City of Hamilton’s new media policy



City councillors passed a new media policy today as GIC, bringing an end to a saga that began when the Mayor’s chief of staff declared she and the Mayor would only speak to “a journalist that has a boss that I can complain to.”

The new policy was widely condemned by almost all media outlets. City staff moved quickly to clarify that the Mayor’s office’s policy was not staff policy and a staff media policy review began.

I was consulted during the process and stated to staff that my priority was to see equatable access to public information for all.

The new policy achieves this, encourages city staff to engage online in communicating with citizens, and speaks to a need to provide access to city staff for all media outlets (both old and new) to clarify and explain city affairs.

Credit must be given to city staffers Debbie Spence and Mike Kirkopoulos for their work creating the updated policy and removing the review from the political firestorms that often engulf the relationship between media and City Hall.

Filed under: City of Hamilton Government, Hamilton

“Accountability and Transparency” cmte releases agenda less than 24hr before mtg



The so-called “Accountability and Transparency” committee is moving towards accountability and transparency – which is not to say they are actually being accountable or transparent.

I just received from City Clerks a copy of the agenda for their meeting tomorrow morning. On the agenda, a presentation from Toronto’s lobbyist registar and continuing discussions about the terms of a new contract for Earl Basse, Hamilton’s integrity commissioner.

This will be the third meeting of debate about Basse’s new contract. The sub-committee attempted at their first meeting about renewal to create a new bylaw gagging citizens who file complaints. During their meeting last week, the committee rewrote the minutes of their first meeting and backtracked from the gag bylaw.

Hamilton’s current lobbyist registry is voluntary. There is discussion about creating a mandatory registry and possibly giving it teeth.

Filed under: City of Hamilton Government, Hamilton, Sub-Committee Agendas

File under awesome: A federal judge learned to code



Don’t claim you can’t learn and don’t try to fool a judge.




The last couple of days, there’s been a fair amount of blogosphere angst over Coding Horror’s ” Please Don’t Learn to Code .” Ironically, the best argument for learning to code appeared this morning, when it turned out that Judge William Alsup in the Google case could program , and learned Java in the course of the trial, and wasn’t going for Oracle’s claim that a short range-checking function was days of work.


Read more at: radar.oreilly.com

Stifling community voices at the HWDSB



Rick Cordeiro / via Wikipedia

Delta Secondary School

Where’s the community organization against school closures this time?

As public school trustees vote this month to close schools, the crowds attending the meetings can be counted by the dozen.

Regardless of one’s position on closures, this lack of community involvement is concerning. How did this happen?

The biggest reason is the decision of the school board to minimize community dissent.

A decade ago, school closures (now called “accommodation reviews” in Boardspeak) were contentious matters that brought overflow crowds to the earliest committee discussions.

As well-noted by Gord Bowes of the Mountain News , it seems the process was designed to prevent community mobilization. (They follow the Board consistently and have called things straight from the beginning.)

Part of preventing community opposition was stifling of school principals.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Hamilton, Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, School Closures

The Candy Bombers



The Berlin Airlift is one of the great battles of the Cold War, and arguably one of the most misunderstood.

Andrei Cherny spent years researching his book The Candy Bombers and shared his insightful understanding of the conflict during a session at the Pritzker Military Library in 2008.

I listened to the podcast today and was fascinated by just how pivotal this conflict was to the eventual victory of the Western Powers in the Cold War.

Most interesting is the discussion of how the key players in the Airlift – Truman, Wedemeyer , Tunner, and Halvorsen – were all seen as second-stringers, unworthy of those those who came before them. They couldn’t compare with the great men of the WWII and the military men had not seen action during the war.

Prior to listening to this podcast, I lacked a true understanding of the political climate leading into the airlift and just how unlikely its success was. History can change on a dime, this is a great example of that.

Visit the Pritzker library page and enjoy this informative discussion.

Filed under: Musings

Busy week before long weekend at City Hall



It will be a busy week at City Hall leading into the May 2-4 long weekend with four committee, two sub-committee meetings and the annual meeting of Council as the Hamilton Utilities Corp Shareholders.

Audit, Finance and Administration Committee

Monday’s AF&A meeting looks at the quarterly tendering, procurement and RFP reports, including emergency and non-competitive, and non-compliance with purchasing policies.

In the first three months of the year, the City made 17 purchases they classify as “emergency” for a total of $1,096,151, nearly 75% of the cost was for two projects: the emergency replacement of the Chedoke Radial Trail Bridge ($572,930) and restoring electrical power to a pumping station after a water leak above the transformers caused loss of electrical ($249,963).

There were 15 instances of non-compliance with purchasing policies for a total of $191,408. The general managers of the department is responsible for reviewing and issuing discipline in each instance and the results are not included in the report.

Also on the agenda: tax appeals and apportionment, changes to citizen appointments on the procurement sub committee, appointments to the LGBTQ advisory committee, and the Grants sub-committee report.

I won’t be attending any of the meetings. I’ll be watching the livestream when possible. Following Cable 14′s Doug Falloway (@c14DougFarraway), CBC Hamilton, CATCH,  and TheSpec for updates. Doug Falloway’s twitter and blog are two great sources of coverage you may not be following.

