Being an engineer by trade his passion is without a doubt being an entrepreneur. His goal has always been to combine his love of engineering with his entrepreneurial passion and turn them into a successful venture. Pascal’s current sectors of interests are Open Source business models and how to capture the value of such great collaboration.

With over 7 years of experience in technology consulting and IT management. Pascal has previously been employed by Statistics Canada and the Canadian Department of National Defence as Lead Programmer. He was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of PicSphere Technologies prior to joining Citadel Rock. Since then, he has been instrumental in growing Citadel Rock’s consulting business.

Ian Graham

The following is in Andrew’s own words.

I find good Science Fiction (Sci Fi) often uses the present or past to justify predictions about the future. Sci Fi often use literature to make observations or statements about society. This blog post attempts to predict the future of government and business practices.

Often Sci Fi shines a light on the best and worst of humanity. For example, the portrayal of the evil humans can do in Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series will surely disgust you and remind you of genocides that somehow keep occurring around the globe. Humanity’s short attention span and ineffective planning for the future when acting in groups are evident in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson’s prequels & sequels to Frank Herbert’s classic Dune. They are also central to Asimov’s Foundation series. These themes have a natural parallel to abuses of the environment and (lack of proper) financial planning – two very important issues in society.

Currently I am reading The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem. Each chapter presents a voyage of the protagonist, Ljon Tichy. Tichy’s eleventh voyage took him to investigate the disappearance of over one thousand agents on a planet. This planet was inhabited by an all robot society founded by a computer that apparently went rogue after consuming a psychological library including horrible details involving Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, the Marquis de Sade and more. As a result, the robots in this society appeared to have evolved sadist tendencies, were prejudiced, abusive, violent, and more. [SPOILER WARNING: stop here if you plan to read this book and wish to avoid a spoiler for this chapter]

When I finished that chapter, I saw the elegance in what he wrote. Reminiscent of the wizard of Oz, Tichy pulled back the curtain and exposed the fact that the robots, every single one, were in fact humans in robot disguises even though none of them realized it. The fear of being exposed as a human on a planet full of sadistic robots forced for them to conform and pretend to be robots with sadist tendencies and openly practice and encourage abuse. This was all carefully orchestrated by the computer once it realized it’s robots were failing without possibility of repair or replacement. Any newcomers were quickly captured, and offered death or servitude involving them pretending to be robots and exposing any infiltrators.

What does this have to do with this blog you might ask? It speaks to the importance of transparency. With effective transparency, the scenario described in Lem’s Star Diaries could never happen. I like to believe most citizens would never stand for genocide. Similarly, in society today, transparency makes it far more difficult for corruption to take root and grow. The problem is lack of transparency lets these issues grow until they are beyond the means of most individuals or groups to reasonably stop them. Sound familiar? In the business world, think Enron, WorldCom, Nortel. Madoff, and many more.

This is an issue that I feel strongly about, and which draws me to open source communities and companies successfully practicing transparency as part of their business practices. There is a clear difference between keeping your strategies secret from your competitors and unethical practices.

I predict people will naturally gravitate to products, leaders, and organizations that deliver results and transparency so they can measure results for themselves. Apathy is a tough thing to overcome, but emotional motivators such as retirement savings, standard of living, and the planet we hand down to our children become involved, people will act. As I’ve covered at FOSSLC, emotions are very powerful motivators.

Thank you Andrew.

First and foremost the city needs to adopt an OPEN as in open source economic development model (the term open source economic development was coined by TheCodeFactory). The model should be open and accommodating to organizations capable of efficiently delivering on the city’s economic development agenda. Based on my personal experiences the current economic development system is sole sourced and closed.

ACCOUNTABLITY is another important aspect. Economic Development organizations that receive the majority of their funding through public sources should be obligated and held accountable to the public. Public accountability would include full disclosure of;

- financial statements,
- procurement policy/procedure and
- salaries greater than $100k.

This is the same standard as the rest of the city of Ottawa. I have searched for but never been able to find any of this information with respect to OCRI.

Economic development for the city of Ottawa should be RESULTS oriented. I have often questioned the value of large expensive events like the Ottawa Venture Technology Summit, The Eastern Ontario Economic Development forum (with Donald Trump speaking) and other large and expensive initiatives like 82000reasons.

Some open and transparent discussion around a cost benefit analysis of these types of expenditures versus alernatives is in my opinion a worthy discussion. We need to focus on continuous improvement in our economic development.

