The Challenges Facing Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia is a diverse collection of communities, each facing unique challenges as they try to develop in these times of economic uncertainty.  The hurdles Nova Scotians must overcome to create a prosperous economy seem quite daunting.  Our coffers are low and our demands are high. Our infrastructure is aging, as is our population, and our economic stability is too reliant on private enterprise and decisions made in Ottawa about the management of our abundant ocean resources and the funding of our health care.

As is the case in regions across Canada, the Nova Scotian economy is approached as the sacred superstructure from which prosperity flows.  Progress and development in our province is measured in terms of our activities and outputs for a few key sectors: housing, food production (fisheries and agriculture), employment and energy.   These are also the sectors upon which our economy is heavily reliant for growth.  These sectors are healthy when our communities are healthy, and our communities are healthy when our population is healthy.

We rarely do interdisciplinary full-cost GPI accounting in the calculation of our yields.  And many of the profits which are generated through Nova Scotian labour and resources are exported rather than reinvested into the infrastructures that produced them.   This makes our economy unsustainable, and paralyses our ability to create and maintain our own economic stability.  It also makes provision of long-term and stable funding to our communities extremely difficult.

Community organizations and the people who run them are continually being challenged to prove the economic validity of their work to the government, and increasingly to the private sector to which they must turn for resource based assistance.  Yet they lack the capacity to produce such analyses due to the funding gaps that already exist for program delivery.

But Nova Scotia’s population requires additional support whether community organizations have the ability to prove this or not.  By Canadian standards, our population is older, physically and mentally unhealthy, and experiencing poverty at higher levels than other provinces across the country.  Therefore, we have a disproportionate number of people with special needs which require the use of more assistance and resources.  But government, at all levels, is downloading the responsibility of care onto community organizations.  Because these community organizations are unable to secure a long-term commitment from their municipal, provincial and federal overseers, the people who require extra assistance and resources are treated with band-aid solutions or left untreated.  In either case, an individual’s ability to participate in the economy is dependent on how well all of their special needs are addressed.

Our current government is working from a negative budgetary position, which can potentially exacerbate these issues, but balancing a budget takes more than simple money.  It requires creativity and collaborations within departments and across community, municipal and federal lines of jurisdiction.  It requires a push in the direction of technological development and job creation in the green energy and communications sectors, and a commitment to reinvest in our communities.  Our government can do its part in creating a bold new vision for Nova Scotia if it is willing and able to redefine what progress and development means for the province.  It will also require a shift away from old paradigms framing progress around financial profit, and acknowledgement that our economy can only be prosperous if we reinvest in the people and communities that create and power them.

We have many challenges ahead of us which go beyond this fiscal year.  In many ways balancing our current budget determine the budgets we will have in the future.  Therefore it will require more than short-term economic analysis; it will require creativity, collaboration, reallocation and reorganization towards a prosperous Nova Scotia.

Talkin’ Shit

We humans are clever animals.  We have figured out all kinds of ways to make our lives convenient and pleasant.  Cars, electricity, space travel, information and communication technologies… so many advances and innovative feathers in our brain caps related to the wondrous applications of human knowledge and intellectual superiority.

There is one particular issue that humanity has been grappling with since we began to organize ourselves in various civilizations.  That is, what do we do with our waste.

Human waste as it exists today is significantly more complex than the waste they had to deal with in other eras of history.  Back then, most human waste was shit, piss, vomit and blood… Not a very pleasant topic, I know… but a very important one.

I have read that in Rome, public urine vases were commonplace, and tanners would use in leather and fabric preparation.  One Emperor (Vespasian 9-79 AD) recognized a serious buck to be made from the industry and introduced a urine tax.

Paris, circa 1200’s… where legislators had to explicitly forbid people for throwing their feces out the window.  And when that didn’t work, they compromised and asked people at least shout ‘gare a l’eau’ when showering your urine from an upper story window.

In 1590’s the model for the modern flush toilet was created by a fellow named Sir John Harington, and readily adopted in France and most of Europe. However, in Britain the design did not suit Queen Elizabeth I, as the smell that remained in the pipes was as unbearable as the shit that caused it. By the 1700’s Britain was still the only major European nation without their shit in relative order.  A few more tweaks of the technology, and a few 100 years later… most of the modern world can happily report that the only thing they have to do with their waste, is flush.

