Whale in the sky, by Gail Johnson

In Toronto, #HoHoTO was a holiday party held December 16, 2008 to raise funds for the Daily Bread Foodbank that has had a big local impact and received coverage all over the online and traditional media.  I think the Toronto tech community will look at this event the way some of us look back at the first BarCamp in Toronto in November 2005, a milestone in the emergence of a new community made possible by technology.

Since then, a myriad projects have hatched on or been assisted by Twitter. #thmvmnt is reimagining how free-agent creative and design professionals work, collaborate and make the world better. #ChangeCamp is changing the way we think about government, democracy and citizenship. #tsTO is a conversation about “TwitterSpace” - garages and war rooms provided by Twitter patrons that act as distributed temporary incubators for projects born in the swarm. #svc is looking to launch a Social Venture Commons leveraging the power of the hyper-connected twittersphere.

What is going on here?

Jay Goldman recently described it as ant colony communication - we’re leaving little pheromone signals in our digital wake. They act as attractors to trigger self-organizing behaviours among others in the colony.

Hive, a short film by The Movement co-founder and instigator Alan Smith, foretold the story of its emergence:

Clay Shirky has talked about how online social networks and communities are entering a new phase of development, one of collective action. We’re watching this new form emerge from its cocoon, and it’s fascinating.

Humanity appears to be undergoing a techno-social evolution right in front of our eyes. Is Hive’s superorganism being born, and are we part of it? Is the Web truly Us?

I believe it is, and I believe that this is not only good, but it is critical to our survival. All around us are huge, intractable problems of collective action: crisis and the risk of collapse are in our ecological, economic, political and cultural environments. What better evolutionary development than a collective intelligence enabled to in a decentralized way coordinate collective action to these very problems?

To realize the potential of this collective intelligence, we have problems to solve:

1. How do we involve, include and reflect the values of the non-connected periphery in our hyper-connected core?
2. How do the myriad fleeting ideas that emerge find stable structures to see them through to execution?
3. How will existing structures have to adapt in order to allow this new potential to be realized and harnessed?
4. Whose interests are served by the new emergent order and whose interests are harmed? How will those conflicting interests be negotiated?

If you’re interested in these questions and have some ideas on how to solve these meta problems, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or better yet join the conversation on Twitter: #swarmintelligence, I’m @remarkk.

His recent post Why StatCan is (or could be) Google is fascinating and well worth a read. David’s thesis is that StatCan needs to give away the data for free while at the same time attracting a whole new generation of creative Gen Y geeks to build its relevance in the future.

First, distinguish and separate what you do: “Creating and organizing information about Canada” from what makes you valuable: making this information universally available to citizens.

Second, make yourself the centre of a data gathering, sharing and analyzing eco-system: There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people out there who could do amazing things with StatCan’s data.

Eaves poses an amazing challenge to an institution that is, like many public service agencies, under pressure to act more like business, looking at new business models and additional revenue opportunities. This orientation isn’t bad in itself, but often public institutions learn all the wrong lessons from the private sector.  At the same time, their public good mandates are often well-suited to their being linchpins in the coming network economy. Look to Umair Haque’s work on “Edge Economy” for clues on what the emerging economy looks like.

Publicly funded content creation can create huge downstream innovation and public good possibilities in a world of long-tail and so-called “crowd-sourced” economics. But the management of many publicly funded institutions have been moving in the wrong direction - trying to capture, limit and monetize content instead of making it freely available to the public. Eaves’ piece on StatCan is an important shot across the bow of why this approach is counterproductive to its stated goals.

Join the conversation on Twitter. tag: #ChangeGovCA

Recent political developments in Canada have taken us all by surprise and left many of us confused and disillusioned, but also super-engaged. This a tremendous opportunity and a moment for real dialogue among Canadians about our politics, our democracy and our individual citizenship.

Many of us are watching with rapt attention what’s going on in the transition to an Obama administration in the United States. I’ve been amazed at how the technologies of participation are being married to the philosophy of transparency in very real and exciting ways. An administration-in-waiting that blogs with open commenting! And offers a Seat at the Table for open policy conversations and submission of documents!

Inspired by these developments and the work of Laurence Lessig and Joe Trippi with Change-Congress.org and Open-Government.us, I registered the domain ChangeGov.ca, with an eye to it being a place for a new conversation for a multi- and non-partisan movement of Canadians interested in changing our institutions of government to reflect our times. I don’t know what this might become, but I’m inviting people interested in democratic renewal and the principles of politics embedded in the philosophy of the open web to join and open the conversation.

Leave a comment on this post, or join the conversation on Twitter by using the tag: #ChangeGovCA. You can follow the conversation at search.twitter.com or using the awesome search pane on the powerful TweetDeck twitter app.

