Child Poverty: Why Youth Must Lead

Teach every child to raise his voice
And then, my brothers, then
Will justice be demanded
By ten million righteous men.
Make them hear you.
When they hear you,
I'll be near you
Again.

 

 

Two headlines from today.  If you commit just a bit of sociology, you might even sense a connection between them:

 

“If ever there was a wakeup call, this would be it,” the mayor-elect says of a report showing city has highest child-poverty rate among Canadian cities.

 

Crippling child poverty.  That's a whole generation growing up in tense climates, without proper nutrition, without proper supports.  But clearly, this is someone else's problem, right?  Those parents should be doing more, working harder, hustling for cash, or something.  It's their own fault, right?  Nothing to do with us.

 

So long as governments keep taxes low and especially provide tax breaks to businesses, that'll create jobs - then people just need to hustle to get them and everything else will be fine.

 

On to story number two:

 

Some 73 students were suspended or expelled for bringing weapons to school over the past school year, up from 42 the previous year.

 

Guns.  In our schools.  What's behind this?  Are backwoods bigots from Pakistan invading our schools and using their mind control powers to make our kids bring weapons to class instead of pens? Is this a reflection of the erosion of Canadian values, or the Americanization of our culture?

 

Here's an idea:

 

Chris Penrose, executive director of Success Beyond Limits, a youth outreach program in the Jane St. and Finch Ave. area, said he is concerned about violence among teens. But he said the weapons spike likely has to do with larger community issues, including poverty, education gaps and youth unemployment.

 

There is plenty of money in Canada right now; there are 118,000 millionaires in Toronto alone.  There are plenty of services - public, not-for-profit, corporate social responsibility - that exist, offering an alphabet soup of services.

 

And of course, there's the prevailing wisdom of our laissez-faire model of capitalism; in Canada, it doesn't matter where you come from, what hurdles are in your way, if you push hard enough you too can be one of the 118,000.  You gotta work hard, be willing to start simple, but above all you gotta hustle.

 

The implication, of course, is that if you don't succeed, it's your own damned fault.

 

Here's a term that will be familiar to pretty much anyone in town with responsibility for managing finances - ROI, Return On Investment.  If you can't see a clear, short-term return on whatever your investment might be, you don't do it.  Low-hanging fruit are therefore preferable; the least effort required for decent gains in short time frames.

 

Let's reframe that a little bit so that we're all on the same page:

 

- If you don't have resources - if you're poor, young, accessibility-challenged, whatever, the pressure is on for you to hustle hard over the long-run if you want to get anywhere in life.

 

- on the other hand, if you've had some success in life, long-term investments aren't worth your time; it's all about the quick-wins, the best bang for your buck, the low-hanging fruit.

 

For the haves, it all makes perfect sense - you spend half your life working really hard to gain success, but when you're there, you put the pressure on everyone else and focus on quick wins.

 

Now, picture you're a child who lives in a marginalized neighbourhood.  Maybe your parents were born somewhere else; maybe they grew up marginalized themselves, but in either case, they've invested time and energy - time away from their kids - and have nothing to show for it.  If anything, the amount of energy they've put into trying to get ahead and the frustration they've faced in not succeeding has bled into home life, which isn't great.

 

This is the lesson a youth can easily take away from this - the people with resources will tell you to hustle, but the truth is it won't get you anywhere.  In fact, this whole "you gotta come to me" approach to success is pretty much an excuse for those with power to stick to their low-hanging fruit and not share their millions.

 

What happens when you feel the people who are supposed to be the movers and shakers in town are making excuses to exclude you and our peers?  How much effort are you willing to put into getting an education, working crap jobs if you can find them, if you are never going to get where they are because society's designed to keep you marginalized?

 

Leadership is solving problems.  The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.  They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care.  Either case is a failure of leadership.

 

This is worth pausing on. 

 

Our society is anti-leadership, from the top down.  We have governments cutting programs, cutting taxes and cutting cheques on things like child care and mental health supports for veterans rather than making long-term investments.  We have bosses that are increasingly pressuring employees to be functionaries, content-producers, client-managers and business developers, yet training is not being provided and salaries aren't matching up. 

