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Every so often you see a news story or two that make you do a double take. Case in point: this CBC story about the city of Toronto banning kite flying in a park. I saw the headline, and thought it was a crazy idea. The gist of the story? Apparently some people don’t just fly kites with plain old string. There are people who indulge in the hobby of “kite fighting,” in which two fliers try to cut the string of each other’s kites.

And there’s the problem: the string can apparently cause several problems — birds can get caught in the trees with it, ducks and geese can get the string wrapped around their legs in the pond and lose a limb, city workers find the string tangling their mowers or weed-whackers, and apparently the councillor has had reports of people being injured by the string.

So the city banned kite flying in the park where the kite fighters congregated.

The comments on the news story are entirely unsurprising. “Moronic government”, loss of freedom, “why not take on some real problems”…

But this story got me thinking about two things. Number one was how you balance sensitivities.

To me — a white Canadian guy who grew up in Cape Breton — kite flying was something did once in a while on a windy day. If your parents made you, you’d make a kite like the one in the picture, and fly that. Otherwise, you’d go down to Woolworth’s, blow a buck or two on a plastic one, and fly that.

But to others, this is a big deal. Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Korea, Japan, and the Caribbean all have long traditions of kite fighting.

Here’s a story from AlJazeera about how it’s done in Afghanistan (or at least was done before the Taliban and is now done, after the Taliban:

So while some are upset by the effects of the kite fighters on the park, for others this is their sport — their ultimate, their running, their dogwalking. Does this turn kite-flying into a culture clash? I hope not. But if I use a park for dogwalking and someone else uses it for kiteflying, whose interests are more important, more valid?

Second, one commenter made a really interesting point: “So a few birds are hurt by string, but tens of thousands of song birds in Toronto are killed each year by cats. Cities should ban outdoor cats.” I’m not arguing for such a ban. But I think the commenter underlines an interesting point. That point: nothing is risk-free; no solution perfect.

And surprisingly enough, it made me think of the Chalk River NRU nuclear reactor, which began to make medical isotopes again this week. When the NRU was shut down a couple of years ago, it became a cause celebre, leading to emergency sittings of Parliament and the passage of a bill to keep it open. Then it shut down again, and that time it didn’t seem to create any great public concern.

At the time, Dr. William Leiss wrote a short essay for me about risk and the decisions being made. It occurred to me then that the situation was one in which shutting the reactor was a decision with a high probability of negative effects on the patients who needed its medical isotopes, while keeping the reactor open had a low probability of a catastrophic negative effect. It reminded me that almost nothing is ever clean-cut.

Same thing with the kite-flying (on a different scale, of course):

• Allow kite-flying:  adds a likely source of harm to birds, a possible source of harm to people
• Disallow kite-flying: removes one source of harm to birds and people; removes fulfilling activity for some.

One more example: I’m on the board of the Ottawa Folk Festival, and we had an absolute downpour last  Sunday. Suddenly, a million decisions had to be made. What got cancelled? What got moved? Was the site safe? Which stages could be used? Do we discount tickets? Do we refund tickets? And on and on… Every decision (with the exception of site safety) was not black and white. Each one had to be hashed through (in this case with extreme time constraints). And no decision pleased everyone. You never do. At least our festival director found an opportunity to get a great photo taken.

My partner Cathy and I love spending time in our garden. And we spend lots of time out there when things get green and lovely.

And when we travel, we like to find beautiful things to take pictures of.

So I thought I’d share some of them with you. If you’re looking for an iPad wallpaper, feel free to take one or all of these, and I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as we did finding the images.

The Ottawa Fringe Festival, one of the seemingly dozens of annual events that make life in Ottawa in the summer fun (and sometimes exhausting) has been holding a series of lunchtime events that have ranged from bloody debates on the future of theatre to… an Ignite event.

With the help of theatre and communications guy Ryan Anderson, the Fringe folk put together a roster of artists (not including me) and business types (yeah, that was me) to do Ignite presentations with the loose topic of the intersection of art and business.

For those of you not familiar with Ignite, it’s a movement where people put together 20-slide presentations that are the visuals for a five-minute talk. The slides advance mercilessly, every 15  seconds, so it’s like “The Pit and the Pendulum” for speakers.

The good news is that  all the presentations were great.

The presenters were, in order of appearance:

Tyler Cope, co-founder of Overlay.TV, a local tech startup and general good corporate citizen in Ottawa
Nancy Kenny, a peripatetic young actor, writer, and marketing guru
Sterling Lynch, another hyphenate (actor-writer-only-guy-wearing-a-tie).
Ram Kanda, creative director at Fuel Industries, a seriously big advertainment and online company here in Ottawa
Me
and Barry Smith, a Colorado newspaper columnist here with a show called “Every Job I’ve Ever Had”

Anyway, I thought that since I’m in the business of shameless self promotion, I should record my audio and match it up with the slides for you.

The presentation, which I called “If your art falls in a forest was it really art?” is only about five minutes long, so at the very worst you won’t have wasted much time.

