Hey Calgary, I know you don't read Finnish, but...

... it should be easy enough to spot the idea here. Also, why aren't the number of available parking spaces tweeted in a more accessible format? That information would reduce time and energy waste from a lot of pointless driving around.

City of Calgary budget app fail

A balanced budget is one result of good social planning, not *the* precursor to it. This much I'm sure the mayor understands.

Yet Calgarians have been asked to engage in an unconscionable activity: namely to use a financial spreadsheet which purpose is to record tactical activities and outcomes *several steps removed from previous planning and strategy*, for the purpose of planning future strategy.

Not only do spreadsheets lock in available options to fit certain ranges of pre-determined proxies for outcomes, but the budget balancing spreadsheet in present use does not even provide useful indicators of how effective current and past have been. Therefore, Calgarians must not only guess at how well previous dollars have been used, but also guess how city officials might reverse-engineer social policy from arbitrary financial figures. (There is no way for one to rationally allocate more or less funding to something if one does not know how such funding advances one's personal or community goals.)

Also completely excluded from the realm of possibility is the option to consider, add, or substitute new kinds of collaborative expenditure among departments and external partners that is less costly or delivers better results than the imposed current rigid model of how the City fails to work today. This is evident in the various community consultations in which different kinds of stakeholders were systematically discouraged to talk to each other; the city having chosen to consult with each of many stakeholders group individually without effective advertisement or publicity.

In short, unless we as citizens are enabled to collaborate with each using *planning* tools for planning based on a substantial understanding of past performance and future goals, this current budgeting activity can aspire to be nothing more than a farce.

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.

Event review: #smbyyc 14

"Too early for unrequested surplus of plenary" was my description one-third into the smbyyc event. I forewarned associates of being jaded that morning.

In fairness to organizers, I had not read the event description before signing up. It was perhaps a triumph of marketing that I dragged myself to a supposedly sold-out event at an ex-gravel pit on a Friday at 8 a.m., or a marketing failure in that I arrived completely clueless about the organization or the event.

Perhaps 80 of the 100+ RSVPs partly filled a glorified home entertainment theatre to receive, I'll guess, information relating social media to marketing and business things. At least that's what some people in the audience stated. I was there to see if anyone could (dis)confirm my suspicions that "social media" is poorly defined, but I digress.

The event's stated purpose was to allow the organizing committee to gather feedback about smbyyc's direction as an event series and as a community. Though raised hands showed that most attendees were new to both the event and the community, the focus group discussion charged ahead.

Perhaps the audience of mostly marketing, business development, and PR people were each waiting for another to point out potential pitfalls of asking prospective clients about how to change a service and organization they've not used and about which they know almost nothing. Or perhaps we were all waiting for the next uber slide to explain everything. I don't know. I was never very good at hand-waving.

Not lost on me, however, was a very real question: how did a group whose purpose concerns (that's the strongest word I dare use) asynchronous distributed communications among avatars come to ask what to do with itself as a group of local warm bodies. Several community engagement manager people did not immediately jump in, nor did several spectacularly titled business strategy-sounding people. I was left to wonder if I had been doing it wrong.

Why was no one else pointing out the disconnect among the apparent purpose of the gathering (strategic plenary), the lack of suitable resources (informed stakeholders), and discussions around stranded tactics (implement things!)? What were the terms of reference for this discussion? Why were we having it? Certainly, it was not for change alone. Why did organizers seek largeish external corporate funding while refusing smaller amounts from interested stakeholders? How did this organization in twelve months copy a model from the Internet, build a community around it, apparently lose most of it, and churn through to another cohort? What is the business model, its purpose, and its competitive advantage? How does it obtain its resources? What was the business case to invest time and resources in this? How does partnering with a mostly unknown new group in Edmonton with a similar name help either party? Why are we considering it right now? Is there a genuine community, or just a group of people with common interests?

Did the cattle guy walk out because he was the only one to be sufficiently concerned?

