A Remarkable Meeting with Craig Elias and Dan Olesen: Shaping the Future of Canuckduck
I recently had the privilege of meeting with two incredible minds, Craig Elias and Dan Olesen, from Alberta Innovates. It was an inspiring experience to sit down with such brilliace where bring decades of experience in innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology come to a crossroads.
From the moment we began our conversation, Craig provided invaluable insights into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for Canuckduck Research Corporation as we continue to build and refine our vision. We discussed the strengths that can propel us forward, like our unique approach to civic engagement and transparency, as well as the weaknesses we need to address as we grow and evolve.
The energy in the room was electric as we delved into the potential of the platform and how we can leverage modern technology to shape a better future for Canadians. Their expertise offered a fresh perspective on how Canuckduck can become a driving force for meaningful social change. The entire experience reinforced my belief that we're on the right path, but it also reminded me of the hard work and thoughtful consideration it will take to bring our ideas to life.
As Canuckduck begins to take shape, these early conversations are invaluable. We’re just getting started, and the guidance from thought leaders will continue to influence the development of our platform. It’s an exciting time as we build something that can truly empower communities and create lasting change.
I have long avoided engaging in social media platforms, but at the advice of Craig from Alberta Innovates, I have set up the FaceBook business page, a Linkedin page, Twixxer, a Youtube channel and there will probably need to be a bunch more as I explore just how far I can spread my wings. I can't say there is much there yet, but all things in time.
We are well into the blockchain development for CanuckDUCK. Using the Hedera HashGraph consensus technologies, we have deployed a new token to the Hedera Testnet.
CDK, or Canuckduck for short.
Why Hedera Hashgraph Was Chosen as Canuckduck's Blockchain of Choice
At Canuckduck, we selected Hedera Hashgraph as the foundation for our blockchain integration due to its exceptional advantages in scalability, low-cost transactions, and transparency. Hedera’s unique consensus algorithm enables fast and secure transaction processing, making it an ideal choice for handling the complex voting systems and community-driven solutions we plan to implement. The platform’s ability to scale effortlessly ensures that as Canuckduck grows, the blockchain infrastructure will remain efficient and cost-effective, while maintaining the highest level of transparency. With Hedera’s decentralized governance model, we’re able to provide a secure, trustworthy environment for users, empowering them to engage in meaningful civic participation without compromising on performance or integrity.
The tokens are to be tethered to the Canadian dollar, and we have reached out to ATB to discuss API connections to be able to function as the onramp for transactions. With a tethering to the Canadian dollar, we will be able to accurately set all costs and thresholds for the required engagement before blockchain is involved in the decision making process. It will also allow us to link funding down to the level of issues and even further into exact proposed resolutions with a method returning unused funding and ensuring absolute transparency in operations and engagement.
The CDK Token is a 1:1 value with the Canadian Dollar, and with it now created, we can get it connected to MAINNET, PREVIEWNET, and TESTNET. The idea here is to utilize the advanced capabilities of the Hedera Network and make a sandbox environment of the Canadian Economy. The key differences in the versioning are that the MAINNET version does not have the capabilities of burning tokens since they are tied to real financial sources while the TESTNET version does have the ability to burn tokens in an effort to be able to simulate the input of monetary policies. Accounts will scale down within the testing environment to simulate operational government departments and functions, and when all is said and done, the Ducklings initiative will be able to make changes to the simulation world (TESTNET) while drawing experience from the ties to the MAINNET. This will allow for users to generate simulations of the national, provincial and municipal economies, and apply blockchain voting to the process of proposals and changes.
This is a huge step, and the fact that it has now been implemented opens up a world of doors. We are creating a sandbox for the entire Canadian Economy that can draw real world experiences into process and administration and determine the impacts of changes by introducing real information into the system.
So far only 10 tokens have been minted (REAL), which should be enough for us to test the basic functionality.
The tokens functions:
Has the ability to be de-pegged from the Canadian Dollar
Can be frozen if security measures dictate the requirement
Can be transferred and paused
Can be staked on the Hedera MAINNET (Not yet Enabled)
KYC functionality is included (Not yet Enabled)
CDK will be utilized as the method of currency transaction during the voting processes.
