I left a comment on the Worldchanging blog’s post about Transit Camp, Unconventions and the Toronto Transit Camp, by Alex Steffen. It quickly grew into a blog post, so I may as well republish it here. Full attribution for the “stone soup” reference goes to silo-busting City Councillor (and TTC Commissioner) Joe Mihevc. I met Joe Mihevc at today’s press conference announcing a Provincial funding contribution and an overall project go ahead for the remarkable Artscape Art Barns project at the former TTC Wychwood streetcar barns site. More on that later.

Alex, thank you for mentioning our little unconference on Toronto Transit. The response and interest has been overwhelmingly positive and we’re looking forward to a fantastic day where the unexpected will be commonplace.

The TorCamp Community is looking to this event as a pilot project for other similar events, including one we’re developing with some fellow city-building schemers and dreamers that we’re calling OpenCities.

Toronto Transit Camp is an experiment that brings together the BarCamp event format and community principles, the best “Web 2.0″ social media and collaboration tools, and applies those methods and tools to a difficult (intractable, if you know TTC history) problem area outside tech.

Transit Camp is about creating space for play. It is about leaving our organizational roles and business cards at the door and entering an open space that has been carved out for play, interaction, meaning-making and collaboration. It is a new way of working, for social goals as well as for market activity. It is about creating abundance from scarcity. It is a stone soup.

BarCamp’s Chris Messina and Tara Hunt are our touchstones for cultivating and nurturing the open communities that support these events. The unconference format without a sustainable community to support and contribute to it is merely a format. The power comes from what I’m calling Open Creative Communities, which are the life-blood of transformative unconference events that link to ongoing work in those communities and ultimately to tangible results on the ground.

We will be documenting Toronto Transit Camp extensively on the open web and will be publishing a case study (Creative Commons licensed, of course) on the event as an example of the power of Open Creative Communities, how they emerge, how they organize themselves and solve problems and how community gardeners can create space for their emergence. We will also find a way to allow other cities to use the transitcamp.org domain to host and organize their own Transit Camps. May a thousand flowers bloom.

Please continue to follow the story as it unfolds (tag=transitcamp). We would love for Worldchanging folks to be involved in future work to develop the underlying concept further and share it with the world. Cory Doctorow is in Toronto for a reading on Thursday, so we’ll talk to him about this as well.

Many TorCampers are Worldchangers too, whether we know it or not. Please get to know one of Transit Camp’s key sponsors, Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation. It is ground zero for these kinds of ideas in the city, and I’m proud to say it is my future office space.

Technorati Tags: centreforsocialinnovation, citizen+wonk, opencities, worldchanging, opencreativecommunities, Toronto, transitcamp, TTC

Wow…this is going to be huge fun. Toronto Transit Camp:

An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto’s talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto’s transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.

I have been working like a mad man to get this going with my fellow community tricksters: Jay Goldman, David Crow, Bryce Johnson, Eli Singer, Julia Breckenreid, Rannie Turingan, Joey DeVilla, Misha Glouberman, Patrick Dinnen, Madhava Enros, Mark Surman, Michael Glenn, Amber MacArthur. Special mention to the TorCamp Skype chat swarm for being the collective sounding board and reality check.

Read about the history and origins of the event. I found myself in the middle of a storm of multi-threaded, massively parallel organization and collaboration in the past week (you read right, it took 1 week to pull together from our first planning meeting last Sunday at the Gladstone to being open for registration with all the major pieces in place) and now I have a moment to reflect back on what it means.

Reflecting now on TransitCamp’s origins and how quickly and powerfully things came together, even I am shocked at how the social media and online collaborative tools have made this possible. This is truly a new paradigm of collaborative peer production. Something new, fundamentally important and very powerful. This is Wikinomics meets city-building. BarCamp meets the real world.
Think about it:

From web critique and user feedback to design solutions and cultural transformation in 35 days, volunteer time and a tiny budget…

I didn’t do this. There is no organization that did this. No organization can own it. No one will profit directly from it. It emerged from the community, from the community’s collective dream-space and to the community it owes its life.

This is distributed community-based creative production. The event itself will offer more of the same, and I am so excited to discover how the participants will populate the space for play that we’ve carved out in a small corner of Toronto.

If it isn’t fun, it will fail. If people don’t buy into and live the principles, it will fail. Those principles are borrowed from its mother-ship, BarCamp:

1. We are all equal individuals in open community.
2. Leadership can emerge from anywhere.
3. We are all participants.

Register now.

My interest in Transit Camp is in feeding my research on social media, peer production and the open meme. I am looking at TransitCamp as a pilot project of a much bigger and more audacious proposition called OpenCities.

