A bit off topic for my usual blogging here, but I spent this afternoon at the initial planning meeting of CrisisCampTO, the Toronto manifestation of Crisis Commons. Although this is happening here and now in response to the earthquake disaster in Haiti 12 days ago, Crisis Commons has a broader mandate:

We are an international volunteer network of professionals drawn together by a call to service. We create technological tools and resources for responders to use in mitigating disasters and crises around the world

We’re here today to work on anything that can be done to help, in collaboration with other Crisis Commons teams all over the world, on the various projects that have been defined by Crisis Commons based on requests from NGOs to fill a need that they have. The bulk of the projects fall under the category of software development, but there are also teams for social media, logistics and more general duties.

Our first goal today is to find a development project for the bulk of the Toronto team to get involved with, and learn how to plug into other Crisis Commons groups around the world. There is quite a bit of infrastructure already in place to connect up, including IRC channels (retro, I will definitely need a refresher course) and voice conference lines, plus a rapidly growing wiki.

I have a pretty broad range of skills to apply here: although I don’t really write code any more – unless I’m really inspired – I can do all the other stuff around development (requirements, testing, documentation). I also do a lot of social media stuff, and have attended more unconferences than you can shake a stick at, so can help with the local social media efforts such as wiki gardening, Facebook and Twitter updates, and more.

The main goal of today is to get ready for next Saturday’s CrisisCampTO (time and venue to be announced shortly), by getting some basic team structure in place and selecting one or more projects to which we will be contributing. That way, when newbies show up next week, they can start contributing immediately.

One of the things that we learned about today is Sahana, an open source disaster management system that was created in response to the Sri Lanka tsunami in 2004. There’s a Sahana instance set up just for Haiti, although it still needs a lot of content added, and possibly some development to add specific requested functionality. We also saw OpenMRS, an open source medical records system, and Ushahidi, an SMS-to-web service that accepts requests for assistance sent by text message to a specific shortcode, and makes them available to aid agencies. If you check the feed from Haiti, you can see requests for food, water and medical assistance that have been received, translated if required, and logged for followup. In summary, there are a ton of free, open source projects that can be applied to the Haiti disaster; some of them as is, others requiring some customization. This is were we all come in.

I’m a strong believer that technology can be a way up for those in financially disadvantaged circumstances: without some computer skills, kids can’t compete in school, and don’t meet the minimum requirements for many jobs. One way that I can help – and probably many of you reading this – is to donate to programs that provide access to computers and training to people who can’t afford to buy them. There are a number of ways to do this: you can give money, you can give used computer equipment, you can give your time, and you can promote the programs to others who might do the same.

This week, I replaced my mother’s old computer, and was left with a working (although underpowered, by today’s standards) computer with keyboard and mouse. I immediately thought of Little Geeks, a program that refurbishes old computers, provides them for free to kids in need, along with 12 months of internet access and some training on how to use it. They use reBOOT Canada as their drop-off depot; reBOOT is a charitable organization that “provides computer hardware, training and technical service to other charities, non-profit organizations and individuals with limited access to technology”. I headed off to reBOOT yesterday to drop off the computer, and had a chat with Nicholas (I believe this was Nicholas Brinckman, the Executive Director). He mentioned that they’re trying to get funding from the Aviva Community Fund to build 50 learning centres across Canada, in partnership with community centres and schools.

If you support this idea, go to the reBOOT project page on the Aviva Community Fund site and vote for their project (registration required). You can vote once per day until this round of voting ends in 11 days, and I encourage you to drop in there daily to cast your vote if you believe that this is an important initiative. They make it easy to link to the page on Twitter and Facebook, so use your social network for good. You can also help out by dropping off your old computer equipment – and encouraging your employer to do the same when they sunset old computers, printers and other equipment – or volunteering some of your time to help with computer refurbishment.

Apparently, Shel Israel’s fact checkers were too busy to actually check facts the day that they proofed page 208 of his new book Twitterville: I am not, nor have I ever been, the mayor of Toronto.

After a couple of people alerted me (via Twitter, of course), I hiked over to the local bookstore and snapped a pic of the page in question – click to see the full-size image, and check under the heading “Tweeting International” near the bottom left where it refers to “Toronto mayor Sandy Kemsley (@skemsley)”. I didn’t buy the book: if it lists me as the mayor of Toronto, who knows what other nonsense it contains?

fyi, the mayor of Toronto is David Miller (at least until the next election), a.k.a. @mayormiller. I am, however, one of the 57 people who he follows.

For those of you who were kind enough to comment on blog posts from the BPM conference in Ulm last week, my apologies for being so late to approve the comments: I’ve been on vacation in Switzerland and Germany since then, and mostly off the internet due to being in small towns with crappy wifi coverage. To give them credit, the towns do have great wines, cycling along the river, boat rides, 15th century castles, all the schnitzel you can eat, and a number of other good points.

The short version of the trip report: after leaving Ulm (which was a really great place for recreation as well as an excellent conference), I headed to Zurich for the weekend to visit a friend, stayed in the old town on the east side of the river, visited the old cathedral, climbed a small mountain, went for a boat cruise on the lake, and went to a piano bar where I experienced a minor dancing injury (and I wasn’t even dancing). I then returned to Germany to spend a day in Baden-Baden and visit the incomparable Friedrichsbad Roman-style spa, then two days in Cochem on the Mosel River, complete with a 4-hour hike to Burg Eltz, a view of a castle from my hotel room and some lovely local wines, before heading back to Dusseldorf.

