By Nestor  Arellano
In a rare exhibition of election fervor Canadians vented their views about the polls and a few even braved the risk of being fined by Elections Canada by “illegally†tweeted early results of yesterday’s Federal Election.
The act of online civil disobedience squarely went against the archaic but still in effect Elections Act, Section 329 which states: No person shall transmit the result or purported result of the vote in an electoral district to the public in another district before the close of all the posting station in that other district.
Penalties for violating the act, which was introduced back in the 1930s to prevent election results from Atlantic Canada from being broadcasted to the rest of the country, could include a fine of up to $25,000 and five years in prison.
Back in 2000, Peter C. Bryan of Vancouver was fined $1,000 for flouting the 70-year-old law and posting on his blog the election results from Atlantic Canada which he accessed from a satellite feed from Newfoundland.
While, Bryan was reluctant to do the same this time around, many of his compatriots and not a few from abroad posted their opposition to EA Section 329 under the hashtag #tweetheresult. #tweettheresults generated so much buzz that it quickly became the most tweeted topic worldwide eclipsing even tweets about Osama bin Laden.
Creators of the site , and , said they created the site to “highlight that fact, and to urge lawmakers to revise this information blackout.â€
The law, they said, made sense in an era when there were only a dozen radio stations in the country and we were generations away from the 24-hours news cycle, the Internet, Facebook updates, microblogging and Twitter.
Although from 7 p.m to 10 p.m, Â the site removed its aggregation feature: “To avoid a potential fine or protracted legal battle, we have taken this site offline for 3 hours,” Â there were many tweets like the one posted by Schmeedle that dared to include riding numbers
Deena Roth owed
Haha! RT @ Conservatives ███ █████ in ███ ridings.Liberals ███ █████. NDP █████ ██ ███ ███ seats!
A lot of users also began posting election results that were being shown on TV by local networks:
One person in Australia said he received election results sent to him via email: some 45 minutes before the social media blackout expired: Â
I think punitive measures such as the one threatened by Elections Canada against people posting preliminary poll results on sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are not the answer.
At a time when we have been facing voter turnout of less than 50 per cent, activities that enable citizens to voice out their thoughts about politics and generate interest about the country’s political future should be encouraged.
EA Section 329 was created so that voters across the country went to the polls with basically the same information and would not be influenced by news coming from other parts of Canada. Proponents of Sect 329 believe that tweets from one end of Canada have the power to sway voters in the other end of the country. Yes that will likely happen in some cases but I think in general people in different provinces vote on different issues. I also can’t imagine people waiting outside polling stations checking on their smartphones and tablets checking to see how people on the other side of the country voted before they cast their own ballots.
The law was mainly aimed a broadcasters and large news media, not individuals using social media tools to communicate with their friends. Its framers had not foreseen advent of the Internet and the spontaneous viral connections afforded by social media. Elections Canada was able to single out Bryan back in 2000 but would the election body be able to enforce the law today if it decided to?
Would the law cover an individual informing his 40 friends on Facebook about election results in his part of the country? Would an American retweeting poll results from Newfoundland be fined for doing so?
How do you police the twitterverse? If they wanted, people can tweet, text, post on Facebook or even make a video on YouTube of the elections proceedings in their area.
Elections Canada, actually seems to have little appetite for s doing just that. In interviews with various news outlets its representatives have made it clear that Elections Canada is not monitoring the social media space. Elections Canada is simply not set up for such a task. Instead, reaction to violation of Section 329, they said, will be a “complaint driven process.†– there won’t be any investigation unless there is a complaint.
Perhaps this difficulty in enforcing the Section 329 will eventually lead to the law being replaced with something that is more in tune with our current reality.
The ITBusiness.ca story we’re still waiting to tell
The ITBusiness.ca story we’re still waiting to tell
By Shane Schick
Enough with the nostalgia already.
Yes, we are celebrating this week, and yes, I am incredibly proud of the stories we’ve told in that time, but there’s plenty of elements in our coverage already that will have us looking back on the biggest news events, the site’s origins and the evolving nature of online journalism. I want to take a moment instead to look forward 10 years.
Not so that I can make any predictions – I’m notoriously wrong when I do that – but to talk about the one big thing that didn’t happen over the last decade. Despite all the mergers, breakthrough products and unexpected innovations, the biggest problem facing SMBs has not been resolved. They’re still mired in legacy IT issues.
This should be more surprising than it is. One of the most remarkable but relatively ignored trends in the last 10 years has been the slow migration of technology product and service companies from their traditional top-tier enterprise accounts to firms with 500 employees or less. Or 100 employees or less. Or less than 10. The Internet removed many of the barriers to entry in many markets and produced an incredible impact on world economies that we now call globalization, but it also meant that even what we used to call “mom and pop†companies could compete with much larger entities.
Related:
Helping SMBs become more competitive, however, hasn’t been a smooth journey for most vendors. Even at what they consider bargain-basement prices, SMBs have been averse to significant IT spending, and much more careful to avoid risk than larger organizations. (They have probably been wise in this respect; the last decade has also been marked by two recessions, the last one far worse than the first.) In almost every category, however, from databases and accounting packages to enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, vendors have launched SMB-friendly (often termed “expressâ€) versions of their products.
By now, you would think there would be more SMBs up and running on these tools than the majority who continue to stick band-aid solutions on aging hardware and software. We hear this time and again in many of the stories we do. If the IT industry is all about progress, shouldn’t we have made more headway here in the time since ITBusiness.ca was founded?
There’s also little to suggest that much will change in the next 10 years, but here are a few suggestions that might help. Perhaps a group of savvy CEOs will create a grassroots level pan-Canadian association that will voice the IT concerns of SMBs. Vendors could eventually come up with a way to plug into to reasonably priced cloud services as easily as Facebook Connect allows consumers to sign into other Web sites.
Or maybe we just need somebody to provide ongoing guidance and support for SMBs with relevant examples of those who have demonstrated a way to move beyond legacy in as pain-free a way as possible. And by “somebody,†of course, I am referring to ITBusiness.ca.
Here’s to another decade.
Shane Schick is the founder of ITBusiness.ca, and now the editor-in-chief of IT World Canada
What is your market validation plan?
By Peter Hanschke
Here’s the situation: Your development team is busy creating a (MVP). You have people off in all directions trying to secure some funding. But do you have a Market Validation Plan? Furthermore, are you executing this plan along with all the other activities? In other words, is this an activity that you are currently performing?
As the name suggests, a Market Validation Plan (another MVP for those who like ) is about reaching out to your target market to determine whether:
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