Visualizing change

Friends Ben Banky and Linda Rae pointed me to a web site with amazing panoramas of Vancouver’s changing urban landscape, 1978 to 2003. It’s a terrific example of how somewhat abstract issues like urban planning can be given an immediate and apprehensible...

A quick view of e-consultation

I just came across a very succinct take on the advantages of online consultation. It’s from a 2003 paper Beyond Civil Society: Public Engagement Alternatives for Canadian Trade Policy (PDF) by Josh Lerner. Here’s how he summarizes the case for...

Is podcasting the death of discourse?

Tod Maffin sees podcasting as a way of letting people create “vertical” audio feeds; instead of listening to general interest radio shows like As It Happens, listeners can create their own personal streams of audio, based on their own particular interests. This is just the kind of scenario that makes Cass Sunstein worry about the future of democratic discourse.

Wiki-love

…but the joy of Wiki is that I got to fix the misleading instruction myself, right away.

Down for maintenance

Kudos to the team at WordPress for their foolproof scheme for backing up WordPress databases before upgrading. Did I say foolproof? Let me be the fool to take that back. If you’re missing all the juicy e-engagement news that’s usually here — not to...