An inconvenient talk: An article in Walrus Magazine on the end of the fossil fuel age has finally convinced me that policy analysts need to include low-energy scenarios into all our planning. Our entire way of life is based on essentially free energy. According to Thomas Homer Dixon’s Carbon Shift, “oil and coal are such rich energy sources (for example, 3 tablespoons of gasoline is the equivalent energy of an entire human’s day of labour) that it’s hard to replace them ‘one for one’ with renewable energy sources, at least using conventional technologies” (from an article in SpeakUp Winnipeg describing how radical energy reductions might affect Canadian cities).

Appropriate social policy responses, as far as I can see, will be to develop systems and services that will be resilient in the face of decreased energy consumption. In other words, when we design social responses to poverty, ill health, etc., we need to consider how feasible they will be given two or three reasonable scenarios for the next 20 years. That would include the necessity of educational systems that are based around neighbourhoods within walking distance, increased use of online communication to replace travel, etc. Depending on the severity of the scenarios we may need to use railways for food delivery in urban areas, supplemented by urban agriculture, and build community services around those activities.

A New York Times article about Dr Kessler, the former head of the FDA, on how the food industry has engineered food to literally make it irresistible. Kessler is recommending a social shift in how we deal with ‘hyperpalatable foods’ in the same way that society stopped tolerating cigarette smoking. In this online speech about the neurology of eating, he describes how prepared foods are designed to elicit over-eating. Individuals are not able to resist the conditioning alone; as a society ‘we should be saying that this is a deadly, disgusting product’. It’s a fundamental public policy issue.

Wired has pulled together a set of recommendations for transparency of government data in response to the Obama administration’s policy of open government.

The article includes ‘models for opening and using government data’, including:

Socrata

Socrata is a social data discovery site which hosts lots of government datasets with a simple appealing UI to browse, search and analyze the data.

Infochimps.org

Infochimps is dedicated to finding and hosting free, redistributable datasets. It’s a simple but absolutely enormous mission. So far, they’ve got thousands waiting for you to use.

Sunlight Labs’ Apps for America

Sunlight Labs is an organization dedicated to “turning government data into useful information.” They are currently hosting an Apps for America contest to design web services that promote transparency in Congress.

From Tech Crunch:

A coalition of non-profit organizations, technology developers, designers, marketers and others has unveiled the alpha version of a new Web service dubbed All for Good in an effort to build some sort of ‘Craigslist for volunteer services’. …

All for Good basically lets you browse volunteer activities and find related events based on your geographical location and/or interests. The site brings together listings from organizations and local groups to help you find volunteer activities that fit your time and talent. If you ‘like’ a certain item, you can share it with your friends across various social networking services, hopefully spawning more attention and the possibility for the activity or event to spread virally within your network.

It’s not clear why the group behind All for Good didn’t work with existing sites such as volunteermatch.org, but it looks like their approach is to facilitate data sharing among many different sites and social networking tools rather than compete head to head with any of them.

There are already some Canadian listings that may have been scraped from other sites.

Harvard Business Publishing has several good RSS feeds that deliver thoughtful articles and working papers. In this one, Tony Tjan writes:

In both entrepreneurial and larger companies, we too often spend time focusing on the desired financial performance target, rather than the inputs that drive those numbers. Because boards, investors and management demand an objective way to measure performance, we often go right to the result without focusing on what caused those results.

Financial performance is a result, a by-product, a consequence of something else. The financial “numbers” ultimately represent the scorecard we care about, but they do not help us understand how to score. When we ask management teams what are the most important drivers (or what we call operating metrics) of their financial results, I usually see one of two reactions: a) a dog in front of the television blank stare or b) a further breakdown of financial results: “sales on the West Coast drove the results.” When pressed further, we may get even further sales breakdowns which tell us little. As my partner, Dick Harrington, says, “We end up slicing baloney with a scalpel” and are talking too much about the “what” without getting the “why.”

Operating metrics are the inputs that correlate or drive the desired results of a business. If you focus on the inputs, you need to worry less about the financial outputs. Examples of inputs include customer convenience, product quality, customer retention, or customer referral rate.

This is exactly the same issue with outcome metrics. Tjan’s recommendations below avoid the ‘attribution problem’ of outcome measures, assuming that the operational metrics are valid:

Businesses need to focus on the 3-5 metrics that represent the most important drivers of value creation. It helps align an organization towards doing the right thing in a repeatable and scalable manner. When you just ask a team to chase results on a plan, you may never be sure what drove that result even if you are successful. There is a difference between having a good year of numbers and a sustainable business model that allows for more predictable year-over-year results. From a managerial tool perspective, a weekly or monthly dashboard that highlights not just the financial results, but also the operating metrics is smarter and more actionable. A dashboard with operating metrics serves effectively as an exception-based report where you look for deviations from the norm of operating metric levels and then consider whether the issue is systemic or one-off.

Google Translator Toolkit

Google Translator Toolkit is a new tool being launched today to help translators organize their work and benefit from shared translations, glossaries and translation memories…

This service looks amazing; it incorporates google’s excellent translation engine with basic translation tools, including the ability to share vocabulary and suggested translations.