Two-Zero-One-Zero, Two-Thousand and Ten, Twenty-Ten, Aught-Ten.

Whatever you call it, a brand new year and decade* have begun, bringing in a bumper crop of projects and initiatives to MASS HQ.

Current MASS LBP Projects
MASS LBP is working with the Mayor of Burlington's Citizen Advisory Committee on Civic Engagement to research better methods to engage and consult with members of the public. Stay tuned—the project website will go live later this month with a report due out in April.

Champlain Local Health Integration Network has contracted MASS LBP to run our first bilingual Citizens’ Advisory Panel on Hospital Services for the Eastern Counties region. Twenty-four citizens will be randomly selected to participate on the panel. Over the course of three Saturdays they will learn about health care in the region and make recommendations about the distribution of hospital services.

Northumberland Hills Hospital wrapped up its Citizens’ Advisory Panel on Health Service Prioritization, with a presentation to the Hospital’s board this past week. We’re excited to tell you more about it in the February Bulletin, when the CAP’s report is made public, but for now you can visit the project website.

The W. Maurice Young Centre for Applied Ethics at UBC has commissioned a Civic Lottery to select twenty-five citizen participants to review plans for the remediation of military waste through the use of new biotechnologies.

150!Canada Conference is only 60 days away—have you registered?
Join Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin on Citizenship and Celebration, Danny Graham on Citizenship Leadership; Roch Carrier on Canada’s Past and (Likely) Future, Jeanette Hanna on Symbolizing the State; and Sujit Choudhry, on Demographics and Democracy, among more than a dozen other leading thinkers for this amazing two day event to begin imagining and planning Canada’s Sesquicentennial in 2017.

That night the 6717 Arts Celebration will rock the National Arts Centre’s Theatre Hall with a Canadian music mash-up featuring Juno Award–winning singer Jully Black, DJ Rise Ashen, classical pianist David Virelles and Sampradaya Dance Creations.

The 150!Canada Conference is a fill-your-brain, roll-up-your-sleeves and work-with-dozens-of-inspiring-people kind of event. We need you to be a part of it. Join us in Ottawa at the National Arts Centre on March 11–12 and help to make 2017 Canada’s Next Great Year.

Follow the 150!Canada Twitter feed here or download the 150!Canada playbill.

MASS Idea: Facebook Populism
Martha Stewart shows you how to organize your life and throw the perfect dinner party. IKEA shows you how to assemble your furniture and arrange it just so. Canadian Karim Rashid’s new book exclaims “Design your life”.  And Facebook shows you how to rally friends to your campaign. But is all this DIY design idolatry really just about moving around a kit of standard parts? Dmitri Siegel thinks so. As a web designer he worries that the DIY Design craze is making us all just bunch of fakers. What we want are safe templates, says Siegel and when it comes to web “the templated mind searches for text fields, metatags and rankings like the handles on a suitcase.”

This led us to think about how new technologies are shaping how we interact politically. A lot of initiatives talk about being democratic — the spontaneous Facebook page objecting to the prorogation of parliament is only the most recent. But maybe it makes sense to make a distinction between democratic activities and populist ones. Democratic activities are creative because they are synthetic: they draw together different perspectives, requiring imagination and learning. Populist activities are shared and easily accessible, requiring that they be resonant and easily distributed. In this way an initiative can be both democratic and populist. But it’s just as likely to be populist and not democratic, or democratic and not populist.

The web is often touted for its ability to further democratic ideals and promote democratic engagement. But what we get are more and more platforms for populist participation. Just as assembling an IKEA bookshelf is not the same as cutting the timber and plotting your own design, participating in an online consultation or Facebook group will never match the artistry — and peril — of a freeform conversation.

MASS Innovation
Democratizing patronage = City Patron. What would Toronto be like without the work and efforts of the volunteers and coordinators that make things better for the rest of us? What could these people do if they could focus on creating, building and organizing full-time without worrying about the rest? Why should it only be rich people who get to work with artists and inventors and share in the excitement and beauty of their creative process? These questions and several conversations with our friend and Toronto’s Civic Innovator-in-Chief, Dave Meslin led us to launch the CityPatron pilot. Thanks goes to the Toronto Star’s Catherine Porter for the nudge and article.