Upcoming: On-ramp and off-ramp functionality to increase the ability for the token to be used, and minimizing the costs to do so. Ideally our reliance on 3rd party services is minimized as it adds to the interaction costs.
We are currently conducting tests to confirm CDK remains pegged at 1:1 with the Canadian Dollar (CAD). This includes: Peg Stability Verification – Ensuring the token retains its 1:1 value under various transaction scenarios. Mint & Transfer Testing – Validating token issuance, distribution, and movement across accounts.
Following these stability checks, we will initiate development and testing on the TESTNET variation to explore broader use cases.
Governance & Monetary Policy Simulations
CDK is designed as a governance-controlled digital asset, meaning: 🔹 Pegged Stability – By default, the token is fixed at 1:1 CAD unless a governance decision dictates otherwise. 🔹 Governance-Controlled Minting – Issuance above the current supply is restricted and requires governance approval. 🔹 Economic Model Testing – The system will allow real-world monetary policy simulations, including:
Inflation & Deflation Scenarios
GDP & Investment Growth Impacts
Foreign Exchange & International Trade
Tokenomics & Treasury Management
Infinite Supply, Controlled Issuance – While the maximum supply is unrestricted, issuance is strictly governed to align with economic model simulations. Treasury & Governance – All minting and token adjustments will be handled by a treasury account or governance model, ensuring controlled and transparent economic interventions.
The ultimate goal is to create a digital framework capable of testing real-world monetary policies, paving the way for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) research and financial innovation.
We have successfully launched an OpenLDAP server and configured site-wide integration, establishing Core (core.canuckduck.ca) as the centralized authentication hub for the CanuckDUCK ecosystem.
A key architectural decision was made to generate site-specific authentication tokens, rather than using a single persistent user ID across all sub-sites. This approach ensures: User Anonymity – Preventing correlation between activities such as voting, forums, and project contributions. Enhanced Security – Limiting exposure in case of data leaks or breaches. Ecosystem Scalability – Allowing future integrations to seamlessly adopt token-based authentication without requiring direct LDAP access.
How This Impacts Users
Unified Login Experience – All user authentication occurs at core.canuckduck.ca, reducing friction across multiple sites. Temporary Session Tokens – Once authenticated, users receive a temporary session token, allowing seamless navigation between sub-sites without repeated logins. Security & Expiry Controls – Session tokens are time-limited, automatically expiring after a set duration to enhance security and prevent misuse.
As we migrate content from canuckduck.ca to core.canuckduck.ca, the new authentication system will form the backbone of our privacy-first, decentralized ecosystem, ensuring a secure and anonymous user experience across all CanuckDUCK services.
Pond has been successfully set up with the Drupal Forum module, laying the groundwork for an interactive, community-driven platform. While full activation is still in progress, we are actively developing a frontend interface with an emphasis on geospatial mapping and location-based discussions.
Mapping & OpenStreetMap Integration
To provide users with a dynamic and cost-effective mapping solution, we are integrating OpenStreetMap (OSM). This choice ensures: Minimized integration costs, avoiding proprietary licensing fees. Customization flexibility, allowing us to build unique Pond-specific modules tailored to user needs. Open data support, aligning with our vision for transparency and community-driven improvements.
Pond API & Future Development
At present, Pond has its own API, designed to facilitate continuous expansion beyond the initial launch. This API will support: 🔹 Forum interaction & content management 🔹 User-generated location-based discussions 🔹 Real-time geospatial data updates 🔹 Seamless third-party integrations
Our roadmap includes enhanced user engagement features, deeper forum customization, and the potential for blockchain-backed location verification, ensuring data integrity and user trust.
Pond is evolving into a versatile, decentralized knowledge-sharing platform, with an emphasis on mapping, open discussion, and scalable expansion.
We are actively building a comprehensive database of over 200 Canadian governmental organizations as part of our initiative to analyze their financial impact. This database will serve as a baseline for each organization’s operating budget, allowing us to model its financial weight against Canada’s total GDP.