But as HRM’s recent sewage disaster has taught us, we still have a long way to go before we have solved the problem with what to do with our waste.  And, as Jocelyne Rankin and Jennifer Graham from the EAC, remind us in the most recent issue of Halifax Magazine, our waste sure ain’t what it used to be.  Chemicals, cleaners, plastics, pharmaceuticals… we really abuse our toilets with the amount of stuff that isn’t either shit or piss or vomit or blood we flush down it.

But beyond human waste, we share our sewer lines with industry… with hospitals and dry-cleaning businesses and research facilities and breweries and gas stations… all these industries creating their own forms of waste which are mixing with the domestic waste creating a superformula of the most unpleasant byproducts of modern human existence.

Now, in Halifax, we are very concerned about all this waste getting dumped into our Harbour… but… there is something else, which is perhaps even more disturbing than the “glitch” we seem to have encountered with our waste management plan.  That is, what we are doing with the sludge left once our sewage is processed through the technology we have chosen to “fix” our sewage problem.  Our sewage system takes care of 70% of the particulate matter in our sewage… but what do we do with it once we’ve filtered it out?

Currently, as I understang it, the city lets a corporation called N-Viro Systems take that leftover human and industrial waste sludge away.  Which is then mixed with cement kiln dust (a liming agent which is another industrial waste product containing heavy metals) at a 50:50 ratio.  The resulting product is something they call Bio-solids.

N-Viro Systems trucks bio-solids to various farms in the province, where it is dug into the land and used as fertilizer.

Now, it appears as though HRM has plans to get into the Bio-solids game by building its own facility to process it… and, it appears as though bio-solids are being touted as a “Green” Solution to our shitty problems… However, I seriously question the ecological wisdom in giving such a process the green stamp of approval… As I learned last night, acceptable evidence on the safety of the land use of bio-solids in agriculture is sketchy at best, given the methods of testing for acceptable levels of certain toxins available to us here in NS.

I mean, we are talking about our food here… our food and our land.  We are digging this shit directly into our soil and calling it fertilizer.

Bio-solids are on the agenda of some, like Dr. Marilyn Cameron and other members from the NS Environmental Network.  Dr. Cameron gave the keynotes speech at this weekend’s GPNS AGM… she has our attention, and now she needs yours.

Dr. Cameron has been attempting to have this issue addressed by the current government, however she is unable to get any satisfactory response.  She is unable to get a list of the farms using bio-solids, and the province is unwilling to legislate labeling laws.

She would like to see the NDP adhere to the “Precautionary Principle” on this issue (From Wiki: The precautionary principle is a moral and political principle which states that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action).

When we’re talking biosolids, we’re not talking about simply those natural excrements of humanity… but all the unnatural and chemical ones too… It seems to me that I have a right to know, as a consumer of local foods, if my produce is being grown in this sludge.

Dr. Cameron has yet to get an audience with HRM City Council, but she has an application in to do so.  If she manages to get the floor, it will be interesting to hear how Halifax responds to her, an environmental activist from rural NS in response to a problem they believe they’ve come close to solving… I predict it will fall on deaf ears.  I mean, the city is pretty pleased with itself, and this so-called Green solution… to the extent that they are pumping more of our tax dollars into a processing plant, which will allow them to cut out the middle man, collecting, processing, selling and delivering the sludge themselves.

I will be pointing my city councilor, my MLA, the Minister of the Environment, and the Minister of Agriculture to this issue… I will also be asking the local farmers who sell their bounty at the numerous farmers markets in the area, whether their food was grown with bio-solids… I have already started talking with my friends and family about the issues… and I (with other GPNS members) am resolved to assist Dr. Cameron in her public education campaign.

Why would the province and the city take such a risk with an already fragile agriculture industry. And what about the local grassroots economy which has sprung up as a result of successful farmer’s markets across the province… what about the health of the residents of the province who actively make the local choice.  It all just seems reckless and wrong.

At least let me know if my food is grown in the shit… so that I can make an informed choice as a socially responsible consumer who is weary of the impact of all these chemicals in our environment.

life@speed

I’m dealing with waves of anxiety right now.  the last 24 hours have been an intense whirlwind… very intense.  Now that the dust has somewhat settled, and our issue… our cause… is in the last 3 minutes of its 15, my protective cognitive devices are kicking in as I start to intellectualize the experience and turn it into something productive.

