Congrats to CityHallWatch!

October 15, 2020

If you have any interest at all in what happens at Vancouver’s City Hall but are not following CityHallWatch then you are sorely missing out. Today, with their 3,033rd post they celebrate 10 years of solid reporting and analysis of Vancouver city politics.

“Common themes, always with a focus on our own municipal government, have been accountability, pro-transparency and anti-corruption, regulatory capture, the role of big money. We have tried to shine a light on things … We have tried to see where the dots connect, and to connect them. We’ve tried to deconstruct and understand the processes at City Hall. All of this, from a perspective of being outside the real estate and development industry, and outside of the government.”

Randy, Steve, and Gudrun do all this on a completely volunteer basis. We are truly lucky to have them, especially with a diminished media presence, especially at the community level.

Thank you!

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To Those Who Would Lead Our City & Province

October 15, 2020

Some things to think about:

“By exercising practices of direct democracy in our communities by developing cooperative forms of social and economic relationships we can directly challenge not only the specific forms of oppression that we experience in our daily lives but we can get to the bottom of overturning those deep-seated patterns of hierarchy that have damaged social relationships through much of human history and have fundamentally shaped the mindset of domination with which current society has come to exploit all of nature.”

Srsly Wrong Podcast #219, 2 Oct 2020

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We Have Seen The Future — and it Zooms!

October 15, 2020

Just read a fascinating article at Forbes about how Zoom wants to become the operating system of the future or, rather, an entire infrastructure service provider.

“In an interview, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said … ‘Zoom is not a meeting anymore, it’s more like a people-centric infrastructure service. We can play online games, we can do so many things not like it used to be, where we talk or [use it] for business communications.”

As their next move to capture this space, Zoom has just launched Zapps,

“a feature that connects other apps directly in Zoom. By clicking a button at the bottom of Zoom’s interface, workers will be able to pull up Slack chats, Box or Dropbox documents and other tools from a range of productivity apps without leaving a Zoom room … In addition to Zapps, Zoom announced several other new projects at its annual customer conference on Wednesday, including the public beta of OnZoom, a platform and marketplace for online events that provides tools for hosts to schedule, sell tickets and promote events, and guests to search available events, buy tickets or make donations. 

In a world where we seem to be moving away from offices and have become quite comfortable with the paraphernalia of remote relationships, I can see Zoom being a key innovator — at least until it becomes big enough for Jeff Bezos to be interested in buying it out.

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Image: Motion #1

October 15, 2020

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Grandview 15th October 1920

October 15, 2020
Province 19201015, p.7

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