Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Last night I attended a presentation by Susan Mernit (Twitter) about the Knight News Challenge, an initiative by the Knight Foundation to promote democracy and discourse through innovative digital (and social) media projects. My notes on the presentation, which I first heard of through my employer, comprise only the 4 elements that the screeners look for in filtering out the good proposals for grant consideration:

• it must be innovative, groundbreaking or new in some way. Not going to just do community journalism based on blog software. Failure is an option: Knight thinks that if half the projects don't fail, they're not trying hard enough.
• it must be an open source project, not just code, but the lessons and value of project have to be scalable and replicable. You can commercialize the project, but something needs to be documented and exportable.
• it must serve the public interest. Newspapers dying because of the web, but also because of corporitization. Knight intends to promote democratic discourse through the program. The project needs to make people more informed citizens.
• it must serve a specific geographic community. It can be a test-bed for a wider project, but the test-bed must happen in a real place, with the possibility of exporting to other places.

(Drupal came up a lot. Boris and I shared a moment.)

She cited EveryBlock multiple times, especially during my question which was to get her to talk more about the discourse promotion than the journalism aspect. I can't get excited about EveryBlock until either Vancouver, B.C. (the city in which I currently reside) or Portland, Oregon (the city I have a crush on) get included in the data sets. I understand the importance of it—that it scrapes government websites or taps into their knowledge stores and makes it presentable so that citizens can have informed discussions about important issues in their neighbourhoods—but until it comes to my neck of the woods, I can't be expected to fully resonate with it.

That speaks less to the Knight Foundation's goals than it does to EveryBlock as a specific example: I have some very vague ideas of what to propose that involve Urban Vancouver as a starting point (either as a brand or reinvigorating the sadly neglected community site or building upon its function as aggregator of Vancouver bloggers). Boris suggested a wiki page for people to collaborate, and thought to use the barcamp.org wiki as the place to do it. He suggested VancouverKnightNewsChallenge, and before he finishing talking I had created the page. Ideas don't necessarily need to get posted there: they can go on your own site or even stay private until you propose them.

What's missing in the digital sphere of Vancouver that would enhance the discussions citizens are having about the city and the region? Do we need an EveryBlock for Vancouver, or has that been done for other cities? Maybe we can do something a little different?

More TransLink mobile integration heroism from the folks at Handi Mobility here in Vancouver: Igor Faletski today officially announces something I knew unofficially-officially yesterday via Twitter: m.translink.ca as viewed in the iPhone is a web application that gives transit riders quick access to bus, SkyTrain, West Coast Express, and SeaBus information in a pleasing interface. Users of the site can bookmark not just most-used routes but individual stops along that route, and the bookmarks themselves show the next 3 scheduled buses to arrive at that stop. It's already came in handy with a couple of trips last night. No more sending text messages and waiting to receive them for information the next bus! Now I just wait as long as the Internet takes to deliver the information.

I love the nice TransLink logo icon for when you "Add to Home Screen" and the bookmarking functionality. What, I don't have to sign up for an account to do that? Neat! I like the iconography at the top, though it's too bad there's no distinctively "Vancouver" bus that one can play off of. I like the alert bar at the top, but who has seen it change on the website? Maybe the one or two times it snows we'll get a notification that SkyTrain is down again. The part of the web app I'm not feeling is landscape mode: my expectation for landscape mode, iPod app aside (and even there it bothers me) is to see the regular portrait mode screen but wider and/or bigger text. In the case of the TransLink web app, it delivers city transit maps (and miscapitalizes the name of the regional transit authority) and in PDF form. Is it just me or can I not zoom in on them? Regardless, I don't see myself using the maps all that much. Transit is more point-to-point (how do I get from GM Place to Lougheed Mall?) than trying to find myself and where I need to go on a static map. More integration, if possible, with Google Maps' directions (or Google Transit) is needed, though Apple and/or Google have some work to get that happening.

