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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I attended this year’s Free Software and Opensource Software Symposium at Seneca College this year. As it was last year, it was an engaging event to meet with some major actors in the open source field.  Something didn’t set well with me this time around that perhaps didn’t perturb me quite as much last year.

It is something very dangerous about the open source community - dangerous in the sense of eroding moral legitimacy of a social movement that is foremost about improving the lives of others. I’ve commented on it before and it’s a struggle I deal with every day of my academic and professional life.

How does what I do and what I think about actively improve the lives the people who need it the most?

This is not a question that was addressed in my experience with the conference. Granted I only saw at most a third of what was on offer - but my intuition tells me this wasn’t central to the discussions being had.

When I say the “people who need it the most” I’m speaking about as inclusively as one can. I typically think of Africa and parts of Asia when I hear and say it but I don’t impose this constraint formally - the impoverished, oppressed, threatened or unsecured the world over are included.

What I heard the most of at the conference, at least with respect to non-technical considerations, were questions of conversion or recruitment, particularly within groups of which we were already members. “How do we make people like us, even more like us?” Was the question couched in various forms of address - particularly in the Teaching Open Source panels which dominated my Day One.

For me, this is the wrong question and it’s the wrong question for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it’s not one we need to answer - it’s answering itself.  Open source is here to stay and its growing,  it’s not a fledgling nascent idea that needs to be protected - it’s heavily entrenched in the industrial system and the fate of some of the largest corporations are enmeshed with the fate of open technology.

Secondly, it’s the wrong question because it’s expensive in its implications. The resources required to convince institutions of anything are generally not with the effort - especially when there’s a great many other more feasible opportunities for growth.

Thirdly, it’s the wrong question because, in my opinion, it’s pedantic and self-indulgent. The open source community is arguably the greatest well-spring of navel gazing pontification available on the internet - the very existence of my blog and others like it contributes to it. We were discussing the defense of what is, in essence, a morally defensible luxury - access to source code is not a right or a requirement; it’s a liberty afforded to us by our production capacity.  So, for me, open source community members need to work doubly hard to justify their existence in the face of other movements - there’s a finite attention span, finite resource pool and finite quantity of political capital; I will not abide a world where access to some C++ is an impediment to  Women’s Shelters.

It may not appear that would be possible at first glance but it’s entirely justifiable and necessary to question the purpose of showing up at FSOSS - of spending my nights or afternoons coding Drupal or WordPress or Symfony instead of volunteering at a shelter or writing code for software used by Doctor’s Without Borders (which uses proprietary software).

Yet none of this came up - the greater social responsibility discussion was omitted or its conclusions assumed. When explaining this to people outside the OS community the merit of such a venture seems dubious - to outsiders it doesn’t appear as intelligent, engaged people coming together to discuss their community, which it is, it instead appears as a self-congratulatory shin-dig for overwealthy nerds.

Until the community engages the globe with the same seriousness and with the cultural-integration that say, the medical community has or the legal community has - it won’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

If I were to do a talk at FSOSS - it would be centered around providing examples and motivation for the people in attendance to engage with issues that actually matter. As a former tech person, I know how difficult it is to find a place to go with these issues - one feels like a fish out of water when they step outside the tech world and suddenly nobody knows or cares about what you spend most of your life doing.

David Crow talked about designing interfaces that matter, in effect. He spoke about Microsoft Surface and the paradigm shift amongst UX people in light of the new interaction capacity of devices. The spirit of his talk was right on the money and was incredibly important but I think it went over the heads of most in attendance. Just as we must design interfaces that matter to the people who use the software we must make software that matters to the most underserved users we can identify.

Only then can software developers look a civil-engineer or trauma-surgeon in the eye and say that what we do matters to people, and only then can the collective disdain for proprietary software vendors be legitimate.

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I think it can be laid to rest any mythology we made have had about the superiority of the Canadian political process to the Americans. We’re now just like the Americans in the degree to which only a scant majority are worthy of the democracy they’re given.

While I could be hostile that every single riding I care about had the person I wanted to win lose by a margin that could’ve been superceded by a fraction of NDP votes or, more pointedly, Green. Green party voters must want Conservative victories - that is the only rational explanation for their voting pattern. I hope you enjoy the degradation of the environment in exchange for voting “for” a perennially losing party.

