Harold Jarche

Green Domain Hosting

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For Canadians, I have found two ways of becoming a “greener” presence on the Web. One is to use Green Hosting, where everything is powered by renewable energy:

All the electricity required by the server and ancillary operations (101% of demand) is generated by wind turbines in Alberta, and is distributed through the Greenmax© program of the Calgary utility ENMAX. Both generation and distribution are certified under Canada’s national EcoLogo© program to ensure that this service contributes directly to the reduction of GHG emissions and supports new renewables facilities.

Another possibility is to use Ethical Hosting’s service, which uses offsets, or green tags:

Obviously we can’t just throw up a Wind turbine outside our office and it would be very expensive to do so (but would be very cool if we could!) This is where green energy certificates or Green Tags come into play. After auditing our energy usage, we were able to calculate the electricity usage of our office and computers. We are then able to purchase the necessary amount of Green Tags through a nationally recognized provider: The Pembina Institute.

Definitely a couple of considerations if you’re looking for a new host or considering changing your current host.

Team Sports and Ethics

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When we mention that we will be home-schooling, many people say that our children will miss important socialisation activities, especially team sports. Personally, I was never interested in most popular team sports and neither was my wife, so our family doesn’t have a history of playing hockey, basketball, football, baseball and other team sports.

This report released by the Josephson Institute of Ethics, which surveyed 5,275 high-school students across the USA, shows some interesting findings regarding ethics and team sports, such as:

Some Sports Are Worse Than Others. Boys engaged in baseball, football and basketball are considerably more likely to cheat on the field and in school and to engage in conduct involving deliberate injury, intimidation and conscious rule-breaking than boys involved in other sports. Generally, boys participating in swimming, track, cross country, gymnastics and tennis were markedly less likely to cheat or to engage in bad sportsmanship than their male counterparts in other sports. Girls involved in basketball and softball were more likely to engage in illegal or unsportsmanlike conduct than girls involved in other sports.

They also found that “Many Coaches Teach Negative Lessons”, specifically – Illegal holding; Using the other team’s playbook; Faking an injury; llegally altering a hockey stick; Illegal start; Wrong player shooting free throws; Altering the field of play; Soaking the field to slow down the other team.; Throwing at a batter; Mistake in score; Trash talk; Showboating; Motivation through insult; Swearing at official to motivate team; and Holding back an athlete in school.

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Like anything else, we have to be careful about generalising, but these data show that we shouldn’t take for granted that all team sports teach good socialisation skills.

Energy Efficiency Information Session in Sackville

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Passing on this information I received via e-mail.

EOS Eco-Energy and Efficiency NB are hosting an Energy Efficiency Information Session on 16 March 2007 at 7:00 PM. It will be held at the Sackville Civic Centre and admission is free. The presentation will cover existing homes, new homes and multi-unit residential buildings. To learn more about existing New Brunswick energy programs, go to the Efficiency NB site.

Open Source is (still) best for customers

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I’ve been an advocate of open source software for quite some time now. Part of the reason for this advocacy was my experience selling a proprietary learning management system. I saw how customers could become hand-cuffed to a technology once they had put a critical amount of data into the system and could no longer get it out. This wasn’t just our company but everyone in the business.

Matt Asay, in a case study from University of Nebraska (that’s an academic client folks), once again shows why open source is better for the customer in the long run:

You buy into a Microsoft (or Oracle, or ….) ecosystem, and they provide all the tools to get you in deeper, and to keep you there. There are good reasons for Microsoft to do this, reasons which have nothing to do with pernicious business practices. One reason is that Microsoft can better control the total user experience if it controls all the interlocking pieces, just as Apple does on its computers.But therein lies both the promise and peril of a vendor-dominated ecosystem. It’s hard to get out once you get in.

Here are some of my past discussions on open source for learning:

How open source has a much lower total cost of ownership.

A Canadian case study on open source in education.

Open source is recommended by impartial research organisations.

NB Self-sufficiency Task Force

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The New Brunswick government has commissioned a task force to look into ways that this Province can become self-sufficient.

You are invited to view the comments and/or join the discussion. The Task Force Co-chairs also contribute, by posting questions and/or clarifying issues. The contents of this Discussion Forum will be analyzed and contribute to the preparation of Final Report of the Task Force on Self-Sufficiency. The Discussion Forum is open until March 31, 2007.

The recommendations to date could be considered to be a bit controversial and have fostered some discussion and conflicting points of view. I’ve added my comments to a few of the six discussion areas:

  1. Increase population and labour force
  2. Sweeping changes
  3. Increase labour productivity
  4. Rural and Urban connections
  5. Export growth
  6. Expand our existing corporate base
  7. Leaders

Part of my concern about this process is that it is just a snapshot in time and does not connect to the serious discussions that have been going on for several years in non-traditional media (like blogs). If you have some perspective on economic & community development, then please add your comments to the “official” discussion. I’m told that the Premier will read these comments, while I’m sure that most politicians don’t read any of our blogs (correct me if I’m wrong).

So if you have older posts that pertain to these topics, then just copy and paste them in. Think of it as a manually-operated RSS aggregator ;-)

Value Networks Workshop

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We will be hosting a workshop in Saint John, NB, on Creating Value Networks for SME’s in the ICT Sector on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007. This event is being conducted in partnership with PropelSJ and NRC-IRAP, and it’s free.

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Consider this your invitation

The workshop will be conducted by Patti Anklam, thought-leader and practitioner of value network analysis. Patti has literally written the book on the subject – Net Work: A Practical Guide to Creating and Sustaining Networks at Work and in the World, to be published this April.

