Ryan Coleman, a TorCamp Citizen I’ve come to know and love, did a fantastic job in hosting and facilitating VizThink1 a visual thinking jam session last night at his offices at Clay Tablet.
Ryan really stepped up the plate, added a whole new dimension to our community and facilitated a whole new conversation. And because he setup the wiki using the BarCamp event pattern, this one event will trigger more and will almost certainly go global. The goal (visually presented, of course):
So who is this nascent new community? Well, this is it (for now):
BarCamp London friend (and Italian) Riccardo “Bru” Cambiassi reports about a very threatening note a BarCamp organizer in Italy received for organizing rItaliaCamp to open up discussion about the 40 million Euro italia.it portal. Who is threatened by openness and participation? Some people are very threatened, apparently. Please DIGG this story.
Three weeks ago, I coined a new term in my attempt to understand and communicate some of the ideas under the surface of Toronto Transit Camp. I referred to Transit Camp and BarCamp as open creative communities. It was a vague notion founded on my intuitions about what I have been observing in places as diverse and apparently disconnected as BarCamp to CaseCamp to NewMindSpace to Burning Man.
So what do marketers and tech geeks have in common with half-naked neo-tribal bohemians in the desert?
These are communities of interest, practice, proximity and values.
These communities live in a hybrid virtual- and place-based geography. They are hyper-creative and produce some phenomenal artifacts of human ingenuity and culture. They are open, in that the barrier to entry is not a membership fee or a geographic line in the sand or a common ethnicity. The barrier to entry is creative citizenship, and you are either a citizen and a participant or you are not, based on your individual relationship to that community’s interests, practices, proximity and values.
They are communities with both global and local dimensions. And they are self-organizing at an increasingly rapid rate, in the most unexpected places. (more after the jump)
I’m not making this up. Read the inspiration here. Pastor Chuck Warnock of Chatham Baptist Church, Virginia saw something in the Transit Camp model that he felt was needed in the Church. In particular, the BarCamp principles as we outlined them:
Bar Camp Principles Apply:
We are equal individuals in an open community.
Leadership can emerge from anywhere.
We are all participants.
Pastor Warnock apparently saw a need for openness, self-organization and participation in the Church:
I just think this is amazing. Here we have a self-organized group of transit evangelists who are getting together on their own to help the transit system improve and they have principles that any church should be shouting from the rooftops — equal individuals in open community, leaders emerge from anywhere, and all are participants.
Maybe we ought to let non-church members organize churches for us.
Warnock’s ChurchCamp wiki is up, a solutions playground for the church, with the 3 principles given prominence of place, like a wikified version of Luther’s 95 Theses.
If we needed proof about the amazing hunger in the world outside tech for the methods and tools for openness, participation and community being developed in the BarCamp community laboratory, we need look no further.
Vista’s DRM mistake, and the decline of Microsoft Windows:
Microsoft introduces Vista to area bloggers, Nov. 2006
Tom’s done a fantastic job summarizing the current state of things with respect to MSFT, Vista, DRM, Big IT, Enterprise 2.0 and how they are all interlinked into a bigger story about the long-term trend towards OPEN. Some key quotes:
No, the next revolution in business productivity comes from empowering *people*, and not Big IT. The next revolution comes from embracing emergent uses of tools and a default status of “openness� not the other way around. Port 80 has set us free [port 80 is used by web browsers to access the greater internet and the one loophole left necessarily, grudgingly, open in every corporate firewall].
Meanwhile those who know, and those who are [not] tied to corporate IT have switched to Mac already. It was the MacBookPro and Apple’s switch to powerful (and finally equivalent/better) x86 hardware that did it. Try going to a tech or blogger conference and every single person sitting comfortably ensconced behind the glowing Apple logo of their MacBooks.
Ryan Feeley has a blog. Expect to see lots of usability critique, urban warrior tools and food porn.
Ryan was a proto-photo-travel-blogger back in the day, long before LiveJournal or Movable Type. It was called Wrecktangle, and it was genius. So why did it take Ryan so long to find his voice post 1.0? Good question, let’s ask him.
