The Gettysburg Address, Tweeted

How Does Puget Sound? What Does Salish Sea?

Retired Western Washington University professor Bert Webber has initiated an effort to rename the Puget Sound, Strait of Georgia and Strait of Juan de Fuca under one name – the Salish Sea.

Notes from Cascadia Workshop

Meeting organized by Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly, Local Governance Institute. University of Victoria, April 10 2009.

The Premier doth protest too much

The British Columbia Climate Action Secretariat has been moved from the Premier’s Office to the Ministry of Environment. In fact, the Minister of Environment is also identified as the Minister Responsible for Climate Action.

Reminds me of June 2005 when the Minister was also responsible for Sustainable Communities and Water Stewardship. Didn’t take long for those business cards to be shortened. The Premier went out of his way to say this doesn’t signal a change in priorities.

On the DM dance front, Graham Whitmarsh is to replace Chris Trumpy as DM Finance in April.

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Globe & Mail and The Dominion Institute : Policy Wiki

The Globe’s Policy Wiki is a nice experiment with a lot of thoughtful features (that trump the Obama “Citizen’s Briefing Book”). Let’s see if we can keep up the civil Canadian tone and also avoid juvenile commentary.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Crowdsourcing Policy Analysis

Change.gov has ramped up the crowdsourcing idea a bit more by soliciting policy proposals from the masses to build a “Citizen’s Briefing Book“. This is similar to the Open Questions app the site was running late last year.

Once you log in (no validation required!!), you can submit your brilliant policy idea and vote up or down on the ideas already submitted. The transition team will collect the best ideas and present them to the President-Elect in a briefing book.

Screen Capture from Citizen's Briefing Book

The primitive stage will soon pass. But, for now, it’s an entertaining ride.

The Gettysburg Address, Tweeted

Why Briefing Notes Are Important

Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.

Charles Peters. How Washington Really Works. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1983.

The Other Peters Principle

“The Peters Principle-take care to distinguish it from the less persuasive Peter Principle -provides that organizations cease to function effectively when employees spend more than 15.8 percent of their time attending meetings or writing memoranda.”

Tilting at windmills – meeting mania…review thine enemy…buppie taste…and other odds and ends

Washington Monthly, Feb, 1986, by Charles Peters.

Derek Zoolander, Governor of the Bank of Canada