Without a Yard

Been reviewing relatively recent Toronto plan-undoings that involve citizens rallying around a piece of property & pushing back – online, natch.  What drew me to the first was plain’ol’personal interest & proximity – the No Big Box in Leslieville campaign.  Take a boo at their webpage - it’s nothing special.  But it worked.

The second was brought to my attention by a clued-in-colleague with a nose for all things green’n'municipal – the Strachan bridge offered up by Metrolinx.   This advocacy group’s site is even less stunning – how the heck do you navigate this thing?  Who came up with that rambling acronym? (stands for “STOP METROLINX Super-Bridge on Strachan Ave”, FYI) Where do those hot models live?  But it worked.

Finally, a photo-journo extraordinaire reported Home Depot’s foiled plans, which made us realize that local hardware handymen can’t do it nor can they help.   Although Home Depot cited economic concerns were behind their retrenchment, there was little to no local lurv & my *super thorough* online investigation includes year+ of grumblings & mumblings…

So wha’happen?

As much as I’d love to blame the developers for not wielding flashy splashy sites to dazzle & inform residents, it’s easier than that.

There’s nothing high tech, high falutin’ or high octane about the anti-project sites & their successful offshoots – Facebook groups & online petitions.

It’s the basic call-to-arms simplicity that saved the day in the two most recent examples.

Check your options on the No Big Box site:

• Sign & Circulate a FAQ sheet or Petition (downloadable in PDF & Excel, respectively)
• Display a No Big Box in Leslieville Poster in the window of your home or business (downloadable in 2 sizes, B&W or colour, in PDF)
• Attend an OMB meeting (dates updated on homepage/only page & OMB’s website offered in case user can’t attend a ‘real life’ meeting)

Same with the Strachan’ites:

• Regular updates from municipal & provincial politicos
• Email blast cross-posted on homepage
• Drive to petition, Facebook Group, Photo Gallery of plans

Although it’s far less straightforward than the Leslieville gang, it acted as a vital hub for anyone searching for information about the bridge & immediately offered actionable tasks to affect change.

From feedback posted by the publicspaceratti after new non-bridgey-plans were announced, the community appears pretty happy with Metrolinx’s compromise.

So what can we learn from these two successful online grassroots campaigns & one scared-off developer?

You can quickly frame the discussion & perception of a project by mounting a simple online campaign HQ that offers basic information, easy-to-understand & actionable tasks, & multiple off-shoots (petitions, Twitter, Facebook groups, e-mail signups, links to authorities) for your supporters to review, repurpose & redistribute.

Developers, investors, corporations & local politicians can learn a great deal from the momentum built on these sites, the frequent maintenance, updates, engagement, as well as the clarity with which they describe a problem/plan & offer immediate levers to send feedback.

Establishing in-real-life consultations – as well as concurrent online fora – is only the first step – executing these events & maintaining the web properties has to be conducted transparently, while prioritizing frequent updates, accessibility & ease-of-use.

Easy.

My favourite political blog post this week was penned by Garth Turner about the Lisa Raitt controversy.  It’s a succinct & tartly delivered case study that reflects many observers’ frustrations with partisanship & the unflattering cut’n'thrust of ‘real’ politics.

For those outside the Canuckistan borders, or otherwise not tuned into this stuff:

- Political staffer leaves Minister’s briefing binder at a television studio – Big whoops in Yawnsville, right? Well, erm, it was backgrounders & talking points about NUCLEAR ISOTOPES & our $1.7B/3 year investment in these facilities (which wasn’t listed in the last federal budget…)

-  Studio decides NOT to broadcast info & contacts Minister’s office to arrange pick-up, no doubt partly because docs’re stamped ‘secret’, which makes’em tough to get under Access to Information Act (for an opposite approach, check out Day One of MyBO in office).

-  Word gets out + Calls for resignation + ‘Ministerial Responsibility + Outrage in the Legislature + Public hanging, etc = Staffer got quit.

-  Some who’d worked with politicos kinda felt sorry for the staffer ‘thrown under the bus’ in light of the Minister’s resignation not being accepted by the PM.

-  Then it got worse.  Really worse.  No REALLY – involves a taped conversation by the Minister.  Left on a recorder.  Left behind (you guessed it!) at a media outlet – a good ol’fashioned newspaper.

-  All fairness to the Minister, it was very old convo, taped unknowingly…but the media outlet patiently gave the staffer months notice/reminders to pick it up (tiny Ottawa geography fact – the Press Gallery is across the street from the Main Legislative Buildings)….& when they heard of the staffer’s dismissal…they pressed ‘play’. (& so can you!  cilck here to launch Halifax Chronicle Herald media player)

© Bette Burgoyne

-  Staffer tries to ban the paper’s use of the tape’s contents -> Futile – a Halifax judge (rightly, IMHO) ruled that the contents of the conversation were more important than ‘reputation’ of staffer:

“It is wrong to deprive the press, and the public it serves, of remarks made privately but not confidentially in the sense of trade secrets…The issue of the political oversight of Canada’s medical isotope system is literally a matter of life and death for cancer patients. It is a matter of intense public interest…The handling of this issue by the government and the cabinet ministers is a matter of immediate public and political interest.”

The comments were tough to take on two fronts – Minister assesses a policy decision that could have been potentially fatal for cancer patients as a ‘sexy’ political win & describes a political colleague with a different cultural background as being disadvantaged due to her cooperative & collaborative approach to public service.

Drama & hype aside – why do I love this story so much?

-  Demonstrates that Access to Information is a vital piece of legislation to monitor, maintain & strengthen (less than half of FOI requests are met within 30 days, & 1/3 go longer than the most extended timelines allowed by law)

-  Humanizes politicos/staffer caught in rat-raciness of work (we all screw up, leave things behind, indulge in gallows humour & have ALL said things to close friends & colleagues that we’d be mortified to have distributed on a newspaper’s pop-up media player – Blatchford has a valid point & is often the first to remind us how overhyped stories in this vein become)

-  Serves up perfectly parallel karmic retribution finale (eventually when Raitt is shuffled off…just wait for it…) for losing sight of what it means to be a public servant

-  Completely reaffirms the imporance of mainstream media sources – & their Job-levels of patience – in staying professional with politicos & staff…& holding public interest above all – fighting to publish documents that are necessary for an informed citizenry

-  Proves online content & media-rich resources have changed the way we expect to consume this information.  Immediately after the court decision was announced the paper posted an audio file of the conversation – blogs & other news sources can grab this file & link back in seconds.  News hounds can watch the apologies online as they happen or archived at their leisure

That’s the REAL ‘sexy’ part of the entire schmozzle – swoon-tastic three part harmony of old media, new media & karma.