The past while has been an unusual time for me, and as I believe one should collaborate with things that are wrong as little as possible, this period has affected my behaviour in every way. As a result of trying not to collaborate, I have chosen to blog as little as possible on public policy issues. But there is one idea I had that has nagged at me, that I feel I should share, even under current circumstances, because it could do some good.
The question of how to deal with poverty is a large one, and a total revamp of how we do so in Canada is in order. There is a debate to be had about minimum income/negative income tax or mor,e better funded, more targetted income supports, as well as just how paternalistic the State is allowed to be, given the needs of some, v.-à-v. the individual’s right to liberty and autonomy. I shall leave these debates aside for the moment, and my views on them, and simply introduce an idea I think could be helpful in the meantime.
In Vancouver, as in Toronto, there are multiple services and service-providers for the poor, many constituted as a result of path-dependency: someone, at some time, started offering services from a church, or some establishment, and over time the service-provision became ingrained, and gained volunteers, etc.. However, as a result of so many services being offered by so many different providers, often in close geographical proximity, there is frequently an overlap in services, and thus very sub-optimal use of resources and services targeted at the same clientele. For example, Institution A offers free haircuts at the same time of the week as Institution B, when they are both five minutes from each other (I pick free haircuts as a typical service, it could be anything, food services, etc.). In part this is due to the largely volunteer nature of organisations, and if by coincidence the barbers come at the same time to both institutions, then that’s all they can do. But I have researched this matter, in both Vancouver and Toronto (the best social research is always bottom-up), and most often this duplication/sub-optimal use of resources is the result of inferior information-sharing, or networks. If the institutions knew what one another was doing, they could better coordinate services, and help more people, better.
The information systems in use in these institutions are typically memory, verbal communication, and written notes, whether posted on bulletin boards, or handed out. Given the nature of the staff, turnover, and lack of communication between institutions, is follows that the information provided is often faulty, if not altogether absent (I could provide various examples, but the hair cut example was one where I was provided with a list of free haircuts, which, upon verification, proved largely wrong).
It should be possible, for relatively little money and resources, to install a system of digital bulletin boards, and a shared database of services, accessible for update by all the administrators of the different institutions through a simple web-based email type system, easy enough to use for anyone who can use gmail, or yahoo mail, etc..
If such a system were in place, in, say, Vancouver, then resources could be allocated more efficiently by the administrators themselves, improving services for all through reduction in overlap/duplication/etc.. The same amount of resources could be stretched to serve more, better.
This is no great solution to the problems of the poor in Canada. But it may be of some significant help to the urban poor, while we wait for more general reforms.
It may well be that such a system has already been implemented somewhere in Canada, but I do not know of it, and am happy to be corrected. I would expect such a system has been implemented somewhere in the USA in one of their many pilot projects, or elsewhere in the world (Finland?).
I would suggest that Vancouver would be an ideal place for a pilot project in Canada, given the number of poverty-service institutions in close proximity downtown, the nearby SFU campuses (notably their Masters in Public Policy program), the computer science programs at SFU and UBC, and the general infrastructure that exists. I would imagine a situation in which the digitisation is a joint project of MPP students and professors, with the computer science departments, and associated others, and they get companies to donate the hardware (cheap for them) in return for public credit.Make sure the administrators all have smart phones through which they can update the web-based database, whose information is then instantaneously updated and available on digital bulletin boards across all the institutions, and which can be printed out through use of some dependable printing medium (like ATM technology?). The printing aspect may prove the most tricky, as the poor rarely have smart phones themselves, and depend on written notes. Administrators could write out information themselves, but that would defeat the efficiency objective. The urban poor need to be able to have written notes on their person, so it would be necessary to choose some dependable, easily repairable printing technology that would permit them to obtain paper copies of the information they need.
All these details can be worked out by the working group that develops the idea, but the essential idea is clear: use computer, or digital technology to reduce information asymmetries among institutions that serve the urban poor so as to improve services.
I throw this idea out there, despite current circumstances, since I think it could do some real good. I am sure such a system exists somewhere already, and I will research this further, but I think it is useful to draw people’s attention to a simple yet significant matter in the lives of many, and a possible solution, should it not have occurred to all (I found no-one in poverty-services had thought of it, anecdotally).
pierreeugeneforseytrudeaugreenliberaldemocrat 