My main hostility, of which there is ample amounts, is directed squarely at the 42% of you out there who didn’t show up at the polls. You are a disappointment to your parents and their parents before them, you are the shame and burden of this country and you are pathetic and ignorant.

You are weak and you are what prevents Canada from improving.

I hope you are happy - I know anyone who worked hard this election to try and make a positive difference isn’t.

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Thomas Barnett and David Weinberger have a lot more in common than being things David Eaves introduced me to.  They both attack the notion of categorization.

Categorization, to a cognitive scientist, is problematic. Roughly phrased it’s the notion that the world is separated into groups in our cognition - there are many schools of thought that explain how this happens ranging from the debunked yet recurrent Classical theory to a geometric or featural model to a prototype theory and others.

Weinberger being a philosopher is probably more aware of his opposition than Barnett being a politico-military strategist but their equally vehement that categories are a byproduct of human limitation - a shorthand for reality rather than something inherent to it.

Barnett criticizes soundly the notion of thinking about war within the context of war. He cites the problematic deployment of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. A situation he dubbed “Blackhawk Down: the series.” He explains that a huge source of the crippling mishandling of coalition forces is a cultural pathology that exists within the US Department of Defence.

Barnett believes and convincingly articulates that the Pentagon has calcified into a Cold-War machine - the military-industrial complex has gained such momentum that they cannot reorganize to fight the threats it faces and instead needs to fabricate threats to rationalize their current force structure, spending and doctrine. President Eisenhower’s shadow looms ever large.

Anyone familiar with the concept of cognitive dissonance isn’t at all surprised by the conundrum the DoD faces - it’s MUCH easier to change rationalizations than it is to change behaviour.

Where does Weinberger fit? David Weinberger believes that traditional conceptualizations of taxonomy (a particular structure of categorization) are futile in a world where everything is miscellaneous. More particularly he believes that organization schemes should be dynamically applied and emergent - information itself and its organization should dictate its structure not the other way around.

Weinberger uses the example of libraries - and the accidental holdovers from the paradigm of physical books; to explain why we hold on to contrivances which were helpful and are now pathological.

Barnett believes that the US Government and by extension Western military powers have contrived an artificial separation of military operations from other operations. Particularly he emphasizes that there is a profoundly mistaken emphasis on the utility of military power. Simple, easily observable fact backs up his assertion - the most powerful military force in the history of mankind is actively threatened by men in towels with 80 year old weaponrs technology.

Barnett articulates  a need for a global system administrator force. A so-called peace waging body that would come in “after action” - that is, after the world’s Leviathan sweeps aside all amassed/conventional military enemies. This force would deliver the DImE support needed to secure permanent peaceful development. That is the Diplomacy, Information Operations, military protection and enforcement and the Economic aid to establish infrastructure.

The kind of war Barnett is talking about without saying it is termed by some fourth-generational warfare (4GW). 4GW is a theoretical notion that war has entered a new strategic phase that has its roots in the post-Westphalian international warfare. Typical examples cited are the Vietnam War, Mao’s Revolution, the Sandinista’s of Nicaragua and of course Al Qaeda and the Salafist Jihadis.

This is the notion of “skipping” typical levels of warfare to move straight to strategic aims. Without regard to tactical or operational capability 4GW combatants will go straight for the strategic jugular.

Military historians like Jeremy Black would argue that fourth-generational warfare is guilty of profoundly selective analysis of history - and they would be right. However, they would also be missing the point. Fourth-generational warfare is not meant to be an analytical framework for historical analysis - it is designed to be a system for establishing an understanding for the wars we are fighting now; not necessarily squaring them with any historical notion of progress. This is the Weinbergian miscellany clashing with the Dewey classification scheme - to conventional histories analysis comes in levels not angles.

Hammes argued that fourth-generational warfare is the strategy of targeting enemy decision making processes. The full deployment of all network capacity to disrupting and maniuplating the decisions of the enemy leaders without engaging in a conventional industrial war - which will invariably lost if fought against the United States. 4GW combatants disrupt or destroy the enemy leadership’s will to fight.