 

Even in our education system, teachers are being told it's their job to be educator, mediator, psychologist and content-creator to massive classrooms that include children with learning challenges.  Parents are being told to do more, but do they have the resources, time, or cognitive/emotional bandwidth?  Are they too absorbed with work, or too depressed and frustrated from a lack of work to give their kids what they need?

 

We can look to previous generations and say "they did it, so quit making excuses" - but without asking if it was a good process for them, or how the changing nature of work (who really has a 9 to 5 job anymore?), the rise of mobile comms devices and the soul-sucking challenges of gridlock play a role.

 

There is next to no leadership out there right now.  The people with power and responsibility don't want to be leaders - they don't care about their people's problems.  Sometimes they don't even care about their organizational programs, because they plan to be gone before they blow up (low-hanging fruit, remember)?

 

Or, they don't feel empowered themselves.  This can be justified in many ways (blame being a common one) but the basic fact is that they aren't, in their current condition, up to the challenge of leadership.

 

Some of them actually believe throwing the kids in the deep end is a good strategy, because that's how you identify the strong swimmers.  What happens to everyone else is one of those "not my problem" things.

 

Yet we desperately need leadership right now. 

 

We're hearing the same things from every echelon of society; government is broken.  Infrastructure is screwed.  Organizations are a mess.  Yet those within those institutions will step up to the mic and tell us "everything's fine, we have a bold plan, just trust us and don't mind the man behind the curtain."

 

Back-of-napkin plans are being sold for their commercial value, not because they make sound structural sense.  Marginalized voices are being drowned out with top-down messaging.  Rabble rousers are being silenced through defunding, firing or even eviction.

 

Is it any wonder that youth are taking their cues from the world around them and realizing that if they want to be safe, if they want to have power, they have to be willing to take it through whatever means are available?

 

A kid not investing in schoolwork, being a bully and carrying a weapon aren't defying social rules of engagement - they're picking up on the socio-cultural cues around them responding in kind.

 

This is it; this is where laissez-faire capitalism meets behavioural economics.  In a game of competitive escalation and a reduction in personal investment, it's who's got the biggest stick who wins power and privilege.

 

And as of right now, there is no way, no one who can do anything to stop this trend. 

 

Why?  It's the culture, stupid. 

 

We have a silo-based culture, full stop.  Even those who talk about disrupting silos are really just trying to stuff more stuff into their silos.  Funding is there, but getting it is so competitive that an increasing amount of investment is going into competition, not solutions.  Lost opportunities, duplication, gaps and overlaps are resulting.  There are communities in this city that are glutted with programs and players, and yet the structural issues remain.  Why aren't we learning from this?

 

I question whether the people leading the charge right now are prepared to wrap their heads around the enormity of the challenge.  Even if they do care, the reality they grew up in and are living now is fundamentally different than the one being faced by marginalized youth today.

 

The best champions of any problem are those with lived experience.

 

Which comes to the crux of the matter, the core component of culture change, the disruption that is most difficult but most necessary.

 

The way forward isn't for more downtown adults to impose solutions on youth; if those youth aren't themselves leading the way forward, whatever gets built isn't going to work.

 

This requires a fundamental shift in the way we look at society, at ourselves, and at the role of power.

 

We always look for the best-in-show to invest in; they're most likely to provide the best ROI.  We then take them from wherever they are and put them in environments considered to be good for growth.

 

All of this is backwards.

 

We have to start focusing on those least likely to succeed with minimal effort and put them in the driver's seat.  That means going to their communities, learning to speak their language, taking them serious and treating them seriously.

 

We have to create the best environments where these youth are - in other words, don't bring youth to MaRS, bring MaRS to the youth.  That means more investment of time and interest - which, but its nature, requires motivation to want to make things better, not for a quick ROI, but because it needs done.

 

Which comes to the last, most challenging, most fundamentally important component of our needed culture change.  Right now, we see power as a form of wealth to be accumulated; power is something we want because, when we have it, we can get more through giving less.

 

That stops right now.

 

From this point forward, power isn't something to be obtained; it's blood to be circulated.  The same goes for money.

 

Here is John Tory's challenge - he needs to be the anti-Doug Ford.  He needs to step away from the practices that have brought him success in life, because it's not about him right now.

