of those forums through online distribution of videos, along with what seems to be more broadcast of forums on radio (thank-you CJSW) and television.

We have quite a few candidates engaging in previously unheard of levels of accessible dialogue with citizens. A significant portion I’ve seen of this has been through online tools such as Twitter, but also through what seems (at least to me) to be a higher quantity of accessible public events than usual.

It’s still far from “enough” in my view, but these are very encouraging developments and do bring us closer to democracy.

Alberta soldiers excluded from voting

The Calgary Sun reported today that many Canadian soldiers from Alberta who are stationed overseas (such as in Afghanistan) will not be able to vote in this month’s municipal elections throughout the province.

Now, those who know me know that I am no fan of the military, but I am somewhat of an extremist when it comes to including everybody in the democratic process. It is a travesty that these citizens are being left out of the process because of an inability of the various levels of government and the Canadian military to find a way to enable the soldiers to vote.

The problem stems from these factors: Typical mail delivery time for overseas military is apparently at least 5 weeks. There are just 4 weeks from nomination day until election day in our municipal elections. The Provincial legislation governing municipal elections only allows for traditional voting station balloting and “Special Ballots” which must be physical paper (not electronic), but which can be mailed or otherwise transported from outside the province.

In discussions on Twitter today, we talked about what I consider to be three very doable possibilities:

1. Provide “Special Ballots” (that’s the legal term under Alberta Provincial election regulations) that allow for candidate names to be written in by the voter. A supply of these fill-in-the-name ballots could be made available to the remote military operations (with various authentication measures) and, with the cooperation of the military, could be filled out by the voters and rush-delivered back to Canada for inclusion in the election day counting.
2. Change the provincial legislation to make a special exception for overseas military operations to allow for electronic voting. This would require collaboration (and legal wrangling) between the Province and the military, as well as imposing a blanket policy to include this voting method for all Alberta municipalities (who currently have some leeway in defining their own paper balloting procedures).
3. Provision for establishing remote special polling stations at military bases overseas. From a municipal elections offices stand-point, this would not require much variation from existing procedures for setting up special polling stations at hospitals and such. The big difference would be in allowing for remote reporting of results, to be verified by the later delivery of the actual ballots. This, like the previous option, would require some coordination with military officials.

So, 3 very viable options to address this failure of democracy. None of which can feasibly (or legally, without unprecedented rapid intervention by probably at least 2 levels of our governments) be done in time for this election.

Here’s what I want Albertans to do: Call, and write to, your MLA telling them you want them to ensure that Alberta soldiers who are stationed overseas are never again excluded from the democratic process at any level of our governments. This afternoon I telephoned my MLA’s office, and then sent a more detailed email to him (and Cc’d the four in-Legislature party leaders).

Someone on Twitter asked about trying to lobby the federal Conservative government to improve on the 5+ weeks delivery time so that the soldiers would be able to just use the mail-in ballots that other citizens can use. That would be great, but I don’t see it as realistic. It would require a radical shift in thinking on the part of the feds toward actually supporting our troops instead of just spouting patriotic platitudes.

Politicians threaten public health

This year, I have been sick twice with bugs presumably caught from shaking hands with politicians (I won’t go into the gory details, but there is a high likelihood of the source, given my hand-shaking activities in the days preceding the development of symptoms). I’ve also heard that a number of candidates in the current election have come down with illness, too.

So, I’m putting a call-out to politicians, political hacks like myself, and the public at large, to try to practice safer politicking. Let’s try to reduce the social pressure to always shake hands and instead accept alternatives that are less likely to spread contagion. A couple I can think of are the “fist-bump” and the Japanese-inspired head-nod.

This is going to need to be led by those of us not running for office since a politician who won’t shake hands in the current social environment could be seen negatively — potentially hurting their campaign. It’s up to us to offer a head-nod or fist for bumping to any politicians we meet on the campaign trail, instead of the usual proffering of a hand to be shaken. The politicians, in turn, can be encouraged to thank the hand-shake-avoiding person for taking public health into consideration.

That doesn’t leave the politicians without responsibility — you can be more pro-active in applying hand-sanitizer, washing your hands frequently, or other measures at your disposal. Braver politicians might also consider being not quite so quick to offer a hand-shake — leaving an opportunity for safer approaches.

(A special note of thanks to candidate Gian-Carlo Carra for taking the initiative to offer me a fist-bump instead of hand-shake at a recent political event.)

Together, we can all curtail the spread of biological contagion!