Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 $630 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the $5 philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Remarkk! » Social Media http://remarkk.com OPEN creative communities Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:22:13 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/ http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 15:06:17 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=593 Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!
Social Web, Social Change and the Return of Community
]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/05/27/social-web-social-change-and-the-return-of-community/feed/ 3 Open Source Journalism http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/ http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/#comments Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:55:04 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=566 CBC's 800 employees about to get the axe. Clay Shirky recently wrote an important piece about "thinking the unthinkable" in newspapers, highly recommended reading. I took note of this in his concluding paragraph:
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
My work with TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about "broadcaster" or "newspaper" and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for. The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO's flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement. The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario's changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast. While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants. So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario's innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to "open source" her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream. The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra's research space that she's sharing with the community. Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.]]> http://remarkk.com/2009/03/25/open-source-journalism/feed/ 5 Public Media 2.0: TVO’s The Agenda on the Road, pt.1 http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/#comments Fri, 24 Oct 2008 03:51:50 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=387 Dan and I are still processing the impact and learnings of the first AgendaCamp and TVO's The Agenda on the Road, which took place in Windsor earlier this week. Overall, it was a huge success and something we're going to build upon for the next four events and shows in other communities. The best part for me was the end of day reaction of Steve Paikin, host of The Agenda and one of Canada's most respected journalistic talents. The format called for 6 simultaneous 1 hour sessions. After 50 minutes, participants were asked to wrap up their discussion and tasked to produce a 2 and a half minute video that summarized their conversation using our inexpensive Flip Video cameras. It proved to be a powerful format and we will tweak it in order to help gather even more and better video content from our amazing participants. You can check out the content on the budding AgendaCamp wiki, YouTube, Flickr and get content updates by following AgendaCamp on Twitter. We just love our participants' passion and we felt their desire to come together as a community to make the place they call home a better place. They tackled the big questions of economic renewal in the context of a rapidly declining auto industry, and they planted their seeds of their own future. The next step is to support this budding community as they continue their work together, providing them with tools to help their collaboration and ongoing conversations. I hope that we can find a way to connect this grassroots energy and enthusiasm to power and influence in a way that can meaningfully effect change, but that really depends on the community. The thing we're most interested in seeing evolve is how AgendaCamp participants and content interact with the broadcast. With five events, five shows and five different producers in five communities, we'll get to see a number of variations on this combination of bottom-up engagement, online interaction and major current affairs broadcast platform. So much fascinating stuff! We're excited for the next event in Sault Ste. Marie November 16th and 17th.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/23/public-media-20-tvos-the-agenda-on-the-road-pt1/feed/ 0 How to participate in TVO AgendaCamp from your couch http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/ http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/#comments Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:05:41 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=382 Sunday is the first TVO AgendaCamp, taking place at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor's jewel overlooking the beautiful riverside walk and the Detroit skyline. A stunning location for an innovative new format in citizen-powered exploration and social-media enhanced journalism. Creative facilitator-ninja Dan Rose and I will be helping to run a 3-ring circus of citizen journalism and economic policy thinking.  Linking social media, a BarCamp-inspired unconference and one of Canada's premier public issues broadcast journalism platforms is a very exciting opportunity for me. The topic - Ontario's changing economy with a focus on the manufacturing sector and places like Windsor that depend upon it - couldn't be more relevant or timely. For those of you who can't make it to Windsor, TVO.org will be the place to be from 10:00 am Sunday until 4:30pm. Arm-chair policy wonks and social media junkies can follow along as video is streamed live, as citizen-journalist YouTube videos and Flickr images are uploaded, the Wiki is populated with content and the whole event is live-blogged and Twittered. Use and follow the tag: AgendaCamp. We have MacBooks and FlipVideo cameras available on-site for participants, plus pro equipment and staff from TVO helping to capture the content and stories. The strategy and platform for this was built by TVO.org's great production team, helped along with insight and guidance from Sean Howard. We have a great platform, an amazing group of on-site participants, a bunch of technology and a beautiful and inspiring venue. I really can't wait! I hope you can join us online and help us start an important new conversation.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/10/17/how-to-participate-in-tvo-agendacamp-from-your-couch/feed/ 2 AgendaCamp: Citizen-driven economic intelligence http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/ http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/#comments Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:45:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/?p=339 0 billion in new money being printed by the Federal Reserve together with central banks around the world and sudden and frightening drops in global stock markets. Meanwhile, news that talks on Canada-EU economic integration are due to begin mere days after the Canadian federal election has gone largely unnoticed. It is clear that we are not living in normal times. How will this instability in the system affect citizens and businesses in the places they call home?  Even before the Wall Street meltdown, Ontario's local and regional economies were under stress and changing rapidly. The current crisis appears likely to accelerate and exacerbate these changes. It is said that all politics are local. What about economies? Dan Dunsky, Executive Producer of TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, believes that we need to think about Ontario's economies in the plural and his team has identified that major sectors of Ontario's economy correspond to our geographic landscape and its people in specific places. How do these places and people adapt to global forces that are largely outside of their control? How can we get ahead of the change curve and make our regions more resilient and adaptable to accelerating change? To tackle this critically important question about our future well-being, TVO is launching an innovative new project that brings together collaborative events and social media together with premier broadcast journalism and expert inquiry.  I am advising and supporting TVO for this project, "The Agenda with Steve Paikin: on the Road" & AgendaCamp. We're looking for participants - like you. More after the jump... Ontario's trade manufacturing economy is concentrated along the highway 401 corridor of southwestern Ontario particularly close to the US-Canada border. Ontario's natural resources sector dominates our vast northern expanse.  Eastern Ontario is home to a rich rural economy located in places with storied histories since before Confederation.  Ontario's native people made a sustainable living from the lakes and forests across Ontario long before Europeans arrived. Ontario's burgeoning knowledge-based and technology-driven economy is concentrated in places like Waterloo, Greater Toronto and Ottawa but is also popping up anyplace where talent and connectivity can find a suitable home. The Agenda is going on the road to find these economies and their people and engage them in a new conversation about their challenges and future opportunities.  The first show and event will take place in less than three weeks in Windsor (October 19th and 20th), followed by Sault Ste. Marie (November 16th and 17th). The audacious format looks like this:
  1. AgendaCamp: an all-day Sunday participatory event, similar to the Barcamp model of unconference, that takes place face-to-face and is also live-blogged, with video capture and other social media content uploaded to the web in near realtime
  2. The Agenda on the Road: a live-to-air broadcast hosted Monday evening by Steve Paikin featuring a panel of invited guests and a studio audience, where the best AgendaCamp ideas can find a larger audience
AgendaCamp is looking for:
  • local citizens and business-people
  • academic experts and bloggers
  • policy-makers and politicians
  • artists and technologists
  • bankers and social activists
- really anybody who has a stake, an opinion and a passion for the subject of the economy and it's impact on our communities and our lives.  If you are interested in participating in AgendaCamp please register your email address at http://tvo.org/agendacamp/ for more information or email me at mark@remarkk.com. Thanks to collaborators Sean Howard and Daniel Rose for being part of this project. We're enjoying working together with Steve Paikin, Mike Miner and the rest of the TVO team. My dream list of participants from across the web and blogosphere includes: Richard Florida, Anthony Williams, Naomi Klein, David Eaves, Deborah Leslie, David Wolfe, Meric Gertler, John Britton, David Crow, Jevon MacDonald, Warren Kinsella, Andrew Coyne, Kate Trgovac, Bob LeDrew, Canadian Silver Bug, James Bow, Kate McMillan (small dead animals), Uncorrected Proofs, Steve Janke (Angry in the Great White North), Zednik (A View from the Right), Graeme Steward (Nunc Scio),  More Notes from the Underground, Canada's World, Another Point of View, Dr. Dawg (Dawg's Blog). Who am I missing? You? ]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/09/30/agendacamp-citizen-driven-economic-intelligence/feed/ 7 Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate’s Blog http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:25:58 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/ Will Pate links to a really great PBS Frontline documentary, Growing Up Online:

If you want to understand the generation gap between us Gen Y kids and our Baby Boomer parents, you can’t beat this show. You can literally see in the eyes of the parents their fear at how fast their kids are evolving, their frustration at the amount of their kids lives kept private from them but made public on the internet, their media-fueled paranoia about child predators, the pain of realizing their son used the internet to get the know how and the support he needed to take his own life before he was old enough to drive a car. Kids are changing too fast for their parents to possibly keep up, and that’s not a good feeling.

[From Gen Y Growing Up Online | Will Pate's Blog]

And what of us Gen X'ers who only partially get it?

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/02/03/gen-y-growing-up-online-will-pates-blog/feed/ 1 Obama inspires! (From Gen-X Apathy to Sense of Purpose) http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/#comments Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:55:19 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/ obamaI have been following the U.S. democratic primaries pretty closely and I am struck by Barack Obama's amazing talent to transcend everyday politics and inspire in a way that no leader has done in my lifetime. Obama's abilities and his unique and transformative potential were well articulated both by small-c conservative libertarian Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic Monthly and by Caroline Kennedy in this weekend's NY Times.

His ability to engage the passion of youth and unite it with the wisdom of age inspires me. In my community engagement work, I am attempting a similar kind of engagement and I am learning a lot just by thinking about this task in the context of the emerging Obama moment. If successful, he will be the first President of the Social Web Age.

