Rarely do I read an article where I just keep going “yes, yes, yes!” (well, not in a mainstream publication anyhow! ) But that was my reaction after reading “The Facebook Generation vs. The Fortune 500”, a Wall Street Journal article which outlines the 12 differences between the Facebook generation (aka Generation Y aka Millennials aka Digital Natives aka “Anyone Born Between (Roughly) 1980 and 2000) and conventional workplace behaviour and expectations.
Before I copy the list, an anecdote…my boss at my last job and I were talking about something, possibly the idea of creating an electronic branch for our region, and he goes “You know what? You're a Gen X'er but you act and think like a Millennial.” “Is that a compliment or a criticism?” I asked. “Neither. Just an observation.”
I don't know – I like my entitled apathy as a Gen X'er but I guess there's probably a fair bit of truth to that statement – especially based on my reaction to this list.
Here's the list of expectations for the next generation (er, my generation?) when they enter the workplace, having grown up in a digital world:
1. All Ideas Compete On Equal Footing 2. Contribution Counts More Than Credentials 3. Hierarchies Are Natural, Not Prescribed 4. Leaders Serve Rather Than Preside 5. Tasks Are Chosen, Not Assigned 6. Groups Are Self-Defining and Self-Organizing 7. Resources Get Attracted, Not Allocated 8. Power Comes From Sharing Information, Not Hoarding It 9. Opinions Compound and Decisions Are Peer-Reviewed 10. Users Can Veto Most Policy Decisions 11. Intrinsic Rewards Matter Most 12. Hackers Are Heroes
Time to break out the long-neglected “CLA Conference” tag. Just got word today that I was approved to go to this year's CLA conference in Montreal at the end of May!
I'm especially happy about this because I'd had a feeler extended to see if I'd be coming to the conference and available to sit in on a panel that the Emerging Technologies interest group is doing. So now I'll be able to participate in that as part of my conference experience too.
I know this song was written in response to the Ecole Polytechnique shootings but I'm posting it as my Music Monday clip mainly because the title's relevant (well, the presumed title – the Tragically Hip never officially released this song so it was usually identified as “Montreal” (or occasionally “Don't You Worry”) in tape trader circles back in the day)…
In the morning, finger plays. In the afternoon, just play!
Kevin MacKenzie is awesome and if you're near Regina, you should try to attend this workshop. In fact, you should consider planning a special trip to the Queen City just to check it out!
One of my most visited sites, Reddit, has a section similar to another of my favourite online stops, Ask Metafilter and it occasionally has really interesting questions and answers – especially since they don't frown on the “ChatFilter” questions like AskMetafilter does.
Tonight is the first in a series of province-wide forums among the NDP leadership candidates in Moose Jaw. (At least I think it is – the official NDP site I just linked to doesn't list this event – though the candidates' sites do. Who knows?)
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure it is the first forum tonight and that's a good excuse to touch on something I mentioned in passing in a recent post. I said “[Lingenfelter's Google Map mash-up is a] great use of technology, very interactive, very cool way to represent
that Lingenfelter is running a province-wide campaign and trying to
reach out to all parts of the province (of course, this also subtly
hints at his apparent ability to set the rules he wants the other candidates to follow – but that's a different post.)”
That last line was a reference to Lingenfelter's announcement that he was “concerned
that the Saskatchewan New Democratic Party has decided to ignore the
Far North in its series of Leadership Candidate Public Forums next
month, and says he has decided to organize his own public forum in the
region and invite the other leadership candidates to take part.”
I think I know what he was trying to do with this move – in one fell swoop, he could show himself as representing the whole province, as someone who's concerned with First Nations issues and acting like a leader should. Except that (to me at least), it smacked of John McCain's “suspending his campaign” when the financial crisis hit – as much about political grandstanding as the other points.
To me, there's also a fair bit of arrogance in how he unilaterally announced this – arrogance not only towards the other candidates but to the hard working staff and volunteers of the party he's trying to lead. Why call them out publicly like that? What purpose does that serve?
There was one other little detail that indicates to me that this was more about political grandstanding than honest concern about the needs of the people in northern Saskatchewan. He scheduled his forum for April 26, two days after the deadline day for selling NDP memberships!
So, in a welcome show of unity (that perhaps reflects the generational shift better than anything else I've seen in this leadership contest – Lingenfelter's top-down, “I'm the boss (already)” move versus a joint announcement from Meili & Pedersen, the two youngest candidates that they were organizing their own northern candidates' forum *before* the deadline for selling memberships to give the people of northern Saskatchewan a real opportunity to have their concerns heard.)