 

After years of seeking high office of some kind, of being the guy at the top, now is the moment for John Tory to show true leadership by stepping back and becoming a conduit rather than a capstone.

 

The same holds true for every person of influence in this city; councilors, Executive Directors, CEOs and talking heads.  We need to be empowering leaders, not giving orders.  We have to be cultivating solutions from the grassroots rather than imposing infrastructure on top of.

 

This is not a lofty vision, nice words on a page.  It's a fundamental necessity. 

 

Our society is crumbling and the solutions we're coming up with aren't good enough.  We are failing the next generation, and they know it.

 

If we aren't prepared to empower youth to lead, there will come a day not too far from now when they will simply take what they want by force.  That is, after all, the lesson we're teaching them.

 

The choice is ours.  The consequences will be ours.

 

Either way, it will be youth that lead.

Political People: Blowing Storms vs a Changing Landscape

They could do that, but in the past couple of days they demonstrated they'd rather wait for the negative attention to blow over and business to return to usual, the way it was under that former premier in whom they were all so disappointed.

What I can guarantee you is that whichever government succeeds the Harper government, be it the Glorious Haired One or the Angry Bearded One, in 2015 or 2020, it won't change this new approach to political communication.  The 24/7 communications environment won't allow it.

Politics is a blood sport.  At least, that's what political brawlers like to tell us.  They relish the fight and believe a big part of what they are supposed to do is provide entertainment for an otherwise disengaged electorate.  

By and large, they're right - busy people trying to get through their day and maybe think a little bit for tomorrow don't have the time or luxury to immerse themselves in the nuance of, say, the GST or the Fair Elections Act.

It's only when a Party or interest group issues a rallying cry with enough volume, distribution and repetition that people start to pay attention and even then, it's pulling teeth to incite action.

But what happens when political people feel like they and they alone are the sales agents of democratic engagement?  Well, they tend to operate like sales people.  Sales is transactional, not structural, and is focused on wins, not sustainability.

Such is the state of our politics.  

The big challenge for political operatives is that when you look at political relations as a series of transactions, you tend not to look at the bigger trend lines emerging.

So what if there have been a growing number of very public scandals involving the political sausage-making process?  Scandals happen all the time, and get moved on from.  Does it really matter that staffers and emails and back-room deals are coming to light?  It just means one Party or another got sloppy; if a Party maintains strict internal discipline, that won't happen.  Right?

Wrong.  Political people may think in terms of storms and passage - get through this election, you've got a brief reprieve before the next one hits - but that's not the emerging reality.  

The storms are adding to a number of elements, including the rise of social media, the economic impacts of living in a global village and increasingly complex societal needs that are straining a government model that is way past its best-before date.  

The landscape is changing beneath our feet, yet political people are trying to adjust old methodologies to function on this new, increasingly open terrain.

Fortunately, there is another trend emerging as the rains of change pour down with increasing vigour.  

People from every level within bureaucracies, the private sector and civil society are coming together to raise tough questions about social sustainability and work together to catalyze new solutions.  It's a messy, iterative process, but it has to be.

To get through these challenging discussions means a new approach to communications, one that is less focused on how to get a message out and more focused on how it is received.  Self-regulation, social-emotional literacy and empathy are all part of this package.

I may dislike what you say, the new maxim goes - but I am committed to understanding why you said it.

The landscape is changing; it won't be the toughest who fight their way to the top, nor the cleverest who spin their way out of holes they dug themselves.

As we should all know by now, that's not how evolution works.

Neo-Feudalism: Backing Into the Future

Where lies the future?

We tend to think of it as resting before us, an undiscovered country we explore either timidly or with bold intention.  

For speakers of Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire, it's the past that rests in front of us; after all, we know what happened in the past, just as we can see the world before our eyes.  The future lies behind, unseen; we back into our tomorrows at a petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time.

There's something to this.

You've probably heard the phrase "past behaviour is the best indicator of future behaviour."  We also have expressions about apples not falling far from trees and what has happened before shall happen again.

It's like there's a mirror in front of us; we project the past onto the future.  As often as not, we see but through a mirror, darkly.

