The Content Philosopher

Parliamentary Reform

This is my first, and I suspect my last, post that will touch upon the subject of politics. In some ways, the topic in this case is interesting as a general example of how institutions need to regularly renovate their structure and operating principles in order to remain relevant. The context of this example is the Parliament of Canada, an institution within which I spent some time around ten years ago looking at how newer information technologies might help in the cause of running Parliamentary business and perhaps even improving its relationship with the electorate.

While I am not a political scientist (which is one of the stranger names to emerge from academia and that is saying something), and perhaps because I am not, there seem to be a couple of steps that could be taken to re-center parliamentary democracy in Canada. It would also seem reasonable to expect that a country like Canada should be able to, and indeed possibly bears an obligation to, continuously improve its democratic processes. 

Now in looking down this path a couple of things need to be borne firmly in mind. Foremost among these is the fact that a democracy is a lot more than people casting ballots when their politicians deem it beneficial (for them) to do so. As many places around the world prove by exception, rule of law is indeed the most important attribute of a functioning, and evolving, democracy. For this reason, and for purely pragmatic reasons, reform measures should energetically explore how existing traditions, conventions and laws can be leveraged in order to improve democratic procedures. In the case of Canada, the constitution, and specifically the original constitution, and the traditions of Parliament in fact contain a great deal of under-utilized democratic progressivism - which is probably why our current politicians prefer to dismiss these inheritances as worthy of contempt. In order to update Parliament for the 21st century, there will likely need to be a few "structural modifications" made but these could be kept minor if the most was made of what already exists. 

So we will break Parliamentary Reform into two topics - Electoral Reform and Senate Reform.

Electoral Reform

There has been recurrent talk about moving away from the first-past-the-post system used in the Canadian electoral process. Most of this talk gravitates towards something based on proportional representation and the suggestions all seem to degenerate into proposals for an impenetrable electoral calculus that would baffle voters and shield politicians from any sense of accountability to anyone. On the other side, we have a current system that continues to gravitate towards a fixation upon the cabinet and specifically upon the office of the Prime Minister. The members of these higher offices are also, notionally, representatives of specific electoral ridings with this stretching credibility as well as wandering precariously close to questions of conflict of interest.

The modification that could be made would be to introduce a relatively small number of seats to the House of Commons that would be proportionally distributed. If one seat were distributed per 5% of the popular national vote, then there would only be 20 such seats with this being dwarfed by the 300 plus seats that would be associated with specific ridings. The purpose of this minor allocation would be to ensure that small but nationally active parties (such as the Green Party) would at least get some presence in Parliament. Another would be to require that the Political Parties put forward their leaders and specific named candidates for the higher profile portfolios (e.g., finance, justice, foreign affairs, defence) on a prioritized list from which these proportional seats would be filled. During elections, this approach might (repeat might) encourage a wider range of debates that involved these key party spokes-people (perhaps according to their declared portfolio affiliations) and this would hopefully break the nullifying press focus on the leaders alone.

This small application of proportional voting would be a relatively minor adjustment, although it would remain a "structural modification". This change would also foreground the political parties and again hopefully turn elections to being ones centered on policies and positions and less about the personalities of the leaders alone. In foregrounding the parties (as a team of higher profile candidates and a cadre of riding candidates) this would also acknowledge a key truth in parliamentary politics - the riding representatives do not represent their constituents so much as they represent their parties to the constituents.

Senate Reform

Senate reform is something that many people, and many elected politicians, like to champion as a democratic cause with the introduction of elected senators deemed to be the highest goal. This would represent a major "structural modification" in that it would spawn a perhaps unending series of successive modifications as the implications of introducing a more potent adversary to the House of Commons were digested. The prospect of two elected houses manifesting, and working around, continuously evolving "checks and balances" might strike some people as a step in the right direction. I suspect the reverse would be much more true.

In the current parliamentary model, it is established that the Senate is, or should be, fully separate from the House of Commons and that it is the lesser of the two houses in terms of power. In current practice, the Senate is variously seen as a slow moving impediment to the sitting Government's agenda and as a dumping ground for the party faithful with the Prime Minister claiming the right to fill vacant Senate seats (with the party faithful). I suspect a perusal of the constitution and parliamentary procedures would turn up the fact that Senators are appointed by the Crown upon the recommendation of the House of Commons (which today gets distilled down to the Prime Minister).

If my recollection serves, one of the lesser known potential roles for the Senate is as the highest court of appeal in the land (higher still than the Supreme Court). If my recollection is correct, it would not surprise me that this fact would be among the first that politicians would want to see swept under the carpet. However, it does perhaps suggest a path that the Senate could take to make it a superlative arena for democratic action.

What if the process for recommending Senators was adjusted so that the Senate was made up more truly of representatives of Canadians as opposed to political parties? Although political parties would howl with objections, the voters might warm to restrictions on Senate appointments such as they must never have help a position in a political party. Others would rejoice if it was added that no more than a small percentage (say 20%) could have ever served at the bar (i.e., were lawyers). If this path were taken and explored more fully, it would begin to look more and more like jury selection. If this process also took as its goal adding exemplary Canadians, people with practical experience and genuine expertise at their disposal, then some of the challenges facing Parliament (specifically the growing complexity of legislation and society) might find better service.

