Hello world (again!)
After a long hiatus, it is time to return to blogging in the wider world. Perhaps some context is in order:
Around the time of my last post here, I started working full time at the City of Toronto. Between studies at the University of Toronto, I had worked several summers at the City as a research assistant in Information Technology (working on controlled vocabulary, document and records management system projects). This experience helped get me hired and continue some of this work, particularly developing and implementing a subject controlled vocabulary in Toronto 311 and other systems to improve search and retrieval.
Almost two years ago, some of my colleagues and I decided to start up an Information Management (IM) community of practice blog. We wanted to share best practices, projects and ideas among ourselves, and coworkers whom we might not see daily or even weekly. I think we've been fairly successful, and have a number of regular contributors and commenters.
However, our IM blog is only accessible internally, to City of Toronto staff. Many times, I would find myself writing posts about an interesting newspaper article or project that I wanted to share with people outside the City. And perhaps inevitably, some of my observations would stray into politics... I even had one of my posts deleted, with the following policy cited: "Do not include controversial or potentially inflammatory topics in your postings such as politics, sex, race, religion or any other non-business related subjects." I thought I was being fairly even handed. How do you advocate for open government without talking politics sometimes?
So, in the spirit of collaboration and openness, I'm going to use this blog to share my thoughts on information management, classification, conferences, building an open government and the like. I'll repost old and new favourites from the internal blog but also add writings that might not be possible to post there. To be clear, these posts represent my own views and not the official views of the City of Toronto.
Thanks for reading!
After a long hiatus, it is time to return to blogging in the wider world. Perhaps some context is in order:
Around the time of my last post here, I started working full time at the City of Toronto. Between studies at the University of Toronto, I had worked several summers at the City as a research assistant in Information Technology (working on controlled vocabulary, document and records management system projects). This experience helped get me hired and continue some of this work, particularly developing and implementing a subject controlled vocabulary in Toronto 311 and other systems to improve search and retrieval.
Almost two years ago, some of my colleagues and I decided to start up an Information Management (IM) community of practice blog. We wanted to share best practices, projects and ideas among ourselves, and coworkers whom we might not see daily or even weekly. I think we've been fairly successful, and have a number of regular contributors and commenters.
However, our IM blog is only accessible internally, to City of Toronto staff. Many times, I would find myself writing posts about an interesting newspaper article or project that I wanted to share with people outside the City. And perhaps inevitably, some of my observations would stray into politics... I even had one of my posts deleted, with the following policy cited: "Do not include controversial or potentially inflammatory topics in your postings such as politics, sex, race, religion or any other non-business related subjects." I thought I was being fairly even handed. How do you advocate for open government without talking politics sometimes?
So, in the spirit of collaboration and openness, I'm going to use this blog to share my thoughts on information management, classification, conferences, building an open government and the like. I'll repost old and new favourites from the internal blog but also add writings that might not be possible to post there. To be clear, these posts represent my own views and not the official views of the City of Toronto.
Thanks for reading!
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