Which helps explain why politics today looks so much like feudalism past - and why the system progressive-loathing Conservatives want to impose on society looks less like Capitalism and more a form of Neo-Feudalism.

So what if this feeds distrust between the federal government and the government of the largest province?  This is all about politics.

Canada's conservative politicians (and many of the so-called "liberal/socialist" ones as well) have no interest in working with anyone else.  Winning is the only thing that matters; success is individual, not something to be shared.  After all, they need absolute power to be able to shape tomorrow's reality.

Stephen Harper and Rob Ford believe this so strongly that they're willing to go to war with their competitors to achieve victory.  Dirty tricks (like robocalls or fake calls to radio shows), political canny but structurally unsound funding announcements and ridiculous amounts of time, energy and money spent on propaganda are the tools of their trade.  For them, social media isn't a forum to connect with others; it's the latest siege weapon.

Does this picture remind you of anything?

The more leader-centric, partisan and aggressively competitive our politics becomes, the more it resembles Feudalism.  Party leaders are modern-day kings building tall, opaque walls of defense, relying on courtiers to inform their unilateral decisions and seeing every-day citizens as subjects to be ruled, not constituencies to be represented.  Power is the ultimate goal - everything else is mere justification.

Harper has never hid his partisan ambitions - he wants to destroy the Liberal Party entirely, creating a Two-Party State where the NDP serve as a straw man in much the same way Communists did for Joseph McCarthy.  He wants a secure line of succession that sees his country (now known as Harper's Canada) ruled by his political progeny in perpetuity.  Rob Ford, for his part, has Ford Nation, which has at its head the Ford Brothers and a few stalwarts like Doug Holyday.  They don't like Council, who they apparently feel should serve as courtiers to a strong mayor; they also harbour ambitions to spread their influence beyond Toronto government into provincial and federal jurisdictions.

Absolute power serves as absolute justification, just as it did in the Dark Ages.  There's another parallel to be had; not a lot of innovation emerged from Feudal Europe - in fact, what advances they did employ were cribbed from the Islamic Empire that brought a sea of troubles to their shores.

Canada has an innovation deficit.  We're also having a real problem getting corporations to invest in R&D; why would that be?  The latest transit craze provides a clue.

Despite the multi-lateral focus on building a subway to Scarborough, I don't know anyone who actually believes it'll happen in our lifetimes.  The general assumption is that tens of thousands of dollars will be spent on announcements, studies and the like without anything actually happening; there'll be lots of heat but little light.

That's the general impression people and corporations have of our politics as a whole; it's a lot of gamesmanship that, at best, will lead to some progress during one government's tenure that will be undone by the next.  They see politicians circling their wagons and lobbing missiles over each other's walls while the rest of us try not to get caught in the policy-shifting crossfire.  

This lack of stability and predictability has everyone treading cautiously, hoarding what resources they have and backing carefully into the future.  It doesn't really matter what tax incentives the government offers - financial incentives don't foster innovation.  Inspiration does, and that's something sorely lacking at the political level. 

Neither Stephen Harper nor Rob Ford believe in inspiration, collaboration or diversity of ideas as essential for innovation.  They hold to the myth of the lone innovator who simply needs to be freed of rules and taxation; they feel the future should look something like a mythical version of the past where socially conservative values rule and strong, independent individuals compete and carve out strong, independent successes.  

A man's home is his castle, his to protect as he will.  Regulation and social enabling hinders risk-taking and personal growth; it's competition alone that leads to advancement of both people and nations.

In short, not only are they practicing Neo-Feudalism at the political level, but they are pining for a future that embraces a model of Neo-Feudalism for society as a whole.   

They're intent is noble, of course - they pursue this path in good conscience.  It's just that, by looking through the mirror of a mythic past, darkly, they aren't seeing the whole picture.

Historically, the pursuit of wealth isn't about offering more - it's about offering less for more if you're selling but demanding more for less if you're buying.  When financial wealth is the goal, the consumer focus is on spending less; cheaper goods made by cheaper labour offer more immediate ROI than spending more for something that might be more durable in the long run.  Look at the lifespan of modern vs. older houses/apartment buildings/office towers as an example.

