FCC vs the Internet: Canada Saves the Day?

A Snowy White House
OpenConcept’s sites have mostly been served from Canada. Like many others, we were concerned when the 2002 Homeland Security Act was put into place. Lots of organizations adopted our concern about what access the CIA, FBI, NSA would have on sites on American soil. This was an issue for us, but we certainly didn’t feel like these agencies would respect Canada’s border and indeed there might have additional restrictions within their territory. Despite our concerns, we decided to move our infrastructure to the cloud and chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as they were clearly the leader at the time. They...

Becoming a Greener Company

Bright Green Frog
When I started OpenConcept in 1999 it was with a keen awareness that we needed to make rapid changes to how Western Society was consuming the resources of our finite home. I knew that we would need to build collaboration between groups to ensure that we could hope to manage the challenges that we are going to need to face. I knew that technology was going to be the backbone of managing that enormous communications challenge. Because of my background and involvement in the environmental movement, OpenConcept has always had a pretty small footprint. Joining the Certified B Corporation community...

OpenConcept Moves to Carbon Neutral Hosting

Hydro Electirc Dam
OpenConcept is happy to have migrated our corporate servers into greener data centers. Currently all of our corporate servers are hosted by companies in Quebec that is almost entirely powered by hydro electric power. We have some dedicated servers with iWeb and are leveraging Amazon's new Montreal data center. In discussions with Certified B Corporations like Man Overboard and Mighty Bytes , I have learned a lot about the impact of the growth of data centers around the world. Man Overboard produced Serving.Green to raise awareness about the environmental impact of web hosting. Mighty Bytes has produced an EcoGrader for...

Bullfrog Power Helps Us To Reduce Our GHG Emissions

Bullfrog Power table set up at in Westboro
With the climate chaos that we are seeing, it is clear that we need to do more to reduce our Greenhouse Gas Emissions (GHG) . Government and business leaders are getting behind the UN Sustainable Development Goals . These are 17 goals which are critical to our survival on this planet. Goal 13 is to "Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts", which is one I've been promoting personally for decades. In 2008, OpenConcept Consulting entered into an environmental partnership with Bullfrog Power , Canada’s leading green energy provider. Through this partnership, we pay a premium and...

Drafting a Procurement Policy

Photo from B Corp Retreat outlining need for interdependence.
OpenConcept is a pretty small company and most of our services we consume are digital, so in the scheme of things, we have a pretty small footprint on our planet and our local economy. That being said, as Mahatma Gandhi said “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." I just returned from my second B Corp Champions Retreat and I am even more enthusiastic about being able to leverage our small contributions to make a much bigger impact. I believe strongly in fixing the problems at the source, and many of our...

OpenConcept ranks in top 10% of B Corps on Positive Employee Impact

B Corp | Best for the World
We are happy to announce that OpenConcept Consulting Inc. has been recognized for creating the most positive overall community impact by the nonprofit B Lab . OpenConcept has been named a winner in the Best for Workers list, which means that in our B Impact Assessment we scored in the top 10 percent of more than 2,255 companies around the world. B Corporations are for-profit companies from around the world that have been certified by B Lab against rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. The Workers portion of the B Impact Assessment measures how a company...

Building in Digital Accessibility - With an Ontario Example

A friend using his eye-tracking software
Originally posted on LinkedIN in two parts. Building Digital Inclusion into Organizations There are an increasing number of organizations that are looking to make their organizations more inclusive to People with Disabilities (PwD). Some organizations do this because they are seeking talent, others because of ethics and still others because it is the law. There are lots of little steps that any organization could do to include more people with disabilities. This is a description of an approach for an organization that wanted to demonstrate leadership. Accessibility is a big field and although the physical environment is critical for some...

The Case for a Federated Open Departmental Web Strategy

Canadian Flag Behind Chicken Wire
Originally posted on LinkedIN in two parts. The Government of Canada’s Web Renewal Initiative has failed. It may not be public yet, but there really is no way to redeem this half-conceived initiative to centralize all government pages onto a single website - Canada.ca. This goal was lifted from the UK Government’s Government Digital Services (GDS). The goal of the GDS team was no less than digital transformation. Our government appears to have mistaken the alpha.gov.uk site as the end goal, rather than a platform with which to experiment with new ideas in government usability. The GDS is continuing to...

Inline Form Errors - What They Are and Why they Matter

Image flow chart
This article was initially posted as a guest blog on The Digital Echidna Blog on December 2, 2016. Lots of organizations are working hard to see that their IT is accessible to their visitors and staff. Reducing barriers for effective two-way communications is really important for businesses that want to engage fully with their community. Unfortunately, many organizations overlook the many challenges with online web forms. Organizations who adopted Drupal 7 benefit from having semantic labels associated with their web forms automatically. This is a particular problem with custom built web-forms, but the Drupal community made an effort towards solid...

Drupal 8 - Accessibility Now; Supporting Continued Accessibility in the Future

This article was initially posted as a guest blog on The Digital Echidna Blog on November 29, 2016. So you’ve gone all out on making your website accessible. You considered accessibility at every stage of your project. You started by choosing Drupal. You then evaluated the wireframes for potential problems, took careful consideration that the colours had sufficient contrast, had your developers do regular accessibility checks with every sprint, brought in an external reviewer at the end of the project to evaluate your work, etc. It was the textbook example of how you should approach building a modern site using...