Wlliam Lind, one of the first to articulate the concept of fourth-generational warfare has criticized Hammes for assuming too much rationality from decision makers - Lind attacks the straw-man of economics by criticizing the notion of politicians “reviewing the numbers” of a conflict. He argues that fourth-generational war isn’t won by targeting the “will” of the enemy leadership, he argues, “they win by pulling the states they are fighting apart at the moral level.”

Wittgenstein would roll his eyes at such a statement. This is a distinction without a difference - particularly Hammes is speaking about a desired effect of 4GW (the extraction of the enemy) whereas Lind regresses to a rather abstract causal argument around the morality of a conflict.

This is hugely problematic for historical reasons - but I won’t get into that. A bigger problem lies at the basis of his assumptions about what influences political decision makers to leave wars and of course the nature of the combatants in 4GW.

Whereas Hammes roots his argument in the pyschological realities of will - Lind runs into the blue yonder of philosophical abstraction. Which is made more problematic by his appeal to decision theory to support his argument that rationality has no place in strategic thinking - he abuses beyond recognition the concept of bounded rationality and satisficing to support his claim.

Lind profoundly misrepresents the notion of rationality is being solely the type specified by economists - articulated first by David Hume as instrumental rationality.  Instrumental rationality forms the underpinning of utility maximization and economics.

The issue is that a Humean notion of instrumental rationality is impossible in reality - we would be paralized by the problem of standing up since we’d have to explore all possible options before choosing one; elsewise we’d be irrational under Hume’s and consequently Lind’s conditions.

Thomas Hammes and other fourth-generational theorists are arguing for a mutliagency, multidisciplinary approach to tackling the problem of our current violent conflict. Network-centric warfare of the kind David Arquilla and Jon Ronfeldt articulated is becoming ever more real.

Barnett argues that only be understanding how military conflict integrates with a broader strategic vision of global integration can the US / NATO possibly hope to win the peace.

Weinberger articulates that only be embracing the dynamic arrangement of information based on problem solving and subjective need can we possibly begin to make sense of the world around us.

Thankfully for Barnett, Hammes and even Lind - we have a body of work that integrates these notions and provides a mechanism for dynamically shifting perspectives to observe the effects of military and non-military operations.

It’s called human security.

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I quit my job in the technology world not out of boredom or disinterest in what I was doing. I love working with software, developing applications people find useful and bringing value to customers or community members through the products I produce. What I took issue with was my skills and talents were being invested in businesses whose profits benefited the richest elements of society. My bosses didn’t need my help getting and staying rich; someone half as smart with a fraction of my ambition can do that job and reap the benefits.

The Impedance Mismatch

It seems so obvious to many people that technology is fundamentally important, even essential in the struggle to make the world a better place. Ranging from alternative fuel sources to reduce carbon emissions, AIDS research to the development of communications technology to give everyone the world a voice.

However, if we were to use Collier’s definition of the bottom billion and to target solving their problems using technology, the momentum of innovation slows to a crawl. For anything resembling high-tech to get a foot hold in these places there are simply far too many requirements that need to exist.

Some social entrepreneurs seek to circumvent these limitations by adapting the technology to suit the environment - projects like the One Laptop Per Child with its XO device pursue this. They’ve built a rugged, portable, low-requirement laptop.

My issue with it is relatively simple - a huge percentage of children born in the developing world will die of diarrhea, smoke inhalation or other preventable diseases before they even get to see the shiny green and white slab of plastic.

How can you expect a 13 year-old Somali farm-girl, the eldest in her family tending a parched scrap of land to appreciate the wonder of the XO? It doesn’t spit out food or clean drinking water, it doesn’t make her crops grow or the market prosper. Literacy is pretty overrated to the starving.

This does not diminish the accomplishment of Negroponte it merely reinforces the notion that connecting what Silicon Valley does with Sierra Leone is a very difficult task.

In electrical engineering and computer science there is a term called the impedance mismatch. We have this very problem with the innovators in technology, the innovators in foreign policy and the people of the bottom-billion developing world. The technology world and the political world don’t understand each other and the solutions the technology world produces have relation only to theoretical problems.