In parallel, we have engaged with the Hedera Foundation to request permissions for utilizing their TESTNET. Our goal is to leverage quarterly network resets to create a structured simulation environment. By integrating our local application with the TESTNET, we will:
Automatically re-enter all organizations each quarter with their respective budgets and data. Introduce a unique financial crisis scenario each cycle to test various economic policies. Analyze the effectiveness of different responses, tracking both successes and failures. Retain historical simulations and policy outcomes for refining future models.
To facilitate this, we are developing APIs that will seamlessly connect our application to the TESTNET, ensuring that the entire process is automated and scalable. These simulations will be conducted using the CanuckDUCK (CDK) token, pegged 1:1 with the Canadian dollar, allowing for risk-free economic modeling without real-world financial impact.
Our long-term objective is to develop persistent economic policies based on these iterative tests, providing data-driven insights into fiscal policy-making and crisis management.
We are migrating the site content to the new location at core.canuckduck.ca. The new site is set up with OpenLDAP and will allow us to roll out the unified login experience. As such, many of the timestamps from posts will be inaccurate. Its a feature, not a bug!
We are currently testing an integration of the TB MegaMenu plugin for Drupal in order to address menu complexity challenges. This may cause the menu to look a bit off-brand as we work from functionality towards the UI/UX objectives.
We have finished a preliminary run of entering topics into Pond. These include about 20 major topics with 10 threads each to dive into more detailed discussions. Over the next week we will be trying to integrate a site selection switcher and relinking the topics so that the discussions can be applied to provincial or national levels and be sorted accordingly.
Have a meeting lined up for intake into the Industrial Research Assistance Program (Prairies). Hopefully we can get ourselves into the crosshairs nationally!
This survey is designed to determine the viability of the platform. Our next steps for consensus are to introduce further surveys and perform the site-wide integrations to ensure that it becomes an active functioning component with the ecosystem. This will Include integration into the existing OpenLDAP platform and security hardening. We will be looking to bridge the gap between Pond and Flightplan, ensuring that the system is able to handle automated trigger events.
We are working to bring it back online after transitioning it to a docker framework and integrating the connections between the live environment and an offsite development server. This will allow us to build some of the more complicated modules and connections in a way that allow us an increased ability to roll the services back if required, and to develop staging environments. The trusty Dell R720 with 124GB of RAM has so far been able to handle the services we have deployed on it, and we will be integrating the TrueNAS server to perform regular backups.
We have transitioned from VMWare ESXi to Proxmox and set up the the lab to utilize Kubernetes and Docker. This will allow us to isolate the environments and begin testing for full implementations.
We took a quick break to see what happens when Ollama (Localized LLM/AI) is installed on a local machine with an AMD Radeon 7900 XT (16GB VRAM) and were very surprised at the results. During initial testing a few months back we forgot to set the local development machines bios to completely ignore the onboard video card, and it used the onboard as the primary... which had less than spectacular results. During the testing, not only did it crash, but it began outputting the actual logic code during difficult questions. This time around, it yielded much better results. There was almost no lag, with a significant amount of data provided before any requested output. We were using the default mistral model, and as time permits we will begin to explore some additional models and integrations.
We have begun to engage directors of community organizations and start the discussions over challenges and solutions. A very special thank you goes out to Kate in Sunnyside, Keith in Acadia, and Ron at Imaginecities for giving us the time to thoroughly explore the challenges and obstacles that they face in their roles and we are looking to connect with many others as we develop.
Community associations play a vital role in fostering local engagement, improving neighborhoods, and advocating for community-driven initiatives. However, many face persistent challenges that hinder their ability to drive meaningful change.
Key Challenges Faced by Community Associations
Low Citizen Engagement – Encouraging community members to participate in discussions and initiatives remains a struggle.
Volunteer Burnout – With many positions being unpaid, volunteers often face time constraints and diminishing returns on effort.
Inefficient Communication with Municipal Government – Navigating bureaucracy and ensuring that community voices are heard can be a time-consuming process.
