Jonathan Brun

Racial data mapping is it good or bad?

In the states, they collect data on the racial make-up of the society and where they live. The image above is from the New York Times info-graphic based on US Census data, and each point represent 500 people. I am curious to know what you think of making this data available. My first question, is why don’t we collect this data in Canada?

Secondly, though I am a proponent that more information allows us to make better decisions, sometimes more information can hurt us or actually hurt a system. For example, to take a banal example, Facebook actively prohibits you from knowing who is looking at your profile. My guess is that they feel that were you to have this information, people’s relationships to each other would be negatively impacted – I tend to agree.

My question is, does making racial make-up publicly available (which is different from collecting it) help citizens. Or does, it further promote ghettoization of races into different neighbourhoods? I am not sure. Of course, immigrants naturally gravitate to specific neighbourhoods where they might have family and friends, but by making this information even more available, are we not encouraging this behaviour even more?

And, should we be making decisions based on race? Arguably, having this information allows the US to say “Blacks have less access to high quality schools” and therefore put in place programs, but should the question not be “People of a certain income distribution have less access to high quality schools”. What value is there in differentiating people by race? There are of course negatives – big ones.

While I realize that the data in the US is per 500 people, it still seems dangerous. Clearly identifying people or groups by race (or religion) can lead to very bad things. Whether it is Hutu/Tutsis or Muslim/Jewish or any other government-run categorization of people based on race or religion, there are downsides that potentially outweigh any upsides.

All in all, I think this is an interesting case of open-data and its merits. Should we collect this data? If so, should it be made public?

4 free business ideas to start 2011 off

Here are 4 crazy ideas, let me know what you think.

Membership for restaurants

Restaurants have cash flow problems, patrons often hesitate to go out because of cost. How about a membership (or time-share) system for restaurants. You create a subscription for restaurants where you pay a monthly fee and get x number of meals (table d’hôte – fixed meny). This allows for restaurants to improve cash-flow and for patrons to go more often. There are supper clubs for hard-core foodies, bit this would be for the normal folk.

Justify

Government, like many large organizations, are wasteful. How about we create a website to list the budgets of different government institutions and ask people to vote if they think the budget is worth it. Each institution should have to justify itself in relation to its budget, purpose and impact. As anarchists say, we should constantly question why an institution with power exists and if it no longer lives up to its requests, the institution should be changed or scrapped. Right now, budgets are hard to visualize. Where and why tax payers money goes is a mystery to even the most hardened government official. With this website, the people coulees vote on whether or not they agree with the budget in proportion to the justification.

TED Talk of the Week

When TED started out, they put out 1-3 talks a week, now, there is close to 1 a day. Sadly, I am having a hard time keeping up. Concurrent to the increase in talks, there has been a decrease in consistency. You still have some amazing gems that rock your world, but many talks are now average. What if we set-up a very simple website that allowed people to vote on their favourite talk of the week and propose a winner. This would allow some filtering and perhaps make the real gems stand out.

Contests Aggregator

There is tons of free stuff out there to be had. Local papers often offer movie premiere tickets, raffles give away gift cards and other contests offer innumerable items. Many people, sometimes elderly, spend their time combing through the papers, applying and winning these items. How about we build a simple aggregator for contests for free trips, movie tickets and other items commonly offered by newspapers and promo companies are offered. The site would be membership based with a 15 day trial period.

The next quiet revolution – how Wikileaks, Open-Data and Citizen expectations will change the world

Things change quickly. Prior to the 1960s, Quebec was run by Maurice Duplessis and the Catholic Church. Upon his death in 1960, a radical change in government took place as power over health care, education, and much of Quebec society, perviously held by the Catholic Church, was ripped away and given to a democratically elected government. This non-violent revolution took place in the span of one decade and lay the foundation for today’s society. Just as that revolution saw the power move from one shadow government, the Catholic Church, to a more representative government, today’s shift transfers power from the hidden parts of our government back to the people.

Western governments are crippled with debt, which simply means they are trying to do too much with too little. You can argue their management is inefficient, the systems are too old or they are not competent – either way, the people are tired of it and are demanding change. Citizens live in a connected, digitized world with email, Facebook, and other amazing tools. When citizens, especially young ones, arrive at a government website, a hospital or a public school, they fail to understand how they are run so inefficiently. Of course, these institutions have inherited decades of legacy technology and practices, but that is still not a satisfactory answer. The people have expectations and governments are failing to live up to them.

Three major pressures are coming down on governments around the wold – Citizen expectations, Open-Data and Wikileaks.

Citizen expectations are born out of their daily lives. They communicate through email, Facebook and Twitter, see photos and have access to amazing tools. They consequently expect governments to rapidly embrace these same tools to improve the standard of living and better deliver existing services. However, governments are often burdened with so much responsibility they cannot easily pivot and change according to new technology. It is thus important for governments to begin offering the raw data so that third parties – citizen’s, non-profits and business can help deliver services to society. This raw data feed is a new trend that is rapidly growing into the global Open-Data movement.

