So it appears again that saying unkind things about people with good intentions is the pathway to discussion! I thank Michael for his (very reasonable) commentary on my previous vociferous post regarding Taking IT Global. I should clarify that I had very little issue with Taking IT Global as an organization, my beef was with their website, which I generously called a platform.

I recognize that Taking IT Global is attempting to accomplish something monumental, and failure to accomplish the goal of engendering action in it’s millions of users shouldn’t be used as evidence of pathology. Ultimately one need ask only if it does more harm than good; a messy, heuristic and subjective judgment to be certain.

I do not denigrate its objectives or its staff members. I do not think them lazy or ignorant or any such thing, I do not question their motives. My concern is that they, bright young people that they are, are pouring a huge amount of effort into something that will not help. Intentions do not make outcomes and TiG’s time has passed, its model obsolete.

It does good things still - Michael thoughtfully outlined some of them, and not one had to do with their website. But that is not my contention, my contention is that the opportunity cost for operating the website as it does is unacceptably high.

I think a significant underpinning epistemology here is that I do not believe in the inherent validity of institutions. They exist to serve a purpose and do not bear merit of themselves. Taking IT Global was developed in an environment where institutions were thought to be only viable avenue for change, now this is no longer true.

TiG was highly innovative, there is little reason why it can’t continue to be.

I don’t like pointing out shortcomings without offering some solutions. So here are some suggestions to TiG.

Firstly, open everything on the site.  Hand out the source code to the platform, make the authorship process of all content writ-large open to public scrutiny, commentary or *gasp* direct participation.

Currently, much the system’s prominent content is “vetted” and authored by closed organizations who are “responsible” for the issue - mostly (Canadian) governmental or government supported bodies (cf. The Climat Action Guide). This is problematic. The government is a source of a great many of the problems and allowing them access to shape the discourse has profoudnly distorting effects upon which I don’t think I need to elaborate.

Secondly, Creative Commons the whole thing. Every shred of content should be copy-left and waive as many rights as it can muster - if content authors can’t swallow this they’d best start a private blog and link in because if you want to foster discussion and interaction you’ve got to give people the right to use the information you’re presenting. No more (C) 200X TakingITGlobal!

Thirdly, deploy contemporary web technology. Even the mark-up in TiG is 9 years-old. Where’s my OpenID? OpenSocial? REST APIs? What about my OPML and other DataPortability standards? Heck even plain-vanilla RSS? If the platform were open these features could be available (hell, I’d develop some of them) - but because it’s closed because the TiG need to retain total institutional control these kinds of technical features are infeasible.

Fourthly, integrate integrate integrate. Where’s the TiG Basecamp API integration? Wikipedia integration? Google MAPS? KML files? How about a Wikipedia task-force to ensure relevant articles are maintained? How about TiG Google EARTH Overlay(s)? Facebook/OpenSocial app (framework)? Google Docs ? Twitter ? You know the names…

Finally, provide an open translation back-end for all languages. It seems odd to me that it’s not available in any of the languages of India despite it being the biggest source of traffic.  They have Romanian and Turkish but no Korean? Japanese? German? What about Pashto? Urdu? Somali? Farsi? A huge diversity of languages isdemanded of a truly global website, especially if you want to target the developing world (where only the highly-educated elite both own computers and speak English).

I’m willing to bet the answer to why TiG hasn’t done any of these things is because it can’t.  The site is stretched like a drum over its current system and there’s no room for expansion or diversification, again because everything is insitutionally C&C-ed.

As mentioned in the comments, Taking IT Global was borne of the Web 1.0 era and of a climate in civil society action that had very different laws of nature than today. My suggestion to TiG and to the many sites and organizations like it is to stop fighting against change - it’s easier on the Web 2.0 side of the fence.

I didn’t criticize Taking IT Global because I want to see it fail, it won’t fail, it’ll keep puttering along doing what it’s doing without making the kind of impact it can and should.

