If they bothered to ask....
Who?A challenge in building an open data portal is trying to determine what data to use. Otherwise, as we have with the Saint John open data portal, citizens are left with a mess of data which is meaningless. The best feature of building a portal is that citizens from all walks of life are asked for their views.
What citizens?
- Young Singles.
- Mid Career
- Families with children
- Empty nesters
- Retirees
- Professionals
- Gay/lesbians
What kinds of questions might city planners ask during a citizen engagement forum?
- What do you like least and most about Saint John?
- Where else would you prefer to live and , why?
- What kind of work do you do, and would you prefer to do? Can you do it here?
- What is most important to you, now? Work, dating, a mate, a house..?
- How important are cultural activities? Museum, cinema, film, art, music?
- What are the characteristics of city living which attract you?
Saint John ranks 375/431 cities in Canada, on the Moneysense list. Moncton ranks 155 and Fredericton ranks 149. Why? What might we do about that?
The categories in the Moneysense survey include:
- low unemployment
- high incomes
- affordable housing
- affordable rent
- access to healthcare
- healthy population growth
- low taxes
- low crime
- easy to walk, bike, take transit
- strong arts/sports community
None of these categories is listed in the Open Data Portal. Nor does the City's strategic plan address how the City might improve its standing in any of these categories. Yet, this data could prove effective in quantifying any of the concerns or points raised by a citizen engagement focus.
To be sure, there are a few categories missing..such as school performance, attendance rates, school ranking, access to community college , access to and affordability of, university (across all age groups), ranking of the community college and the university , opportunity for professional development through post secondary institutions. NBPSPP and board evaluation
In 2000, Guilanne Saucier presented her report about how to promote good governance. She emphasized that an educated and diverse board would set the tone at the top. In that way, board members could, with self assurance, discuss issues of strategy with key stakeholders. The education, and continuing education, however, did not necessarily focus on the business of the corporation, although that was a factor. Instead, the board would focus on the mechanics of good governance, self appraisal, comparison to standards set by professional governance associations, such as the CCGG . The Auditor, Insurer and consulting lawyer were to be key educators in this project
In 2003, Higgs focused on how boards build the skills of directors, what experience ought to be recruited to the Board and how the Nominating Committee would play a role in this. Spencer Stuart www.spencerstuart.com, (check out their 2018 Governance Outlook); Ernst and Young www.ey.com (check out the illustrative corporate governance report) and, Deloittes www.corpgov.deloitte.ca all produce annual governance reports, describing trends in governance, current weaknesses and where boards are improving performance. It is not unusual for these consulting firms to cross reference the CPA and CCGG, referenced in earlier blogs.
A look at the make up of the NBPSPP Board and one would wonder whether this Board membership reflects the diversity necessary as described by Tyson (2003). The membership should reflect a diversity of background, skills, experience, gender. Are members recruited from a variety of sources and is training sufficiently rigorous. One can't really evaluate this from the information presented .
So, grading the Board based on this interpretation of Saucier, the Board would get 1/ 5. None of the principle Board advisors appear to have anything to do with continuing education. Nor is there any education focused on good governance.
Similarly, there is no focus on education which meets Higgs standard.
No comments:
Post a Comment