First Figure Out What You Want to Change

I resubmitted a major grant application last Friday (or re-resubmitted—there was some back and forth too painful and boring to go into here). After celebrating my birthday in quiet but satisfying ways (yes, being woken at 5:30 am by a baby can be fun), I had a little time to think about what it is I’m actually trying to do in this job. Figuring out how modern collaboration technologies ought to be incorporated into software project portals is part of it; so is figuring out how to improve the skills and productivity of scientific software developers. But here are a couple of other things I’d like to have an impact on:

• Jay Goldman, Eli Singer, and Mark Kuznicki have an article in the Harvard Business Review about the TransitCamp they organized last year. There's a lot of names in the thank-you list at the bottom of Jay's blog post about it—none of them, so far as I can tell, from the University of Toronto.
• Six Canadian companies are showing their stuff at DEMO08: none of them from Toronto.

I know it isn’t a new complaint (i.e., people were probably already grumbling about this in Italy in the 1400s), but I’d really like to see the university and local innovative companies talk to each other more, and Toronto talk more to the rest of the world about what it’s doing. Big rock, steep hill, but if this is where my daughter is going to grow up, I think it’s worth trying…