Feudal kings didn't offer value to their peasants any more than plantation owners of old offered value to their slaves.  Factory owners at the start of the Industrial Revolution weren't inspired to give more to their employers; modern employers prefer contract positions (low wages, no benefits) for the same reason money-conscious consumers prefer cheap foreign imports and study discount flyers judiciously.  

Risk taking leans towards picking stocks and buying lotto tickets, not innovating new products and services.  Conquering your neighbour to take their resources (or voters) wasn't very original, but it was pretty expedient - as was colonialism.  As was indentured servitude.  The goal is never to finding and retaining a few, wickedly talented but expensive people - it trends towards having more, less expensive and disposable ones.

We see the same trend away from expansion in Neo-Feudalist approaches to education, too.

Conservative commentators are telling us too many kids these days have too much book-learning; when everyone has a post-secondary education and expects to find work of equal value to the amount of money they spent on their education, expectation doesn't match the market.  The majority of kids should put their ambitions on hold and aim lower; less people should get higher learning and instead focus on lower-paid trades skills and positions.  Success isn't about reaching higher, it's about setting low, realistic goals.  Of course the more competitive, aggressive people will ignore this advice and instead look to discourage competition, but that's the whole point, isn't it?

At the same time, from a Neo-Feudalist perspective individuals should bear more direct responsibility for their own training; companies should be hiring the best people, period, not spending money on training them.  The theory goes that money-focused employers will focus on finding and retaining the best-skilled labour but again, in practice, what actually happens is that money-focused employers will look at the discount bin for cheap, replaceable labour that saves on costs rather than adds value to brand.  

If they want quality, they'll go with known commodities (like their own kids or the kids of their friends); big-picture financially beneficial ones (like the kids of shareholders) or those that just for some reason feel right (ethnic bias, beauty bias, gender bias).  If they go beyond this, though, they're going to hire those individuals who sound and look like winners, meaning those who have the greatest confidence, sales ability and soft-skills (networking, diction, social graces, etc) that are often determined by nurture, not nature.  Lots of wickedly smart, capable people are naturally introverts; just because they can't sell doesn't mean they can't do the job.  Others are so wickedly competent that communicating in simple sound-bites is impossible for them.  How well would Einstein have done at an entry-level interview?

The focus on competitive ability is in turn puts increased pressure on individuals to work hard, work earlier and make the cut.  Where Neo-Feudalists draw the line between "not trying hard enough" and "unable to compete for reasons of external bias or individual capability" never seems to be clearly defined.  There's a reason for this; having a bottom limit of any kind limits competition.  It's an unspoken, probably unrealized fact, but a strict focus on competition is a race to the social bottom (there's a reason Feudal Europe gets referred to as The Dark Ages).  Again, social advantage will trump and many people will never have the chance to realize their full potential, as doing so would take resources and mentorship they simply don't have access to.  

A child born with developmental disabilities to a family with wealth and education is far more likely to get the help they need to succeed than will the same child born to day-labourers struggling to pay the bills.  At the same time, a gifted child born to a poor family won't have the same chance to contribute as will a middling child from a wealthy family, to the detriment of all.

So what would a singular focus on individuals being as competitive as possible, as skilled as possible and to get there on their own merits look like in practice?

At a recent Why Should I Care chat about youth employment and underemployment, a new Canadian from Mexico provided the answer: maybe it's not enough for kids to start part-time jobs in highschool if there is such high competition for skills and experience in the workforce; maybe they should be starting to work in elementary school to ensure they have the abilities they need to succeed.

Not everyone should get higher education.  Some people should set their employment sights lower.  Those without natural advantages of birth, postal code, genetics or luck simply have to start earlier.

This was a notion that made even conservative commentator Michael Hlinka uncomfortable, but the woman had a point.  When the emphasis is on competition, you have to start earlier, work longer and in a glutted market, spend time tearing down your opponents if you want to get ahead.  Unless you have the fortune of being born into a wealthy or well-connected family, or of being born with exceptional beauty, the right ethnicity and latent salesmanship.  