This story, the story of this little boy with autism, who is absolutely adorable and photogenic (by consensus)… generated so much interest that it was picked up from station to station to station across the country.  Newspapers, radio, TV, Cyberspace… the media dug in.  We figured a page 6 story on the Chronicle-Herald… maybe.

Our friends and family are amazing and supportive.  As are the autism parents I have connected with online over the years, from all over the planet who have a variety of perspectives about autism.  One thing is unanimous about all Autism Moms and Dads… they protect their cubs.

And god bless ‘em for it.  Lord knows the institutions of our society aren’t going to fight for them… because people with Autism immediately present a problem for the status quo… in that they have different needs than the status quo, so the status quo has to start making exceptions for them.  This is true, not just for people with Autism, but for all people who have disabilities that lie in the realm of brain function and cognitive processing.

The status quo easily adapts to people with physical disabilities.  We have braille on our money, closed-captioning TV, all of our buildings have to be accessible for people on wheels.  But when it comes to people with mental disabilities, disabilities that we can’t see, and that we can’t understand… the status quo doesn’t do so well in it’s adaptation.

But I digress…

The only certain conclusion that I can draw at this point in time, the only nugget I have taken from this experience so far, is that I will not be taking Izaak on the public transit system again, any time real soon.

Other than that, I have to keep digesting…

Carless no more

For the past 3 years, our family has been carless.  For the most part, it has worked for us.  Keeping the household expenses down while commuting on public transit throughout the city.  Sure, there were some inconveniences, like grocery shopping and going on outings outside the city… but even at that, we would either take taxis or bum rides from our friends and family and it was still cheaper than owning and maintaining a car.

But recently, we had been finding ourselves wishing for a car more often than not.  Especially for doing things with the boys.  Carting two autistic children around on public transit is sketchy.  Not eligible for Metro Transit’s Access-a-Bus, it meant at least an hour of preparation, especially if it was happening during rush hour.

Gabe (almost 12) loves taking the bus.  Scratch that, he simply loves buses.  He probably knows more about the fleet than most of the bus drivers… especially what ads are going to on them.  He refuses to get on particular buses because of the ads, or lack of ads on them.  He particularly dislikes single advertiser buses, like the Bell and Pepsi ones.  One day I had to wait an extra 20 minutes because he wanted to wait for the 958 – 60 Eastern Passage bus.  The alternative… him very loudly screaming “you can’t make me come with you” and having a complete and utter meltdown while judgemental eyes would inevitably scorn my inability to “control my child”.  So we waited, and sure enough, the 958 – 60 Eastern Passage came along and he happily trotted onto it where he proceeded to recite every ad on the bus until we arrived at our final stop.

Izaak (almost 9) is unpredictable on the bus.  Sometimes wonderful and easy… sometimes taking off his shoes and biffing them across the bus to hit some poor public transit rider in the back of the head with.  Izaak has very few traditional communication skills.  He talks in one or two word requests and answers, and is incapable of expressing complex descriptions about what he likes and doesn’t like and why.  He also has no idea how to appropriately interact with people.  So if we are on the bus and someone sits next to him that he doesn’t like the smell of (one of his hyper-sensitivities), he is likely to smell them then push them away by saying “no – bye bye” very loudly.  While I think it is kind of cute, the people whose smell he is offended by don’t so much.  And that’s a tame one… Izaak is getting to the age and size where if he doesn’t want to be on a bus, there’s not much we can do about it unless we are willing to subject a whole busload of strangers to one of Izaak’s meltdowns, which we are usually not.

So we’ve been really feeling like a car might make life just slightly easier for us.

We had heard about Car Share Halifax a few months ago.  I can’t recall where I heard about it, but I do remember that I had gone to the website and checked it out.  We flip flopped regularly about whether it would be useful to us and we could justify the expense.  Then about a month ago a friend of ours told us he was Retiring his Ride and he could either get $300 cash or have a $500 coupon to Car Share Halifax.  He had heard us talking about Car Share, and offered us the coupon.

Signing up was extremely painless.  The folks at Car Share Halifax are nice and easy-going.  Within one hour, I had signed up, got my membership number, had an orientation session, and was given the FOB to the Car Share Fleet.  I went from having one car, to having 8 cars, strategically placed across the city.  Even a Prius! For $9 an hour (M-F 6am-6pm), gas and insurance included.

