Cedric Sam, an IT analyst with radio-canada.ca, has developed a custom electoral map using Google’s satellite imagery.

As you can see from the picture above, Sam used customized electoral maps and overlaid them on top of Google Earth’s satellite imagery. The technique was used once on-air for the federal election, and then several times for the recent Quebec provincial election.

To make it work Sam collected geographical and elections data from provincial and government sources and then feed it into a database. Then he incorporated the live elections results, and crunched it together to represent the ridings. “At each moment during the evening, by a click on the script, I could generate a fresh map with current data colored with the party in advance or elected in any given riding,” he said.

“The coolest map that we generated that night was that of parties finishing third in each riding. In a single shot, [we were] able to show how Quebec effectively returned to a two-party system with a map almost entirely colored in pale blue, the color representing Mario Dumont’s ADQ.”

Given that the next election is probably around the corner, this seems like a great application for the Canada Votes pages. To watch a Youtube video of the on-air presentation, click here.

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	Behind the Scenes, I.T., News & Journalism	Posted at 1:11 pm (11 Dec 2008)

CBC’s network briefly blocked employees from from visiting social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace this morning. Also, some personal blogs, like John Gushue’s and the popular anonymous Teamakers blog were not accessible.

John Mang, operations manager for B.C. radio said: “It looks like was was a technical glitch. It was certainly unintentional. One phone call and it is being fixed.”

Ray Carnovale, head of CBC’s I.T. confirmed that and said the blockage “may be something going on external to us.”

All regions should have access to all those sites again.

What I think was interesting was just how fast news spread in the Corporation. I was on-air at the time and was getting dozens of CBC folks emailing me within the space of an hour. It spread quickly within the Vancouver radio newsroom and, presumably, others.

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	I.T., Workstations and Desktops	Posted at 10:27 am (31 Oct 2007)

CBC/Radio-Canada is training its Information Technology staff with a simulation game that recreates the Apollo 13 space mission.

But rather than training on how to survive on space food and moving efficiently through cramped quarters — both skills that CBC’s I.T. team has already mastered — the training puts staff in events and situations that correlate with incident, problem and capacity management.

“One of the biggest benefits of it was the team building aspect,” Fiona Soward, service manager for technology and quality of services at CBC/Radio-Canada, said. “Sometimes, we had people in different roles that they wouldn’t normally play within the organization. We would have senior management at a potentially lower position, so it’s interesting to see how they perceive the work being done at that level.”

From IT World:

The simulation, offered by Montreal-based Nexio Technologies, is a mix of screen projections which takes users through the different stages of the game, as well as direction from an instructor who drives the problems that occur during the flight.

“The users will play the role of mission control,” Stephen Goulet, vice-president of research and development at Nexio Technologies, said. “They will go through different incidents that will cause problems. They need to manage costs and make decisions in order to meet my expectations as mission director.”

More

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	I.T.	Posted at 6:55 pm (06 Sep 2007)

There are 1,163 CBC employees and regular freelancers who have accounts on Facebook as of today. That’s about 12% of the CBC’s workforce, including Radio-Canada.

Today, IT security firm Sophos said that 50 percent of workers are being blocked from accessing Facebook by their employers who are worried about the website’s impact on productivity and security, and have therefore put policies or access controls in place to ban its use in the workplace.

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	I.T., Workstations and Desktops	Posted at 1:35 pm (21 Aug 2007)