Public Commons

Note that your emails to publiccommons.ca may not be private. See privacy policies below.

Publisher, Editor

This website is for everyone. Formally, it is published by CELOS and edited by Jutta Mason. This is not a government website.

Mission

The purposes of the website are:

• Keep people informed of activities in common spaces, and features of the commons.
• Keep track of support, management and maintenance issues in relation to particularly the Parks, Forestry, and Recreation Department of the City of Toronto.
• Act as a public repository of information regarding the activities that are involved with support of a community oriented commons.
• Act as a research resource for members of the public who are interested in engaging in the development of public community space here or elsewhere
• Act as an advocate for the commons.

The ultimate purpose of the website is to help connect people with each other, without the intervention of technology.

Content History

The policy of the website is to capture and retain as much information as possible regarding the activities around the commons. As such histories of activities in the commons are maintained, as are important dialogs with neighbours and City personnel. Content is rarely deleted.

Standards

We maintain certain standards of publishing to ensure the value of the material accumulated:

This website is about public commons (public space). Content is confined to that and directly related material. Constructive reports, suggestions and criticisms are all accepted. General complaining and unsupported assertions are not.

Reporting must be accurate and informative. Facts must be verifiable, and referenced.

Reasoning must be sensible: conclusions must follow sensibly and directly from premises. The corollary is also true: conclusions must be directly and sensibly supported by premises.

We apply these standards to all contributors of the website.

Feedback and contributions

If you see any content of the website that you believe falls short of the above standards, then please contact the mail@publiccommons.ca.

Likewise if you have anything to contribute please contact us.

Privacy Policies

We view all dialog regarding the park as a potentially important way for this community and others researching commons to gain insights into the issues and social dynamics regarding commons. Accordingly, we often publish dialogs, including emails we receive so that others may benefit from them. If you wish your communication to be private, please explicitly indicate this in your email. Otherwise we may publish the content of the email in the context of a story that we are following. We publish names associated with the emails if the individuals themselves are significant in some important way to the story, or if the individuals being quoted request that their names be attached.

If your email contains a request for information or resolution of an issue, as a practical matter, anyone receiving email through this website may refer your email to others who may or may not be associated with this website for further action.

Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

We do our best to respect copyright laws. This is a complex topic that we are told is not at all clear in law. At bottom, our aim is to be fair and constructive. In general we will reproduce portions of items in other media in the context of review and reference regarding important topics covered by this website (with references). Where a third party story is particularly newsworthy, we will reprint the entire raw text with references to the source.

Material on this website not otherwise copyrighted is copyrighted by the publisher under the Creative Commons licence. Material may be reproduced in whole or in part so long as authorship and source are acknowledged with the reproduction of the material, and the material is not altered.

Viewpoint

This website has a viewpoint:

Commons are for people. "Let them play".

Commons programming is best developed from community initiatives, with the support of the City's Parks, Forestry, and Recreation department, and the local City Councillor.

From experience of more than a decade: Stewardship of the entire commons space is required for successful integration of the various and complex aspects of running a park.

Dedicated long term staff are required to integrate and support the complexity of activities in a public space.

The business of the commons should be conducted in a highly transparent manner.

If you have any comments about this, we encourage you to give us feedback at mail@publiccommons.ca