Our neighbourhood lot is convieniently located one block away.  3 minute walk, tops.

We used Car Share a lot this week.  Mostly for transporting Izaak home from summer camp, and running errands.  I found hours last week that I did not know that I had in a day.

Another cool thing about Car Share Halifax is that it makes me feel good about being a part of it.  I am not only a customer, using a service… I am a member participating in a fabulous organization.

But perhaps the best thing of all is driving in a car which has facebook and twitter on the bumper.

So I’m sold, and I’m encouraging everyone who’s been thinking about it for the past few months to dive in and try it.  I can totally see how a service like this would be useful to non-profit and government agencies as well.  Pay-per-use is the smart way to have a car.  I’d also like to add that if it so happens that my blog has been that final convincing point for you to try it, give them my name as the referrer and we will both get a $25 driving credit for doing so!

The Golden Arrow of Consumption

Now that I have you here… please take 20 minutes to watch this video I found on YouTube.  That is all…

Why I am voting Green

I have a very dear friend named Greg. Greg has lived with schizophrenia for his whole adult life.  After many struggles, psychotic breaks,  pills, poverty, addictions and therapies, he has arrived at a very good place in his life.  He has found a nice balance between the meds, his art, his friends and living.  He has been on Income Assistance because of his schizophrenia for a while now.  But recently, he has expressed a desire to get off I.A. and try to find a job.  He’s in a stable housing situation, and starting to get involved in a few community and advocacy organizations around Mental Health.  Greg will need his meds to be able to maintain a job though, and if he goes off of I.A. he loses coverage for his meds… you see the problem.

I jokingly said to him the other night that his situation now was a good symbol for everything that was wrong with the Departments of Health and Community Services.  It is really not right.

So what does Greg have to do with why I’m voting Green?  Well Green is not simply about the environment.  It is actually about the approach.  You see, approaching things in a Green way means looking at them holistically (David doesn’t like it when I use that word, because it’s flaky, and we are really trying hard to reduce the stereotype that the Green Party seems to still face in Canada and especially in Nova Scotia).  Viewing something holistically means that you do your absolute best to look at it from all angles, and see exactly where it overlaps and intersects with other issues.

The reason why it’s Green, is because it is the physical environment first.

When David, Ryan (Watson) and I went to Dartmouth High last week, one of the kids there said, “so I’m going to die in 80 years and I don’t plan on having any kids, why should I care so much about the environment (he later admitted he was playing devil’s advocate).  But I said to him… if our physical environment keeps going the way that it’s going, it might not be 80 years, but 40… and David asked if he wanted to go take a dip in the Harbour.

The reason why it’s Green is because environment means more than just saving the trees and putting up windmills… it’s about our social environment to.  For too long our governments have been disconnected our selves from our environments, physical and social, for the sake of profit margins and powerful lobby groups.

Our physical environments and our social environments are intimately intertwined.  We need clean air, clean food, clean water and protection from the elements absolutely first.  Our survival depends on it.  Yet, it seems as though it is too much to demand these things living in our democratic and abundant society.  You may question the word abundant in these times of economic crisis, but we still have many resources at our disposal, despite the minuscule drops in our GDP.

Last night on CTV Atlantic, Ryan Watson was interviewed by Steve Murphy and he was asked, what do you mean by seeing opportunity in this global economic crisis?  Ryan responded that when a crisis emerges, it is the perfect time to take a step back and examine why we have arrived at a crisis situation.  It’s not about a few emergency room beds here and a few “green” jobs there… it’s about looking at the whole structure.  It’s about taking a step back and examining whether or not we are delivering services in the most effective and efficient ways, it’s about throwing away the perspectives that got us in this mess in the first place… it’s about moving into the 21st century with 21st century ideas using 21st century technology and organizing our government in 21st century ways…

The Green Party is the only party suggesting that it’s time to move away from the GDP as a measure of our progress and province well-being, and instead adopt the GPI, Geniune Progress Index.  The fundamental difference between the GDP and the GPI is social accounting.  Social accounting is a difficult task because really, what price tag can you put on a human life?  How to do calculate the human experience in economics?  The current trend is to simply discount it as a part of the equation.  The GDP calculates the value of the person as a consumer, and nothing more.  The GPI considers the value of a person as a person, participating and communicating with their community.

