Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Development and corruption talk this evening

I attended a talk sponsored by engineers without borders University of Ottawa Chapter this evening. A Canadian International Development Agency employee, Shaukat Hassan gave a talk. Here is the blurb from their facebook event post where I learned of this event

Interested in learning how corruption is affecting Canada's development today? How EWB can play it's part in this fight? Or whether it should at all? Is corruption a post-imperialistic construction used as an excuse to target aid based on political motives? Or is corruption an overlooked challenge to development that can finally be addressed in a highly technical globalized era? Wondering what all this means for a socially conscious person like you?


Then Come on out to Development Drinks!


What: Shaukat Hassan, the Canadian International Development Agency's expert on corruption issues will speak on corruption and challenges it poses to development, and this will be followed by informal group discussion.

As background the EWB shared this article on facebook.



Article by Shaukat Hassan:


http://www.acdi.gc.ca/images.nsf/vLUImages/Journal_Of_Development/$file/journal-corruption-and-dev-chal.pdf

Shaukat Hassan recommended that EWB develop ethical guidelines and codes of conduct in other words a professional code of conduct for their voluntary efforts.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Iran and the nuclear question.

So it is father's day and I spent the day with my father-in-law and his family, our family. I read the newspaper here and notice that the Iran nuclear question and the Korean nuclear question is still in the news. I don't want nuclear power to spread but I am also not happy with imperialism and its left over nuclear powers that be. I also know Canada is not innocent on the nuclear question and we have invested in selling our Candu systems world wide.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Hello world of the web, welcome to my partisan green party blog

I have been blogging for about 4 years now. I typically don't blog about politics. I blog about in order of time spent on these blogs:
  • my school work,
  • my computer tinkering,
  • anonymously on a topic I won't share here,
  • about being a cybernetic citizen,
  • about music my partner and I make,
  • about a Friday night role playing game,
  • about community networking,
  • and I have a few blogs out there that are either no longer there, or are no longer used.

I am a minority in the blogging world as I am an adult male. I am a long time green party member and do some official work for the party too. I might add the Green Party of Canada but actually the Green Party is a global party so would it make sense to add a national boundry here? At any rate welcome to my debate er I hope not a ranting blog about green issues.