It’s the last MASS Bulletin of 2009. And all we want for Christmas is…

… your advice.

We’ve been publishing the Bulletin for a year and we want to know what we can improve. What topics do you think we should tackle in 2010? Do we need more videos? More pictures? Fewer links? Please send your comments, questions and ideas to chris@masslbp.com.

… to be re-gifted.

Don’t hesitate to re-gift the MASS Bulletin. We won’t be upset—it’s how we get around. Share the MASS Bulletin with your friends, colleagues and loved ones. Maybe even those you feel a bit indifferent about. We’ll convert them. Hit forward now, or send them to the MASS website or bring them to the next MASS Talk.

MASS Events

The Best Conference in Canada Is the Best Conference for Canada:
The 150!Canada Conference
March 11–12, 2010—National Arts Centre, Ottawa

In 2017, Canada will celebrate the 150th anniversary of its Confederation. It may seem far away, but the time to start planning is now.

This March, the Institute of Public Administration of Canada and MASS LBP are holding the first major conference concerning Canada's Sesquicentennial at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. For two days, 300 delegates—representing all levels of government, business, the arts and sciences, First Nations and community organizations—will come together to begin imagining and planning for 2017. Contribute your ideas for shaping the Sesquicentennial and Canada’s future. Register today at www.ipac.ca/150, or for more information please email morwenna@masslbp.com.  

Designing Great Public Engagement Programs:
New Ideas and Engagement Models for Public and Private Sector Professionals
March 19, 2010—Toronto, Canada

Don’t miss the second installment of our popular engagement workshop. Get under the hood of the MASS LBP model and learn how to tackle highly charged situations through better program design and facilitation. Create a better fit between engagement initiatives and communications, and find out how to build a stronger business case for public engagement within your organization.

MASS Book

When Stewart Brand writes, you read.

And his newest book demands that you buy not one, but two.

Whole Earth Discipline picks up where Brand, an ecologist by training, left off in the 1970s when he was the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Surveying the rapid assent of new technologies, he started his manifesto “We are as Gods and we might as well get used to it.” Today, surveying the impact of climate change and a fast-moving global poor, he writes, “We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it.” For Brand, getting good at it means junking forty years of environmental dogma—some of it his own—and taking a sober look at the big challenges and few options we have available. Reading Discipline  will upend much of what you think you know about the richness of slums, the greenness of nukes, the nature of genetic engineering and, ultimately, environmentalism itself.

Coda:  One of the best afternoons I ever spent was when I invited Brand to spend three days in Toronto, and introduced him to Jane Jacobs at her Annex home. Jacobs had called Brand’s book How Buildings Learn  “probably a work of genius,” and as an admirer of so much of her work, he was keen to repay the compliment. Whole Earth Discipline is a book I think she’d have loved even more. It’s tough. Practical. And, like the best of both Jacobs and Brand, Discipline  will change how you see and think. — PM.

MASS Ideas

Canadian Diaspora
We continue to think of ourselves as a country of immigrants, but Canada is also fast becoming a country of emigrants. According to Canada’s Secret Province,  a report from the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, 2.8 million Canadians now live abroad. That’s more than the population of Atlantic Canada, or the populations of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the North combined. It’s also twice as many citizens per capita as any other G8 nation, making it plausible to talk about a Canadian Diaspora. For policy-makers and governments, the question becomes whether Canada should work to amplify or discourage this trend. Circulation and multinationalism could be this generation’s version of immigration and multiculturalism—and here’s betting that its effects will be no less profound.

Ten Percenters
It’s a new bit of lexicon that most Canadians probably would have been happy enough to live without. “Ten percenters” are the cheap, ugly and ineffective flyers that MPs mail by the truckload to Canadian households. Only cheap is a really just a term of art. They cost taxpayers $10 million a year. What was originally intended to help parties communicate their agenda to residents in opposition ridings has been perverted as a publicly subsidized fundraising boondoggle. The real name of the game is to carpet-bomb ridings with the mail-in coupons the flyers contain. If you’re foolish enough to answer the question “Do you support the Prime Minister in his stance on global warming?” then expect to find yourself added to a new mailing list: one that comes direct from party HQ asking for a handout. The exact ratio is unknown, but effectively the parties are spending big public dollars to raise relatively small private donations. Gross.

Shout Out:MP Meghan Leslie gets a gold star for not only refusing to play the game, but changing it.

MASS Shorts

World Wide Views on Global Warming has released its consultation report from Canada as well as from 45 other countries, each of which will be presented at this week’s COP15 negotiations.

When you go out in the woods today … you’re in for a better kindergarten.

“When we visualize data we often get a chance to see patterns or anomalies that we might not otherwise notice.” Pushed by cuts to British Columbia’s arts funding, Jer Thorp, an award-winning digital/visual artist, makes sense of the B.C. budget the best way he can—through amazing and beautiful interactive graphs.

David McCandless, a London-based designer, has been thinking in Technicolor too. The Billion Dollar Gram helps you to quickly make sense of the big numbers behind government budgets.

If you’re blown away by these visualization tools, then take a look at this online art exhibition of works created using a programming code called Processing—which provides an amazing platform for artists to explore public issues. OCAD, ACAD, NSCAD, are you listening?

David Brooks writes about Bruce Springsteen and his second education.

Real estate just isn’t getting any cheaper. Have you consider a DIY Tiny House? All the comforts of home in 208 square feet. The Tiny House people come to Toronto in July.

The U.K. builds some social capital over lunch.

And Americans buy a beer company.

The Kindle and the Nook are changing how we read. But if you still love paper, technology has a fix for you too. (Think Frankenstein’d laser printer.)

Simon Pulsifer, once Wikipedia’s most prolific contributor, discusses the fall-off in Wikipedia’s volunteer editors. With few easy entries left to tackle, the complexity of the project has become increasingly “daunting,” scaring off volunteers old and new.

In a world where traditional media companies are dropping like flies, Bloomberg bets it can soar.

What’s the biggest threat to America’s long-term economic success? According to Thomas Friedman, it’s not an ingenuity gap, but a governance gap. Wanted: Democratic innovation.

Best. Website. Navigation. Ever. From our friends at DOTT. Don’t know DOTT? Ask why we don’t do DOTT. We nominate Nova Scotia. Confused? Check it out.

Equally cryptic: Blow. Your. Mind.

And finally… Nominations are open for this year’s Public Policy Forum Emerging Leaders Award. Swank dinner and a chance to tell three thousand of Canada’s power elite why your vision of the future doesn’t look like theirs.