I am so sick of being referred to as a consumer.  I am a person damnit.  I have a family and a community.  My life is more meaningful than being part of the bottom line in some trans-national corporations year-end profit margins.  Greg is not a mental health consumer, he is a person who requires a little more support in his community because his brain works a little differently than most.

I love my province.  Nova Scotia is a gem.  We have a perfect-sized population, a wealth of natural resources, and a creative class with great ideas. I believe in the 6 priniciples that the Green Party embraces: Ecological wisdom, social justice, participatory democracy, nonviolence, sustainability, and respect for diversity.

I am voting Green because I want to see structural change which reflects their holisitic approach to the issues.  I am voting Green because I believe the citizens need an opportunity to participate in the dialogue.

Johnny Law may need a new slingshot… redux

I had the great pleasure of working with Donald Clairmont on the Mayor’s Roundtable of Violence and Public Safety back in 2007-2008. The Mayor’s Roundtable was a response to a crime wave involving mostly youth.  A response to Teresa McEvoy and the kiddie swarmings and the late night downtown brawls that were breaking out (though the Christmas Eve brawl came after the meetings).  A response to an American Sailor being stabbed and a few drive-by shootings.  A response to a McLean’s Magazine article ranking Halifax as having the highest rates of crime in the country.

One of my tasks was to observe the Roundtable meeting at City Hall and take notes for Don, who was helping moderate the presentations.  It was a long day, but I learned a lot about law and order in this city.  I wrote a blog after the meeting, which you can read here if you want to… but given the recent crime wave bonanza in the city I thought I’d look back and see how many of the policy proposals and suggestions we’ve implemented since those meetings in 2007:

One theme that did not go unnoticed was the call for change… some sort of change… any sort of change… Recognition that the current system is not working and the culture is moving faster than any policy can catch. Just acknowledging that there is a need to start “thinking outside the box” is a big step for some of these officials. One of the best sentiments came from the Executive Director of the newly formed Provincial Child and Youth Strategy, Robert Wright… Any policy designed to address these issues of youth culture and societal change should be inclusive and acknowledge the multiplicity of contexts that are represented in day-to-day social life. And it should acknowledge that when it comes to policy surrounding youth, they are moving targets. A good youth policy/strategy has to be malleable and move as fast to meet the needs of the moment. Now whether the government can actually speed up the processes of bureaucracy will be another matter all together.

So a few of the specific suggestions that came from that day of presentations and where we are on them:

From the urban planner, Frank Palermo – HRM should start thinking of itself as a 24-hour city with 24 hour public transit. - yeah, okay… NEXT!

From a number of presenters – The opening of schools to act as community centres in after-school hours – well parents are fighting to keep community schools open just for school so… no.

Also from a number of presenters – Possibility of “community courts” for low level crimes, mental health related crime and drug treatment – we almost got a community court a few months ago, then something happened and it’s stalled

From Strategic Planner Jack Novack – The municipal government should get all the junk off their agenda and start thinking about policy that really matters for the growth and development of the city. – feeding the ducks… need I say more?

From Don Clairmont – The employment of a public safety coordinator attached to the Mayor’s Office well we got a public safety coordinator attached to the Police Force.  I think the idea was to get an administrator in there, not another police officer… but, at least it is half there.

From Don Clairmont – Race Relations The race issue is never in the forefront of crime in Halifax, ever… despite the fact that black men are waaaaay overrepresented in the criminal justice system.  Race relations are this city’s biggest shame… the ghosts of Africville haunt.

From Don Clairmont – Community Policing (not more police, but more visible police) – It seems as though they are doing both.  They’ve hired more police, so that’s why I see them all the time and everywhere in the Capital Districts…  There is a difference between visibility and feeling as though you are under siege in a police state.

Don gave about 60 recommendations to the City in total, some of them have started rolling and I think we’re seeing improvements where they have been.  It would be interesting to know, from the City, how many of the recommendations from the Roundtable have been enacted since it came out last year.

My take on the current rash of shootings is that they are mostly gang-related.  Which means they are almost certainly mostly drug-related. But there are concerning crimes happening that aren’t because of gangs .

Beazley said the public was not being targeted in the crimes that were happening.  This was the day after 2 girls were taken hostage in a bowling alley heist, and a few days before a 19-year old was shot in the head (and then died).