The situation had so many unexplained plot holes, failing to connect familiar elements, but the fans of social media in the audience seemed unaware or uninterested that none of it was making sense. I began to feel like the victim of some elaborate improv by George Lucas. But wait, I may have seen this before.

But the major difference between smbyyc and the dot-com implosion appears to be that this group is backed by solid people, ideas, experience, and resources. It just needs to identify and build on its strengths:

1. The audience members represented almost every social, economic, and cultural sector in Calgary, all of whom have some set of business development and marketing needs. Absent members of the group would fill in any gaps. It's therefore unlikely that any (social) marketing technique one could think of has already been tried by someone in the community. Further, the highly networked nature of the business community means that almost any knowledge or resource could be easily accessed. But these are also strengths of the Calgary business community in general.

2. Participants inexperienced in social media sought beginner tactical guidance and ideas. The social media veterans sought to share high-level strategies. The strength unique to smbyyc is that all participants are willing to seek out, consider, and try new things. They are innovators, and are comfortable with learning from making mistake after mistake. As both novice and veteran social media people pointed out, the value of the group, or the "networking", is to share and learn from others' experiences.

3. Calgary is great at accepting diversity. SMBYYC should draw on that strength to bring new individuals into the language and culture of social media. Since we would want to engage and retain new and enthusiastic members of the group in order to form a sustainable community, we must keep barriers to entry and frustrations low. Consider mentorship and birds of a feather type activities that work well for other sectors in Calgary unless there are solid reasons to invent something from scratch.

Together, these strengths could underpin some very solid strategy and plans to allow smbyyc members to amplify the value they provide by sharing with each other. Participants and their organizations would easily connect participation with value.

However, the smbyyc group as observed, has a number of weaknesses:

1. The smbyyc group has several thousand years of collective marketing, communication, engagement, media, and PR experience. The 'media' part of social media is probably well understood. Modifying it with 'social' and treating it as a completely new thing, without clearly explaining how just media was not social, is likely causing unnecessary confusion. This may annoy some social media experts, but to draw on its strengths, smbyyc should be guided by business and societal goals, rather than by a collection of related electronic tools. Speaking and thinking about clear concepts would reduce artificial barriers to extending existing competencies and expertise into the adjoining social media space.

2. There are hundreds of social media forums, websites, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, etc. They have in common the requirement that individuals have to consciously go out of their way to participate such venues, rather than making knowledge sharing and discussion about social media part of the routine. If the objective is to make or treat social media as a pervasive communication technology, such as phones and e-mails, the affordances must not be exceptional. Business development and PR professionals are familiar with the challenges of driving even very interested potential customers to websites. As people, our time and attention are no less scarce. For smbyyc to be a community, rather than an ad hoc group, it must be reliably accessible and consistent in reach. The three or four existing forums do not sustainably engage the group are unlikely to be improved by adding yet another forum. Good community managers make big money for the reason that the value they provide cannot simply be found by emergence alone. Majordomo and twitter have worked reliably well to coordinate learning (both strategic and trial by error) in thousands of other communities of interest (even if they do not contain most of the tacit or explicit knowledge learned), and it's difficult not to learn something from being bombarded by problems and discussions.

3. smbyyc participants are united by a common interest in a common communication platform, but are as diverse in needs and practices regarding that platform as users of any other communication platform. Calgary does not have an e-mail blast group, or a business cell phones users group, etc. but people do meet about using particular kinds of tools in particular industries. A multi-disciplinary approach would be required to engage this community in general, and in its various potential fractions, but this approach risks loss of general appeal. Institutionalizing the partition of special interests seems redundant when groups of people naturally cluster on their own, as long as the overall environment provides some positive value or opportunity.

But these are weaknesses that are addressed relatively easily once smbyyc as a community comes to understand why it exists. Sorting out these high-level concepts and strategies would make it much easier for all the low-level tactical and implementation pieces to fall into place.

Random notes:
-Feedback forms are good for collecting input about what works, or not.
-The opera house, the U of C Learning Commons, and the medical school can all do crowds of 100 in flexible formats, with teleconferencing.
-Birds of a feather sessions provide advance notice of interesting content.
-Do the networking activities need to be more focused on socializing newcomers into the community?