I’ll be getting on a flight home in a few minutes and back to work tomorrow, but will be jet-lagged so don’t expect too much witty repartee.

If you ever wonder what BPM analyst/architect/bloggers do in their spare time, wonder no more:

Ignite T.O. Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto this week, and decided to discuss how I’ve been using social media – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogging – and some integration technologies including RSS and Python scripting to promote a new farmers’ market in my community. I’m on the local volunteer committee that acts as the marketing team for the market. Here’s the presentation, it’s not too clear on the video:

If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it’s a type of speed presentation: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and your slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. For a marathon presenter like me, keeping it down to 5 minutes is a serious challenge, but this was a lot of fun.

For a technology view, check out slide 17 in the slide deck, which shows a sort of context diagram of the components involved. Twitter is central to this “market message delivery framework”, displaying content from a number of sources on the market Twitter account:

• I manually tweet when I see something of interest related to the market or food. Also, I monitor and retweet some of our followers, and reply to anyone asking a question via Twitter.
• When I publish a post on my personal blog that is in the category “market”, Twitterfeed picks it up through the RSS feed and posts the title and link on Twitter. These are posted to both the market account and my own Twitter account, so you may have seen them if you’re following me there.
• Each week, I save up a list of interesting links and other tweet-worthy info, and put them in a text file. My talented other half wrote a Python script that tweets one message from that file each hour for the two days prior to each Saturday market day.
• I connected my Flickr account with Twitter, and can either manually tweet a link to a photo directly from Flickr, or email a photo from my iPhone to a private Flickr email address that will cause the link to be tweeted. I could have used Twitpic for the latter functionality, but Flickr gives me better control over my photo archive.

The whole exercise has been a great case study on using social media for community projects with no budget, using some small bits of technology to tie things together so that it doesn’t take much of my time now that it’s up and running. I’d be doing most of the activities anyway: taking pictures of the market, cooking and blogging about it, and reading articles on local food and markets online. This just takes all of that and pushes it out to the market’s online community with very little additional effort on my part.

Via Mashable, I discovered a cool little gadget this morning: Retaggr, which allows me to create a profile page and badge with all my social media links, then embed it on my blog or website:

You can click on the links within it to show the content from those sites directly within the badge, or click through to the whole profile page. The badge here updates when I update my profile on Retaggr. I can also create my own custom badge, although the minimum width is wider than my current sidebar so I can’t put one there.

I’ve already added it to the contact page on my website and the About Me page on this blog in place of the manually-maintained lists of contact information on those pages.

There are few things that will get me out of bed early on a wintry Saturday morning. ChangeCamp is one of them: an unconference dedicated to re-imaging (Canadian) government and citizenship in the age of participation. My friend Mark, who is passionate about government, change and unconferences, is one of the ringleaders here, but there’s an amazing group of people who made all this come together in less than a month. I’ll be doing some wiki gardening, Twittering and live blogging about ChangeCamp today.

Why do we need an unconference about government? Because the usual methods of providing input to government aren’t, in general, working; unconferences shake things up and tend to get the communications lines unclogged. TransitCamp was a start to this, getting citizens involved in generating ideas for public transit and resulting in the ongoing Metronauts community, but also engaging with the TTC and causing some real change. HoHoTO showed how quickly people can come together to become something that’s bigger than themselves, raising over $25k for the Daily Bread Food Bank at a 600-person holiday party that went from inception to reality in 13 days.

And here we are today, pretty near a full house at the MaRS Centre to address the long tail of government.

There’s a couple of modifications to the usual open space format of unconferences: we’re being organized into groups up front to exchange some ideas and define problems, and there’s an opportunity for people who have a specific idea that they want to dive into and start developing something in ChangeLab.

Barton George tagged me on the latest internet meme to tell you seven things about me. Given that less than two years ago, I played along with the “five things you don’t know about me” meme, I figure that I only owe you two more:

1. I prefer to go barefoot, or at least sock-less, whenever possible. Given that I’ve lived most of my life in Toronto, I can only imagine that this is a flat-out subconscious rejection of winter.
2. I tried to semi-retire at the age of 41, but it didn’t take. After three months of walkabout in Australia, I couldn’t resist heading home and starting up another business.

I’m supposed to inflict this on tag seven other people with this meme, but I just can’t bring myself to do that. I also don’t forward chain letters, regardless of the dire warnings therein.

Don’t forget: way too many BPM implementations end up as legacy systems.

This post by analyst relations consultant Carter Lusher, entitled You have to focus on influential analysts even if they are negative or unpleasant, totally cracked me up. There are lots of analysts with attitude, but there are also lots of vendors out there who could use some lessons from Miss Manners: in dealing with vendors, I’ve had accusations of bias, suggestions for blog post topics that come straight from the vendor’s press releases, requests to sign a non-disclosure agreement before talking about something that they want me to write about, whiny complaints when I write about another vendor instead of them, and arguments from (always large) vendors why I should pay my own expenses to attend — and blog about — their conference.

These tend to be outliers; most of the people who I deal with at vendors are professional and reasonable, and don’t treat me like the hired help (which is good, because they’re not paying me anything) or like the enemy. Having to occasionally deal with negative and unpleasant people is just part of the job for most of us; for an analyst relations specialist to pretend that all of those negative and unpleasant people are on the analyst side of the vendor-analyst relationship is disingenuous.