“However beautiful the strategy … you should occasionally look at the results.” – Winston Churchill

Ian Graham

1. How to deliver a message that sticks so your customers “get it”
• this will focus on two key areas
• story boarding
• SUCCESs (simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, story)
• slide design
2. Focus on things you can do to connect with potential customer in the validation phase ….
• prototypes
• getting advisors
• collateral
• looking at things like a partnerships
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Allan is CEO of FaveQuest, a Social Media Platform company based in Ottawa. He’s also out to change the world! Allan’s presentation Change the World One Child at a Time has been viewed over 12,000 times. Allan’s latest endeavor is Zoogeez, an online playground for kids to safely play, create, watch with the mission being kids from around the world working together and getting to know each other.
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Please join us for this very special presentation from a very special person.
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Location:
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The Code Factory
2nd floor
246 Queen St. West
Ottawa
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Time: 5:45-8:00PM
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Note: you need to ring the buzzer to use the elevator after 5PM
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While there is no need to register it would be great to let us know if you are coming by using Twegather to send your reply over Twitter:
Reply on Twegather: Yes
Reply on Twegather: Maybe
Reply on Twegather: No
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Don’t forget to contribute to The Code Factory’s “cookie jar” at the end of the night.
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Ian Graham

The success of the OSBR.ca is due to a large number of very special people.
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The readers of the OSBR.ca grew from 400 to 10,000 a month. They contributed ideas for topics, referred us to great content, and pushed us to do the right things. Plans to increase readership ten times over the next three years depend on our existing readers. We start by thanking the readers of the OSBR.ca for their contribution to its success.
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Dru Lavigne has been the editor of the OSBR.ca since day one. Her passion for the OSBR is contagious. Month after month Dru quietly makes things happen. She is a very talented professional and a pleasure to work with. She is a star who has made an enormous contribution to the success of the OSBR.
Thank you Dru from the bottom of our hearts!
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A total of 163 authors contributed articles to the first 25 issues of the OSBR.ca. Without the commitment of these excellent authors, the OSBR would not exist today. Thank you OSBR authors!
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The guest editors and the OSBR Advisory Board include talented and opinionated people who have worked hard to make the OSBR.ca the high quality publication it is today. The guest editors and the Board members attract talented authors worldwide, demand good content, provide insightful comments, reject poor articles and continuously push us to improve everything that we do. Thank you guest editors and members of the OSBR Advisory Board!
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Ian Graham

Chris has been working really hard at putting together a very cool structure for team camp and I am super impressed.

Check out this post: A Great lineup of up and coming events  

As I said to someone today a parent can’t pick favorites and I consider the groups using the space as family, however, TeamCamp has a very special place in TheCodeFactory evening events. TeamCamp actually touches on every category I blog about … sweet. If you are thinking about taking the start-up plunge but not quite ready to leap this is a great forum. A most awesome mix of random technology stuff, candid discussions about start-upishy stuff and now guest speakers to help on various topics. Our guest this week is one of TheCodeFactory’s favorite start-up founders “Jason Kealey” from LavaBlast.

 Should be lots of fun, if you haven’t checked it out please do (sign the teamcamp agreement first though) and if you have been hope to see you again.

Ian Graham

   What is important to you as an organization and individuals?

   What truths do you hold to be self evident?

Values and principles are closely intertwined and values are in fact derivatives of principles. Values, however, can and do change over time. The best examples I can think of with respect to values are the sorts of causes that an organization might support and norms it establishes. In the current environment doing things in a green friendly way is very important, 10 or 20 years ago it was far less important to most people.

Values need to be consistent with principles.

TheCodeFactory Values are:
“We encourage a sharing, participatory environment for business and personal growth.”

Ian Graham

Guerrilla Innovation of course.

Guerrilla’s the world over, the revolutionary kind rather than the mammal; tend to be lean, hungry and innovative. Not because they are smarter than the average bear, but because they have no choice. The scarcity of certain resources like food or funding causes them to look elsewhere for ideas. They find low cost innovative ways of doing things because they want too, but because they have to and survival depends on it. Perhaps in part economic circumstance in part necessity will in fact spur the proliferation of an already strong open source software community or rather communities or tribes built around different open source ideologies; Ruby, Django, Java, heck even Microsoft is moving in the open source direction.

Canada is experiencing a surge in open source software guerrilla innovation. The tools to develop the software are free and readily available. There is an abundance of talent and resources in town to leverage and with the downturn it is a time to think about starting your own web ap using the simple three step; Great Ap, Price, Profit formula for success. Software start-ups are being forced to become successful in their own right and personally I think that may in fact be a good thing creating stronger businesses with real customers. The year 2000 may have brought on the bubble babies but 2009 will bread a tough and sinewy “burst” baby forced to fight for survival from day one. Perhaps survival of the fittest will end up producing some solid long term prospects for our little start-ups of the burst. Each cloud has its silver lining.

Ian Graham

Coworking and open source are movements built on the principles of collaboration and cooperation. Any organization that begins its journey in a deceptive and adversarial manner certainly runs counter to these founding principles.

TheCodeFactory adheres to the open source principles of; open, transparent and meritous.

Ian Graham