If the terms of engagement were then set to make the appointments fixed in terms of length (perhaps 10 years with a couple of sabatical years) and were set to make the appointments a full-time job (versus a patronage post that is held alongside other endeavours), then the Senate may come to be understood as playing an important, and unashamedly secondary and supporting, role in Parliament.

Interestingly, this particular path towards Senate Reform would not require much in the way of "structural modifications" as I suspect it could be grafted onto the current laws and traditions more as a corrective against past abuses than as a radical change.

Conclusion

As I implied above, there is a sense in which Canada, as a pluralist society that has shown a consistent genuis for finding reasonable solutions to political challenges, is obligated to continuously refine its democratic machinery and thereby set an example for emerging democracies. By the same token, it must be acknowledged as disheartening that Canadians have been so content to have their politicians work so tirelessly at undermining the often surprisingly good democratic measures afforded by their constitution and by their parliamentary traditions. If democratic progress can be derailed here, and worse still, if core tenets of democracy can be cavalierly abused in Canada (as seems to be the default preference of the current government), what hope can there be elsewhere? 

 

Engineering Innovation - The 787 Takes Flight

December 15, 2009 saw the long-awaited, and much anticipated, inaugural flight of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. There has been, and continues to be, a swirl of opinions around the 787 and specifically around the schedule delays that have beset the program. This first flight must have come as a relief to many people as it provided such a tangible demonstration of progress towards the aircraft’s entry into service.

I myself was pleased to follow the news of the initial flight as I have been peripherally involved in the 787 program from back in the days when it was still referred to as the 7E7 (e.g., five years ago).  This involvement was admittedly minor, if not microscopic when placed into the context of a program of this size, but it does however provide at last some measure of perspective on the magnitude of Boeing’s accomplishment. What I can say about the experience is that it has instilled in me an almost boundless respect for the engineers at Boeing and very specifically for those with whom I have dealt.

One aspect of the 787 program which I do not believe has received adequate attention, or appreciation, is the fact that it has pursued what I would call “multi-dimensional innovation”. What the schedule hawks, and especially those whose interest does not extend beyond short-term stock market performance, fail to appreciate is that engineering an aircraft like the 787, and integrating the almost innumerable ways in which it represents a leap forward in airliner design, is nothing like pushing a stuffed toy out the door for a designated holiday season. While setting out, working to, and adapting realistic schedules remains a continuously challenging process, I personally cannot imagine how so many innovations could be accomplished and their features integrated into a seamless whole without there being some schedule turbulence. Unlike the critical schedule hawks, every time I hear about a schedule adjustment for the 787 program I knew that my colleagues at Boeing were in fact re-doubling their efforts to make sure that the resulting aircraft was as good, and as safe, as it could be. Personally, I take great comfort as a regular airline passenger in knowing that the Boeing engineers are such fiends for detail (and this is to put it mildly) and are so dedicated to the craft of, as it was once explained to me, “making good airplanes”.

I have on occasion been known to declare that a business should be judged by the quality of its customers and following this logic I have allowed myself to feel a small flash of satisfaction, even pride, in being associated as a specialist supplier to Boeing and to the 787 program. Customers like Boeing invariably make the companies and individuals who support them better. And in an economy where the primary function of many institutions seems little other than the distribution of inflated bonuses, it is that much more heartening to imagine yourself assisting, in however a small way, an organization like Boeing who not only builds things but engineers innovations on such a grand scale and marshalls those innovations together to deliver such magnificent products. I take my hat off to them all.

Talking about Content

Over a series of recent posts (since the summer of 2009), I have been blogging a little more consistently about the subject of content. These posts (see for example the post The Truth about Content) have been considering content in the abstract, seeking but not yet finding a satisfying definition for the term.

These discussions should, at some point, descend from the ethereal plane and address more practical concerns. This is where the discussionsneed to engage topics such as the technologies and standards that are typically, or ideally, deployed to help us create content that can live up to some of the lofty expectations we are setting for it.

Attention thus turns to standards such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) and DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture). I suppose there will be some, and especially those who know me, who will find it funny that my idea of being practical is to talk about these types of foundational standards. While still several steps away from the real world of people, projects and products, these types of open standards are along the path as we journey towards being able to design, create, manage and deploy intelligent content. And we are interested in these standards because they can be understood as tools whereby we can reflect increasing levels of intelligence into content and therefore into the information products that are consequently published and the business processes that depend upon those products. Somewhat surprisingly at times, we are not the only people showing interest (we being the small community with a long-standing interest in open standards and intelligent content) and there is a growing receptiveness amid widening circles to some of our arguments and claims.

This post was spawned when I was recently, and accidentally, led back to an interview that I had given with Tom Johnson at a conference in 2008. In re-listening to the interview, I was struck by a number of things. One was that nothing in the last 18 months, since giving the interview, would cause me to modify my answers in any way. Another thing that struck me was that in the span of approximately 15 minutes this interview managed to cover a pretty wide range of topics including XML and DITA and why these standards merit attention. And finally, I was re-acquainted with the fact that Tom Johnson is an excellent interviewer and perhaps because some time has elapsed I was able to appreciate how good his questions were. Good questions, we recall, can lead to good answers. I will leave it to the curious to decide whether or not I did justice to the questions with my answers.

To listen to the podcast interview go to: How XML Enables Information Sharing and Reuse — Interview with Joe Gollner. For more interviews and lots more, see Tom Johnson's blog: I'd Rather be Writing.