I’ve put up the audio from the presentation, as well as a PDF of the slides. I tried to marry the slides with the audio, but sad to say, couldn’t get the timing to work the way I wanted it to.

UPDATE: Or… you could just wait a little bit for the enterprising folks at Ottawa Tonite to put up the video (which I thought was just being streamed). I’m really not that smart.

Almost exactly eighty-five years ago as I write this, a man named William Davis was shot and killed by police paid by the British Empire Steel and Coal Company (BESCO), as he marched in a union demonstration in New Waterford, Cape Breton.

The miners of that day were striking. BESCO cut off water and electricity to their houses. And their police fired over 300 shots in that skirmish.

Even now, despite the fact that no mines work in Cape Breton, Davis Day is celebrated in the mining communities of Cape Breton. I grew up in one of those communities. And I salute the courage of those long-ago miners who fought against tyrannical and brutal companies for the basic rights of a worker and a human being.

William Davis left a wife and nine children.

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The Men of the Deeps: “Coal by the Sea”

In blatant self-promotional news:

Mark Blevis and I have a new episode of our podcast up, number two (the second episode — the name of the podcast isn’t number two. That is a different podcast. About poo.)

And of course, I can’t promote the podcast without mentioning Podcasters Across Borders. You’re registered, right? To see Barry McLoughlin and Kady O’Malley and Avril Benoit and Tod Maffin and Adele McAlear and a bunch of other great sessions? And the boat cruise? And the backstage tour of the NAC in Ottawa? You’re NOT?! Shouldn’t you be going right over HERE to register, then?

“Welcome! I’m creating this blog to chronicle life as a flack in Ottawa. More to come as I find the time, energy, and inspiration to write and link to interesting stuff.

Ciao.”
From such inconsequential beginnings are dynasties made. Or not. Since then: jobs changed, life delivered into and out of the world, sickness, health, sadness, happiness, music, and friendship. But the blog’s been here. Happy seventh birthday, Flacklife.

It’s easy to snipe from the outside. But having watched and read coverage of yesterday’s announcement of new rules around the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) system by the Canadian Real Estate Association(CREA), I can’t imagine this is the way they would have wanted it to work out.

Some quick background:

In Canada, the MLS system is operated by CREA, and until yesterday, nobody but a realtor could put a listing on that system. This upset people who wanted to sell their house on their own, or who wanted to use services such as Grapevine or Property Guys. The proprietary nature of MLS data also led to disputes between CREA and people who wanted to mash up MLS data with Google Maps. One example of a failed mashup venture was housing123.com, which was shut down last year.

The federal Competition Bureau has been involved in a longrunning dispute with the association, arguing that the MLS system as presently constituted wasn’t open enough to  competition. In February, the Competition Bureau moved against CREA, saying

For example, under CREA’s rules, agents are prohibited from offering consumers the option of simply paying a fee for an agent to list a home on the MLS system. Instead, all consumers looking to list a property on MLS must purchase a pre-determined set of additional services from a real estate agent, such as the presentation of offers and negotiation of a final deal.

“The Bureau is focused on striking down these anti-competitive rules, so that real estate agents wishing to offer innovative services can do so, and consumers can benefit from greater choice,” said Commissioner Aitken. “While the market will ultimately determine prices for residential real estate services, we expect that if the Tribunal strikes down the anti-competitive restrictions, there will be downward pressure on real estate fees in Canada.”

CREA strenuously objected to that characterization. Here’s what CREA President Dale Ripplinger told the Globe and Mail at that time:

CREA president Dale Ripplinger said the decision was “surprising and disappointing.”

“We do not agree with the Bureau’s position that certain CREA rules are anti-competitive, either as a matter of fact or as a matter of law. CREA’s rules allow for innovative business models and provide a broad range of choice for consumers,” Mr. Ripplinger said in a statement.

Which brings us to yesterday, when CREA announced a number of changes to their services and held a news conference. Normally, I would have added “a news conference to explain the changes” to that sentence. But I didn’t for a specific reason — they didn’t want to explain, as this CBC News report will make clear:

The next blow came when the Competition Bureau dismissed the changes in no uncertain terms, saying in this statement:

“There is nothing in these proposals that we haven’t seen before and they do not solve the problem,” said Melanie Aitken, Commissisoner of Competition, “They are a step in the wrong direction. These amendments amount to a blank cheque allowing CREA and its members to create rules that could have even greater anti-competitive consequences.”

In February, the Competition Bureau filed a challenge to CREA‘s rules regarding the use of the MLS. The Bureau has concluded that these rules restrict the ability of consumers to choose the real estate services they want, forcing them to pay for services they do not need. The rules also prevent real estate agents from offering more innovative service and pricing options to consumers.

“We have repeatedly advised CREA‘s leadership that these amendments do not solve our ongoing competition concerns and I reiterated this directly to CREA as recently as last week in a letter to the President,” the Commissioner said.