Limited Resources and Funding – Securing necessary funding and resources for community projects remains an ongoing hurdle.
How Canuckduck is Helping
At Canuckduck, we are developing a civic engagement platform designed to streamline interactions between community associations and municipal governments, reducing friction and maximizing impact. Our key solutions include:
Pond: A space where community members can voice concerns, discuss issues, and gain traction for initiatives.
Consensus: A structured system for collective decision-making and prioritization of key community issues.
Flightplan: A project-tracking tool that helps community organizations submit proposals, track engagement, and ensure transparency in communication with municipal leaders.
Community Impact Dashboard: A real-time engagement tracker that provides associations with actionable insights and data to support their advocacy efforts.
By integrating these tools, we aim to reduce the administrative burden on community leaders, increase volunteer engagement, and streamline the pathway to municipal action—ensuring that every invested hour leads to tangible results.
After significant development and system hardening, we’re proud to announce a major leap forward in CanuckDUCK’s identity infrastructure. Following extensive testing and troubleshooting, our LDAP backbone has been fully transitioned from OpenLDAP to FreeIPA—a more robust, secure, and scalable foundation for civic identity management.
This strategic shift has been validated across Core, Pond, and Communities, confirming our ability to manage seamless SSO-style authentication across all major platforms.
🔐 Identity Logic: Wisdom, Stature, and Solidarity
At the heart of this rollout lies our privacy-first civic identity model, now functionally live and integrated into the backend.
We’ve finalized the generation and hashing logic for three distinct civic identities:
🧠 Wisdom ID — Represents what you say and do. Tied to your long-term public behavior, ensuring accountability without revealing identity.
📍 Stature ID — Anchors participation to a general location (e.g., province or city) to support geographic representation while preserving anonymity.
📘 Solidarity ID — Reflects verified credentials (e.g., education, profession), enabling trusted participation without storing sensitive personal data.
All IDs are now created via secure SIN-based input, hashed locally using a multi-layered HMAC-SHA256 process. No raw SINs are stored or transmitted—only precomputed identity hashes are retained, and those are internally linked to LDAP accounts via immutable tokens.
🧬 Design Philosophy: Anonymity with Integrity
No centralized aliasing: Each platform maintains its own display alias tied to a hidden Wisdom ID. No cross-platform tracking is possible.
One-way identity binding: Once linked, a user’s actions are bound to their civic ID permanently—ensuring traceability of behavior but not traceability of the person.
Role-based security: FreeIPA now supports both functional roles (e.g., voter, moderator) and abstract identities (e.g., guest sponsor, forum contributor), all mapped through our evolving schema.
Region-aware logic: Our backend now interprets SIN regional prefixes, allowing us to cross-check claimed location with issuance patterns as a soft validation layer.
🛠️ What’s Next?
A DuckPrint pool of hashed civic identities is live and growing, ensuring rapid onboarding and validation scalability.
LDAP hierarchy now supports geographic, credential, and application-level groups, with containerized user control and auditability.
This relaunch marks a defining moment in CanuckDUCK’s architecture: we're building not just a platform, but a foundation for ethical, resilient civic participation in the digital age.
Core, Consensus, Communities and Pond have now all been successfully bound to the LDAP, and we are now laying out the schema for the LDAP to integrate users, communities, community associations, businesses, municipalities and provinces. Login processes will now be fully directed towards core, which is to function as the Single Sign-On (SSO) and Consensus, Communities and Pond verified as operating in isolation from each other.
While loading the entire Canadian Postal Code dataset into our LDAP (900000+ entries) I realized I had set an incorrect variable in the ldif injection script. Which caused all of the entries to become unusable data. The beauty of it was I was running it from the server, with no way to stop the process. On a different note, I had a fantastic dinner.
Comments25
Canadian Audio-Visual Certification Office
Personal account creation of CAVCO personnel number/ID
Technology Development Advisor Program with Alberta Innovates
Received the green light for the TDA program with Alberta Innovates.
...Time to make a splash...
