It was Friday afternoon and went over to search for terms on Twitter that I like to keep an eye on when I ran into a post from @haggaret. It was a call to convert an Earth Hour WordPress Plugin over to Drupal.  Now I'm very aware of environmental issues, but there are 8765 (or so) other hours in the year to worry about, so what's the big deal about this one.  I'm still not sure, but in solidarity I decided to check it out and see when it was, unfortunately it was 8 days later on the last Saturday of March. 

But really, how hard could it be?  A bit of CSS, tad of javascript, and heck, most of the logic had already been figured out for WordPress.  It was a bit more difficult than it seemed at first, but never-the-less, by the time there was one week remaining until the Earth Hour countdown of 8:30-9:30pm on March 28th, 2009, I had a working module for Drupal. 

Was interesting to see how this spread through the Twitosphere, getting a few folks trying out the code within a few hours of providing a download able version.  I had a less functional version the previous evening that I posted to pastbin, but didn't get any feedback on.  I had thought it would be neat to get some spontaneous collaboration around improving this module if the right people were watching.

There's been a rapid flurry of political activity in Ottawa this week as it seems like Ottawa may a union of the Liberals & NDP successfully challenge Stephen Harper's minority government.  With the position of Bloc Québécois in Federal politics it is very difficult for any one party to obtain a majority government.  Working cooperatively in coalition governments is going to be an increasingly important skill for Canadian politicians.  We've been busy over the weekend setting up the Canadian Labour Congress' online action tool so that that they can encourage their supporters to send emails to their MP's.  It is interesting too to see how many other people are doing the same thing:

• CUPE's Make Parliament Work
• Rideau Institute's Smart Vote 2008
• Canadians for a Progressive Coalition

Well just over a week ago I was presenting at Octopus Books about the elections and the Internet.  Last night showed the first decisive electoral victory in a US presidential election using the Internet as a primary force of communication, community building and fund-raising. 

The talk at Octopus was lined up between the Canadian federal election & American election, and there were some good examples that we could look at from the Canadian experience too.  In organizing the talk though I thought it would be most beneficial to look at the history of the relationship between USA presidential elections & Internet use since 1996.  With the adoption of the Internet, election campaigns have changed to reach it's users.  Likewise the flood of $$ from the USA election cycle has had a huge impact on online campaigning in general. 

Who really knows exactly why the arms show was cancelled.  It may have well been the sudden federal election.  However it wouldn't surprise me if seeing a growing group of over 850 activists opposed to the planned "US Embassy Defense & Security Exhibition" was a concern for those looking to avoid bad press. 

I blogged about this earlier when the campaign was starting, but nice to be able to claim a victory (although not without a lot of effort).  The trouble with most Canadian campaigns though is in keeping and building on the momentum.  This particular event was cancelled, but this is an issue that will come up if not in Ottawa, in some other Canadian city in the future. So if you haven't signed this petition yet, do it now.