May 1, 8 a.m. Oulu.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
The clock on my laptop says 8:03 a.m. MDT Saturday April 30, but it has already been a full day. Today is day two of the annual end of class celebration in which students from the University of Oulu, the technical university, and the secondary schools get alcoholed on the streets, in corporate-sponsored overalls. Think of it as an open-carry snow-pants day with mobile music provided by boom-boxes built into petro-powered couches. Things are supposed to pick up later tonight.
The luggage arrived today mostly in tact. The hand-written "RUSH HEL" and "RUSH OUL" suggest that the badness happened at CDG. The taxi driver didn't know what had happened.
Finnish supermarkets: Produce sells for twice the dollar figure, in Euros. Dry goods are priced comparably to Calgary. Green diet drinks do not appeal to the appetite in any language.
Finnish Italian seafood: Salt must be restricted to the underside of potatoes only. No spices or seasonings are tolerated elsewhere.
Notes: Long-toed dress shoes are incompatible with steering a tall road bike. Cooper was right about bicycles and hills in this part of the world: I've not been on a bike in over a decade, but easily powered past the locals going up slopes. Also, I bought a snowboarding helmet.
Remarks: No pictures until I find reliable internet access that doesn't regularly drop out.
I'll try a photo later today.
Cell phone coverage is interesting. I bought a Sonera SIM card (which my current cell phone can see), but neglected to unlock my Wind phone before leaving Canada.
The luggage arrived today mostly in tact. The hand-written "RUSH HEL" and "RUSH OUL" suggest that the badness happened at CDG. The taxi driver didn't know what had happened.
Finnish supermarkets: Produce sells for twice the dollar figure, in Euros. Dry goods are priced comparably to Calgary. Green diet drinks do not appeal to the appetite in any language.
Finnish Italian seafood: Salt must be restricted to the underside of potatoes only. No spices or seasonings are tolerated elsewhere.
Notes: Long-toed dress shoes are incompatible with steering a tall road bike. Cooper was right about bicycles and hills in this part of the world: I've not been on a bike in over a decade, but easily powered past the locals going up slopes. Also, I bought a snowboarding helmet.
Remarks: No pictures until I find reliable internet access that doesn't regularly drop out.
I'll try a photo later today.
Cell phone coverage is interesting. I bought a Sonera SIM card (which my current cell phone can see), but neglected to unlock my Wind phone before leaving Canada.
Friday, April 29, 2011
I've arrived safely in Oulu.
OUL reminds me of YMM, but with casual security. None of my luggage arrived. We left a lost luggage form on the airline's counter. I should have been concerned when KLM had to tag my luggage manually in Calgary. Fortunately, there are 24-hour supermarket/truckstops.
Apparently, the roommate I was to share a student housing room with has left the place in an uninhabitable state, so I'm in a friend's spare flat by the river.
Since the panOULU city-wide wifi connection [and also blogger.com] is a bit sketchy, my postings will be irregular. I'm pleased that they recommend using SSH or VPN on the tourist literature.
Sleep required now.
AC: +1 (departing the airplane)
Apparently, the roommate I was to share a student housing room with has left the place in an uninhabitable state, so I'm in a friend's spare flat by the river.
Since the panOULU city-wide wifi connection [and also blogger.com] is a bit sketchy, my postings will be irregular. I'm pleased that they recommend using SSH or VPN on the tourist literature.
Sleep required now.
AC: +1 (departing the airplane)
Thursday, April 28, 2011
I have never moved countries before: part the second
Thank you all for the various parting parties over the last week. Although it has been a long week, I will cherish the memories. I will see most of you over the winter break, or sooner somewhere on the continent.
Q: Will you bring back a Finnish hottie?
A: The universe is full of possibilities, but the bar has been recently raised considerably by someone in Calgary.
Q: What is the climate of Oulu?
A: It's a coastal city lined with trees and farms. I expect it to be similar to Vancouver, but flat and less sea-salty.
Q: Will you bring back a Finnish hottie?
A: The universe is full of possibilities, but the bar has been recently raised considerably by someone in Calgary.