Update: Nobody does an event announcement quite like Accordion Guy, Joey DeVilla – The Prince of TorCamp.

Toronto Transit Camp is a TorCamp Community Project (cm).

Technorati Tags: barcamp, centreforsocialinnovation, cities, citizen wonk, collaboration, creativity, opencities, socialmedia, torcamp, Toronto, transitcamp, TTC, wikinomics

The BarCamp/TorCamp community is circulating a survey to discover this rapidly emerging global community’s political orientation. The project was inspired by my recent post Search for a 21st Century Ideology. The results so far indicate that these are strongly individualist, socially libertarian people with varying degrees of economic leftiness. Not surprising perhaps for a group of people who come together in ad-hoc unconferences where we are all equal participants and where leadership can emerge from anywhere.

In discussing the above-mentioned survey, Tom and others have commented on its flaws and the “false dichotomies” in its design. One can distrust both multinational corporations to do good in the world and the ability of governments to effectively address economic and social inequality. Which reinforces my question, what is a relevant political ideology for the 21st century?

Rohan makes some connections for us, and points to the book “The Sovereign Individual” which argues on the basis of “mega-politics” (large political shifts due to technological change and its relationship to the logic of violence), that individuals, enabled by information age technologies, will escape the sovereign clutches of the nation-state which will eventually lead to the collapse of the welfare state. I haven’t read these authors before, but the argument resonates with my question, if in a dystopian Children of Men kind of way. (If you’ve seen the film, watch the commentary by Slavoj Zizek on the Children of Men site. If you haven’t, go see it.)

Those of us who live in the social media world online have a certain amount of confidence in the new technologies and embrace them. Meanwhile, many who do not occupy social media space fear what this radical new world represents in terms of a new, frightening, society of millions of chaotic individual voices. Cultural commentators decry the decline of the cultural reference points of quality in this massively participatory new cultural playing field. It represents a loss of power, and in that loss of power, a loss of a certain sense of identity and stability that underpins our society.

In a boiling sea of technologically enabled individuals, neo-tribal confederations may emerge to supplant the nation-state and other social institutions. However, rather than a Mad Max dystopian future, I see hope in this transformation. One of the reasons for my hope is that online communities and social media technologies allow for the expression of our true multidimensional human nature. We don’t belong to one tribe, but to many, both in virtual and physical space. Our loyalties are therefore federated in a neo-tribal sense within the individual. We belong to business networks and markets, cities and communities, social and political causes and movements, families and national and religious affiliations. There are two implications of this:

1. The knowledge that violence by one tribe of which I am a member may damage another tribe of which I am also a full member changes the calculus of violence
2. Social media may be the medium of both the expression of these multidimensional identities and the mode of negotiating new social contracts among sovereign individuals.

This is early thinking, but I think it moves forward the discourse on 21st century ideology a bit for me.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, politicalsurvey, socialmedia, torcamp

Responding to recent concerns about a general lack of quality in demos and calls for a retooling, David Crow’s announced DemoCamp12. Get on the wiki, go to Upcoming. It’s setting up to be a great one – World Class, all the way.

The new format includes invited demos/discussions by Will Pate on Flock, Mike Beltzner on Firefox and Albert Lai on Bubbleshare. It’s also an opportunity to review a fantastic year of DemoCamp, with the story by Albert and David on the origins of DemoCamp and 2 minute updates from past presenters on what they’re up to now.

I hope the Conceptshare guys come back, I’d like to see the DabbleDB guys again, and I’d love to know what’s up with Bumptop. What’s up with PlanetEye, Nuvvo, Semacode, Ambient Vector, BlogMatrix, Freshbooks, Radiant Core, Idée? For all the concerns about slipping quality standards, looking back overall there is a remarkable collection of talent and ideas and companies in the mix.

Anniversaries are great opportunities for a reset…appreciate what’s come before, reset expectations, look forward to the future. The community is a friendly, open, cooperative and competitive environment which should be continually raising the bar of quality and expectations. There is now an authentic grassroots tech community that didn’t exist a year ago, which has created excitement in the Toronto tech scene that is drawing them in from Sudbury to Vancouver to Silicon Valley.

I’ll be sure to invite our friends at ICT Toronto to come. But I’m not making bets on whether any of them will, having been disappointed by good intentions in the past.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, democamp, ICTToronto, torcamp, Toronto

E.O. Wilson, patron saint of SEED Magazine and father of consilience. His life’s work is to reconcile religion and science through the issue of protecting the biosphere.

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