The Infection of Centralized Information

I still haven’t found an answer that lets me stand next to AIDS researchers, agricultural scientists or civil engineers and not feel like I’m wasting people’s time.

What I have figured out is this - information technology cannot possibly hope to change Myanmar or Bolivia for the better until it changes some of the fundamental aspects of Canada or the United States; particularly in the way our political system is formed.

The political system in both Canada and the United States, and in many other countries is profoundly distorted by the capacity for message-control by policy makers. Particularly in the United States, the tightly-knit connections between federal politicians, corporate interests and the Pentagon and their stakes in media outlets results in bizarre interpetations of factual information being spread throughout the country.

Broadcast media has gotten progressively better at what they do. They’re more covert, more pervasive and ultimately more influential than ever before. The handling of politics in 1960’s television looks practically ham-handed by comparison.

Political voices have become more shrill, more extreme and less accountable. Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, who are still broadcasting; cannot hold a candle to the irrational and provocative rhetoric being wielded by people like Anne Coulter.

The media, particularly the news, used to be the sentinal against tyrrany. It was the citizen surrogate to provide information for voters to use when they elected leaders or chose to act out against them.

Instead, now, the media acts as a self-interested agent. A mercenary force of fact generation.  The pages and airwaves are filled with a homogenized, undifferentiated miasma of falsehoods, opinions, entrenched ideological rhetoric or outright bafflegab. I have never once been surprised by what I read - the analysis and conclusions are drawn almost before news occurs. The established political groups are pandered to by their preferred media source. Rational, impartial examination of fact - the universally-respectful discussion of policy options; these are mythical pipe-dreams.

Cynizens of the World Unite!

If there is one word to describe the dispositions of Canadians across country it would be “cynical”. The victory of any party is a dubious proposition. This cynicism is exacerbated by the fumbling, knock-kneed analysis by the national news media.

The cynicism is the unsurprising result of many policies which restrict the level of interaction voters have with their supposed representatives. Professional politicians have taken the word “leader” altogether too literally - they believe they establish an agenda that the country follows. With a very narrow collection of people the notion of representing the citizenry, not just your constituency has vaporized in Canada and has only started to resurface in the United States.

The media has failed us utterly - it has been cowed by Harper and leaders like him across the world. It has curried favour with the most disgusting elements of our society and decides to seek the biggest, fattest most ignorant audience upon which it can lay hands. The Globe and Mail and the National Post produce a slaw of op-eds with nary the mention of potential bias or disclosure. If Slashdot were arbiter of the news the combined efforts of the media oligarchy would bat zero in the Insightful scoring.

What is a disaffected, disenfranchised cynizen to do? How do we become citizens again?

We take back the message and we fight for our right to know.

A politician should never ever be more afraid of a reporter than a voter. When and if that happens all journalists the world over have become the mortal enemies of democracy.

Distributed Information And The Reclamation of Awareness

When examining the greatest failures of humanity in the last decade - some of the grossest and most abysmal acts it’s difficult to not notice that the level of media coverage after-the-fact is tremendously higher than before.

Anyone who owns a television set can appreciate the difference between being informed and paying attention. There’s a huge difference between a crawler and a half-hour-pseudo-news program.

There has yet to be a single catastrophe wrought by the developed world that resulted from a lack of information - they can be readily isolated to a lack of attention.  the comprehensive carpet bombing of Cambodia, the invasion and destruction of East Timor by Indonesia, the genocide Rwanda, the rapine destruction of Sudan, the unrestrained war in Somalia, the rise of international Jihadist terrorism - the list goes on and on for particular incidence.

However, the international attention-deficit-disorder extends to chronic problems - the spread of malaria, AIDS, shortage of drinking water, food, the narcotics trade.

There also exists examples of what happens when attention is paid - Bosnia, CFCs and the ozone layer, Small pox. These were not issues that stealthily resolved and announced - the impetus to act came from overwhelming public pressure on decision makers to act.

Technology promotes self-organization

Clay Shirky teaches at NYU, he has discussed the new-found capacity for disperate groups to cooperate using technology as the medium of communication. Shirky predicts that this ability for technology to enable self-organization based on self-identification will severely disrupt and undermine the authority and centrality of institutions.

