On the TTC and ICT Toronto

ICT, Meet the TTC

The DemoCamp brain trust and I attended a presentation put on by ICT Toronto, a committee formed by the City of Toronto to boost Toronto’s profile as a leading city of infortmation and communications technologies.

I should pleased at this development, but something really worries me: it’s being run by the City of Toronto. Mayor David Miller and his crew, like most NDP members and voters, are very good at talking about “feeling your pain” but aren’t all that hot on actually getting things done. It’s a problem with Toronto politicians; they worry excessively about projecting the right message, optics and photo opportunities, even when the task is simply to change a lightbulb.

At the risk of alienating some big players in the local tech scene, I will state that I believe that not only is ICT Toronto’s task too important to be left to ICT Toronto; I think that we will have to accomplish that task in spite of ICT Toronto.

Let’s consider another promotional effort run by the city: The Toronto Transit Commission.

The Toronto Transit Commission: Its Fans are Better Than its Management

Say what you want about the marketing and lore that comes with the world’s other transit systems — New York’s, London’s or Paris’ — when it comes to home-grown transit fandom, Toronto does quite well for itself. This is a good thing, too, since the Toronto Transit Commission (a.k.a. “TTC”) is pretty clueless at marketing itself; they’d probably be incapable of marketing immortality. The best promotion for the TTC comes not from the head office, but its riders and fans.

The Fan Site Clearly Beats the Official Site

Consider the difference between the Toronto Transit Commision site, a useless hodgepodge that seems to have been designed by someone with the visual sense that God gave oysters:

Believe it or not, someone got paid to make that.

Now consider the completely unofficial, fan-created labour of love, Transit Toronto:

The difference is stunning.

The Fan Memorabilia Beats the Official Memorabilia

The New York and London transit systems market themselves well. There’s lots of licensed memorabilia for the New York subway:

…and the London Underground’s memorabilia sells like hotcakes:

Where is the TTC merchandise? Good question. It actually exists, but you’re not going to find a link to it from TTC site, and none of it shows the design or imagination of the merch for New York’s or London’s system. The official merch is simply the TTC logo slapped on various objects, with all the creativity and style of those “YOUR COMPANY NAME AND LOGO HERE” ball pens.

Once again, the best stuff comes from the fans. The most desirable TTC memorabilia is Spacing.ca’s lapel-pin buttons featuring the names, designs and colour schemes of every station on the line:

The Efficiency Guide, Unorthodox Tips for Riding the TTC and the Anagram Map

For those of you who want to ride the subway more efficiently, there’s the TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide, which tells you where to sit on the train to be closest to the exits for every station on the line. It’s available online and had also been distributed free of charge by loyal TTC fans.

The people behind the Efficiency Guide are going to release a new guide on May 2nd titled Unorthodox Tips for Riding the TTC, which will contain over 200 tips for riding the TTC. Included will be “23 tips on making riders’ journeys more comfortable, 11 tips on how to secure a seat on the busiest routes, and 6 tips to help make travelling with young children a little easier.” The TTC should be giving these guys a year’s worth of free passes for this.

Since this is the TTC’s management, they’ll probably ignore it, or worse still, come out against it. They’ve done this sort of thing before. You might have read about John “Robot Johnny” Martz’ troubles with the TTC. He created a map of the Toronto subway lines featuring the names of the station rearranged into amusing anagrams and got a cease-and-desist order as his reward.

The TTC seems so good at actively seeking out and killing any public goodwill towards it that it’s hard to tell whether their actions are driven by incompetence or malice. You’d think that it was being run by a secret cabal of car dealers.

Back to ICT Toronto

I worry that ICT Toronto will handle the promotion of Toronto as a high-tech hub with the same lethargy, inefficiency and inefficacy as the TTC in promoting itself as a public transport system.

I believe that the true promotion of Toronto as an information and communications technologies centre will come not from top-down committees of investors, but the people closest to technology: those of us who actually make them go. Bottom-up organizations such as DemoCamp, BarCamp, the Mesh Conference, the Rails pub nights and geek gatherings at Linux Caffe will probably do a much better job that ICT Toronto will, especially if their lame web presence (a single static HTML page, and no link to the report about which it made so much fanfare) is any indication.

It all boils down to this: if you’re a technologist in the Toronto area, don’t wait for ICT Toronto to promote this city. The city’s past performance suggests that it could very easily fall flat on its face. It’s up to you!

To close, I’ll leave you with the three things you can do right now to meet ICT Toronto’s goal of making Toronto a high-tech hub:

• Work! Without actual technology to promote, there’s no point in promoting it. Keep on cranking out code, designing sites, working on projects, sharpening your skills and go beyond 9-to-5 development. What made Silicon Valley great was its people’s dedication to their craft that went beyond marking enough time at work to fill a 40-hour week to get a paycheque.
• Blog! The reason we remember Marco Polo and not his father and uncle is because he wrote down his experiences about travelling to China while they didn’t. The rule still holds today: if you’re a techie in the Toronto area and you’re working on an interesting project or can write tutorials or report on developments in the tech world, blog! Tech blogging will help boost Toronto’s tech presence on the web far better than a stack of glossy ICT Toronto brochures sitting in an investment bank’s recycling bin. (ANd make sure to mention that you’re from the Toronto area!)
• Socialize! Computing is just a fancy branch of mathmematics, and mathematician Paul Erdos (you should read his biography, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers) proved that math was a social activity. Get out there and meet with other developers in the area — this city has all kinds of meetings, user groups and gatherings of that nature. Meet your fellow geeks and exchange ideas! Remember, Silicon Valley is as much a product of its after-work gatherings as the work done in the garage.