Q: What is the climate of Oulu?
A: It's a coastal city lined with trees and farms. I expect it to be similar to Vancouver, but flat and less sea-salty.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
I have never moved countries before
As I wind up my preparations to move to Finland, I have received many requests to do a blog. Here it is.
Frequently requested answers:
Q: When do you leave?
A: Thursday, via YYC, AMS, CDG, HEL, OUL.
Q: Where will you go?
A: Oulu, a municipality just south of the arctic circle.
Q: How long will you be there?
A: Perhaps four years? The University of Oulu uses an older academic pattern that includes a Licentiate's degree between a Master's degree and a PhD. The Lic. Phil. is a two-year degree, followed by two more years for the PhD.
Q: Why Finland?
A: Finland has problems I'm interested in. Finland is a relatively small country with respect to population. With 5.5 million people, it cannot specialize in much other than Nokia and some high-tech manufacturing. It must rely on international scientific and industrial collaborators and data to perform well in global social and financial systems. This relates to my Master's degree research about international technical and expert collaborations.
Q: What will you do in Finland?
A: The details are to be decided. My project studies long-term international information infrastructures. In particular, ecologists collect data about things they study, and (are supposed to) share it in ways that make sense to other researchers. But long-term studies change over time. Changes to assumptions, data collection and storage methods, and even the purposes of research are not always well documented in shared data. Researchers require a way to assess outside data to use it responsibly. I will be contributing to a way to think about such problems.
Q: What does this mean for the rest of the world?
A: As a species, humans have never been able to automatically collect infinite volumes of data about almost everything, nor to store it indefinitely. We have also never been able to combine different kinds of data with such ease. We have never had to think about this kind of problem.
A practical example: Some media companies operate in journalism, publishing, and educational textbooks. Suppose they expand into on-line anti-plagiarism websites that store copies of student work to detect when students submit duplicate work. Suppose Sally writes a paper defending some dictator's economic policy for some class. Suppose also that Sally runs in an election to be the leader of some country 20 years later. What, if any, headlines should we expect from the journalism division about this circumstance?
Suppose further that the "cloud" infrastructure that stores copies of student work becomes insolvent and becomes nationalized by some government. How could we think about the social, moral, or other responsibilities would the nationalizing government have to combine and examine (or not) commercial and other data to which it has access; or to support third-party business models based on access to nationalized cloud data?
Further consider that the technical designers of the various infrastructures to collect and store data make many unstated assumptions about how the data will be collected, used, and possibly curated. How to limitations and conveniences built into technical data collection, storage, presentation etc. infrastructures now shape the way we conceptualize the phenomena described by such infrastructures in the future?
Q: Will you have a place in Finland?
A: I will be renting a flat by one of Oulu's many lakes. You're welcome to visit. My supervisor at Oulu has put together some provisions.
Q: What has been the process to move to Finland?
A: The University of Oulu sent me some letters formally offering me the research/PhD position.
I secured a visa to work in Finland as a scientific/technical researcher from the Embassy of Finland in Ottawa, Canada. This required sending my passport to the embassy with the letters, some paperwork, passport photos, and a money order. I will not go with a student visa since ay main purpose is to conduct scientific research (I will be salaried as such), for which I will also earn a PhD. After four weeks (including a delay due to a minor processing error between the Embassy and Finland), I received my visa.
I secured a student flat through PSOAS, a clearinghouse of (state run?) student housing for the major educational institutions in Oulu.
Since I am appearently a new kind of situation for their system, they have not been able to provide clarity about if or how I may be covered in their social security system. I therefore purchased a few months of health insurance for Canadian students studying abroad, along with travel insurance. I took the opportunity to order some spare sets of eyeglasses.
Q: Do you plan to return to Canada?
A: Probably, for Christmas and such.
To be continued...
Frequently requested answers:
Q: When do you leave?
A: Thursday, via YYC, AMS, CDG, HEL, OUL.
Q: Where will you go?
A: Oulu, a municipality just south of the arctic circle.
Q: How long will you be there?
