MPP Rob Leone visit the Imagination Catalyst (Photo by Miriam Kramer)
On Tuesday MPP Rob Leone visited OCADU and the IC; Mark presented a brand new version of Qualia, which is looking great.
This week I met with Frances Ryan, who offered some great insight and advice. She also told me about a few IC-related committees that I’d never even heard of. I also had good meetings with Stephanie and Monica.
I spent a good portion of the week working on developing one-pagers about each of the IC participants’ projects. These will be distributed to the IC’s advisors and their networks, to seek out the specific kinds of assistance that participants require.
One of the ideas that I tested with Frances was to use a discussion paper to help anchor the IC during its current transition phase. A common approach that has been used when “things need to be figured out” is the creation of one or several committees — these have their challenges. As an alternative, I’m developing a discussion paper. It’s a living document, meant to be accessible to anyone internally, and which I will steward. I’ll write the first version based on my initial understanding of the IC, and continue to refine it through conversations with as many IC stakeholders as possible.
My hope is that this approach will allow us to solicit feedback from a wider range of people in less time, while building collaboration and goodwill.
My non-IC-specific activities this week include: seeing a great talk by Joel Solomon, hosted by Urbanspace; completing the first version of a script to scrape City of Toronto call documents; getting approval for the wifi installation at Dawes Crossing; and doing initial testing with an RFID/NFC reader that I want to integrate into a new project. (Sadly, the RFID tags in OCAD IDs are proprietary, and can’t be read with the Adafruit reader.)