The importance of this to the developing world seems pretty far off until you think about what stands between the starved, malnourished and dying and a life of work and meaningful existence - that barrier isn’t necessarily you and me; it’s potentially our classmates, co-workers - the people disengaged and uninvolved. They feel this way because they feel unimpowered.

Institutions serve as a resilient bulwark for politicians against public opinion. The media used to serve as channel controls - allowing enough to flow back and forth that progress was made.

The ediface of the long-held consensus of apathy is quickly revealing itself to be the product of orchestration and collusion. The degree to which citizens care about the world around them is higher than ever before and people, especially young tech-savvy people, are beginning to feel constricted by the confines of traditional channels.

The capacity to control the discourse is ultimately the most powerful influence in politics - if it is not in the hands of everyone it is fundamentally corrupt.

By expanding the pervasiveness of global connectivity in the developed world - increasing the bandwidth of media and information coming from the bottom billion - we increase the awareness and attention. Linus’ Law suits this well - the more eyes looking at the problem the faster solutions become available and the greater the will to act on them.

This is where it starts - this is where technology can really help the world.

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Charles Darwin taught us that not all change is good. In this case not all biological change is good. Genetic mutations occur, those that increase the chances of the mutant’s survival are called adaptations - everything else is a zoological curiosity, or in the case of humanity, a disorder or disease.

One thing that plagues psychologists and cognitive scientists among many questions, is the underpinning purposive question of the human brain. Why do we have such relatively big bags of goo in our skulls? Darwin provides a framework within which to pursue this explanation - evolutionary adaptation and natural selection.

Geoffrey Miller found that simple competitive natural selection does a poor job of explaining why, in mere evolutionary-moments our brains went tripled in size from the chimpanzee like Homo erectus brains to the contemporary Homo sapien sapien.

Robin Dunbar proffers a social selection explanation. Primates are highly social animals - an adaptation more strongly held across the genus than any other. Socialization increased rates of survival. Dunbar observed that one can predict the size and intensity of social interaction by the proportions of the brain in primates. Specifically, the closer primates become to humans the greater and more complex their social systems.

Miller said that a great deal of our adaptation occurs because sexual selection - the same force that compells Peacocks to grow such extravagant and costly tail-feathers. Creativity, Miller singles out, is an adaptation primarily of reproduction rather than survival. This points to our state of nature being artists not warriors - as comforting observation as any.

Miller also observes something quizzical. Brain size tripled between 2.5 million years ago and 200,000 years ago. Yet, in all this time, innovation was non-existent. The same stone and bone tools developed by our sloped-brow ancestors were used by our contemporaries. This occurred up to the point where our cranial accretion ceased - then and only then did innovation spark. Fire creation and control, cave painting, spears, hunting groups, nomadic tribes all happened following the emergence of our modern brains.

This perhaps, is unsurprising to any parent of a young-adult or someone who was a young-adult not so long-ago. Gerontology shows us that during periods of mental development and growth there are severe and often crippling disruptions in mental activity - mood swings, hormonal oddities and other fluctuations distort the creative process.

Anyone who has attended a high-school art showing knows this.

During adolescence, contemporary humans go through a developmental stage that refines and expands the cortical regions, particularly the frontal lobe. This region of the brain is responsible for planning, complex visualization and impulse control

Like a building undergoing renovations, this region of the brain becomes disrupted and chaotic as it matures - leading to the compulsive, risky behaviour we typically associate with our youth. It’s also why mental disease, like Manic Depression or Schizophrenia, becomes triggered in late adolscence.

This is the first same region that was being developed and expanded during our ascension to Homo sapien sapien.

So, perhaps we as a species were in our teenage years during this time. Spending our time listening to rock music and being angry at australopithecus instead of mastering flame or building housing.

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I miss you Daniel.

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What I found profoundly disgusting about the electoral process in Canada, and it seems to have become acceptable - is the belief on either/any side that the opposition does not first and foremost have the interests of Canada at heart.

Such disrespect is juvenile and intellectually stunted and it needs to stop.