Her excellent presentation is online at her blog. Video is online at the Rotman site, including an intro by Alexander Manu, formerly of the Beal Institute and currently professor of Business Design at Rotman. I’m embedding the slides here:

Great story and insights. Most important insight for me was that the social media tools worked because the underlying strategy and philosophy of the campaign was itself new, different and consistent with those tools:

1. The 50-state strategy
2. Targeting the “disaffected center”
3. Small donor focus

Social media isn’t a set of tactics, it is an orientation and philosophy and needs to integrate a focused brand and clear compelling message together with an inclusive and adaptable approach as well as an organization that is culturally ready to live those principles.

Strategy, message, culture. As powerful as these technologies are, it is the subtleties of their use and the human behaviours they enable that is the key to unlocking their value.

1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city.  somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.

The Mayor responded immediately by pre-announcing that TTC routing data would be opened up in Google Transit format in June of 2009, and said that, while he couldn’t promise that the City would be ready to process the output, that Toronto’s web geeks should go ahead and do a Toronto version of FixMyStreet and that City would listen. This is huge.

The moment was the culmination of a lot of our hopes and dreams for a city that understands the power of open, the meaning of participation and a signal of a more effective and responsive government of and for the people of Toronto. Will Pate and I have offered our assistance to make this vision a reality and we hope others will join us.

Mark’s presentation was excellent and highly recommended.  I have embedded the slides here, but you should go to Mark’s blog for the full audio presentation (and audio of Mayor Miller’s response) for the full effect.

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It appears that the CRTC did not accept the anti-competitive argument, mainly because it did not observe a drop in the growth of 3rd party ISP’s business.

Based on the evidence before us, we found that the measures employed by Bell Canada to manage its network were not discriminatory. Bell Canada applied the same traffic-shaping practices to wholesale customers as it did to its own retail customers - Konrad von Finckenstein, Q.C., Chairman of the CRTC

The frame of this judgment is not about the discrimination of content.  This misses the main point of the net neutrality debate: the discrimination of content between individual users on a common carrier network that stems from certain kinds of traffic shaping practices.

This is just the first salvo, and CRTC is preparing itself for more consultations in July 2009 as the issue is not going to go away.

What can you do? Join a citizens movement for the open web! SaveOurNet.ca is front and centre on this file. Please send a letter to CRTC, donate to the campaign and volunteer to help organize digital citizens across the country.

You also might want to drop Bell and Rogers and go for a smart, engaged small company like TekSavvy for your internet service needs. They have amazing customer service. You may be confused at first if like most of us you have become accustomed to the maze of call centre hell that is the customer experience of the big boys. Bonus.

Tuesday night showed what community organizing can do. Not only did Obama take the electoral college in a landslide, but the 50-state strategy made red states like North Carolina blue while turning many others purple. He did it with huge turnout, a dominant position among emerging voter blocks like youth and ethnic voters and with techniques learned from the trenches in Chicago.

Only a community organizer could pull this off.

The stories from the field about the Obama vs McCain ground game show the difference. Obama’s field offices were reported full and buzzing with volunteers from all over the country. McCain’s campaign offices were mostly empty and dull, or closed.

Then there’s the Obama campaign’s web strategy, which will go down in history as the first mass scale and most effective use of the social web for political or any other form of organization. But it’s just the beginning, and there is so much yet to be written!

Change.gov shows that Obama fully intends to take his massive email and sms lists, the lessons learned from the campaign and his community organizing instincts together with a new call and program around National Service to really transform the meaning of politics, community and country. The clues are there, and I just can’t help but stare in awe and amazement.

For those of us who dreamed of the potential of marrying bottom-up social movements with a new kind of leadership style, it’s hard to process that our moment may really truly be now. All of a sudden, the work of community organizing just got a new and rather Presidential luster. For those of us who work in the field where social web and real-world issues meet, it’s going to be a very busy time indeed.

The next generation - Generation Y, the Millennials, the Net Generation - emerges, announces itself and declares its intentions this year.

I talk about these amazing, creative and post-partisan young people a lot in my work - their values, the way they work, their use of media, their learning styles. I usually explain that my role, and the role of my Generation X peers, is to act as translators and brokers between the Boomers and their Millennial children - transferring knowledge, power and capital to a new generation that will become the dominant force in our future. I know my place, and I have confidence in their abilities to fix the crap their parents have left in their wake.

This may also go down as the first election where YouTube and user-generated content played a major role in the campaign. Obama has inspired unbelievable creativity from his young and loyal base. My friend Rahaf Harfoush is one of those people, currently volunteering for the Obama campaign HQ in Chicago, where it’s hard to find someone over the age of 30.

So, to begin to commemorate the historic moment of this election through the joy of the Obama fan video, I assembled a YouTube playlist. If you have a favourite that’s not here, leave a link in the comments of this post.

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.