Here is the video from my appearance on The Agenda With Steve Paikin on TVO last week. It was my first one on one interview on a current affairs program, which was a nice milestone.

Much of my personal life in the last 6 months has been focused on well…focus. Most interesting has been exploring the concept of mindfulness, which can be simply put as being calmly present and focused on the moment. It’s a lot harder than it sounds, and my suspicion is this modern world of 24/7 technology and media makes keeping focused attention much more difficult than it was 100 years ago.

In this video Winifred Gallagher elucidates on how your life is the sum of what you focus on, rich with insight from the psychology and neuroscience of attention. I will likely pick up a copy of her book Rapt in the near future.

I’m very pleased to announce my first board position with Visible Government, a non-partisan non-profit dedicated to promoting the planning, funding, and implementation of online tools for government transparency in Canada. I’m truly humbled to be among such fine company in the other directors and advisors. For my American friends, the closest equivalent would be the Sunlight Foundation.

The Need for Transparency

Everywhere I go, regular folks have lost a lot of trust in the public and private institutions alike. Resources are becoming scarcer, governments are undertaking significant and complex spending to stimulate their economies, and unprecedented corporate malfeasance has shaken their faith in the people who run the show. Barack Obama has made transparency a touchstone of his administration, and all Canadians should expect the same from their public institutions. Transparency and accountability will be key to maintaining Canada’s membership in the leading nations of the 21st century.

A Call to Colleagues

I’ve been asked to help build a council to assess external technology that Visible Government should use to help drive transparency. If you have experience in technology transfer, commercialization, product and company launching or technology in government – let me know. We have about a dozen projects that need review, and we would like to set a formal process to help that scale.

What’s Next

We’re working on the following, if you would like to help:

• Launching a travel and hospitality expense visualizer
• Launching a FixMyStreet for Canada
• Raising funds to build more tools