/rant

A joke

A group of journalists wonder aloud why journalists do not ask a particular question. They debate until one of them asks another "why do you not ask that particular question?", and another, until he arrives at a rational conclusion supported by objective evidence.

/joke

Do you see what I did there? Jokes are funny because their punchlines describe behaviours or outcomes that violate expected norms.

Détante

An early morning retail door-crasher in Calgary consists of 30 pick-up trucks and mini-vans idling in a strip-mall parking lot, even if it's not a frosty December weekend.

At the appointed hour of 7:15 a.m., the first snow-crushing carriages break suburbia's tranquility. It's important for both parents to doze off in the vehicle as it replaces the still suspension of ice with clouds of carbon monoxide and other fine products of incomplete combustion. The store does not open for almost two hours, so they wait. Minutes later, another. And another still, a comforting pace until someone eyeballs more headlights or taillights than the score of trickets advertised. The early arrives silently reassure themselves a place in some imaginary line, inferred by the unspoken rules of the community and insured by close proximity to the front door. As long as no one actively wants a leg up on each other, everyone can suffocate warmly in their vehicles.

As still more weary prospective consumers arrive, thinking changes in the community. "Maybe /they/ want that /other/ $40 disposable bauble for $40 off. They're certainly not as smart as we are. We're getting the better deal by paying $150 for the $200 disposable bauble! We've earned the right to that deal by sacrificing time with our families and our health to be here at this unholy pre-dawn hour."

Thirty vehicles.

"There are 40 disposable baubles in total, so /we/ can 'share' the bad $40 'deal' with /them/. We're still a communi--"

Someone has broken the line!

Every vehicle sends a sleepy-legged runner across the black ice and through an arriving flow of vehicles to the front door. The first from a vehicle to arrive asks the pedestrian checking his mobile under the canopy: "Do you work here?"

Not even a 'hello'? What happened to friendly Canada or Calgary or the small-town community values that we supposedly hold dear?

The queue of people instantly blooms to 40. Others still file in, noting that some in line are couples and the "deals" were offered "one per family". But the scurrying and the mixing had obliterated the class system of the parking lot, and none would be assured that their early morning wagers and sacrifices would grant a leg up on their fellow man.

The school across the street has taught that interpersonal competition is the goal of social organization, and that standardized tests of memorization and uncritical thinking prescribed by some authority should sort the haves (for social standing and scholarships) from the have nots. By day, hundreds of parents the athletic park hoping that their child outscores and defeats all the others to become Canada's next great sports hero, yet they count on coaches and referees to somehow impartially adjudicate merit based on glimpses of attention. In suburbua, cedar shakes and stucco set some home owners apart from those with asphalt shingles and siding, according to environmental or insurance experts whose competing sciences defy comprehension. Even within the parking lot of vehicles, those aboard riced-up GMCs literally and figuratively look down upon the few compact cars that dare to show up.

Only an authority figure could sort this perceived unfairness, and sorting out this retail scarcity must be the first priority of the community. The early community's assumptions about enjoying both comfort and discount access to baubles must not be preempted by someone not subscribing to the community's ungrounded rules and limits. Only the early arrivals should be entitled to take advantage of /the/ rules, and no one else.

The crowd greedily await the pedestrian's response, knowing that their communal assumptions and individual failures to act have screwed somebody, and that they have each yielded the capacity to effectively watch over themselves.

And they will all return for next week's sale.

Be the pedestrian.

--

Of vaguely related note, a big chain store (not offering the spectacle above) holds a team meeting of everyone except cashiers and greeters at 8:45 a.m. in the furniture section. They had daily sales of $310,000 yesterday, down 1.2 per cent from the same date last year. Their biggest sales were (in descending order): groceries ($35k), pharmacy, electronics, ladies wear, and infant consumables. All were up $1,000-3,000 from last year. Their daily shipment consists of three freight trucks totalling 1,000 food items; and 3 trucks totalling 3,000 non-food items.