Im tellen on yuuu

Our little BlogoSFUO is really a-twitter with news this week! This Dave certainly didn't expect to be writing so much over the summer, but such is life. When there be things to be told, I be tellin' them to you.

Tabaret recently signed us up for ClearView Connects™, a tattle-tale service that can send all the infos of all the bad stuffs that happen on campus to the big tough administrators who will deal with the bullies for us. The idea is that employees can anonymously tell the administrators all about

"any incidents of theft, misappropriation of funds, falsification of documents, vandalism, unethical behaviour, etc."

that is occurring behind the scenes by other employees, simply by going to the ClearView website. Wait a tic... whose website? Not ours! ClearView's website!

Here are the troubles with that my friends, assembled for you in an unordered list<ul>:

• ClearView Connects™ gets all this potentially confidential info that they really shouldn't have, PIPEDA compliant or not
• As some profs have pointed out, anonymous whistleblowing is contrary to the Canadian legal system
• We're not running this on an internal server, so verification doesn't exist
  • This means that every complaint needs to be investigated, even if it's posted with no factual basis, just malice
  • ClearView doesn't (and shouldn't) have a list of employee IDs for people to post with. That'd kill the anonymity, right?
  • That also means anyone, any employee or any student or any member of the community or any Tamil Tiger or any A&W Root Bear can file a complaint about a staff member
  • The University will pay for ClearView to receive this complaint to forward it to them, and then waste their time and money investigating this farce that may have originated anywhere from Rio de Janeiro to Nairobi to Kathmandu
  • The University of Ottawa is located in none of Rio, Nairobi, or Kathmandu
• Adding any sort of login ID to this service to keep it within the University removes the anonymity, which removes the point of paying the $20000/year for it at all.
• The Administration LOVES this idea!

This fun is already in place. If you're a troublemaker, go to ClearView Connects™, type in University of Ottawa as your company, and lodge a complaint of unethical behaviour about, say, acting VP Governance Nathalie Des Rosiers. Her because she's the one pimping the system to the media. I was unable to find who brought it to the BOG in the first place.

While I don't encourage the abuse of a channel to keep things clean and friendly at our wonderful school, they're just asking for it to happen with this system, and if you're going to do it you may as well make your point and do it right.

Oh, for the curious, they talked about it at this BOG meeting in 2007.