A: Perhaps four years? The University of Oulu uses an older academic pattern that includes a Licentiate's degree between a Master's degree and a PhD. The Lic. Phil. is a two-year degree, followed by two more years for the PhD.
Q: Why Finland?
A: Finland has problems I'm interested in. Finland is a relatively small country with respect to population. With 5.5 million people, it cannot specialize in much other than Nokia and some high-tech manufacturing. It must rely on international scientific and industrial collaborators and data to perform well in global social and financial systems. This relates to my Master's degree research about international technical and expert collaborations.
Q: What will you do in Finland?
A: The details are to be decided. My project studies long-term international information infrastructures. In particular, ecologists collect data about things they study, and (are supposed to) share it in ways that make sense to other researchers. But long-term studies change over time. Changes to assumptions, data collection and storage methods, and even the purposes of research are not always well documented in shared data. Researchers require a way to assess outside data to use it responsibly. I will be contributing to a way to think about such problems.
Q: What does this mean for the rest of the world?
A: As a species, humans have never been able to automatically collect infinite volumes of data about almost everything, nor to store it indefinitely. We have also never been able to combine different kinds of data with such ease. We have never had to think about this kind of problem.
A practical example: Some media companies operate in journalism, publishing, and educational textbooks. Suppose they expand into on-line anti-plagiarism websites that store copies of student work to detect when students submit duplicate work. Suppose Sally writes a paper defending some dictator's economic policy for some class. Suppose also that Sally runs in an election to be the leader of some country 20 years later. What, if any, headlines should we expect from the journalism division about this circumstance?
Suppose further that the "cloud" infrastructure that stores copies of student work becomes insolvent and becomes nationalized by some government. How could we think about the social, moral, or other responsibilities would the nationalizing government have to combine and examine (or not) commercial and other data to which it has access; or to support third-party business models based on access to nationalized cloud data?
Further consider that the technical designers of the various infrastructures to collect and store data make many unstated assumptions about how the data will be collected, used, and possibly curated. How to limitations and conveniences built into technical data collection, storage, presentation etc. infrastructures now shape the way we conceptualize the phenomena described by such infrastructures in the future?
Q: Will you have a place in Finland?
A: I will be renting a flat by one of Oulu's many lakes. You're welcome to visit. My supervisor at Oulu has put together some provisions.
Q: What has been the process to move to Finland?
A: The University of Oulu sent me some letters formally offering me the research/PhD position.
I secured a visa to work in Finland as a scientific/technical researcher from the Embassy of Finland in Ottawa, Canada. This required sending my passport to the embassy with the letters, some paperwork, passport photos, and a money order. I will not go with a student visa since ay main purpose is to conduct scientific research (I will be salaried as such), for which I will also earn a PhD. After four weeks (including a delay due to a minor processing error between the Embassy and Finland), I received my visa.
I secured a student flat through PSOAS, a clearinghouse of (state run?) student housing for the major educational institutions in Oulu.
Since I am appearently a new kind of situation for their system, they have not been able to provide clarity about if or how I may be covered in their social security system. I therefore purchased a few months of health insurance for Canadian students studying abroad, along with travel insurance. I took the opportunity to order some spare sets of eyeglasses.
Q: Do you plan to return to Canada?
A: Probably, for Christmas and such.
To be continued...
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
I may have been a victim of consultation abuse by the City of Calgary. Here is my story.
I attended a budget consultation early this morning (no link, the City of Calgary does not publicize this, or other sessions to which I've been invited, on its calendar at http://ourcity-ourbudget-ourfuture.blogspot.com/p/calendar.html) at which an Alderman showed up, said that he's there to listen and not speak, and immediately fulfilled his promise of leaving the premesis. It was highlighted that our group of approximately ten members of the lay public (and ten members of the host organization) was the largest so far. The organizers were sufficiently confounded by the questions provided by the City in their toolkit that they made up their own, and we proceeded into the host organization's best attempt to make something good out of a bad situation.
With every experiment or attempt at something new, there is a good chance of failure. We can either resign, or learn from our mistakes and improve. I write this critique with that second intent--namely that the City of Calgary can learn from these comments to do better in the future.