The other hosts with me will be Hal Richman (Productivity Solutions) and Gordon Smith (CBCL Ltd.) who have applied value network analysis in the ocean and marine technology sector in Newfoundland & Labrador [I’ll be there too, but if you’re reading this on my blog, you already know me].

So what are value networks? According to Verna Allee, author of The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks:

A value network is a web of relationships that generates economic value and other benefits through complex dynamic exchanges between two or more individuals, groups or organizations. Any organization or group of organizations engaged in both tangible and intangible exchanges can be viewed as a value network, whether private industry, government or public sector.

Plan to attend this workshop and learn how value networks can help your organization do more business world-wide.

Location: The New Brunswick Museum, 1 Market Square, Saint John, NB

Morning (open session), Lecture and Skills Building Workshop

Mary Oland Theatre, NB Museum

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Afternoon (invitation only), The Value Network for PropelSJ

Specifically for Catalict clients & mentors and invited ICT companies

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Reservations will be required for the afternoon session and are preferred for the morning session.

Contact me or PropelSJ for further information or an invitation to the afternoon session.

Why does Aliant’s service suck?

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I don’t like using the “S” word when referring to a company, but in this case I feel it’s appropriate. I have complained before about Bell-Aliant’s service, and how it took over a year to get things straightened out:

A little bit of searching and I found the e-mail of one of Bell Aliant’s VP’s and sent my story, with links to my blog. Within 24 hours, Aliant had delivered:

  1. an apology directly from a VP
  2. a rebate on the High Speed Ultra service for which I paid
  3. a year’s worth of free Ultra service

Unfortunately, what I received from Aliant has almost no value. First of all, Aliant’s service does not work with Skype, my preferred VoIP application.

Net Neutrality Canada - Neutrality.ca

Secondly, Aliant’s Ultra service comes with free “TV on your PC”, but this service hasn’t worked at all for 3 weeks, and my requests for help remain unanswered.

All I can say is, “Buyer Beware”, and choose an alternative.

Update: I never received a response from Aliant’s technical support regarding TV on my PC, but my son suggested that I roll back Windows Media Player, and after two rollbacks (to v. 9) it now works, in spite of Aliant’s statement that the service works with Version 9 “or higher”. Still no joy with Skype.

Update 2: It seems that other telco monopolies are blocking traffic.

PKM Unplugged

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Jerome Martin responded to my last PKM article with an excellent reference document. Several years ago, Jerome wrote a chapter on Personal Knowledge Management (PDF) for the book, Managing Knowledge: Case Studies in Innovation.

Even though it’s seven years old, I would recommend this 10-page chapter as an introduction to PKM. I don’t think that many people were even using the term at the time, but Jerome has a great list of random thoughts, namely:

  1. Spend time with creative people
  2. Go to conferences that are fascinating and apparently irrelevant
  3. Learn about a new area
  4. Travel
  5. Read voraciously
  6. Create a private personal knowledge web resource
  7. Tell your story

The first five points can be done while unplugged from the Net, so don’t think of PKM as a web-only affair (just look at the good books I’ve read in the past few years) . Today, I would slightly disagree with #6, because I have found that you get more value with a public than a private knowledge resource, but then these recommendations were made in 2000. Finally, #7 is much easier today with blogs.

TED Talk Videos

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Many of the presentations from TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talk are available on YouTube. I’ve watched a number of these recently and some of them are absolutely fantastic. These 53 videos are online and free and make for great informal learning and discussion. We have been watching some of them as a family with favourites being Sir Ken Robinson, Al Gore and Dan Dennett. I think that they are an excellent break from online reading, which many bloggers do a lot of.

These videos are also good conversation starters and I’d think that the 20-25 minutes format would be perfect for a quick lunchroom view and chat. I really appreciate the fact that TED Talk has made these available.

For those in the learning field, check out Richard Baraniuk from Rice University on A vision for free, global (online) education which looks at the publishing industry, academia and open source.

Calgary eLearning Network – PKM

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I will be presenting a 90 minute online session to the Calgary eLearning Network on April 18th. The theme will be Personal Knowledge Management (PKM). Barb Krell, an alumna of one of our informal learning unworkshops, is the chief organiser of this session.

I thought it would be best to put my session info online so that participants could link to it, ask any questions in advance or review some of the references.

This post from Lilia Efimova, best sums up PKM:

To a great extend PKM [personal knowledge management] is about shifting responsibility for learning and knowledge sharing from a company to individuals and this is the greatest challenge for both sides. Companies should recognise that their employees are not “human resources”, but investors who bring their expertise into a company. As any investors they want to participate in decision-making and can easily withdraw if their “return on investment” is not compelling. Creativity, learning or desire to help others cannot be controlled, so knowledge workers need to be intrinsically motivated to deliver quality results. In this case “command and control” management methods are not likely to work.

Taking responsibility for own work and learning is a challenge for knowledge workers as well. Taking these responsibilities requires attitude shift and initiative, as well as developing personal KM knowledge and skills. In a sense personal KM is very entrepreneurial, there are more rewards and more risks in taking responsibility for developing own expertise.

Here are my perspectives on PKM from 2005 and later revised in June 2006. My latest reflection on PKM was in Aug 2006, following an unworkshop.

For the April 2007 session, I intend on covering the two main tools – Social Bookmarks, like del.icio.us; and Aggregators, like Bloglines. If there is time, I’ll discuss blogging in general terms. These three tools, in my mind, form the basis of PKM on the Web.

Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.