I wouldn’t waste anyone’s time if I didn’t think Taking IT Global’s mandate weren’t important - which is why it’s so disheartening to see it squandered in backward models and technology.

If it were my call? I would drop the old platform and switch to a customized Drupal installation (or any other modern CMS, for that matter).  While this won’t fix all the problems of Taking IT Global, it’d be a big step in the right direction and switching to open source provides them with a lot of software and a lot of good will.

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As I’ve mentioned in the past, if technology, particularly open technology is to be regarded as a social movement on the global scale to which it aspires it must be prepared to address concerns that will resonate with people all over the globe.

Having a free version of YouTube, while entertaining, doesn’t give people clean drinking water or feed them. Nor does it prevent the thousands of monthly deaths due to violence in the six conflict raging on this planet of ours.

TakingITGlobal is emblematic of the fatuous slacktivism that has run rampant across the web. TakingITGlobal, for those umfamiliar with it, is a primitive-Web 1.0 social networking system that provides a platform for “interaction” and “involvement” over “issues.” It’s unambiguously youth focused, if totally unappealing to the Facebook generation.

It plays on the notion if that one thinks happy thoughts hard enough at global issues then magically they will solve themselves through sheer force of good will. Good will does not stop the violence in Darfur, does not make crops grow and does not clean the air.

Creating inumerate layers of chatter repeats the same sedimentary bureaucracy that saddles government. Awareness is finished, people are more aware than they’ve ever been in history. I can find out about all the violence that has occurred on this planet of ours within a few days of it happening if I were so willing. Information about what is happening is not the bottleneck - it is information about direct, measurable and valid action that is totally missing TiG (or any system like it).

Obviously this is the case because that is the real problem, the real difficulty. People are starving and dying of preventable disease, we’ve got statistics up the wazoo demonstrating this - heaping up more data to prove it is useless and unhelpful, what is to be done? What information do we need to solve this?

The concern here is that tackling these issues are not well-formed problems, they’re insight problems. One cannot simply pull a lever or push a button to release the appropriate resources to feed Guinea Conarky.

Fear not fellow geeks! Technology can and must help. Firstly, the path lies in the data - not in vacuous ignorant conjecture filling up online fora. We must have ready access to relevant data and systems for integration - even for laypeople. I speak of GIS tools, statistical modelling tools and other systems. These need to be open sourced, simplified and internationalized.

Anyone with a theory should be able to test it easily and cheaply with robust, useful data-sets. At present, this kind of construction is the provinence of academics at wealthy universities to do in between hammering out theory papers.

Once we have the data and tools to analyze it we can, collectively as a community of problem solvers, explore those blind allies. We must accelerate the pace of exploration in the world of human security and development.  The climate crisis hasn’t been solved and no ivory-tower genius has bestowed upon us the perfect solution, so lets get out the spreadsheets and do it ourselves.

TakingITGlobal is precisely the wrong answer, it affirms the stereotype of amateur social involvement amongst the academic and political elite and destroys the credibility of genuine social activity. It is precisely what newspaper journalists are talking about when they reference the vacuous, insipid “me-media” that has become to many the web’s raison detre.

TiG puts lie to Jeff Jarvis and Tim O’Reilly and retracts the promise of the web as source of action, as a leverage point for effective change. It instead acts as a cognitive heat-sink, as much as TV, to absorb the impetus for real change to avoid any nasty progression.

We must demand the data! Make the tools! If the power that forged Wikipedia can bear down on fixing the myriad crises that press upon us we have a fighting chance - we can’t afford to fail.

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DropFees.ca, for anyone not submerged in the murky depths of Ontario higher-education, is a movement orchestrated by the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) to agitate for increased government subsidy of higher-learning. This is not something one could or should divine from their moniker.

The CFS rightly observes that Ontario has the lowest per-capita government support of students in Canada. This is a mishandling and profound misallocation of resources on the part of the Legislature and should be rectified. Education is the best investment one could make and given our turbulent economic times its importance to a strong economy cannot be overstated.

