It’s Alive!: Toronto Transit Camp for pre-Superbowl geekery

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).

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