Robert Paterson's Weblog

The Lessons of New Orleans - Complex Problems

What really happened? Well we had a storm which we could not predict may be one answer.

But what really happened was that a "Complex Problem" revealed itself. Like a game of Pick Up Sticks, people had made a series of poor decisions that they could not see were related to each other until one day, New Orleans fell over. What could they not see? Years of fooling with levees turned a sluggish river into a hose pipe. Years of developing the shoreline took away the natural damper of the delta. The preconditions for failure were set up over time on trajectories that have a dynamic converging force reaching a point called "Criticality" - this the moment in a system when it can be tipped by a small event.

Worse, even though we had passed the point of no return, non one could plan even a contingency. Years of never thinking that a levee could breach lead to their being no effective contingency plans. Years of reacting to emergencies means that the many agencies do not know how to work with each other. So when the inevitable happens - chaos!

This New Orleans Complex Problem is also a subset of the Complex Oil Problem. As the US became not only ever more dependent on cheap oil that had to be imported it became more dependent on parts of the world that it cannot control. So the US is in Iraq, it has helped fund Islamic terror, it drives a huge defense burden that cannot help solve the terror problem (a subset of the Oil Problem) So the importing infrastructure is located in the Gulf of Mexico as the world weather becomes more unstable. A series of events will unfold, just as it did for New Orleans - New Orleans may be the stick that pulls down the pile? Just as Rome was built on slavery, so our civilization is built on Cheap Oil. Not Oil but Cheap Oil. It will never be cheap again folks and every part of our life that depended on it being cheap will crack.

When Humpty is cracked - there is no putting it back. In the context of the levees and the delta, there is no sound reason to put New Orleans back. It will only go when the next Katrina arrives as she has to.

So what is our larger problem? I think it is that when we inhabit a traditional institutional world, we cannot "see" complexity. But as our world becomes more connected, it drives up complexity. Those who cannot see it, risk being destroyed by it. How do we see it?

More on this tomorrow

My plan?

My plan was to go to Montreal to pick up James and bring him home here for labour day weekend. We leave at dawn tomorrow. That was my plan.

Tonight the husband of an old friend who lives in Montreal called. Our friend is dying in Montreal. Just now, she has tipped into the final chapter. Plans change. We still pick up James but we go now for another reason- everything is perfect.

How did this happen? How did one plan lead to another? Why was it this weekend for her and for us? What gave us this opportunity to say good bye?

Politically Correct? - Going Too far in Charlottetown

One of my summer visitors left today from Charlottetown Airport.

She a fit looking 80 year very "Waspy" looking woman. She was given the full treatment including having a female attendant give her a full body feel.

What is going on here? This goes way beyond reverse Profiling into the realms of crass stupidity. What is the policy behind what happens at security at our airport - we deserve to know?

The perils of flashing in the Camera Phone Web Age

Thanks to Jason this pic plus comment on flickr of a guy exposing himself on the subway - how many millions have seen him now?

One way of dealing with folks like these - as you will read the police cannot help

The perils of flashing in the Camera Phone Web Age

Thanks to Jason this pic plus comment on flickr of a guy exposing himself on the subway - how many millions have seen him now?

One way of dealing with folks like these - as you will read the police cannot help

Update thanks to Gabe - he is on the front page of the News

Podcast on the Future of CBC and Community Medie

Well I have done it - David Cormier has come to the aid of the most inept podcaster, Rob P, and helped me with a not bad interview about the the future of CBC and community media. We recorded this just before I got home and heard about the plan for 150 CBC staffers to do what we had hoped for - establish a new CBC online.

Here is the link with the "liner notes" so you know what you are getting into. Sorry about the verbal tick - "you know". I will do my best to lose it now I have heard it

Is the CBC a Beached Whale?

Is this the old CBC?

150 staffers met this week in Toronto and agreed to set up a national internet alternative linking into Community and Campus radio across Canada. What an epochal event! Roll the calendar forward to say the end of October, no settlement, a terrible CBC full of reruns and a full web based system being run by locked out CBC staffers.