“Pedersen and Meili agree that a public forum before the April 24
deadline offers Northerners full participation in the democratic
process, rather than what could be seen as merely token consultation.”
In that last link, the Accidental Jurist speculates on how the two senior candidates – Lingenfelter and Higgins – would react to this development. But recently, he posted an update that his sources were saying Deb Higgins is planning to accept the invitation to the alternate forum leaving Lingenfelter out in the cold. As they say in Internet circles – pwned!
One of the things I do in my position with RPL is work with a couple of my colleagues to write content for our internal staff e-newsletter. One week, we write an “RPL Update” which talks about some of the latest happenings at our library then. Every second week, we write an “Innovation Spotlight” which features a unique library or library service somewhere else out there in libraryland.
I thought it might be fun to give a sample of the type of things we write so here's the one I submitted for this week…
Innovation Spotlight – Las Vegas Central Library As some of you know, I recently had the opportunity to take a brief holiday in Las Vegas. Curious about what a former Library Journal “Library of the Year” winner would be like, I took time out from the buffets and souvenir stands of the Strip to venture downtown to their Central Library. Las Vegas’ Central Library is located in the heart of downtown, one block south of the famous Fremont Street Experience. The first thing you notice as you approach their Central Library is that it fits right in with the Vegas motif – narrow bands of neon wrap around the four-story building and large illuminated neon books glow orange and green and red above the main entrance.
When you walk in the front door, you realize that the Vegas theme doesn’t just apply to the outside of the building. The book return slots are shaped like slot machines, the information desk has the green felt of a poker table and the children’s area has bean bag chairs that look like casino chips. Throughout the library are paintings of notable people from Vegas’ history – everyone from Elvis Presley to Nicolas Cage in his Oscar-winning “Leaving Las Vegas” role to Siegfried & Roy’s white tigers. When I booked time to check my e-mail, I was surprised to see that the default home page for the library featured ads for PartyPoker.net – a gambling site which I assume has some sort of a sponsorship agreement with the library.
Moving to the back of the building, you see something that you’ll probably never see in any other library in the world – a single bank of slot machines set-off from the rest of the library in a glass paneled room. I talked to one staff member who told me the original plan was to have them for display only but patrons kept trying to play on them so the library decided not to fight it. They applied for a special one-off casino license with the state and now the slot machines contribute a significant sum to the library’s budget every year. Because this has been so successful, the library is looking at expand on this experiment by building a book themed hotel and casino in a vacant lot across the street.
For an interesting counterpoint to Meili's position on the possibility of a nuclear reaction for Saskatchewan (see below), read Dr. Jim Harding's excellent essay on Dwain Lingenfelter's position, “Trapped by History“. (Edit: Accidental Deliberations has more on this subject as well.)
—
NEWS RELEASE March 31, 2009 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nuclear Power: Not a Viable Solution Ryan Meili calls of NDP MLAs to oppose SaskParty nuclear resolution
On Thursday, the Saskatchewan Legislature will debate a motion by Meadow Lake MLA Jeremy Harrison supporting the development of nuclear generation in Saskatchewan. NDP leadership candidate Ryan Meili has issued the following statement.
The Wall government’s uranium resolution falsely frames the debate on nuclear energy and uranium development.
Nuclear power is not a viable solution to Saskatchewan’s energy needs. It is too expensive. It is too risky. It is too slow.
I am calling on all 20 New Democratic Party MLAs to vote “no” on this misleading motion.
Nuclear power is being sold to us as a means to provide cheap energy, as a means of addressing immediate energy needs, even as a means of protecting our environment. But none of these sales pitches are based on the facts.
• Nuclear power isn’t cheap. A nuclear reactor is a very expensive undertaking and the people of Saskatchewan will pay for it on their electricity bills for a long time to come, if it is allowed to be built. We pay 10 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity now. Whether its Bruce Power or SaskPower, no one will build a nuclear reactor in Saskatchewan for less than 20 cents per kilowatt hour – double the current price of electricity. That simple fact is why most private sector utilities in the United States have been avoiding nuclear power – they know there are too many hidden costs and that most nuclear power construction projects have huge cost over-runs. Add to that expensive repair bills, the high cost of disposing of radioactive nuclear fuel waste and the very high cost of decommissioning a radioactive reactor core. When compared to wind power at 11 cents per kilowatt hour and electricity conservation at less than 6 cents per kilowatt hour, nuclear power’s economics make no sense.