But you only need to witness the man himself in his moment.

Why do I want to believe? Because we are facing increasingly intractable and difficult problems. The old ideologies are failing us. Government is failing us. Corporations and other large institutions are failing us. I believe that human culture applied through our creative passion will solve the most difficult problems of our age. They are, in fact, the only things that ever have. We have no choice but to unite, collaborate in new ways and harness the creative spark in every individual. It's not a matter of being idealistic, it's a matter of survival and the resilience of our communities and society in the face of accelerating change.

Why do we engage young people? Because they have the energy, the passion, the new ideas and the skills to realize them. They also need the wisdom, knowledge and experience of their parents generation.

If Millennials have the passion and ideas, and the Boomers have the power, authority, capital and experience, then the epochal role of Gen-X folks like me is to help broker the relationship between the Millennials and their parents. We are the ones working to build the institutional structures and the inter-generational interfaces of the new millennium. This is my mission and the focus of my consulting work, and I know it describes the role of many of us in our own ways.

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/30/obama-inspires-from-gen-x-apathy-to-sense-of-purpose/feed/ 3 Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/#comments Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:00:20 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/ Feb08_Cover

Along with my co-authors Jay Goldman and Eli Singer, I am proud to announce the publication of our article titled Sick Transit Gloria in the February issue of Harvard Business Review. The article shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience and is included in the 2008 edition of HBR's annual The HBR List: Breakthrough Ideas section. There are many great ideas in there, so do yourself a favour and pick up a copy. (TransitCamp is also nominated by BlogTO in the Best of Independent Toronto Survey. Vote here!) This short piece tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together to solve problems in an innovative new way, using social web technology, social media and design methods together with the Barcamp unconference framework. The approach helped to shift the relationship between the organization and its customers and community stakeholders. That organization was the Toronto Transit Commission and the event and the open creative community that emerged from it was called Toronto TransitCamp. You can read the article in Harvard Business Review, or visit this wiki page for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp. The authors want to make clear that while our names may appear in the byline of the article, the ideas and the event itself come from a community of participants and peers. We were also inspired by many talented global thought leaders. We would like to acknowledge these contributions and inspirations here: Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen; Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; ; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott, New Paradigm; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & ; Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood; Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Rochelle Latinsky; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O’Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

, , , , , , , , , , ,

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/28/harvard-business-review-breakthrough-idea-toronto-transitcamp/feed/ 5 Digital Journal TV: The AmberMac Interview http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/#comments Mon, 21 Jan 2008 14:27:55 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/ Amber MacArthur, Canada's leading digital media host and tech web personality, left her gig with CityTV/Rogers a while back. Now she tells her side of the "he-said, she-said" story in an interview at Digital Journal. I think it provides great insight into the changes happening at the edge of digital content, where talent just doesn't need the production and distribution arms of traditional media outlets to reach its audience. [From Digital Journal - Digital Journal TV: Up Close and Personal With Internet Star Amber MacArthur] For additional background, check out the BlogTO story and comment thread, where Amber's fans speakout and a brave Rogers exec engages with the fans in a way that is truly admirable.]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/21/digital-journal-digital-journal-tv-up-close-and-personal-with-internet-star-amber-macarthur/feed/ 0 Building the Social Media Starfish http://remarkk.com/2008/01/19/building-the-social-media-starfish/ http://remarkk.com/2008/01/19/building-the-social-media-starfish/#comments Sat, 19 Jan 2008 19:27:07 +0000 Mark Kuznicki http://remarkk.com/2008/01/19/building-the-social-media-starfish/ Scoble has an interesting video podcast up at Fast Company reviewing the social media tactics of the U.S. presidential campaigns, which brought my attention to how these campaigns are using leading social media tactics and are a great source for best practices. To paraphrase Scoble, political campaigns have a really strong market signal to engage their audiences - they have 18 months to get to launch or close up shop.

Building a Political Starfish| FastCompany.com Multimedia - Business Slideshows, Video & Podcasts
Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Scoble's "social media starfish" is a useful way to conceptualize the multi-headed and distributed network nature of effective social media engagement. Rather than just a shotgun list of tactics and platforms, it's useful to think about how the different arms work together and facilitate engagement and convergence across media to influence audience behaviour and calls to action - in this case to donate, vote and volunteer.

I'm looking at the lessons of these campaigns for practices that bridge the online, mass media and events spaces in a way to make change. (In case you hadn't heard, 2008 is the year of change so join your friends in the change drinking game at the next Democratic debates.)

]]> http://remarkk.com/2008/01/19/building-the-social-media-starfish/feed/ 0