The City of Calgary's budget consultation process seems designed to fail for several reasons. Our table agreed that this consultation compared favourably to the City's triple bottom line policy, in that the relevant check-box has been marked so the arbitrary decisions can proceed as planned.
1) Why only three months for consultation? We know that the tri-annual budget cycle happens regularly at predictable dates. Why expect citizens, bureaucrats, and council to accomplish a complicated task for the first time in such a short timeframe? What is in place to enable both the City and the lay public to learn from and build on this consultation?
2) Why undermine the City's own professionals with a public consultation? We assume that City employees act professionally in their budgeting and programming. Why ask the lay public to attempt to find flaws in the details of professional work, or the supporting abstract budgets? (If the people managing the City are _not_ professionals, we have an HR problem, rather than a budget problem.)
3) Why present the consultation as a zero-sum game, in which one area of funding can only be increased at the decrease of another? What would X per cent more or less of department or program Y look like, for each of the thousands(?) of expenditures in the budget? Which programs have critical funding thresholds below which they would be inoperative?
4) Simply pairing large dollar figures to seemingly endless lists of services and tasks says nothing about how efficiently or effectively such dollars are spent. We could demand that X become more efficient, but that is not an insight. Members of the lay public lack both information from the City, and expert knowledge about municipal services management, to provide any informed input about this topic.
4) Greater transparency could help, but is insufficient to enabling lay citizens to provide informed input. We are not technical experts sufficiently knowledgable to address budget details. Opening every City document to the public would not fix the knowledge gap. (We would then increase the separation between the public and governance by relying on a small handful of expert analysts and journalists for our opinion instead of elected and hired City officials.) All we can do is provide high-level input about the kind of City in which we want to live.
6) But it's unclear how our high-level input (or even low-level suggestions such as "adjust these knobs that way") translates into experiences of City services on the ground. In short, while we would like to provide input about budgeting to enhance our lives in Calgary, and while the City would like our input about budgeting to enhance our lives in Calgary, expectations and capabilities are grossly mismatched.
7) Even if the lay public provides well informed and actionable input, parts of the City machinery can ignore override that input at many stages of implementation. Elected officials can make their own decisions against the wishes of the public; bureaucrats can delay implementation or interfere through regulation; and small handfuls of loud voters routinely swing decisions in their favour. Transient gatherings of assorted lay citizens cannot alone indemnify elected and other leaders against public or media backlash for making sustainable decisions for the entire city that also disadvantages some constituency.
8) We discuss creating a culture of innovation at the City, or creating complete communities, or creating inclusive processes, etc. as though we could reliably design and implement such things independently of existing dynamics. However, policy leavers that exist only allow the City to directly influence social dynamics of its own staff. Strict adherence to explicit job roles and responsibilities does not encourage risk taking or iterative failure required to develop new and improved practices.
In short, citizens expect to influence how the City operates through this consultation process, but the process is not configured to solicit or accept the required information. Even if it could use the collected information, the City lacks the mechanisms to communicate or demonstrate its effectiveness in using that information for the immediate budgeting process, without any public plan for follow-through or sustainability.
As Ron Lubensky wrote some time ago, crowd-sourcing government decision-making like this has issues that are reasonably well known: http://www.deliberations.com.au/2010/01/crowd-sourcing-is-not-empowering-enough.html
Why has the City has chosen to change business as usual by going through the motions of a known-faulty consultation using an obsolete model under impossible parameters, instead of planning a genuine consultation for the next budget cycle? Does the appearance of competent grass-roots change continue to be more important than genuine progress to supporters of the current council? The City can now claim that the city "consulted with" (has the endorsement of) umpteen different community organizations for their next budget, amateur axe-grinders and activists alike can feel like they've contributed to the process without having done any substantial work or spending years learning about contemporary governance challenges, and our elected leaders can claim to have met their election promises to "consult with" (cherry-pick several-times filtered input from) many diverse members of the public.
