Howdy. I know I said I’d blog more about transparency issues - but you can see right through me - I’m swamped. This entry’s a two-fer & being cross-posted over here at the ChangeCamp blog, too.
Whoddathunkit? ChangeCamp blogger expectedly expressing love of transparency and, plot twist of all plot twists, turns out to be a lobbyist. Yeah, I just dropped the real taboo L-word.
So I’m @withoutayard, meegs to my friends & a registered lobbyist in the province of Ontario. And you may ask yourself-well…how did she get here?
Living in Austin during the last not-quite-as-amazing American federal election, led me to blogging & playing with online communications tools to affect change, raise awareness & spread awesome. Returning to Canuckistan, I served a tour at the Pink Palace, but never quite mastered the mysterious machinations of political parties. Unlike @dchartier, I couldn’t cut it in the civil service, even though sound recording policy at Heritage Canada was pretty darn close to a perfect policy-wonkette fit during a brief federal foray.
Combine the forces (read: career failures & bad-fits) & it sort of makes sense, right? Witnessing the Dean machine go off the rails as a viral video trainwreck, seeing Meetup’s potential beyond UT Japanese exchange & making campaign donations as easy as Amazon blew my mind in ’04 (& broke my heart the night of November 2nd). True patriot love of responsible government, parliamentary democracy & social justice/equity brought me home & hoping to see these transformative tools used in a Timmy’s.
I doubt I’ll ever get to geek out in a war room or a party HQ. Partisan politics brings out the agnostic in me. The thought of hundreds of thousands of dollars spent during a campaign on balloons, signs, buttons & miscellaneous paraphernalia drives me absolutely bonkers. Working within the system, keeping abreast of legislative issues, regulatory nerdery & jealously eyeing the open source enthusiasm, technological progress & federal government’s paradigm shift to the South is a great fit for now.
Blogging about the last provincial & federal elections, especially the creative campaigns on provincial electoral reform & federal vote-swapping was encouraging. A taste. But not enough.
Enter ChangeCamp. Citizen-initiated, non-hierarchical, collaborative & generally all things old-school civics. We have the tools, skills & thanks to some shindig yesterday in DC, the enthusiasm & momentum. So let’s do some heavy lifting & make our standards for transparency and engagement the new status quo. Liberate APIs, wiki-fy policy docs, de-PDF the whole shebang. Easy.
