london

Change London – A new initiative

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one london evening
Photo by see phar

Several acquaintances/friends of mine and I have had the opportunity to speak to a few City of London councilors and employees at various local events over the last year like AgendaCamp and SMarts London. We’re also encouraging them to attend this year’s PodCamp. I find myself usually running into Nancy Branscombe; while I don’t always agree with her (mostly about the cartoons), I know that I and several others appreciate the effort she makes to get involved in community/grassroots events.

People like Shawn Adamsson, Bill Deys, Titus Ferguson and I have all taken those opportunities to speak to Nancy, voicing our concerns for the city; some of these concerns have to do with the lack of an open data initiative for London, how the city’s engaging citizens (or rather, how it’s not), and more recently Bill Wittur has been talking about making London a “digital destination.” It looks like our concerns have been heard, because Nancy decided it would be a good idea to let engaged folks speak to some City councilors and staff. Last week we had a 90 minute meeting with several higher-ups from the City.

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Sustainable Food Initiatives to Take Note Of

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It’s been a while since I’ve found some really good initiatives that I thought London, Ontario and Canada at large should be adopting or plain old ripping off. After all, I’ve never seen a government agency claim intellectual property (IP) infringement if someone else began doing the same thing, so why shouldn’t we?! This type of stance has been brought forth by Shawn Adamsson very recently.

Food 2030

The UK government recently unveiled Food 2030 – a food strategy designed to ensure that Britons have access to high quality, sustainably farmed/grown, food that benefits both the farmer/grower and the consumer. At the same time Food 2030 should ensure that people have good jobs, a reduction in greenhouse emissions and food waste.

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Recent Changes to My Website

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With the number of changes I’ve made to my website over the last 12 months, I thought it would be a good idea to go over some of the major features.

  1. Integration of RPX. This means you can login using your Google, Yahoo!, Twitter, OpenID, Facebook or LiveJournal account and start participating in comments/discussions.
  2. The current theme/layout. This theme has a lot of hidden features. One major one I’d like to highlight is if you hover your mouse over the top-right corner of the webpage, you’ll be given options to increase/decrease the size of the text and also the ability to change from a fixed-width version of my site to a fluid-width version of my site.

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Reaching Out to ATU Local 741 & the LTC

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Earlier today, in an attempt to do something instead of simply sitting on the sidelines, I contacted both the ATU Local 741 and the LTC with an idea:

Publish your offers on your websites. That way the public is informed, the media has access to it and the “other side” can’t distort your numbers because everyone can fact-check.

Unfortunately, ATU Local 741 President Pat Hunniford has already replied to my idea basically saying that it’s not going to happen. Here is the full text:

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Unions Behaving Badly

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This post has been a long time coming. The current strike by the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 741, which drive and operate the buses for the London Transit Commission (LTC) was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Lately it has been clear that the requirement and use of unions in the developed world is no longer necessary. Indeed, unions seem to be doing far more harm than good these days. First it was the catastrophic downfall of the North American auto manufacturers (not the only cause, but a big one no doubt). Three months ago, here in Ontario, the union representing driving examiners at the DriveTest centres, which are run by a private company called Serco (clearly outsourcing it was a big mistake) went on strike and there’s no end in sight to that one.

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