No party is innocent in this respect; Harper and Dion perpetually exchange snide condescending remarks in the newspapers. This snarkiness tears the fabric of discourse and collaboration upon which the parliamentary system is founded.

I am confident that Sir MacDonald, a man famous for among other things a wickedly barbed tongue, would find the kind of invective interchange going about simply pathetically amateurish. Not only do they do it, they do it poorly - the party leaders in Canada retain the wit of an upset teenager.

Disagreement does not necessitate disrespect. I am a Liberal but under no circumstances could anyone ever get me to admit that a Conservative, by virtue of being a Conservative, has anything but the interests of the country as the primary motivation for her policy choices. Someone can be informed, rational, logically consistent, altruistic and yet still painfully irrevocably wrong.

Unfortunately for the parties in Canada, it seems that if someone disagrees with you it is because they are stupid, naive or corrupt. This is childish and cowardly - if one can’t reconcile that someone intelligent and informed can come to a contrary position, one has no place in politics - or really any intellectual pursuit.

One’s policy suppositions must rest soundly on the evidence used to develop them, not on some lentel of counterfactuals or a presupposed ideological framework.

So it is therefore difficult to introduce topics into campaign debate that are difficult to square with the attempted campaign narrative of each respective parties. As David Eaves points out, there is a gaping hole where foreign policy should be. I observed that technology has no place in the discussion, except in reference to the economy (it seems curious that something so important to all the campaign planks of all the parties gets no attention and is just presupposed to work as intended).

The Liberals cannot win with symmetric tactics - Harper can rout the painfully wooden, extremely francophone Dion in the battle for emotional connection. What Harper cannot hope to dominate is the world of reality and factual information.

Harper is drafting policy for the Canada we see on CTV; not for the real one. Basic, elementary facts, within the intellectual grasp of a child fly in the face of swaths of policy.

But here’s the tactic that will kill Harper - recognize some good ideas he has. Say loud and clear “We the Liberal party are not opposed to good ideas. The Conservatives, once in a while, have decent policy - when that happens we’ll use it - but do you want occasionally good policy? Or do you want the party that will pick the policy every single time?”

Of course, this is boil the ocean problem-solving lunacy on my part; but wouldn’t it be nice to hear SOMEBODY aside from Michael Ignatieff express an interest in picking the BEST policy options instead of slagging a party’s religiosity or haplessness?

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The web, social networks and the like are taking an unprecedented role in the current elections. Obama’s campaign was made in part by the massively successful online initiative his team generated. Marc Gendron, and others like him have made great strides in integrating the Liberal party with contemporary media.

However, using tech in a campaign isn’t enough. Technology with its ever expanding influence over everyone’s lives shouldn’t be a peripheral aspect of policy - it’s as important to the functioning of a nation as foreign policy, fiscal policy, health care etc. It affects every single one of these areas and many more.

Further, compared to many other areas, technology policy (if correctly implemented) is highly cost effective. Sadly, there are so many questions that haven’t been answered and likely won’t be during this election.

What is the government (whichever one) going to do about intellectual property? How do we protect and encourage both future and current innovators - the current law puts them at odds and the encumbants have the resources to crush invention. This cripples Canada and forces innovation to places like Taiwan and China.

What is the government going to do about our cell phone price-gouging? The oligopoly established by Bell, Rogers and Telus is verging on the criminal; the degree of collusion, price gouging and other infuriating activity is exactly the right kind of activity for government intervention in the market. The market actually bars many people for owning a mobile phone - the very same people who would benefit the most from having one.

What about the internet and net neutrality? We don’t have the same imminence of a bandwidth bottleneck that the United States is coming up against but we will sooner or later and the government needs to act now.

Our research is lagging - innovation in Canada is not growing at the rate it should. We are better than this, we’re one of the most highly educated countries in the world - there’s no good reason why we can’t be the most innovative.

What about technology in government. This has become a cliche of mine (and David Eaves) whenever we get on this topic. The Canadian government has barely caught up to 1994 in terms of interface with constituents. This needs fixing and it needs fixing yesterday.

Why am I paying to file my taxes online? I’m essentially losing a chunk of my return because the government won’t throw up a series of online forms and instead outsources to for-profit corporations. Why isn’t there an open API for this?