With every experiment or attempt at something new, there is a good chance of failure. We can either resign, or learn from our mistakes and improve. I write this critique with that second intent--namely that the City of Calgary can learn from these comments to do better in the future.
The City of Calgary's budget consultation process seems designed to fail for several reasons. Our table agreed that this consultation compared favourably to the City's triple bottom line policy, in that the relevant check-box has been marked so the arbitrary decisions can proceed as planned.
1) Why only three months for consultation? We know that the tri-annual budget cycle happens regularly at predictable dates. Why expect citizens, bureaucrats, and council to accomplish a complicated task for the first time in such a short timeframe? What is in place to enable both the City and the lay public to learn from and build on this consultation?
2) Why undermine the City's own professionals with a public consultation? We assume that City employees act professionally in their budgeting and programming. Why ask the lay public to attempt to find flaws in the details of professional work, or the supporting abstract budgets? (If the people managing the City are _not_ professionals, we have an HR problem, rather than a budget problem.)
3) Why present the consultation as a zero-sum game, in which one area of funding can only be increased at the decrease of another? What would X per cent more or less of department or program Y look like, for each of the thousands(?) of expenditures in the budget? Which programs have critical funding thresholds below which they would be inoperative?
4) Simply pairing large dollar figures to seemingly endless lists of services and tasks says nothing about how efficiently or effectively such dollars are spent. We could demand that X become more efficient, but that is not an insight. Members of the lay public lack both information from the City, and expert knowledge about municipal services management, to provide any informed input about this topic.
4) Greater transparency could help, but is insufficient to enabling lay citizens to provide informed input. We are not technical experts sufficiently knowledgable to address budget details. Opening every City document to the public would not fix the knowledge gap. (We would then increase the separation between the public and governance by relying on a small handful of expert analysts and journalists for our opinion instead of elected and hired City officials.) All we can do is provide high-level input about the kind of City in which we want to live.
6) But it's unclear how our high-level input (or even low-level suggestions such as "adjust these knobs that way") translates into experiences of City services on the ground. In short, while we would like to provide input about budgeting to enhance our lives in Calgary, and while the City would like our input about budgeting to enhance our lives in Calgary, expectations and capabilities are grossly mismatched.
7) Even if the lay public provides well informed and actionable input, parts of the City machinery can ignore override that input at many stages of implementation. Elected officials can make their own decisions against the wishes of the public; bureaucrats can delay implementation or interfere through regulation; and small handfuls of loud voters routinely swing decisions in their favour. Transient gatherings of assorted lay citizens cannot alone indemnify elected and other leaders against public or media backlash for making sustainable decisions for the entire city that also disadvantages some constituency.
8) We discuss creating a culture of innovation at the City, or creating complete communities, or creating inclusive processes, etc. as though we could reliably design and implement such things independently of existing dynamics. However, policy leavers that exist only allow the City to directly influence social dynamics of its own staff. Strict adherence to explicit job roles and responsibilities does not encourage risk taking or iterative failure required to develop new and improved practices.
In short, citizens expect to influence how the City operates through this consultation process, but the process is not configured to solicit or accept the required information. Even if it could use the collected information, the City lacks the mechanisms to communicate or demonstrate its effectiveness in using that information for the immediate budgeting process, without any public plan for follow-through or sustainability.
As Ron Lubensky wrote some time ago, crowd-sourcing government decision-making like this has issues that are reasonably well known: http://www.deliberations.com.au/2010/01/crowd-sourcing-is-not-empowering-enough.html
Why has the City has chosen to change business as usual by going through the motions of a known-faulty consultation using an obsolete model under impossible parameters, instead of planning a genuine consultation for the next budget cycle? Does the appearance of competent grass-roots change continue to be more important than genuine progress to supporters of the current council? The City can now claim that the city "consulted with" (has the endorsement of) umpteen different community organizations for their next budget, amateur axe-grinders and activists alike can feel like they've contributed to the process without having done any substantial work or spending years learning about contemporary governance challenges, and our elected leaders can claim to have met their election promises to "consult with" (cherry-pick several-times filtered input from) many diverse members of the public.
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