Under a strictly competitive model where money is the goal, there will be winners and losers; the winners will pull further and further ahead of the losers, who will seem more and more contemptible to them.  Meanwhile, those losers will turn towards increasingly desperate measures to get ahead (like joining gangs, selling drugs and killing competitors) or simply languish in poverty, seeing no future at all - just a brutal present that seemingly draws on forever.  I think that would be a reality the lady from Mexico would already be familiar with, which perhaps explains why she was projecting that model onto Canada.

There's some historical precedent for where that sort of trend leads.  

By ignoring the context of the past and trying to map a mythic historical ideal onto tomorrow, leaders like Ford and Harper aren't shaping the future, they're repeating a cycle that we've witnessed through tribalism, feudalism, the failed communist experiments of the past century, various forms of proto-capitalism and modern capitalism - and one we'll witness again at the end of the to-be-branded post-capitalist model, the first blushes of which we are already witnessing.

As Simon Sinek has said, money isn't a purpose - it's a result.  By the same token, leadership isn't about power - it's about empowering.  Innovation isn't developed in isolation and the motivation for creativity isn't selfish, but altruistic.

It's the people who don't have to worry about paying the bills who buy expensive things; money's not the issue for them, brand is.  The same holds true for companies; the ones that do exceptionally well over time don't focus on putting money in the pockets of shareholders - they focus on brand and legacy.

The people developing tomorrow's solutions aren't doing so for money - money's just the base layer they need for stability.  They're not interested in stepping back in time nor in waiting for theoretical systems to produce benefit down the road; like every generation previous, for them the future is now.

Mapping the Future of Government Services (UPDATED)

Traditionally, government has done a terrible job of presenting information - lists in silos rather than maps in systems.

I have suggested that it's possible to do better by designing service presentation in a way that's intuitive for end-users.

Glad to see someone's listening.

UPDATED: Better than listening - it's nice to see people responding, too.  There are more such initiatives out there, too.  It's a Bold New World...

UPDATED-ER: Maps, yes, but if there's way to bring data to life, that's even better.  People relate to images and motion better than they do to static, highly-contextualized symbols (like letters or numbers) on a page.

Love the fact that so many people are looking for ways to bridge the gaps between us, and between our information.  After all, it's through understanding is the place where diversity meets and innovation happens, creating that better world we all crave.

See the World, Speak the Word

"If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind - you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other." 

Politics is a constant struggle for dominance between the red and the blue, the assumption being that you can only be one or the other.  Oddly enough, there's a correlation between political viewpoints and different regions of the brain.  

What happens when you overlay the red and the blue?

It's by combining the two lenses that you gain perspective.

(CFN) Hub World Ontario: Wynning By Adding Value

My latest from Cornwall Free News: 

The premier said reviving Ontario’s economy will be a major priority for the government, as the province works to become “a hub of innovation, industry and investment.”

My son is a big fan of the WII Lego video games.  Like many of today's video games, these ones have multiple levels you can play accessed through a "hub world".  Essentially a value-added menu, hub worlds have labeled doors that let you look at the available levels in a map-like format, maximizing your opportunity to view your opportunities and determine what option best suits your mood.

Over the evolution of games, these hub worlds have grown in complexity to the point where they've become playscapes in and of themselves; you can try different exercises to hone your skills prior to trying a level, connect pieces you've discovered out in the field to create new opportunities and harness new skills and abilities.  None of these pieces are essential to the game play, but they DO enhance the experience and better prepare players for what they'll find beyond the hub.

Video games aren't the only field where centralized coordination and value-add are manifesting themselves.  News aggregates like Ontario News Watch and National News Watch do the same thing, essentially creating a visually-communicated menu of top stories and adding value with some original content of their own.  In fields like fundraising, there are innovative companies like The Funding Portal; for innovation, you have places like MaRS or the Centre For Social Innovation. 

Coincidentally or not, there's another trend of players returning to a hub-world for added support or to gain added value; as the cost of living soars and employment opportunities shrink, there are many young (and not-so-young) adults returning to their parents' home for sustainable living or returning to school for additional training.  We don't think of homes or schools as hubs or resting places, but increasingly that's an added function they serve.

