the internet will save us all

Here are a couple of interviews on open-source culture that I did last spring. They’re dense but really quite interesting: portraits of virtual conventions taking on real-life avatars, if you will. Maybe the internet can save the world.

The first is loosely about open-source publishing, and is posted on Maisonneuve‘s website. The second is about using the internet to beef up municipal democracy. It was compiled for the Urban Ecology Centre‘s 2009 Citizen Summit, and isn’t available online, so I had to paste the whole thing here. Longest entry ever.

Remixing The Book World
Christine Prefontaine breaks publishing boundaries.

HAVING SPENT YEARS WORKING in communications for international development projects, Christine Prefontaine had long suspected that there was more to be gained than lost from sharing ideas, or even from having them stolen. Not only did sharing seem to solve problems more quickly, but it also raised the profile of the idea’s originator. And it wasn’t ideas that ensured success, she reasoned, but the ability to come up with them—something nobody could steal.

After more than a decade working in the U.S. and pondering how open-source technologies and other forms of “open culture” might affect community, research, and personal success, Prefontaine returned to Montreal last year to find many of her thoughts had become established practice. Volunteers were making free internet increasingly available, freelance workers were sharing space and collaborating, and a local project called LibriVox had created the largest audio-library in the world, entirely drawn from the public domain and available for free.

Without missing a beat, Prefontaine launched a project of her own, Artefatica, which will publish openly-licensed books…Keep Reading

More of Christine’s thoughts and ideas are posted here; the work of Michael, below, is compiled here.

Open-Sourcing Democracy
Imagine a government that wanted you involved.

BACK IN THE EARLY 2000s, when the open-source software models that would come to define Web 2.0 were still incubating, a similar revolution was gestating in hardware: wi-fi devices allowing people to use the public spectrum of wireless airspace became cheap enough that consumers could buy them, tinker around, and experiment sharing internet connections with friends, neighbours, and communities.

At the time, Michael Lenczner was one of a few intrepid pioneers intent on bringing open-source internet access to the city, one hotspot at a time. This month, his collaborative volunteer-run start-up Ile Sans Fil set up its 150th free internet zone in this Montreal and passed 100,000 users. Not only that, but it did it using software created by its members – software which has been used to spawn similar projects in 40 cities across four continents.

A home-grown Web 2.0 success story? Maybe, but Lenczner thinks the city’s “open culture” movement has barely begun. Email, website hosting, and the “world’s largest library” are shaping the evolution of this city; when will Montrealers step up to make sure it evolves in the public interest?

Sarah Colgrove: What are some of the possibilities for open culture in this city?

Michael Lenczner: We can be inspired by the open source movement – by accessibility and transparency and participation – to include not only specific groups of people into Montreal life and politics, but to create the widest participation possible. We can do it now because of internet technologies, and there are some successes coming out of this city that embody these ideals of openness and participation.

Citizens could get together and set an agenda for the role of the internet in Montreal. There could be a public internet infrastructure, to make sure that people aren’t left behind, that businesses get the services that they want, and that Montreal can attract tourists. There could be a public agenda involving state, community, and private projects, instead of everything being relegated to the private sphere and federal laws, with only two major service providers competing for contracts.

There is also the possibility to create openness and participation in areas where we could not before. Another project I’ve been working on is taking the federal hansard – the record of what happened in the Canadian parliament every day – and making them easy to access. There’s a record that’s published now, but you can’t search it, you can’t find out how your MP voted, and it’s quite inaccessible, so our project is to take it and make it more accessible to Canadians. The same thing needs to happen for municipal politics.

SC: How exactly do you see technology making participation in Montreal politics more accessible?

ML: Do you know how to find out how your city councilor votes? Why not? Well, it’s almost impossible to find. But what if you could put your email address on a list on the city’s website and get updates about the topics that interest you and the activities of your representative? If you’re interested a bill in the U.S., there are groups doing projects that will send you an update every time the bill gets form one level to the next. Why not here?

