One way we are organizing on Bowen

Peter Rawsthorne talks about the ways we are using the web to hook up ciizen initiatives for the public good on Bowen Island. The final question is an interesting one: is the Bowen eGovernment initiative, as a citizen run initaive a slap in the face to local government?

Peter's answer is dead on: not at all. It's about invitation and taking on things we all CAN do for each other, whether it is building online tools that the community needs or hosting conversations that the municipality CAN'T host, or running projects that don;t need government support. It's all in aid of the bigger good.

The Road Status tool

When the snow was falling a group of intrepid Islanders created a road status tool by mashing up Google Maps and crowdsourcing information. The result is the Bowen Island Road Status Tool, a little project led by Stu Cole, Mark Groen and John Dumbrille and supported by Peter Rawsthorne, Brad Ovenell-Carter, James Glave and me.

Head over there and explore it, and most importantly, use it.

A visitor

Awoke to a dusting of snow on the ground with a little more expected, although it's not snowing at the moment. Also awoke to a juvenile red-tailed hawk calling out from a fir tree in front of our place. I saw this bird yesterday for the first time, and this is the first red-tailed hawk I've ever seen on Bowen. Looks like it's hanging around, but who knows for how long. Haven't seen much of our neighbours semi-feral chickens either. Hmmm.

The shape of things to come

James Glave and I have been tossing around ideas about urban vs. rural since I wrote about what urban means to me a couple of weeks ago. Today I responded to an excellent post on his blog with this comment:

In my long term vision for Bowen Island, I actually see the neighbourhoods becoming villages, with some small commercial activity for example in Tunstall Bay, Cowan Point and other palces perhaps (probably at some point in the future the Cape too). I’ve always had in my mind that we could move from an island of neighbourhoods to an island of villages much like other islands of our size.

Last year as I was travelling through Belgium, I was struck by how close together villages were, only a couple of miles apart, and how focused each village was on it’s own things - a pub and a bakery and some uberlocal gardens and farms producing the villages food. Every few villages there were services like a garage, a building supply store, that sort of thing. The flow of things was not “everyone falling in towards a centre” but rather, lots of things happening around several hubs all with a reagional consciousness. This is what I can see happening to Bowen as a way to preserve mixed forms of housing, a more distributed village centre and large tracts of free land for various types of resource use (recreation, ecologging, non-timber forest products, agriculture, and wild lands).

What if we became an island of villages?

Community engagement

Last year I was invited to give a talk on the shapes of community engagement for a conference sponsored by the BC Treaty Commission called Forging Linkages and Finding Solutions. This is the slide deck I used and here is a transcript of my talk.

Given some of the stuff happening around here at the moment, I thought I'd share this with my friends and neighbours.

Multimedia fog

I wasn't here for the great sock in of 2009, but other Bowen bloggers covered it. Here's what the fog looked like to Richard Smith and here's how Robert Ballantyne heard it.

Wht did I miss?

Just back from two weekes on another, much warmer, Pacific island. Seems while we were gone, the island was socked in by 19 straight days of fog, and the turf war erupted again. My friend James has a nice posting (with great conversation in the comments) on the issue of installing artificial turf at BICS.

There is still a lot of snow about. At our place, where the snow plummeted off the roof, there are mini glaciers surrounding the house. Hopefully they will melt before the scour circques into our new landscaping.