And a heartfelt thank you for the opportunity to work with such an illustrious organization.
Calgary Board of Education - Partnership Proposal
Application submitted for CBE Partnership.
The purpose is to begin engagement to understand the existing courses and offerings prior to the ducklings development initiative.
Augustana Campus UofA
Attempting contact with educators in Social Sciences
Alberta Innovates
A Remarkable Meeting with Craig Elias and Dan Olesen: Shaping the Future of Canuckduck
I recently had the privilege of meeting with two incredible minds, Craig Elias and Dan Olesen, from Alberta Innovates. It was an inspiring experience to sit down with such brilliace where bring decades of experience in innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology come to a crossroads.
From the moment we began our conversation, Craig provided invaluable insights into the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead for Canuckduck Research Corporation as we continue to build and refine our vision. We discussed the strengths that can propel us forward, like our unique approach to civic engagement and transparency, as well as the weaknesses we need to address as we grow and evolve.
The energy in the room was electric as we delved into the potential of the platform and how we can leverage modern technology to shape a better future for Canadians. Their expertise offered a fresh perspective on how Canuckduck can become a driving force for meaningful social change. The entire experience reinforced my belief that we're on the right path, but it also reminded me of the hard work and thoughtful consideration it will take to bring our ideas to life.
As Canuckduck begins to take shape, these early conversations are invaluable. We’re just getting started, and the guidance from thought leaders will continue to influence the development of our platform. It’s an exciting time as we build something that can truly empower communities and create lasting change.
Social Media
I have long avoided engaging in social media platforms, but at the advice of Craig from Alberta Innovates, I have set up the FaceBook business page, a Linkedin page, Twixxer, a Youtube channel and there will probably need to be a bunch more as I explore just how far I can spread my wings. I can't say there is much there yet, but all things in time.
Blockchain
We are well into the blockchain development for CanuckDUCK. Using the Hedera HashGraph consensus technologies, we have deployed a new token to the Hedera Testnet.
CDK, or Canuckduck for short.
Why Hedera Hashgraph Was Chosen as Canuckduck's Blockchain of Choice
At Canuckduck, we selected Hedera Hashgraph as the foundation for our blockchain integration due to its exceptional advantages in scalability, low-cost transactions, and transparency. Hedera’s unique consensus algorithm enables fast and secure transaction processing, making it an ideal choice for handling the complex voting systems and community-driven solutions we plan to implement. The platform’s ability to scale effortlessly ensures that as Canuckduck grows, the blockchain infrastructure will remain efficient and cost-effective, while maintaining the highest level of transparency. With Hedera’s decentralized governance model, we’re able to provide a secure, trustworthy environment for users, empowering them to engage in meaningful civic participation without compromising on performance or integrity.
The tokens are to be tethered to the Canadian dollar, and we have reached out to ATB to discuss API connections to be able to function as the onramp for transactions. With a tethering to the Canadian dollar, we will be able to accurately set all costs and thresholds for the required engagement before blockchain is involved in the decision making process. It will also allow us to link funding down to the level of issues and even further into exact proposed resolutions with a method returning unused funding and ensuring absolute transparency in operations and engagement.
The Hedera CDK Token has been created!
The CDK Token is a 1:1 value with the Canadian Dollar, and with it now created, we can get it connected to MAINNET, PREVIEWNET, and TESTNET. The idea here is to utilize the advanced capabilities of the Hedera Network and make a sandbox environment of the Canadian Economy. The key differences in the versioning are that the MAINNET version does not have the capabilities of burning tokens since they are tied to real financial sources while the TESTNET version does have the ability to burn tokens in an effort to be able to simulate the input of monetary policies. Accounts will scale down within the testing environment to simulate operational government departments and functions, and when all is said and done, the Ducklings initiative will be able to make changes to the simulation world (TESTNET) while drawing experience from the ties to the MAINNET. This will allow for users to generate simulations of the national, provincial and municipal economies, and apply blockchain voting to the process of proposals and changes.