However, the expected reciprocal response that students want universities to enact is the proportional decrease in student tuition and ancillary fees. Their reasoning is that this would lower the barrier to entry for students otherwise unable to afford schooling.  This is profoundly mistaken and problematic, especially from the vantage point of the University of Toronto.

Universities are not exempt from the realities of the forces of supply and demand. There is a massive, historically unprecedented demand for post-secondary education, especially at a university level that overwhelmed the system. Ontario, with it’s comparatively older establishment had greater institutional enertia - prompting very young institutions like York University to mushroom into the second largest English speaking university in the country.

Lowering the barriers to entry misdiagnosis and in fact aggrivates the problem of capacity - there are tremendously more applicants than spaces. Universities are expected both to offer excellent educations to students and to expand to accommodate future cohorts - all with strictly confined budgetary constraints.

The University of Toronto has managed to establish an expectation of financial investment - in exchange it provides arguably the best undergraduate education available anywhere in Canada and certainly the most comprehensive. This comes at a steep cost that students, by virtue of attending agree to accommodate.

Dropping the fees in response to a cash infusion limits this capacity for expansion and exacerbates the REAL problem. Student fees are going up because universities can afford to charge them - if nobody could pay, the University of Toronto wouldn’t be putting classes in Convocation Hall.

Further, education at the level of a university degree is neither a right nor a privilege and one is off in some utopian delusional fantasy when they think it is. It is a luxury of the excess of our economy.  UToronto is not located in Nairobi or Jakarta precisely because of this. To suggest that we have some ordained right to access to a place like this is disgusting and irresponsible - you say that to 14 year-old AIDS-orphan in Malawi.

Until we appreciate and internalize the profound serendipity of our circumstance we’re not much more than the bratty teenagers with an over-developed sense of entitlement some of us continue to be when they step foot on campus.

Further, the University of Toronto and the kind of institution it exemplifies is a product of converging factors. One of them is a thick, and deeply rooted culture of elitism and performance. Elitism has become unnecessarily pejorative (and gendered) and the connotations have overtaken the denotation in salience. UofT is unapologetic in demanding the utmost from its students - this includes a profound investment across time, finances, emotions and labour. By diminishing the investment you diminish the culture and you transform UofT into York or Trent or Brock - insitutions with a more egalitarian culture.

Student loans are quite forgiving as is, while making them more attractive is always nice - I think it should be recognized that education is a very lucrative investment and should be treated in the same way, subject to the same risk analysis. Where the government should come into play, however, is subsidizing those programs whose research and education do not necessarily translate to financial performance; the humanities of course comes to mind. There is a social benefit not easily quantified that the province can understand but a banking institution cannot.

Education should implicitly require investment, investment usually requires debt. The favourable terms of borrowing in place and the chances of repayment are very good - $28,000 in debt-load accumulated over four years for the very significant bump in capacity-to-pay is about as good an ROI as anyone could hope for. If businesses had an equivalent to university our economy would be rocketing.

Discriminating based on capacity-to-pay is integral to a justifiable fee-restructuring. Providing subsidy for those who need it and none for those who do not is essential. Providing additional subsidy for excellence is also key and is standard practice, but I am also an advocate for the reverse - removing support for students who do not or cannot perform is essential to effective use of the limited resources at hand.

Further, providing multiple channels to prove worth beyond a high-school transcript would become ever more important. Distance learning education, like that available at Athabasca, is a very cost-effective way to deliver learning to those sufficiently motivated and invested.  Perhaps requiring an up-front deposit on distance education courses with full or substantial repayment following successful completion would solve the issues of capacity and barriers to entry while not diminishing the pressure for excellence.