For example, right now the city of Montreal publishes online where there was soil contamination. Say you are interested in contamination because you want to make sure that your neighbourhood is cleaned up and that no more pollution enters it. Information is on the internet, but it’s hard to find and inaccessible to read if you have any visual disabilities. The language is not designed to be read by a layperson at all, and you can’t ask the website to track how a situation is progressing or to search an area for you.

At every point it’s designed to keep people away instead of designed for participation. If the information were accessible, you could have different kinds of people collaborating on solutions instead of it only being the responsibility of one department.

SC: How could this kind of accessibility be applied to other aspects of city life?

ML: It would be great to bring together information from the ecoquartiers, the City, and other citizen groups. You could create a system so that if you are interested in the environment, you could look up an area and find out what environmental groups, the City, and businesses are planning for that area, and get involved.

Or, for example, there’s a project where someone is taking info from the city of Montreal website that is fairly accessible and turning it into an iPhone application, so that if you want to know what rink you can play on, instead of consulting a pdf, you can find it as easily as you can find the weather. It’s a good idea: the state of the swimming pools and community gardens should be a transparent system where information is communicated as it occurs.

wait, the super-rich?

Here’s something that I just wrote for Maisonneuve‘s website. I thought I’d review Ralph Nader‘s new novel “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us!”, but it turned out that pondering how to judge such a book was more interesting than actually judging. It’s more an essay than a review.

For the record, though, Super-Rich is a not-bad read.  It’s far from perfect and way too long, but the quirks are endearing and there’s real momentum in its pages. I was actually tickled by the first heap of chapters, and pleasantly surprised overall.

Is Ralph Nader Antidemocratic?
The tireless advocate’s new novel is called “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!” Has Nader abandoned activism for enlightened dictatorship?

BRIGHT YELLOW, 733 PAGES long, and entirely made up, Ralph Nader’s new book is not his usual fare. Four decades in the public eye have involved the high-profile activist and consumer-rights advocate in over two dozen publishing ventures, but never fiction. That wasn’t, however, why the response at the Canadian stop on his autumn book tour was ambivalent, even mixed. Nor was it because members of the Economic Club of Canada, which hosted the swanky Toronto luncheon where he spoke, are particularly conservative. When Nader’s lecture ended and we turned our attention to the entrees, I asked the suit on my right what he thought. “It’s antidemocratic,” he huffed.

The novel is called “Only The Super-Rich Can Save Us!” The wry quotation marks and exclamation point are included in the title, but they do little to temper its controversial impact. No one at my table had yet read the book, and everyone thought Nader was a great guy, but some of us were uneasy. People listen to Nader because he has spent his life empowering average Americans against the super-powerful and super-rich; what was this?

In plot, “Super-Rich” is a G-rated political thriller…Keep Reading

a softer world

I wrote this a while back for This Magazine. It’s a write-up of a webcomic, one I have since bookmarked because of its talent for catching at something in my chest. And in only three panels!

The strip now appears in The Guardian. It’s writer, Joey, lives in Toronto, though he’s currently touring the west coast with a compilation of cover letters he recently published. When we spoke, he gave me an older book of short stories, some of which have been adapted for other publications. They read kind of like children’s science fiction or horror writing, but without safety padding at the edges. They’re more satisfying that way.

Hard Truths In ‘A Softer World’

“STRIPS HAVE THAT SAMENESS of rhythm that haikus have,” observed Canadian cartoonist Seth. He was talking about Peanuts, but he might well have extended his comment to A Softer World, a webcomic that artfully positions bits of text over three panels of photographs to tell larger stories than 20-odd words typically allow.

With no consistent characters and virtually no dialogue, A Softer World is held together by its whimsical photographs and halting narratives, the latter a result of an attention to line breaks and spacing typically characteristic of poetry. The other common thread is the strip’s few pervasive themes: escapism, hope, sexual deviation and—as writer Joey Comeau puts it—people doing terrible things.

“It’s trying to express something that you never…” Keep reading

active listener

My most recent article in This Magazine is a memorial-type piece about Len Dobbin, a central figure in Montreal’s jazz scene. I never met Len and I wasn’t aware of his legacy until this summer, when he died and I started contacting his friends and colleagues for this assignment. He was a remarkable guy in a lot of ways, perhaps most importantly – for the jazz scene, at least – in that he was in love his whole adult life, and propelled by that energy. “He had jazz in his heart,” remembered friend and venue-owner Joel Giberovitch. “It was stronger than him.”