This is a huge step, and the fact that it has now been implemented opens up a world of doors. We are creating a sandbox for the entire Canadian Economy that can draw real world experiences into process and administration and determine the impacts of changes by introducing real information into the system.
So far only 10 tokens have been minted (REAL), which should be enough for us to test the basic functionality.
The tokens functions:
KYC functionality is included (Not yet Enabled)
CDK will be utilized as the method of currency transaction during the voting processes.
Upcoming: On-ramp and off-ramp functionality to increase the ability for the token to be used, and minimizing the costs to do so. Ideally our reliance on 3rd party services is minimized as it adds to the interaction costs.
CDK - CanuckDUCK Digital Token (v0.0.8188669) Update
CDK - Canuckduck 0.0.8188669
Current Testing Phase
We are currently conducting tests to confirm CDK remains pegged at 1:1 with the Canadian Dollar (CAD). This includes:
Peg Stability Verification – Ensuring the token retains its 1:1 value under various transaction scenarios.
Mint & Transfer Testing – Validating token issuance, distribution, and movement across accounts.
Following these stability checks, we will initiate development and testing on the TESTNET variation to explore broader use cases.
Governance & Monetary Policy Simulations
CDK is designed as a governance-controlled digital asset, meaning:
🔹 Pegged Stability – By default, the token is fixed at 1:1 CAD unless a governance decision dictates otherwise.
🔹 Governance-Controlled Minting – Issuance above the current supply is restricted and requires governance approval.
🔹 Economic Model Testing – The system will allow real-world monetary policy simulations, including:
Tokenomics & Treasury Management
Infinite Supply, Controlled Issuance – While the maximum supply is unrestricted, issuance is strictly governed to align with economic model simulations.
Treasury & Governance – All minting and token adjustments will be handled by a treasury account or governance model, ensuring controlled and transparent economic interventions.
The ultimate goal is to create a digital framework capable of testing real-world monetary policies, paving the way for Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) research and financial innovation.
Project Update: Core (OpenLDAP Authentication System)
We have successfully launched an OpenLDAP server and configured site-wide integration, establishing Core (core.canuckduck.ca) as the centralized authentication hub for the CanuckDUCK ecosystem.
Decentralized Authentication & Privacy-First Design
A key architectural decision was made to generate site-specific authentication tokens, rather than using a single persistent user ID across all sub-sites. This approach ensures:
User Anonymity – Preventing correlation between activities such as voting, forums, and project contributions.
Enhanced Security – Limiting exposure in case of data leaks or breaches.
Ecosystem Scalability – Allowing future integrations to seamlessly adopt token-based authentication without requiring direct LDAP access.
How This Impacts Users
Unified Login Experience – All user authentication occurs at core.canuckduck.ca, reducing friction across multiple sites.
Temporary Session Tokens – Once authenticated, users receive a temporary session token, allowing seamless navigation between sub-sites without repeated logins.
Security & Expiry Controls – Session tokens are time-limited, automatically expiring after a set duration to enhance security and prevent misuse.
As we migrate content from canuckduck.ca to core.canuckduck.ca, the new authentication system will form the backbone of our privacy-first, decentralized ecosystem, ensuring a secure and anonymous user experience across all CanuckDUCK services.
Project Update: Pond Development & API Integration
Pond has been successfully set up with the Drupal Forum module, laying the groundwork for an interactive, community-driven platform. While full activation is still in progress, we are actively developing a frontend interface with an emphasis on geospatial mapping and location-based discussions.
Mapping & OpenStreetMap Integration
To provide users with a dynamic and cost-effective mapping solution, we are integrating OpenStreetMap (OSM). This choice ensures:
Minimized integration costs, avoiding proprietary licensing fees.
Customization flexibility, allowing us to build unique Pond-specific modules tailored to user needs.
Open data support, aligning with our vision for transparency and community-driven improvements.
Pond API & Future Development
At present, Pond has its own API, designed to facilitate continuous expansion beyond the initial launch. This API will support:
🔹 Forum interaction & content management
🔹 User-generated location-based discussions
🔹 Real-time geospatial data updates
🔹 Seamless third-party integrations
Our roadmap includes enhanced user engagement features, deeper forum customization, and the potential for blockchain-backed location verification, ensuring data integrity and user trust.