This web alternative network is global, it is national and it is strongly local. It is full of high quality material. It can turn on a dime - being a network and has a huge feed from citizen journalists. It has a developing international network of bloggers all over the world. A bomb goes off in Paris, Parisian bloggers feed pictures and comment. Stephen Harper admits to being gay. The gay community welcome him! Real pros like Michael Enright can use Skype to call and interview anyone. It has a growing and deep local system. You see the local hockey team - videoed by a parent. You hear an interview with a local author - interviewed by her neighbor. You catch the local fire - fed by a local with commentary by the chief. Your brother becomes a film or restaurant critic - with no limit to time or schedule, the local station can cover everything. You only download what interests you.

The bureaucracy that costs so much is left beached like a rotting whale. Which CBC is alive and which one is dead? Which CBC deserves our tax dollars? Who gets paid to work? Which is truly national? What is the model for the future? Which one costs less than the other but delivers more value and pays its talent more?

Which is the dolphin?

Walking the line for the gang at CBC - What a contracting life can be like

Well I never thought I would walk the line at a picket but there I was this morning for an hour on University Avenue. I will not put in the 4 hours a day that the full time folks are doing but I will do an hour a day.

Why? Every workplace is really a community with all the norms of every community. These are my buds.

I am the lowest of the low at CBC, a part time contractor - the kind of position the CBC want more of and that the full time staff fear will be their fate. I occupy the same low life job at UPEI where I am part of a growing band of sessional lecturers. I also work as a consultant, spending sometimes years in and out of the same organizations.

So what is it like being a contractor? If these organizations are like a body, a full time employee is like a body part. I am more like useful bacteria that say digests food. They key for people like me to be useful not just to the management but to the whole corpus. I do my best to join the community. I need community as much as a paycheck.

I think that in the end formal organizations will be much smaller and will mainly have a lot more folks like me attached. But attached not at an arms length way like today but attached as we see in the film making business where say a lead director gets a film and calls his 5 go to guys, one of whom is his favorite photographer. He then makes 5 calls one of them to his favorite electrician and so on. One of the aspects of contract work that makes people fearful is that there is a pretense that every job is a new experience and that it should be contracted de novo. The Feds whole contracting ethos is built on this idea - of course it only applies to regular folks like me. There is also the idea that you remain as a contractor still dependent on one client. Bad move - that is when you do lose your power. But if you have several clients, then you are the free agent. You have power and you have freedom.

In the end there is more security in having say 5 contract jobs than one full time job. Nor do you lose your community if you really join.

CBC Staff BBQ Friday 26th August

Many of my friends are walking the pickets at CBC. Parkdale Doris, aka Cynthia Dunsford, was on duty at 6am this morrning. Matt Rainnie was there yesterday afternoon with his family (CBC have disabled all the normal links so I cannot link to Matt)

As you can imagine it is a sad way to spend your day - walking outside your work home - hoping that this will all be over before you have to think about how you will pay your mortgage. Knowing that all the decisions will be taken by people that you cannot influence.

This Friday the gang will have a BBQ. It will cost about $100 to fund the food etc. Please drop by this week before Friday and help out with some of this $100. Have a chat with the people that are part of our community. You don't have to have an opinion about the lockout. That has nothing to do with the individuals that we all know. How I see us "supporting" them is to acknowledge by our presence that we care about our friends who are isolated and not a little fearful about what will happen to the and to their families.

When you have a hard time would you want that kind of support too?

Community Broadcast Centre - An Experiment

Well folks, here it is a first attempt here of a community news site

We have the first volounteers. See the sidebar marked Contributors. As more of you sign up, I will add you and your sites.

I have set up a very simple site on the basis that its features and functions will grow as we discover them.

I see this primarily as a site where we can comment on the news rather than break it. I open with a post on why I think that our banks are in such a mess today. This week is when their results for the quarter are released. My hope is that because we are beholden to no organization we can seek a truth that is hard to find when advertisers or government pay your bills.

Please give this a whirl and add your two cents, or five.