I was asked by the City to join ICT Toronto's Business Plan Working Group to "represent" TorCamp. Of course, you might question A) how does one represent an un-organization? and B) what makes me a legitimate representative of this community? For better or worse, my past work in public policy and economic development consulting, early participation in BarCamp and DemoCamp events and my foolhardy willingness to stick my neck out has made me the TorCamp policy wonk. This post is intended to keep the community up to date on what's going on and to open a conversation between the community and this Working Group. Today, the Working Group met to continue work began earlier in the year on formulating a business plan. While this process is certainly not moving at breakneck speed, I can report that today's session showed good progress toward creating something worthy of the ICT Toronto report's lofty ambitions. Today's main focus was an exercise in defining the various "support services" needed for a vibrant cluster of Information Technology businesses in the Toronto region and mapping those needs to the services provided by existing organizations. It was an important first step. The number of technology-related industry associations is ridiculous, and has created a fractured, nested and siloed environment with lots of duplication, while at the same time critical pieces of the puzzle are missing or under-served. After the last meeting between ICT Toronto and the TorCamp hive-mind, David Crow identified a need for a formal non-profit organization of professionals dedicated to exchange information and best practices in the development of emerging technologies, along the lines of Silicon Valley's SD Forum. The Working Group will be completing this exercise, do an assessment of how well these various service needs are being met and identify gaps. This will go a long way to turning ICT Toronto into a focused entity with clearly articulated goals and a well-defined value proposition to prospective members in the community that is clearly distinguished from existing industry and professional associations. The following list of major points (or tenets) is what I am bringing to the table and communicating to represent the TorCamp perspective as a business plan for ICT Toronto is developed:

• Strategy in Three Words: Ideas, Talent & Capital (i.e. Geeks & Rich People)
• Emphasize the need to cultivate, support and develop indigenous, creative small entrepreneurial companies
• Communities of practice (software developers, students, researchers, hardware engineers, entrepreneurs, investors) are critical to developing a vibrant cluster
• Small, entrepreneurial firms have needs that are very different from large multinationals, and deserve their own track of activities and dedicated focus
• ICT Toronto must have clearly articulated, measurable goals that are relevant to these small startups and communities of practice
• Open communication, unconference-style gatherings and social media tools should be embraced by ICT Toronto in its work to engage these communities of practice
• ICT Toronto is a terrible name; "ICT" is a term without meaning to the majority of people that work in the industry; a new name is needed that all the stakeholders can identify with and that is compelling on the global stage

I welcome everybody's input. Please leave your comments here, discuss on the TorCamp GoogleGroup or email me directly.

Technorati Tags: clusters, democamp, government20, ICTToronto, torcamp, Toronto