Ultimately, dropfees ignores the problem of capacity and proposes a solution which would curtail its solution and constrain the discretionary powers of universities, who are still more accountable to students than the Province. Many accuse, absurdly, that universities are gouging students turning our (comparatively) paltry tuition into a profit centre - the government of Ontario has rung up a half-billion dollar deficit, is this really the institution you want holding the purse strings? Further, given the deficit - where is the subsidy money going to come from? More borrowing or cuts from other programs.

Lowering the barrier to education is not some beneficit wonderous ineffable good, it has profound implications for the quality of the education, it’s rigor, comprehensiveness and nuance. I believe university must be a meritocracy - help is given to those who earn it and withdrawn from those who do not. While students should initially be given the benefit of the doubt, which they are, it is encumbent upon them to ensure their own success.

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Today, I will argue, is the most important day that my fellow students remember as adults. 9/11, for most here, occurred somewhere in middle-school. A hazy, illformed and underinformed event whose significance wasn’t comprehended until years later.

Today is the day, finally, that we - the world - can get down to business that matters. The problems that matter - the issues and dangers that are real and aren’t fabricated by a duplicitous and unambiguously malicious government - evil is a word not misplaced.

Like many, I have a strong emotional investment in the outcome of this election. I am, at times, overcome with emotion when I hear Barack Obama speak - I am also overcome with a very different emotion every time I hear George Jr speak.

Barack Obama gives hope not merely to the United States - he brings hope to the globe, every Bush-forsaken square inch of it. Obama reminds us of the promise the United States made to the world when it assumed, largely uncontested, the position of unique super-power at the fall of the USSR.

Obama gives me great hope that the inflamed anti-Americanism that is a wound amongst Canadian’s can heal. That Canada can embrace our wayward ally once more and work hard to fix the problems that have been festering for eight unbearably long years - ignored entirely or deliberately aggravated by Bush and his cronies.

Like dental surgery it will take some painful drilling and extraction to rid ourselves of Bush and his pernicious influence - the sweeping and dramatic changes he was given license to affect will not come undone easily or unproblematically. From Iraq, Afghanistan to relations with Iran, India and Pakistan.

However, I do not wish to make hay over the eminent beneficence of Barack Obama - this man is unafraid of war. I hope that Obama, rather than regressing to late-Clinton isolationism - ignoring calls to arms from the international community, launching cruise missiles and dropping bombs in lieu of deploying troops; I hope that he instead deploys troops wisely in places that need them, where even a small modern military presence would over-awe belligerents - Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe.

I hope that Obama is careful to distinguish Republican policy from Bush policy. To alienate the other party by painting them with the Bush-brush would be catastrophic for both his political legitimacy and his policy agenda. This, amongst other reasons, is why he was picked instead of Clinton and I hope he recognizes that.

I hope he maintains his intellectual integrity and does not bow to White House advisors telling him to dumb-down his message, strip out potential ambiguity and instead reduce the thoughts of the most powerful office on the planet to mere talking-point sound-bytes.

I do not think Obama is some Presidential-Jesus as some have characterized him. He is fallible, human and at least partially ego-driven. He is, however, an astute student of history and of experts - he will surround himself with the best minds anywhere; my hope is that he will listen to them when he must.

On more somber details, I hope that the Secret Service is prepared for the most endangered President since Abraham Lincoln. Obama’s mix of policy, ethnicity and political pedigree is the cocktail for assassination. The United States cannot afford to lose this President, especially at the hands of one of their own.

Obama is a voice for progressivism - irrespective of the content of his message this is important. It sets a tone that the answers for today’s problems lie in future solutions; the belief that innovation is important and new ideas are the only things capable of tackling new problems. This is not “out with the old in with the new,” this is about recognizing what is and is not working and changing those things that do not. Something that needs to happen here in the Great Snowy North.

I am hopeful for America - while this is insufficient to redeem them for the last eight years; it is a good start.

Good luck USA - get out and vote for your future.

EDIT: For the record, I’ve predicted  291  +/- 4 ECVs (54% of voting share) for Obama since August. Hopefully I’ve underestimated!

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