The murder that was down the street from me turned out to be accidental2nd degree.  In a run-down old rooming house involving folks know to the police.  That was the 2nd 2nd degree murder on my block within the year.

And in the midst of it all Jimmy Melvin Jr. becomes a citizen journalist.

Facebook Nation?

I can’t believe it… The Facebook, evolving according to the will of the People?  But it appears to be true.  Today I joined the Facebook Town Hall to participate in the dialogue they opened today regarding what appears to be a constitution for Facebook.

I took part, and wanted to pluck my comments out of the already pages and pages of comments that are pouring in on this and share them here…

1. Freedom to Share and Connect – People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.

Nice beginning… but this does not address the issue of Facebook censorship and arbitration over what is considered “offensive”  It seems to me that there are many caveats missing… wasn’t there just a recent hubbub over Breast-feeding photos?  Also, there needs to be one thing added… the understanding of the user that in consenting to Facebook service, they are consenting to have thier information shared to third parties at Facebook’s discretion.

2. Ownership and Control of Information – People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.

I think it is really important to educate people about privacy controls and I appreciate this being addressed here.  In addition to this, the People should also be allowed to control the amount and substance of their own information that The Facebook shares with third-parties for use outside the Facebook service.  The Facebook service should  allow People who make their living through visual art and words and music, to decide what royalty free rights they grant to The Facebook service to reproduce and use their work.

3. Free Flow of Information -  People should have the freedom to access all of the information made available to them by others. People should also have practical tools that make it easy, quick, and efficient to share and access this information.

Yes, but please define what those “practical tools” are.

4. Fundamental Equality Every Person – whether individual, advertiser, developer, organization, or other entity – should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service, regardless of the Person’s primary activity. There should be a single set of principles, rights, and responsibilities that should apply to all People using the Facebook Service.

Whoa! This is an interesting one!  Does that mean that the People have the same kind of access that the advertiser has?  What about those who want to advertise on Facebook… is Facebook advertising free or something?

5. Social Value People should have the freedom to build trust and reputation through their identity and connections, and should not have their presence on the Facebook Service removed for reasons other than those described in Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Interesting… I don’t really have a comment for this one

6. Open Platforms and Standards - People should have programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone.

Does this mean that The Facebook is open source?

7. Fundamental Service – People should be able to use Facebook for free to establish a presence, connect with others, and share information with them. Every Person should be able to use the Facebook Service regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution.

“Establish a presence” is an interesting turn of phrase… And what is with the capitalization of People and Person?

8. Common Welfare – The rights and responsibilities of Facebook and the People that use it should be described in a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which should not be inconsistent with these Principles.

Wait a minute… isn’t Facebook a private corporation?  Does the Common Welfare trump the investors stakes?

9. Transparent Process – Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities.

Great! I want a copy of the list of third-parties that The Facebook shares my information with, the public and private third parties… please.

10. One World -  The Facebook Service should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be available to everyone in the world.

Nice touch!

There is nothing in here about 2-way data sharing though.  That is, where the People are allowed to gain access to all of the data that The Facebook compiles and shares.  This is valuable information… and what makes Facebook so valuable to its shareholders… that the People can use and put towards the Common Welfare to generate Social Value…

I commend Facebook on trying to bring the democratizing principles of Web 2.0 into a set of morals, or values if you prefer, for this vibrant and active community of People… it is quite progressive and a worthy pursuit… but I just don’t understand how they are going to do it.

The Facebook is a corporation after all… whose soul purpose is to exploit the “prosumer.”  What Facebook has laid out here in its Constitution is fine for the Facebook as a community, but it still doesn’t address the role of Facebook the corporation, or government… which, in this case translates into a pseudo-democratic dictatorship…

The only way to truly make The Facebook into the Facebotopia they propose through these principles, without also being a hypocritical in their own business practices, is by allowing the People to buy it out… something that is unlikely to happen, as it would mean that users would have to start paying for their service… I wonder how many people would still use Facebook if they had to pay for it… Perhaps they could do something like Radiohead did with their pay-what-you-can album… highly doubtful though, and probably suicide.

But one thing that is for certain, Facebook is attempting to test adaptive structuration theory in its operations… and the People have “faithfully” adapted the structure that has been placed in their laps.  But to what extent will The Facebook will allow the People to do so?