Government Services are heading in the same direction; both in terms of physical space usage and online access, the move is towards user-friendly service aggregates designed for repetitive use.  Instead of going to hospitals when an illness has happened, we have Family Health Teams, Community Health Centres and online Occupational Mental Health Tools that provide proactive support and training, reducing the likelihood of traumatic or accumulated stresses out in the field.  I'd argue that the whole point of government is to serve as a social nervous system, efficiently coordinating human and physical assets to result in the realization of our individual and aggregate maximum potential.

There's no reason that Ontario can't expand its role as a hub and become a centralized access point for innovation, industry, investment and human potential for the global village.  There's unquestionably demand for someone to play the role of stone in the soup - if we can work in a collaborative fashion and look at our opportunities not as a path, but a map, we can be hub world for the rest of the world to play in.  When it's clear we're having fun doing so, the rest of the world will want to join our party. 

The same thing applies to how we provide services to Ontarians - if we can move passed a silo-based model towards something more systems-oriented, we can provide more efficient services and reduce duplication, gaps and overlaps at the same time.  We also need to rethink how we view educational institutions - instead of nests we're meant to leave, schools should be seen as education hubs we're comfortable going back to for training top-ups.  The increasing availability of online education fits that purpose nicely.

It's all within our reach - we just need to move beyond thinking what's bare-bones necessary and start thinking about how we can add value both internally and externally.

Fortunately, I believe we have the right leadership to make that happen.

UPDATE 21/10/13: Looks like I'm not the only one who thinks this is a good idea.

UPDATE 15/1/14: Ontario Online.  A hub by any other name still gets the job done.

The World We Know vs The World That Is

Thanks to Vera for twigging me to this brilliant West Wing Video that covers some of the things I love best;

cognition

behaviour

social organization

how linear thinking impacts social equity

maps

This is today's version of heliocentrism.  The world we feel we know, isn't.  This is a concept that goes far further down than you might think.

The world we perecive, thanks to information we take for granted as accurate:

The world as perhaps it is better reflected two-dimensionally:

Of course, the world isn't two-dimensional.  Nothing in our world is, except for the way we perceive it.

Being conscious of this, we can change the world by understanding it better.

Ouroboros: Mapping Social Transformation and Knowledge Emergence in the Global Village

The world has changed.

The dark corners of our external and internal maps are being filled in – and they’re going digital.

The Encyclopedia Britannica is going out of print, after Wikipedia has already matched (and perhaps, surpassed) its record for accuracy.

The profit-motive Capitalist system is failing.

Aggregates in news, media, job-seeking and even social gossip are increasingly popular – and increasingly accessible.

Open-sourced, globally accessible online platforms like Ushahidi are positively transforming disaster relief.

Free translation services are providing a Rosetta Stone for the world’s languages as even archaic texts and varied analyses are but a few clicks away.  Our individual linguistic handicaps are being accommodated, communally.

Really think about this for a second.  People pay good money for institutional education which provides them with some form of certification, yet everything from do-it-yourself home projects to medical diagnoses are being done by people at home, based on information they find online.  Is this a safe practice?  Not really, but it’s common, doesn’t involve estimates and negotiations or wait-times and uncomfortable calls for life-changes.  At the same time, there is an emerging trend towards specialized collaboration in sectors across the board.

Traditional research and citation are going out the window.  Students at universities can find most of the material they need through the Internet.  Here on WAKATA, I’ve got a growing library of studies and academic papers I’ve perused from my home computer – and am now posting here everyone.  My posts are full of hyperlinks – some are interesting tangents, but in many cases, that’s me listing my sources with you.

Broad information access is humanizing public services and starting to address social concerns previously considered insurmountable.  Political Parties are embracing the potentials of social media and increasingly functional data collection and management (in ways both positive and negative); governments are looking at the advantages to things like digital health records and open-source innovation opportunities.  Can open-sourced policy be far behind?

At the surface level, society is in a state of agitation.  Politics is certainly becoming more polarized.  While ethnic, economic and religious friction are prevalent and disturbing, we are slowly becoming conscious of something vibrant, collaborative and promising peeking out beneath the surface.  It’s like the global village is a snake, shedding its old skin.

There are two linear ways to look at this social evolutionary change – as an ending, or a beginning.  Or, you can accept that like all things, social change is cyclical.

I say, it’s a good time to be alive.