– JC –

Filed under: City of Hamilton Government, Hamilton

40 years after Dark Side of the Moon, Ivor Wynne may host concerts again



Pink Floyd's iconic Dark Side of the Moon cover

UPDATE: committee approved the concert proposal

The most interesting piece of City Hall business this week will likely be the debate about Ivor Wynne Stadium, home of the Tiger-Cats and not much else, holding two outdoor concerts in its final year.

The Tiger-Cats are requesting to hold two concerts and Council’s emergency and community services committee will debate the matter Monday afternoon.

If approved, Hamilton maybe could sorta likely see our first big concert at Ivor Wynne Stadium since RUSH played in 1979  as quarter-century long concert ban took effect.
Continue reading →

Filed under: Hamilton, Ivor Wynne Stadium

The Agenda mental health week



The Agenda’s discussions during Mental Health Week have been enlightening and informative.

As someone who suffers from depression, I’m always relieved to see a discussion without stigma and about removing the stigmas.

I’m fortunate to have a great group of friends at Think|haus and from my high school days who can tell when I’m having difficulty and are there to support me. In fact, the past few months have been very difficult for me, with serious motivation issues and a couple of days where I’m barely productive.

My friends are always there to give me a boost.

Take a listen to last week’s The Agenda shows, they are very informative.

Filed under: Musings

Update on Vrancor developments on Main Street



The crane hovering over the site of the former federal building stands out on the drive into Hamilton’s downtown core and some work is underway underneath it.

At the present time, Vrancor’s sole building permit (12-107299-00) on the site is “To construct FOUNDATION ONLY for a future 15-storey hotel” on the former Hamilton Motor Products portion of the site.

Filed under: Real Estate Development, 132 Main Street W (HMP site), 150 Main Street W (Federal Bldg site)

275 King West – variance approval [doc]



RTH File Photo

A third floor window shows the damage from the 2000 - 2003 fires

Finally, work should soon start on fixing the eyesore of a building at 275 King Street West now that all City Hall approvals requested by the development company have been approved.

The building was damaged in series of five fires from 2000 to 2003, with an October 30, 2003 blaze resulting in the collapse of the roof. The building has sat vacant since, with little work done on the building until the summer of 2010 when the City declared the building “not structurally stable” and at risk of partial collapse.

In April of this year, City Council approved $1.2-mil of financial incentives and last week, the committee of adjustment approved variances requested by Hess Village Real Estate, Denis Vranich’s company, to allow the construction of new dwelling within and the expansion of the existing property at 275 King Street West.

On the same block just west of 275, a new development will soon being begin on the land housing All Saints Anglican Church. A recent OMB allows for the demolish of the church which will be replaced by a residential building.

Committee of Adjustment approval documentation:

Filed under: Hamilton, Real Estate Development, 275 King Street West

News embargoes, TheSpec, CBC, and “the like” who “break” them



gnackgnackgnack via Flickr (http://flic.kr/p/Dt26u)

Imagine my surprise upon flipping open page two of Saturday’s Spectator to learn CBC made an agreement with TheSpec to embargo information about their Hamilton launch.

CBC gave The Spectator the time the new www.cbc.ca/hamilton/ website would be live.

However, not everything went as planned – the embargo was “broken” by – in Berton’s words – “Facebook posters, tweeters, bloggers and the like”.

At 5:25pm Wednesday, I broke the news that CBC Hamilton was live.

Continue reading →

Filed under: CBC Hamilton, Hamilton, Journalism

Citizen’s helping citizens: citizen-sourcing the news



Citizen-self-sourcing is taking hold among Hamilton’s twitter community. Increasingly, citizens are connecting each other to information such as details about power outages, traffic incidents, and police-related activity.

#HamOnt power outage in UGage to USherman bounded by Rymal and Stone Church. 198 customers, cause unknown. http://t.co/RtE1TYvF
May 7, 2012 07:02 via EchofonReplyRetweetFavorite
@Gumshoe
Sean Healy

This is great for civic society, and while not apparent, it is good for journalism

Citizen-self-sourcing vs. crowd-sourcing

The distinction between self-sourcing and crowd-sourcing is crowd-sourcing has a organizational structure guiding towards a set of goals – which need not be well defined.

Self-sourcing has little or no structure, it’s a series of individual initatives leading towards a collective result.

How is citizen-self-sourcing good for journalism?

Old journalism as a whole tends to see citizens as either competition or to be co-opted instead of another ‘C’ – our community.

These kind of ‘now’ stories are low-hanging fruit, often missed, or covered after the fact. Citizens reporting them allows journalists to focus less on the individual event and more on what the trends related to and systematic causes of the event. This is good for journalism, it allows journalists to focus on providing higher-value content.

Citizen also inform journalists. This morning power interruptions were covered by local media outlets after they became aware from Twitter. Without citizens tweeting, the story would be missed.

Saturday’s power outage quickly pinpointed

Over the weekend, a Rosedale power outage was quickly tweeted by affected citizens, another person pinpointed the cause – a car accident. Shortly after this, someone tweeted the extent of the power outage using publicly available information for the Horizon Utilities website.

The process of determining what happened did not involve any journalists, nor did it need to. This is the new information landscape and I think it’s great.

Filed under: Hamilton, Journalism