Last week my CBC radio column covered the recent introduction of a 3D imaging surveillance system used at the Kelowna BC airport to screen passengers. Using millimetre waves the system is able to penetrate clothing and create a vivid 3D model of the passenger without clothes on. Thus it is a far more thorough system then the existing setup which only scans for metal.

Part of the focus of the column was on the privacy implications of such a system, and at the time CATSA (the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority) was claiming it had the support of the federal privacy commissioner. I mentioned this in my column, but also expressed skepticism that the current steps being taken to protect passenger's privacy was not enough.

Turns out, the privacy commissioner does not support the pilot project, and does indeed have concerns with how passengers privacy might be violated. Here's a quote from the Globe and Mail:

"However, the privacy commissioner's office said yesterday it is concerned about the implications of the new system and it never told CATSA officials that the body-scanning technology meets Canadian privacy standards.

"At this very early stage we certainly don't know enough to endorse the project, so the suggestion that we endorsed it is perhaps a bit off," commission spokeswoman Anne-Marie Hayden said. "I think we're going to have to watch it closely and we're going to want to ensure that individuals' privacy rights are protected."

Thanks to Blair Campbell for alerting me to this. Goes to show that even when an organization says it is protecting your privacy you should still question that assertion, and try and think of unforeseen ways in your rights my be violated.

Now is the time for all of us to speak out clearly in defense of our culture and against this legislation:

As I started my day I tuned into to watch my friends on CBC News Morning and the lead story is about more massive cuts and layoffs at General Motors. While this is obviously an economic and labour story, Danielle Bochove at one point summed up the situation when she said, "It's become a story about speed."

GM had already made cuts and plans to respond to rising fuel prices, however they were clearly not enough. In fact GM found that the speed by which the economy is changing is far faster than expected, as is the speed by which consumers are buying smaller cars.

Unfortunately the Canadian Auto Workers had just concluded a new contract with GM, and these announcements effectively undermine it, showing the drastic measures GM is taking.

I work with organizations quite a bit smaller than GM, however my primary focus tends to be helping the client accelerate their corporate culture so as to be more responsive and capable of handling the pressures of our network age.

The ability for an organization to move quickly and respond to changing conditions is crucial, and yet there are many risks to speeding up, and I suspect increasingly we're going to see the wrong way far more often then not.

Take General Motors for example. While they definitely need to move faster in the direction of smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, they also have a commitment to their workers and their families. So their ability to respond quickly and increase their overall speed as a company must also include working with their unions rather than negotiating in bad faith which they've done.

The old and obsolete school of seeing your workforce as hostile and expendable will only result in slowing down your ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions.

Successful organizations will unite the leadership structure with the combined intelligence and labour of all the diverse employees and customers/constituents that are part of the enterprise.

April seemed to fly by so quickly I was unable to post any of the reviews or thoughts I had over the last month. While I have been posting some items to my private network, I still have several posts I will be publishing on my blog in the days and weeks to come.

On Sundays I tend to spend my late afternoon and early evening going over my rss feeds and news sources in part to look at the week past but mostly to get a gauge on the week ahead.

The big news over the weekend of course is that Microsoft has backed off in their quest to buy Yahoo. The irony for me is that this past Thursday morning I did a series of interviews on CBC Radio in which I speculated that the merger was inevitable. I still believe this to be the case, however it seems the likelihood of my being right is getting lower and lower.

Check out this series of headlines from the New York Times:

• May 1st: Microsoft Outlines Its Yahoo Strategies
• May 2nd: Raising Yahoo Bid, Microsoft Steps up Talks
• May 2nd: Higher Offer by Microsoft Brings Yahoo to Table
• May 3rd: Microsoft Withdraws Bid for Yahoo
• May 4th: Will Microsoft Really Walk?

That's just the New York Times. The blogosphere as a whole is just exploding with posts, and even I am breaking a month long hiatus to post on the subject. Ironically a lot of the talk is on the death of Yahoo, and the degree to which their price will fall in the morning. This suggests to me that Microsoft may be doing all of this to drive the price lower so as to finally acquire Yahoo.

Yet who knows what will happen, and it goes to show that just when something appears to be certain it will quickly transform into something entirely different. Expect the unexpected!

One of the things I'm committed to doing in 2008 is organizing more public events. Last year, I ran a number of private interactive and intellectual discussions, which nurtured a desire to develop a larger and more public configuration for them.

To use a software development metaphor, my first public event was an alpha test, in that it was a raw and open exploration of a few concepts I've been developing or have seen in the wild and wanted to try myself.

Recently, there has been considerable innovation when it comes to event organizing, with the emergence of the BarCamp phenomenon as well as the Open Space movement. I am inspired by both, but still see room to incorporate my own sensibilities and experiences.