• Nuclear power puts our environment at risk. Yes, nuclear power can reduce the carbon footprint. But that assumed you ignore the massive carbon emissions involved in building the reactor – particularly if it is built in a remote area. A nuclear reactor will also produce intensely radioactive waste materials which no country on earth has successfully disposed of. Why should the next generation of Saskatchewan residents bear the burden of disposing of this radioactive waste material, with the worry that it must be kept out of ground water supplies for tens of thousands of years into the future.
• Nuclear power doesn’t address our immediate energy needs. Nuclear reactors are not designed and built quickly. Sites are not chosen quickly. Even if the process started today, it would be nearly 20 years before a proposed nuclear facility contributed a single watt to the energy grid. • Nuclear power doesn’t address our long-term energy needs either. It is simply another non-renewable resource which, by current projections, will have exhausted itself well within a century and possibly within a generation.
The Wall government has appointed a committee to investigate the possibilities of nuclear power in Saskatchewan. As the Roman Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran bishops in Saskatchewan recently pointed out, this committee is not a balanced group of open-minded citizens. It is a committee hand-picked to give Premier Wall the answer he wants.
Many of us will remember countless expert panels on this issue over the years. My fellow leadership candidate Dwain Lingenfelter has proposed a panel of his own to study this issue. Many progressive activists have become quite cynical about these “studies / panels / commissions.” Too often, their final recommendations have appeared to be predetermined. That is certa
inly so in this case. It is likely to be the case regardless of who appoints the panel.
Nuclear power, on the evidence, is too expensive, too risky and which meets neither our short term nor our long term energy needs.
A far better approach – both more principled and more pragmatic – is to pursue real alternative and renewable energy sources: solar, wind, biomass, geothermal. Pursuing these in concert with well considered and effectively supported energy conservation initiatives will be far more effective in meeting our immediate and long term energy needs at less expense and with less risk.
We need to consider our energy future. Limiting that consideration to an either-or discussion of nuclear power narrows the debate and ignores our best options.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Malcolm French (306) 550-2277
The text of Mr. Harrison’s motion is as follows:
That the Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan supports the consideration of further value-added development of Saskatchewan’s uranium industry including nuclear power generation and recognizes the potential benefits to the growth and prosperity of the people of our province.
It's not misleading in that it contains information about non-existent events as I originally thought. But it *is* misleading in that the map has poor usability and is potentially confusing for users – an issue that could have consequences for the Lingenfelter campaign. At the least, visitors to his campaign web site may click on the wrong spot on the map and think there's no event in their community, just a placeholder push pin (even when there is an event.) At the worst, they may make the same mistake I did and think that there are a lot less events happening than appears to be and think there is something fishy going on.
On another note, Kent has replied to my correction saying I should delete the post. That's not something I believe in and it's not going to happen. I posted what I posted, when I was corrected, I admitted that I made a mistake. But the record of these events should remain for a couple reasons.
I stand by the rest of my criticisms in that post and also think it's important to see the response that my post engendered from him. In all of our back and forth – and there's been a lot as I can't post a comment without getting yet another response from Kent – I have never resorted to personal attacks or questioning his motives.
In my last post, for whatever reason, Kent has stooped to the level of calling me Karl Rove – a pretty extreme attack for what was an honest mistake.
As I said, I still stand by my other criticisms of some of the things Lingenfelter is doing online. I have claimed that, to me, this appears to just be moving “politics as usual” online and I would also say that deleting a post to whitewash something that's happened is also “politics as usual” – and also shows that Kent doesn't understand quite how the internet works. The moment I hit “post” on my blog, the content goes out to Google and dozens of other sites/readers/subscribers/etc. and is impossible to “delete”, even if that's something I was inclined to do.
Kent, since I know you're reading this, here's my challenge. I did a legitimate list giving five reasons I thought Dwain Lingenfelter would make the best leader for the Saskatchewan NDP. Can you do a similar list for Ryan Meili?
) But that was my reaction after reading “The Facebook Generation vs. The Fortune 500”, a Wall Street Journal article which outlines the 12 differences between the Facebook generation (aka Generation Y aka Millennials aka Digital Natives aka “Anyone Born Between (Roughly) 1980 and 2000) and conventional workplace behaviour and expectations.
