Wish I could make this one. Maybe you can?

Cycling Advocacy Workshop!

Sunday April 13 - 11:00am to 4:00pm

Council Chambers, Toronto City Hall (Queen & Bay)

Learn how to improve cycling conditions in your Ward. Become a positive force of change. Learn political process and leadership. read more »

If you are a client, or a colleague, you probably have heard me talk about Bricolage — the industrial-strength content management system. If you’re a client of mine, you probably know why I talk about it (in fact, you’re probably using it every day). And, if you’re a colleague, you’ve probably wondered what the hell I was going on about. Well, I figured it’s about time that I explain why some people claim that “Bricolage is quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class, open-source application available.” read more »

“Yesterday the powerful World Association of Newspapers (WAN) issued a rather terse statement, calling on Google “to respect the rights of contentcreators” and embrace a new access protocol for search engines indexing Web sites, known as the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP).”

Excuse my ignorance here… the w-h-a-t protocol?

(Excerpt from Poynter Online.)

Still cleaning out my inbox from a couple weeks on the road (and a few hectic weeks in general!) and ran across these goodies…

The Social Entrepreneurship Summit that was held on Dec 3-4, 2007 at the Centre for Social Innovation and the MaRS Collaboration Centre has posted the event proceedings online. Sounds like they’ve received some good feedback on the event, and there’s momentum to keep it moving forward. read more »

Two exciting and not-to-be-missed events are approaching in June: Social Tech Training and MagNet.

The first — from the people behind Web of Change — is Toronto’s very first Social Tech Training at MaRS. read more »

The days that we can continue to pretend, despite all evidence to the contrary in a world of rapidly increasing wealth stratification, that mankind will anyminutenow be emancipated by Ubuntu, Wikipedia and Facebook are over.

Just getting caught up on e-mail after two weeks on the road and ran across this enjoyable essay by a friend and colleague Dmytri Kleiner. read more »

That’s right. I’m hitting the road again to bring the “Web love” to magazine folks in Vancouver. This is the second-last stop on a cross-country tour that started in Toronto, got snowed-in in Halifax, and will conclude its first circuit in Edmonton at the end of March. So far, it’s been a hell of a lot of fun — the faculty is top-notch and the participants are reporting back that they’ve embarked on new Web initiatives already. What more could one ask?

So here are the details for Vancouver:  read more »

I first heard of the Guerrillagirls and their creative culture jamming through Andrew Boyd, and learned a bit more when I found myself delivering a workshop for Greenpeace with Frida Kahlo here in Toronto. The power of their work continues to be a lace-lined and guerrilla-masked battle cry for what’s right: read more »

As any inbox warrior would tell you, there’s an easy secret to simplifying inbox mayhem: only have one inbox. As easy as that seems, there’s often a pull to set up new ones. For example, you set up a new domain, or you start working on a project “for” an organization and want to appear like you’re sending from that organization’s domain. “That’s easy,” you say! Just use personalities. For us Mail.app users on the Mac, that was easier said than done. For all of its greatness, Mail.app didn’t (to my knowledge) support personalities. That was, until today… read more »

Dear technologist,

May I have a moment of your time? If so, I would like to know if you have ever asked yourself, “What are the consequences of the advice I’m giving?” Or, let me ask, would you have the nerve to stand over the grave of a once-great social-benefit organization and say, “I did this. I am to blame.” If not, I plead with you, please keep your magic and “next big thing” in the corporate sector, or — better yet — use some of that glib approach and bravado to start your own company. Just stay away from our social-mission sector; it’s fragile enough on its own.

Just after the new year, Kim Elliot sent me a link to an interview with Michael Albert about the much-delayed re-launch of the whole Z communications family of Web sites, including Znet, Zmag, etc. The interview made my heart sink. In summary, Z communications — the 20-year-old media group with contributors like Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Edward S. Herman, Eleanor Bader, and Barbara Ehrenreich — learned the hard way that large technology projects are not easy or without significant risk.  read more »