MASS Talk
Jowi Taylor, one of Canada’s most talented broadcasters and social artists, will present his remarkable Six String Nation project, an incredibly precious guitar and public history project, during our next MASS talk. M&S published a book about his work late last year. This is not to be missed.

RSVP: masstalk8.eventbrite.com

MASS Book
Want to take a trip to the theory end of advanced mathematics but without the work, time or PhD? Logicomix presents the life of Bertrand Russell and the pre-war lives of his genius colleagues. Don’t roll your eyes—the NYT, The Guardian, Boing Boing and the Globe and Mail all agree this is a story worth reading.

MASS Shorts
We love great design and especially compelling infographics. So finding the Good.is blog Transparency was like Christmas all over again. Government take note: If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good graphic is worth at least five reports.

Still carrying around a few extra pounds of turkey, eggnog or latkes? We are, but thankfully the British Military has a model we think the Canadian Forces should adopt. It’s great for public morale and health: British Military Fitness. Anybody know a Canadian General who might listen?

Spring is still a few months away so maybe this is a good time to start replacing the pretty floral arrangements in your city or town with edible greens.

Where did all the optimism about the future go? Golf on the moon, limitless power and rocket speed mobility. The past sure had a rosier view of the tomorrow then the present. We miss you, Arthur C.

Bauhaus and Swiss Modern graphic design once inspired architecture. Font was the inspiration for form. Now it seems font follows form as a generation of designers look to the latest compositions from Gehry, Koolhaas et al. In this month’s AIGA, Helen Armstrong reminds her profession that theory really does matter and its time for graphic artists to (again) get their own.

Richard Florida Smackdown. A new and controversial piece in this month’s Atlantic by Florida on what the economic crisis means for American cities drew an immediate and searing rebuttal in The American Prospect. Now Germany piles on…

Gigabytes go free. Chris Anderson at WIRED talks Moore’s law, waste and what happens when the world gets an infinite hard-drive.

John Tierney at the NYT talks about the web’s “gift culture” and effects of "lock in," which stifle the rise of superior technologies.

Augmented Reality for Fun and Profit: Google is set to use images of billboards, posters and public advertising as their ”own” sellable ad spaces. No really.

The New Yorker asked contributors to write about a moment that represents the past decade and to make a prediction for the decade to come.

Jeffrey Abelson of the Huffington Post sets the stage for sharing two years of research talking to America's leading political philosophers and civic engagement experts. Here is a great line that will stick in my head for at least a week: “A new operating system that motivates and rewards a nation of well-informed citizens—actively participating in political decision-making on a regular basis—helping shape the national debate rather than being shaped by it.” Read his blog here and make sure you visit it often. Great stuff.

Our gift to you. This wonderful, wonderful website helps any user navigate the very frustrating customer service phone trees at various service companies.  This may change your life. 

MASS Short-Shorts
Over the last 50 years, the ratio of top pay to average pay at public companies has multiplied roughly 11 times (24:1 to 275:1). 

Meet our friend Par Hultgren, Kaospilots, proto-MASS intern and now board game designer.

Gondolas in Toronto. And more good things besides.

The smart people at Public know we’ve always wanted to go to Disney World. Here’s a clever way to do it.

Brooks on the best think pieces of 2009. And one of his own: The Protocol Society is a must read.

Good-bye dentures. We live in crazy times.

Hot times, summer in the city, with Margaret Wheatley.

Customer-led innovation.

January’s obligatory link: Five ways Apple’s iTablet will change the world.

And a hearty welcome to Joslyn Trowbridge — the newest member of the MASS team and a recent graduate of the Hertie School of Public Service in Berlin. Joslyn will be leading many of our research efforts as well as managing several new projects. Give her a big hello.

|M| The MASS Bulletin is produced monthly by MASS LBP.
      Got a lead, an item, an event, a book? Send it to bulletin@masslbp.com 

*Finally. The new decade. Yes. We know. It starts in 2011.