But then again, lots of people love jazz. What’s striking about Len is that as a non-musician – as a listener – his love had such an impact.

Remembering Len Dobbin, Montreal’s Most Important Jazz Listener

IN EARLY FALL OF 1950, Len Dobbin stepped out of a listening booth on Rue Ste-Catherine in Montreal to find himself confronted by five New York jazz enthusiasts seeking potential founders for a satellite jazz appreciation society. Only 15 years old at the time, Dobbin had never met enough fans to think the project would succeed, but he agreed to give it a shot. As it turned out, there was enough interest in the city to sustain the club for almost a decade, but, more importantly for Montreal, the experience was enough to get Dobbin hooked indefinitely.

He spent the next six decades as a self-described “friend to jazz,” though his his tireless enthusiasm as a journalist, photographer, promoter, researcher, and fan—almost entirely without pay—suggests an unusually demanding definition… Keep reading

He spent the next six decades as a self-described “friend to jazz,” though his

ponzi schemed here, too

My feature in Maisonneuve is now free online. It’s a history piece with contemporary resonance: the Canadian story of Charles Ponzi. Did you know that before he was a famous con artist, Ponzi, of the eponymous scheme, spent some formative years in Montreal? It’s true!

At the turn of the century, Montreal was an anglo-dominated city, and Canada’s financial core. It was also where our young Italian immigrant landed his first decent job, closely followed by his first jail sentence. My friend Joe drove me out to Laval to look for the prison one drizzly, pre-spring afternoon. Its soaring stone walls are no longer in use, but the structure is still formidably and resolutely there.

Pure Laine Ponzi
The Quebec connection that turned Charles Ponzi into history’s most notorious scam artist.

IN 1907 CHARLES BIANCHI stepped off a train at Montreal’s Bonaventure station. He had spent the previous four years in the North-Eastern US, working the sorts of jobs an Italian immigrant could get while mastering English. With no luggage and only a dollar in his pocket, it’s not hard to imagine he was desperate.

By his own account, Bianchi walked two blocks from the station to the city’s financial district, where he spotted an Italian bank and demanded an interview with its owner, Louis Zarossi. Impressed that he had been tricked into thinking Bianchi an important man, Zarossi hired him on the spot. Over the following months, Bianchi worked his way up from clerk to bank manager.

Banco Zarossi proved an unusual company. It offered its immigrant clientele up to triple the going interest rate; a bit… Keep reading

If you reach the end of the article and want to read even more, try Zuckoff’s meticulous, digestible biography; Ponzi’ s own is quite hard to get a hold of.

pop montreal

Pop Montreal ended last night. I didn’t see an awful lot, but I’m certain that tUnE-YaRdS at the Musée d’Art Contemporain was one of the best things ever, never mind at the festival. It’s unfortunate that the back-up musician/dancer/projectionist troupe from Friday’s show isn’t touring this month as well, but still: catch her if you can.

On the first day of the festival, I interviewed Pop Producer Patricia Boushel for Maisonneuve‘s website. She’s pretty great too.

The Problem Solver
An interview with Pop Montreal producer Patricia Boushel, who brings us an insanely busy insider’s look at the city’s best festival.

PATRICIA BOUSHEL HAS BEEN a producer at Pop Montreal for three years and my flatmate for one month. At this time of year, it’s a tragic combination: the girl is never, ever home. So yesterday, I set my alarm for the crack of dawn to catch her at breakfast and find out how she’s holding up.

Sarah Colgrove: Good morning. Want to tell me what you’re doing right now?

Patricia Boushel: At the moment, I’m going over really cloudy lists of things that will go wrong.

SC: Things that will go wrong, or things that have already gone wrong?

PB: [Pony the cat meows loudly.] For example… Keep reading

my weblog

Hi out there, whoever you are. I’ve started a blog – this blog – as a repository for published work, because everybody’s doing it, you know? Maybe it will even get creative.

Thanks for looking at it.