I've spent the last few years working in television and really studying the direction that industry is going, while also absorbing everything I can about production, both behind the scenes and on-camera. My approach to organizing events has been deeply impacted by this exploration of the television aesthetic and, conversely, my approach to television is heavily influenced by my love of live, interactive events.

The context to all this is, of course, the Internet, where I spend most of my time, and I'm always thinking how to bring the culture and properties of the Internet to live events and broadcast television. Often it has been the focus and/or subject matter. However, in the future, my intention is to run events in which the Internet is so ubiquitous as to no longer require explicit attention.

That is why I chose politics as the focus of my first event. I hoped to capture the zeitgeist of our time (with Obama inspiring a new generation) and tackle a subject that everyone should be able to relate to, one that lends itself to debate and disagreement.

I've always loved Kids in the Hall. I used to go and be part of the audience for the tapings of their old show here in Toronto, and their skits continue to pop into my head at all sorts of weird moments.

So yesterday I was recovering from an exciting event the day before, and still thinking about the intersection of community, technology, politics, and culture, when the KitH song "These are the Daves I know" jumped into my head.

Davids are wonderful human beings. I've known and loved many Davids in my three point three decades of this life. In fact Jesses have a unique relationship with Davids as Isiah chapter 11 describes Jesse as the father of David, Jesse of course described in that chapter as root.

Here in Toronto there has recently been a conflict brewing between two Daves I know, and last night as I saw this dispute seep into tweets, the Bruce McCulloch song got me thinking about Daves in general, and some of the Daves I know.

As in addition to being wonderful, Davids also tend to be powerful. And I must say I've known some rather powerful Davids. As it stands the mayor of Toronto is David Miller. I no longer like him that much, but I did contribute to his first successful mayoral campaign, and he's been in the news lately as he wants even more executive power.

However two other powerful Davids that are making waves in Toronto right now are David Crow and Dave Forde. I like both of these Daves, unfortunately I'm not sure they feel the same about each other, which is too bad, as united these two Davids could enable quite a bit of positive change.

For quite a while now I've been arguing that the traditional conference configuration is obsolete. Of course I'm not alone in asserting this. The incredibly popularity of the Camp phenomena represents a grassroots demonstration of why interactivity and spontaneity are becoming assumed qualities for any gathering big or small.

It's no surprise therefore to watch the fallout from the Mark Zuckerberg Q&A at the SXSW conference in Austin this past weekend. The session was hosted/moderated by journalist Sarah Lacy, and by all accounts it was a total disaster. Why? Sarah failed to either prepare for the panel itself, or be able to effectively engage the energy of the audience.

Add to this the power of twitter to give the audience a collective voice that can effectively organize and overwhelm the stage first with tweets than with heckling.

I've been organizing an event to be held at MaRS on March 18th, and one of our plans from the beginning was to have a big screen with an active twitter feed. This was meant as one of many means by which the audience can become an integral part of our event.

For a long time I've been working on ideas to expand the spontaneity and interactivity of live events, and this upcoming event at MaRS will serve as one of a series of beta tests I'll be doing to test out some of my concepts.

There's something about the weather that fascinates me. I'm always looking at the weather page my buddy Ken Chase has setup, and I'm often outside observing conditions and comparing what I see and experience with the online forecasts.

I really enjoy appearing on the TV Ontario show The Agenda, in part because the conversation led by host Steve Paikin is always top notch, taking the guests and audience into new territory. Steve has this way of simultaneously understanding where the conversation is going while also keeping it grounded in language and concepts that are as accessible as possible. This type of intellectual populism is precisely what I think enables engaging television.

Last night's panel was on the subject of "Socializing Online", it was produced by celebrity TVO producer Mike Miner, and my fellow guests were Nancy Baym from the AoIR, Maggie Fox of the Social Media Group, and Will Pate, community evangelist and host of commandN. While there wasn't as much debate or disagreement compared to past shows, we were able to really build off of each other's comments and insights to reach a high level of discourse.

This past week I was overwhelmed with responses from a number of media stories. A couple of Blackberry business articles, a couple of Facebook expert articles, an article about a Hong Kong sex scandal, as well as some TV and radio appearances, first about the bust of a child porn ring, and then about the bust of a Quebec based Hacker cell.

In general my policy is to respond to anyone who takes the time to get in touch with me. Yet I've now had to revise this policy to only reply to people who show respect rather than outright hostility. Something about the audience that reads the National Post that brings all sorts of trolls out from under the bridge.

The CBC audience on the other hand is a pleasure to interact with. Even when they strongly disagree with me I find CBC viewers and listeners to be intelligent and engaging. One particularly pleasant email I received was from a "middle-aged mother" who will remain nameless, but I suspect represents a typical Canadian, from an average family. For the sake of argument, let's call her Louise.