Jonathan Brun

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.

Why a white poppy should replace the red poppy on your lapel this year

This year (2011) I will have 100 white poppies, I’m in Montréal, Canada – contact me to get one. For white poppies in Vancouver, click here.

After many years of patriotically wearing a red poppy, I have stopped. Why do we wear a poppy? The Canadian Legion considers it the utmost sign of remembrance for the sacrifice of our ancestors – 37 million casualties in world war I and over 60 million killed in world war II. Did the young men, women and civilians die for our freedom or for the politicians who gallantly led them into the muds of Europe from their armchairs in state capitals?

The dead did sacrifice, often with the best of intentions, but if we are to remember something, we should remember the good instead of the bad, the living instead of the dead. Peace, not war.

I firmly believe in the power non-violence and non-cooperation, it changes history – from Gandhi to Jaurès to Schindler to King to Mandela. Do not confuse non-violence with pacification; non-cooperation is the active battle against injustice through peaceful means. The Danes saved far more jews through non-violence than many countries did through violent action. We must honour the dead by reminding ourselves the folly of war; wearing a red poppy does not accomplish this, it simply propagates our reverence for military solutions to problems. This year, I will be wearing a white poppy, in vehement support of peace.

The Canadian Legion must recognize the power of the white poppy, because it has tried to ban it, claiming it infringes on their trademark. The power of peacekeeping is evident in Canadian history, we are a country born out of negotiation and one who embraces non-violence. Without descending into a history lecture, remember that Lester Pearson had the courage to send peacekeepers, instead of arms, to the Suez Canal – and it worked.

The white poppy is not a new idea, it dates back to 1933, when the Co-operative Woman’s Guild brought about the idea of commemorating peace instead of war. In his famous poem, “Flanders Fields”,  John McCrae challenges us to take up the torch from the fallen and continue the battle with the enemy – but is the enemy the man across the mud or war itself?

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Is the quarrel to be taken up with the unknown German soldier or with the people who send the patriotic citizens to their deaths? In WWI, over a quarter million people died or were wounded on the fields of Verdun in a matter of a few days, during WWII six million taking Stalingrad, and millions more continue to perish in conflicts today. We must stop the cycle of violence. There is great injustice in the world that must be fought, and it must be fought will all our bodies and souls – but not with guns.

Only resolution brought through non-violence can be lasting, war leads to war, just as WWI led to WWII. It was only through peaceful measures of post-WWII such as the Marshall plan, mass migration, the UN and the EU that peace in Europe was finally established. War begets war, peace begets peace.

Violence across the world has been steadily declining and while the tasks ahead remain daunting, a white poppy will help us remember that we must honour and remember peace, not death. Mahatma Gandhi prophetically said, “Non-violence is a plant of slow growth. It grows imperceptibly but surely”. We must fertilize the soil upon which it grows and that is why I will be wearing a white poppy this year, I hope you join me.

How to end prostitution

Prostitution comes in various forms and it is very hard to say where it begins and where it ends. People marry for money, the rich guy gets the girl, attractive female waitresses in scant clothes; people constantly use sex, or sexual innuendo, as a way of generating income. However, the actual practice of sexual intercourse in exchange for money seems a fair definition for “prostitution”.

Last week, a superior court of Ontario struck down a series of federal laws that were designed to criminalize prostitution (Globe and Mail Article, Big Think Article). In doing so, they have opened up the doors to brothels and the legal status of sex workers. In his decision, judge Himel makes clear that the decision is based on concern for the safety of the sex workers, not the morality of the practice. The two sides brought together 12 years of studies and data and the judge unequivocally decided that the safety of women in the sex trade was better protected if the trade was done in brothels, not on the street.

My thoughts on this issue have changed somewhat. I used to be in favour of judge Himel’s view, I felt that the current criminal system pushed sex trade underground and compromised the safety of the prostitutes. By making it legal, the trade could be monitored by the government and the health and safety of the people involved would be better cared for.

However, while my views on the safety of sex workers remains the same, the immorality of the practice is a serious consideration. By permitting prostitution, we indirectly (or directly) encourage the objectification of woman and their subjugation to the desires of men. While decriminalization may be done for the safety of the workers, a society that decriminalizes prostitution implicitly says it is an acceptable profession. I think the majority of Canadians would agree it is not a moral profession, so herein lies the rub. (Scary stats here).

A perfect society would certainly be free of prostitution, if we are not working towards that, what are we working for? The question becomes, how do you eliminate or reduce prostitution? Clearly, criminalizing prostitution does not work – there is prostitution everywhere in the world and its illegality endangers the very women you are trying to help. Criminalizing the client does help; in Sweden, the Sex Purchase Law has dramatically reduced the prostitutes and clients that trawl the streets.

As with most problems, prostitution needs to be tackled from the side. The root of the problem is that when the deals are done under the table, out of view of society, bad things happen. So, why not make the entire system transparent? If the people involved in the trade, both client and supplier feel their trade is a legitimate one, they should have nothing to fear. In Sweden, when men are caught with prostitutes, their names are published on a shame list. Prostitution has dramatically dropped in the country.

People who frequent ladies of the night should not be ashamed of it. I would say that those who support legalization of prostitution should be equally in favour of listing all the names of the patrons. I have no qualms with endorsing a baker I frequent or a plumber that helps me, so people in favour of open and legal prostitution should have no issue declaring who they frequent.

We can then use the reduced enforcement costs (courts, police, etc.) to fund education programs and job placement for women. As with anything in society, it is very hard to isolate factors – why do people frequent prostitutes? Surprisingly, many do it for companionship – which indicates another failure in society and in their own relationships. So, perhaps we might offer counselling to some of the people who frequent prostitutes for companionship rather than purely sexual reasons.

Why not let judge Himel’s decision stand, but institute a law that states, “The names of all prostitutes and all clients will be published on a website managed by the government.” Who could possibly be opposed to this? It might just solve our problem and help move society towards greater equality between men and women.