Pond is evolving into a versatile, decentralized knowledge-sharing platform, with an emphasis on mapping, open discussion, and scalable expansion.
Project Update: Governmental Organization Databases & TESTNET
We are actively building a comprehensive database of over 200 Canadian governmental organizations as part of our initiative to analyze their financial impact. This database will serve as a baseline for each organization’s operating budget, allowing us to model its financial weight against Canada’s total GDP.
In parallel, we have engaged with the Hedera Foundation to request permissions for utilizing their TESTNET. Our goal is to leverage quarterly network resets to create a structured simulation environment. By integrating our local application with the TESTNET, we will:
Automatically re-enter all organizations each quarter with their respective budgets and data.
Introduce a unique financial crisis scenario each cycle to test various economic policies.
Analyze the effectiveness of different responses, tracking both successes and failures.
Retain historical simulations and policy outcomes for refining future models.
To facilitate this, we are developing APIs that will seamlessly connect our application to the TESTNET, ensuring that the entire process is automated and scalable. These simulations will be conducted using the CanuckDUCK (CDK) token, pegged 1:1 with the Canadian dollar, allowing for risk-free economic modeling without real-world financial impact.
Our long-term objective is to develop persistent economic policies based on these iterative tests, providing data-driven insights into fiscal policy-making and crisis management.
Canuckduck.ca to core.canuckduck.ca web migration underway
We are migrating the site content to the new location at core.canuckduck.ca. The new site is set up with OpenLDAP and will allow us to roll out the unified login experience. As such, many of the timestamps from posts will be inaccurate. Its a feature, not a bug!
Site Migration
A permanent redirect has now been completed. Traffic going to canuckduck.ca will now be delivered to core.canuckduck.ca.
Site Menu
We are currently testing an integration of the TB MegaMenu plugin for Drupal in order to address menu complexity challenges. This may cause the menu to look a bit off-brand as we work from functionality towards the UI/UX objectives.
Pond - Initial Topics Entry
We have finished a preliminary run of entering topics into Pond. These include about 20 major topics with 10 threads each to dive into more detailed discussions. Over the next week we will be trying to integrate a site selection switcher and relinking the topics so that the discussions can be applied to provincial or national levels and be sorted accordingly.
Upcoming Meeting with the National Research Council Canada
Have a meeting lined up for intake into the Industrial Research Assistance Program (Prairies). Hopefully we can get ourselves into the crosshairs nationally!
Consensus
We have brought Consensus online with our first survey, in an effort to validate the concept.
Citizen Engagement & Policy Feedback Survey | Consensus.CanuckDUCK.ca
This survey is designed to determine the viability of the platform. Our next steps for consensus are to introduce further surveys and perform the site-wide integrations to ensure that it becomes an active functioning component with the ecosystem. This will Include integration into the existing OpenLDAP platform and security hardening. We will be looking to bridge the gap between Pond and Flightplan, ensuring that the system is able to handle automated trigger events.
Ducklings
Ducklings has been brought offline.
We are working to bring it back online after transitioning it to a docker framework and integrating the connections between the live environment and an offsite development server. This will allow us to build some of the more complicated modules and connections in a way that allow us an increased ability to roll the services back if required, and to develop staging environments. The trusty Dell R720 with 124GB of RAM has so far been able to handle the services we have deployed on it, and we will be integrating the TrueNAS server to perform regular backups.
Canuckduck Development Labs
We have transitioned from VMWare ESXi to Proxmox and set up the the lab to utilize Kubernetes and Docker. This will allow us to isolate the environments and begin testing for full implementations.
We took a quick break to see what happens when Ollama (Localized LLM/AI) is installed on a local machine with an AMD Radeon 7900 XT (16GB VRAM) and were very surprised at the results. During initial testing a few months back we forgot to set the local development machines bios to completely ignore the onboard video card, and it used the onboard as the primary... which had less than spectacular results. During the testing, not only did it crash, but it began outputting the actual logic code during difficult questions. This time around, it yielded much better results. There was almost no lag, with a significant amount of data provided before any requested output. We were using the default mistral model, and as time permits we will begin to explore some additional models and integrations.