So you hvae a news conference where the President flees from the media without answering a single question, then your “enemy”, rather than acknowledging things as a step forward, says it’s a step in the wrong direction. This didn’t go well.

So what went wrong? From the outside, my guesses would be that there was some combination of:

• insufficient thinking through the news conference. If you weren’t going to talk to media, why invite them at all? Send out a statement.
• a lack of consultation of the Competition Bureau. If this was going to poke the hornet’s nest, why do it?
• an overall lack of attention to communications. The CREA web site has far from a state-of-the-art media room. It needs some serious upgrading. Furthermore, there’s a wordpress-based CREA News blog, but that site has nothing about the new rules CREA’s proposing. Last year, when I wrote a couple of blog posts about the lack of mobile functionality on real estate sites, I didn’t find CREA tremendously responsive.

There’s no doubt that CREA is facing a difficult issue. But communications could have a positive effect on the issue. Right now, I don’t think that’s happening.

Photo is licenced by Creative Commons: CC BY-NC 2.0; post inspired by Sarah Stewart

In my morning mail, I got something from the “Domain Registry of Canada.” This is purely a sales letter for a domain that I own. Here’s my problem. The name and the look of the direct mail piece is, in my opinion, misleading. It makes the company look like a government agency or organization.

This company is NOT Canada’s official dot-ca registry. That would be CIRA. This company offers domain name registry through another company, Brandon Gray Internet Services, which operates as NameJuice.

There’s a long history of people calling out this company as a scam. Here’s Mitch Joel’s blog post from 2004, for example.

Also in 2004, a related company was fined $40,000 for similar activities. They were also banned from carrying out similar activities for five years. Didn’t take them long to get up to their old tricks, eh?

To be fair, a careful read of their web site will reveal that they aren’t a government organization.

My advice? If you get a direct-mail piece about domain name expiration, don’t pay it. The 5 years “best value” option they offered me in the direct mail piece cost $160. Godaddy offers .coms for $10.87 per year, meaning DROC would cost me nearly 3 times as much. A one-year registration costs $40, compared to $10.87 from Godaddy.

Ironically enough, you could register through the same company, this time operating as Namejuice, and pay $30 for one year and $95 for five.

Caveat emptor.

No further comment required.

Image: Mark Goetz

We’re coming up on the third Case Study Jam in a week. I’ve been involved in these events since Joe Boughner brought the idea to me and a few other people (Della, Nick, Melanie, and Joe’s wife / co-conspirator Amy), and now that we’ve had a couple under our belt, we’re hitting that gawky adolescent phase, I think.

Case Study Jam is a simple concept. The site describes it like this:

Case Study Jam is a place for communications practitioners to come together and share their stories – successes and failures. How are on-the-ground, front-line folks using social media and, more importantly, how are they integrating these tools into overall communications strategies and practices? Oh, it’s also an online repository of these stories. But more on that later.

The idea for this meetup was to set ourselves apart from events like Third Tuesday, Social Media Breakfast, Ignite, and professional development events organized by IABC, CPRS, Canadian Women in Communications, etc. After all, why do the same thing as something else?

The difference? One, the world-cafeish format. Another, the focus on presentations about failure as well success. And third, a focus on case studies, as opposed to theory and principle.

The first two jams have been successful on a number of counts, I think. People have met there, ideas been exchanged, some interesting presentations made.In fact, there’s talk that the model may start up in a second city soon.

Cheryl Gain of Ottawa Tonite emotes at CSJ1

We’ve also found a number of things that we’re tweaking as we go along. For example, we’re giving presenters more structure to follow in their presentations, and we’ll be pushing for more table hopping and shifting in the upcoming jam to encourage discussion.

But one thing we’ve noted is a certain topping out on attendance.

A week out from Case Study Jam 3 (or should I go with the Super Bowl Roman-Numeral Scheme and make it Case Study Jam III?) and we’ve got about 15 people registered. The room holds quite a few more, and we’d quite naturally like to see a full room. And my competitive spirit looks at more mature events like Third Tuesday or Social Media Breakfast and their full rooms and goes waaahhhh!

A bigger crowd would be great. But So there are a number of things that come to mind as to why we’re not filling our rooms yet.

• We’re new, they’re not.
• We don’t have super giant name speakers
• There’s not an infrastructure behind any one of the organizers pushing attendance from colleagues/clients. It’s organic in the extreme.

I suspect that we may be a little impatient. Or you may think we’re missing something. If so, tell us. Or if you want to make me feel better, why not come by next Thursday? I highly recommend the Lindenhof Apple Fritters for dessert and the conversation for a main course.

Case Study Jam 3 will feature Constable Nathan Hoedemann (right) of the Ottawa Police Service, Theresa Woolridge and Jennifer Jager of Emergency Preparedness Canada, and Dan Blouin of National Defence as they talk about the successes and failures they’ve experienced in their projects, and as always, you get to pick their brains afterward.

See you there?