Why is are the precise responsibilities of any given government employee mysterious? Why can’t I know their activity for any given week? Why can’t I look up an hour-by-hour schedule of every member of parliament? The voters are their boss - every other job I’ve ever had, my boss knew my work schedule. I pay their salary - I want to know what my money is doing.

How broken is a system where the media is given privileged access to information? A privilege extended only if they play nice with the reigning party.

The Canadian government’s technology is comical - a high-school student could produce a higher quality product than many currently deployed across minitries.

The software powering the governmental directories, the national archives, the Treasury database and many more is older than many governmental employees.

Software is milk, not cats. If a month goes by and the code base hasn’t been improved something is terribly wrong.

The problem can’t be money - using higher-quality, more secure open source software instead of the calcified pathetically outmoded garbage-ware they run now is a cost-savings manuever.

Anyone who works in enterprise software can tell you that, over time, the most expensive aspect of software is support and legacy integration. Forcing employees to use ancient, unfamiliar applications with archaic interfaces is a recipe for a hefty support staff and a long legacy integration invoice.

I believe the difficulty lies in a combination of ignorance, apathy and political wisdom (like so many other things).

Your average politician is statistically likely to be a social science student and also likely to be a lawyer. Some are doctors, some are economists - very very few are engineers, scientists or software people. So their view of technology is very narrow in scope.

The same is true for the average population - techies represent a very small (but growing) percentage of the population and thus most people don’t (and shouldn’t) care too much about IPv6 deployment, fibre optic relays, net neutrality etc.

Admittedly, techies (and I include myself in this group) do a piss-poor job of making these issues relevant to people - our obsession with precision and accuracy in explanation cripples our communication. That, and we have a strong incentive to keep everyone ignorant about our domain of knowledge - just like lawyers and doctors.

So there’s a general ignorance about the ramifications of policy options - when you don’t understand the issue, the choices proffered by experts sound equivalent. Worse, the constrictive and destructive options frequently have powerful interests willing to craft the message at great expense - often making their option sound better.

Anyone in politics knows the best avenue to success is to find a parade and get in front of it. There’s no parade for technology policy - because it’s so univerally important it’s distributed across many disciplines. Unless you’re an expert it’s nearly impossible to aggregate all these different pieces into a coherent picture (and when you are an expert it’s just really hard).

So when discussion crops up regarding a national protocol for medical records that sounds like a health problem. When discussing electronic voting machines that sounds like an electoral issue. If I want to create a governmental social network that sounds like an HR problem - and so on.

Government is letting their tools define their solutions when the problem needs to dictate it. In other words, when all you’ve got is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail.

Many ministers are concerned about the cost - technology reform sounds expensive. Why does it sound expensive to them? Because when they want to find out how much something costs they get a quote from their preferred software vendors.

These vendors of course price gouge because they know the government can pay whatever price they quote. The largest software companies in Canada (aside from EA, BioWare and Ubisoft) all make software for the government - they rake in piles of tax money by over-charging for absolutely god awful software.

It’s often deliberately broken deprecated open source packages with a half-assed rebrand applied. They then of course license a support agreement so the company can be paid to fix problems they created in the first place.

The Canadian government needs a project managers office - an appointed, trans-ministerial body that handles software and technology related issues. They consult, gather requirements, draft RFPs and oversee externally and internally developed applications.

An important department in this office should be community management for open source initiatives - the default go-to resource for software development. If something needs to be made quickly or is unlikely to have a community surrounding it then and only then does the project gets outsourced to a private vendor.

Everything produced or purchased by the government must be open source - Canadians pay for it, so we should be able to get as much value for our tax-dollars as possible.

The job opportunities this creates are immense, the cost savings equally so. This also provides incentive for small software vendors to enter the market-place by providing value-add services to customers and the ability to compete alongside established players for government contracts.

By using a bounty-style system, scholarship and internship programs the government can get piles of high-quality code very cheaply.

Keeping everything open source means security flaws, bugs and other issues can be addressed quickly and integration issues will virtually disappear.

I’m not suggesting software solves all problems but software should never ever be the problem.

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