Strengthening Community Associations: Challenges and Solutions
We have begun to engage directors of community organizations and start the discussions over challenges and solutions. A very special thank you goes out to Kate in Sunnyside, Keith in Acadia, and Ron at Imaginecities for giving us the time to thoroughly explore the challenges and obstacles that they face in their roles and we are looking to connect with many others as we develop.
Community associations play a vital role in fostering local engagement, improving neighborhoods, and advocating for community-driven initiatives. However, many face persistent challenges that hinder their ability to drive meaningful change.
Key Challenges Faced by Community Associations
How Canuckduck is Helping
At Canuckduck, we are developing a civic engagement platform designed to streamline interactions between community associations and municipal governments, reducing friction and maximizing impact. Our key solutions include:
By integrating these tools, we aim to reduce the administrative burden on community leaders, increase volunteer engagement, and streamline the pathway to municipal action—ensuring that every invested hour leads to tangible results.
Updates
Well, It's been a while since we last provided an update... so here goes...
🦆 CanuckDUCK Status Update – April 16, 2025
"From puddles to precision—progress report from the pond."
🛠️ Platform Infrastructure
✅ LDAP and Identity Core:
auth.canuckduck.cawith hardened LDAPS.✅ Proxmox Migration Complete:
💬 Pond (Forum System) Overhaul
✅ Nested Forum Taxonomy + Topic Structure:
/justice/technology-and-justice).✅ Views and Pathauto:
/taxonomy/term/%+ contextual filters brought back topic lists in-page.[node:forum_parents_path]now generates dynamic nested aliases like/sports/gender-equality-in-sports.✅ Regeneration Success:
/sports/,/equality/,/justice/).🧠 Content & Structure
✅ Taxonomy Audit and Cleanup:
✅ Front-End Review:
📊 Where We’re Heading
Next Priorities:
Platform Update: Identity Infrastructure Relaunch & Integration
After significant development and system hardening, we’re proud to announce a major leap forward in CanuckDUCK’s identity infrastructure. Following extensive testing and troubleshooting, our LDAP backbone has been fully transitioned from OpenLDAP to FreeIPA—a more robust, secure, and scalable foundation for civic identity management.
This strategic shift has been validated across Core, Pond, and Communities, confirming our ability to manage seamless SSO-style authentication across all major platforms.
🔐 Identity Logic: Wisdom, Stature, and Solidarity
At the heart of this rollout lies our privacy-first civic identity model, now functionally live and integrated into the backend.
We’ve finalized the generation and hashing logic for three distinct civic identities:
All IDs are now created via secure SIN-based input, hashed locally using a multi-layered HMAC-SHA256 process. No raw SINs are stored or transmitted—only precomputed identity hashes are retained, and those are internally linked to LDAP accounts via immutable tokens.
🧬 Design Philosophy: Anonymity with Integrity
🛠️ What’s Next?
This relaunch marks a defining moment in CanuckDUCK’s architecture: we're building not just a platform, but a foundation for ethical, resilient civic participation in the digital age.
Stay tuned—we’re just getting started.
LDAP Integrations
Core, Consensus, Communities and Pond have now all been successfully bound to the LDAP, and we are now laying out the schema for the LDAP to integrate users, communities, community associations, businesses, municipalities and provinces. Login processes will now be fully directed towards core, which is to function as the Single Sign-On (SSO) and Consensus, Communities and Pond verified as operating in isolation from each other.
Canadian Postal Code Dataset
One of those developer "whoops" moments:
While loading the entire Canadian Postal Code dataset into our LDAP (900000+ entries) I realized I had set an incorrect variable in the ldif injection script. Which caused all of the entries to become unusable data. The beauty of it was I was running it from the server, with no way to stop the process. On a different note, I had a fantastic dinner.