Joey warmed himself up good for a skeptical blast at the ICT Toronto initiative. Leave your comments with him.
I have to agree with Joey, Rob Hyndman and others that it is very curious that an initiative intended in large part to promote Toronto as a tech cluster (to foreign investment, in part) did a launch event before making a reasonable attempt at a web site. With the plethora of cheap/free tools and high quality design talent in this city, you would think that ICT Toronto would have at least setup a nice little WordPress site. Unfortunately, government is even worse than large companies at being agile, adaptable and resourceful.
What we need in this city is meta-innovation: innovations that support innovation. How our public and private sector institutions adapt to a rapidly changing environment will to a great extent determine our collective fate. Agile processes and tools, from OpenSpace to eXtreme Programming, from Upcoming.org to wikis, can enable rapid adaptation.
Who is going to lead this? Perhaps instead of BarCamp asking ICT Toronto for support, we should simply offer some help. Could we put together a set of introductory workshops to blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, agile project management, OpenSpace for ICT/innovation/cluster policy people to attend? Probably.
Technorati Tags: barcamp, cluster, creativecluster, democamp, icttoronto, Innovation, torcamp, Toronto
[...] Update: More commentary, from Mark Kuznicki. Related Posts [...]
Sharing is a key tenent of what I feel this ‘movement’ is about. Sure offering up training to some government people is possible, easy even… where would the reciporation come from? Everyone needs to participate in these events and wouldn’t we just have a bunch of a government drones starting back at us and the projectors?
Maybe we should just point them to BarCampTdot and hope that they become participants in the spirit of the movement, not just blank-staring drones.