[d@DCC] Heritage consultation: strategies, staying current, etc.

From: Matthew Skala <mskala _-at-_ ansuz.sooke.bc.ca>
To: discuss (at) digital-copyright.ca
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 14:35:53 -0400 (EDT)

Monday's announcement of the deadline for "final submissions" to the
Heritage Committee surprised me - I had thought that the earlier "summary"
process several of us participated in, was the last step at which they'd
be calling for comments from the general public, and the next thing would
be that they'd contact groups and individuals that they wanted to hear
from in more detail.

It was fortunate that Wallace J. McLean posted the press release on this
list the same day it came out, because I don't regularly read the Heritage
Committee's press releases Web page and I didn't see it announced in any
of the other sources I do read (except here).  To make it easier (both for
myself and others) to keep up to date with future similar announcements,
I've created a new script to extract press release information from the
Parliamentary Web site in the form of RSS feeds.  To monitor the Heritage
Committee page for announcements, point your RSS reader at this URL:

   http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/house-committees/?id=HERI

You can get a list of that and the 45 other similar feeds I've created, as
well as links to view them with my own RSS reader in a regular Web
browser, at this URL:

   http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/house-committees/

Note that these feeds simply carry all the linked documents from the
"Press Releases" section of the relevant committee's page.  In the case of
many of the subcommitees, there are no such items and so the feeds are
empty.  The contents of the feed should be at most 4 hours behind the
state of the Parliamentary Web site at any given moment, because that's
the cache lifetime it uses.

The main point of this posting, though, is to ask other list members what
you have in mind as far as responding to the latest call for submissions.
I'm not sure, myself, whether I ought to just fill in more detail in the
summary I've already sent in, send a lengthier and more complete document
(like my submission from the 2001 consultation, available at
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/icsub.html , but updated for the current
situation), or attempt to combine the two - perhaps something grown from
the summary and then the longer submission attached as an appendix?  I
realise that the question of what Heritage wants is better addressed to
them than to this list, but what I'm wondering about is what other
activists are planning.  Feel free to respond off-list or even encrypted
(my key is in the usual places) if you don't want to tip your hand here in
public.

Also:  How was the University of Ottawa's event last week?  I decided not
to attend because I had other things I had to do here in K-W, and in
retrospect I think that was the right decision, but it was certainly a
difficult call.  There were lots of people there who I'd love to meet some
time.  I'm sure other people on this list attended the event and I'd love
to hear your reports from it.

-- 
Matthew Skala, CS PhD student, University of Waterloo
mskala@math.uwaterloo.ca  <-- school
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca  <-- home
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/   http://www.edifyingfellowship.org/

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