I'm looking forward to the fully-qualified app that one can download from the App store, which promises location-awareness ("show me the buses that stop near me") and getting the Buzzer blog (coming October 6th, evidently, at buzzer.translink.ca) on the iPhone through the app. Also promised, according to a post over at Techvibes, "rider-feedback", which presumably includes a panic button or the ability to tell Coast Mountain Bus Company that their operators are taking personal calls while driving. And, hopefully, point out the awesome drivers as well.

Last Sunday, in an attempt to escape some personal doldrums, I set out to New Westminster to enjoy the walk outlined by John Atkin in his book, SkyTrain Explorer: Heritage Walks From Every Station. New West holds a strong place in B.C. history, having the distinction of being British Columbia's capital city, though it doesn't hold much in my imagination, spending most of my time in Vancouver or its suburb to the East, Burnaby. I've spent far more time in Surrey than in New West, and New West has always been closer!

I followed the trail set out by Atkin except for a couple detours, both pointed out by him. I erroneously fully crossed the pedestrian bridge over the rail tracks, stopping past the point where Atkin recommended to see the back of the old CPR station, now The Keg restaurant. Heading back, onto Columbia, I wanted to see “the wonderfully illustrated neon and backlit plastic signs along Begbie and Front Streets denoting Ladies & Escorts, Mens and Licensed Premises”. Maybe I didn't look hard enough. My other detour was to take a look at Galbraith House on 8th (pictured), near the end of the walk. Though not in and of itself unwelcome, a phone call from my sister prevented me from finishing the walk in time to get back to my place in time for an appointment.

I liked walking around downtown New West, and look forward to walking the previous chapter's route, around Columbia Station. I wonder if the city will be as quiet as it was on that sunny Sunday.

This walk, more than others, drove home the sense that I am not a flâneur, someone who strolls the city in order to experience it and notice it, or at least resist the label. Things generally have to be pointed out to me, be it either my girlfriend ("hey, Richard, look at that!") or a celebrated Vancouver neighbourhood historian in a book. I neither seek out nor get a lot of resonance from exploring the city. I acknowledge that the act of noticing mundane things and documenting them fills me with a small joy every time I do it, but I'd hate for someone to make it more than it is. Lately I struggle with people attaching too much significant to regular things, in part because I feel left out from the significance-making but also in part because I don't care. I struggle with opinions held about the "city lecture set", people whom I call friends but wonder why they fuss over the history of a city which a large percentage of the residents don't even come from.

(For an interesting discussion on going from flâneurs to planners, see Grant McCracken's article on Morgan Friedman's presentation and advice on the subject. thx gordonr)

I undertook walking around predefined routes of SkyTrain stations because, one one hand, I sit at my desk too much and feel I can't participate in conversations about the city, but on the other hand, I love SkyTrain. To a guy who had train wallpaper in his room and who grew up 2 blocks away from a still-active small town train station, it's the neatest thing in the world. I don't love SkyTrain walks as much as the mode of transportation that gets me doing them. I don't love walking around unknown city blocks as much ... as much as what? It drives home for me the unanswered question "what do I love doing?" The question, part of a longstanding thread where I compare myself to others and come up short, haunts me because I surround myself with people who have figured this question out and are either doing it or seeking it out. It haunts me because if everybody has a story, then what's mine?

Deepa Ranganathan: “We liked our new [sleep] schedule the way it was. It had given us a newfound sense of control over our lives. We started each morning with an act of will that set the tone for the day. We went to work early and finished early. And if the evenings were a bit less fun than before—even a lot less fun—we also remembered how we often stayed up late into the night, zombified, both of us staring silently into our laptops. Our new routine seemed like a commitment to live a more virtuous life.” (via Sameer)

Unless the list is crazy long, like it can be for operating systems, I realized that I read software changelogs pretty closely. This site now has one, with an RSS feed. It will be a sort of commit message, listing additions and changes worth mentioning about the live site. (Can somebody remind me later on to tell you how I setup my staging environment? Yes, for a personal blog.) It will not include updates to Drupal modules run on the site unless it makes a dramatic difference. The changelog will include changes to layout or the underlying Drupal theme and addition of content sections. The first entry? That I created a changelog in the first place. You can find out which version of Drupal I'm running via the usual open secret method, though I will make a note of it when I do upgrade.