karen louise smith

View the post below at the Metronauts site.

Below is a brief summary of my most recent post at Metronauts on goods movement in the GTHA. This post is a summary of discussion topics from a public meeting.

A number of themes emerged at the Metro Hall meet up on Nov. 18th, 2008, when transit interested individuals discussed goods movement. Some of our discussion points originated from the Metrolinx Green Paper on goods movement, others reflected the interests of the group. My summary of our discussion is listed below:

1) The bigger geographic picture

2) Impacting change through local urban efficiencies

3) The interlinked nature of moving goods and moving people

4) Understanding models

5) Seeing new possibilities

My most recent post at metronauts.ca highlights an upcoming content-generation and research opportunity which promises to be very interesting. This initiative will make use of Metrolinx's online consultation mapping tool and remix screencast materials on the metronauts community blog with participant permission.

Today I presented a paper at OISE at the Learning Democracy by Doing conference. My paper was titled: Transparent Technology? Exploring the political and design values of eDemocracy for citizens. My paper explored:

• transparency as a design value in eGovernment websites
• conflicts between government and citizen definitions of transparency
• the CAIRS database as an example of different enactments of transparency
• design and use of technology as a form of ‘doing democracy’

I promised some of the audience members to place references online. Please click the title of this post to access them.

In Toronto, there is an interesting gun amnesty program which will soon be available. Citizens who want to turn a gun into police will receive a digital point and shoot camera. Major newspapers including The Star and The Globe & Mail have outlined details of the Pixels for Pistols program. The Globe reports that the quality of camera which the citizen receives will depend upon the type of gun they hand in.

What I am interested to know, is what types of photographs are taken. It would be interesting to see a follow-up piece on the photographic results of the program.

The Metronauts blog site has launched. I became involved in Metronauts through my participation at bar camp style events in Toronto and Hamilton. My first posting to the site is titled Buttons bells and bike racks. I will continue to cross post here.

For the past week I have been attending the Values in Design workshop at Santa Clara University in California. The organizers and guest faculty presented on a number of design projects and design methods which are interesting and noteworthy.

• Helen Nissenbaum presented on Track Me Not, which is a Firefox browser extension which allows users to hide their search queries. Essentially the system works by sending information generated from common searches, instead of the user’s actual searches to the search engine companies. Limitations of the system are that it is in English only and functions for the US versions of the engines only.

• Tracy Fullerton and Mary Flanagan presented on game design. As an interesting methodological contribution, they showed us the Values@Play Grow-A-Game cards for use in teaching reflective and value conscious game design
• Shay David did a demo of Kaltura which is an online environment for open source video editing, interaction and collaboration
  
  
  Presentations by Paul Dourish, Geof Bowker, Susan Leigh Star, Fred Turner and many others were also excellent parts of the event.

I sent off my registration materials today for the Learning Democracy by Doing: Alternative Practices in Citizenship Learning and Participatory Democracy conference at OISE, University of Toronto. The conference runs October 16-18, 2008.

Last week during the DGPis40 conference, Nora Yong from CBC radio interviewed Ron Baecker on the multimedia biography project. For the past year, I have worked (on a part-time basis) with a team of researchers on this project. In brief, the research involves a research assistant working with a family where an individual has Alzheimer’s Disease or Mild Cognitive Impairment, to create a DVD movie of their life history. My main role has been to complete qualitative data analysis on the video data from the project. The video data set is from the ‘premiere’ and follow-up screenings with the participants.

To find out more about this work you can access the mp3 of the Spark episode. Ron’s segment is roughly the last third of the mP3.

Buses are public spaces that we can use for much more than moving between two points in a city. I came across an interesting art project today titled Trans-Regalia. Trans-Regalia was envisioned by artist Cheyenne Henry to reclaim Indigenous culture in an urban context. A description from the Reclamation Winnipeg blog is quoted below.

"Trans-Regalia is an act of Indigenous cultural and political reclamation. Artist Cheyenne Henry reclaims the public transit system in Winnipeg to launch education about urban Aboriginal issues into the public sphere. People dressed in traditional Aboriginal regalia step onto city buses and share personal stories of reclaiming their culture and identity in an urban context. The lines between participant and performer are blurred as both become viewer and viewed, sharing a common experience, a bus ride into Winnipeg's core. This act of transit reclamation opens possibilities for dialogue and understanding in the inner city."

See the Reclamation Winnipeg blog for more information.