The Open-Data movement, of which I am part, requests that governments offer their information in a format that can be reused and turned into practical tools. Advocates of open-data want governments to open up their databases of information so that citizens can peer inside, see problems and help fix them. Citizens want governments to embrace crowd-sourcing, leverage experts in their communities and be more efficient. While many governments resist, we should remember the cries of outrage when parliament was first required to publish the Hansard, it is now consider obvious that parliament would act in a transparent manner for all citizens to see.

The third force acting on governments today is fear, fear of Wikileaks. Wikileaks illegally takes information from governments (and corporations) and exposes it for all the world to see. Even in democratic countries, governments have little experience with full and complete transparency. In many ways, the elected government is a superficial level of a shadow government which runs continuously through election cycles and whose power is out of sight of most citizens. It manages the society through meetings, diplomacy, statistics and more. In fact, Assange and Wikileaks want to pull the structure of secrecy out from underneath government bureaucracies. By removing the secrecy of their communication, Wikileaks forces them to either revert to secrecy, which slows down their operations, or open-up, which forces them to act in a moral and appropriate way. The best summary of Wikileaks’ motivation can be found here.

The traditional, semi-closed, hierarchical bureaucratic government institution has served well for over 40 years, but it is time to change. Citizen expectations, Open-Data and Wikileaks will change it by increasing transparency, efficiency and fundamentally making it more representative of the citizenship. Make no qualms about it, society is undergoing a revolution, but a quiet one. The power structure we have now will radically change as citizens and organizations push for honesty through transparency.

Isolation in a modern world

Study after study demonstrate the importance of community to your personal health (TED talk). When you live amongst family and friends, you live longer and better. However, our modern society has slowly lured us away from community – suburbs box us in and make us drive, promising jobs pull us to new cities, and the glamour of the runway makes the grass look greener in New York, Paris or elsewhere. With our international lives, moving from one place to another, we sacrifice health in the name of money. To comfort ourselves in new places, we turn to familiar faces. In some ways, we have replaced common human faces with common corporate ones. When I lived in Beijing, I was happy to eat at MacDonald’s or Starbuck’s, just for the sake of comfort and familiarity – they were like family members.

But do not confuse the friendly neighbourhood corporation for your friend, in fact, you probably don’t really want to get to know them. The Harvard Business review points out that we prefer the ATM to the teller, the online shop to the physical one, and self-service stations to full service ones. We like the image and experience of the Starbuck’s, but not the people working there. We just don’t want to be touched, we want our bubble to stay inflated.

Slavok Zizek, the crazy european intellectual made a fascinating point during a recent interview on Al Jazeera English. He said, and I am paraphrasing, that what we want today is “decaffeinated people”. By that, he means that our society is full of decaffeinated products – decaf coffee, non-alcoholic beer, fat-free cake and so on. We remove the poison from the things we love to make them more edible. Similarly, we are interested in our fellow humans in only so much as we are interested in top most layer of their personality, free of any darkness, unpleasantness or ambiguity.

It is easier than ever to move through life without interaction with your fellow citizens. With a bit of money, you can easily detach yourself from your local community. In our increasingly international economy, people fly and move from one city to another, with scarcely a second thought. I remember, when I worked in Pisa, Italy for a summer one of my coworkers, a 40-year-old man made a 2 hour commute every day to work. I asked him, “Why don’t you move closer to work?”. His response was that in Italy, you simply did not move. He grew up in his village and that is where he lived, he knew the people, his family, the stones and the buildings – his natal village and him were one. Despite having travelled the world, I too have trouble seeing myself living somewhere other than Montreal.

Of course the problems above are mainly tied to the wealthy and the very poor – those who flee their natal villages for the slums of Beijing or Mumbai and the rich who bounce from Hong Kong to Paris. Wealth allows you to distance yourself from people and problems. You can become isolated as you have the ability to pay people to do things for you, things that are fundamental to being human – cooking, farming, taking care of children. Of course, it is not rocket science to see this type of life becomes very void, very fast. To die alone is no fun and you rarely hear of people taking their retirement to spend more time with their possessions. People are meant to live with people, for better or worse. We are messy animals who bark and fight and quiver, but we are social ones and the sooner we realize this, the happier we will be.

Join a club, volunteer, or heck, even join an online community.

Resto-Net.ca exposes health inspections in Montreal

Open-Data is dear to my heart, since July 2010 I have been working at Montreal Ouvert to bring an open-data policy to the city. Open-data basically means that the government (in this case Montreal) publishes its information in an open, accessible and legal format that allows for re-use.

To show our fellow citizens the potential power of open-data, I convinced the amazing Jeff Wallace to build Resto-Net.ca. The site that takes the health inspections, currently available on the city website, and presents them in an easier to use format – along with some great analytics prepared by James McKinney. So, what is missing? A lot. The city should be doing the following:

1. Publish the information in a machine readable format
2. Create an API to get real-time updates of health inspections
3. Publish warnings, inspections and other information – not just fines (which is what they currently do).

On November 11th, 2010, CTV News is airing a special report on health inspections in the city of Montreal and yours truly will be featured. Tune in at noon or 6PM.

To give you an idea of the fines our there, take a look at this chart: