A little more than 2 years after David Crow launched the BarCamp unconference meme in Canada with a mighty yawp, it looks like this "community thing" is catching on in Toronto's technology scene. The National Angels Organization has found religion, the Financial Post picked up the excitement, the Toronto Board of Trade loves being host to the energy of DemoCamp, Peter Evans and the crew at MaRS are great supporters of the community, John MacRitchie and the Ontario Centres of Excellence is actively engaged, the organizers of the Mesh Conference are kindred spirits and provide an important platform, Greg Wilson and the University of Toronto are onside, Rick Segal, Austin Hill and other VCs and Angels are joining in, Interactive Ontario sees the value and many other established institutions of the technology and business community are taking note of one of Toronto's main sources of tech excitement. The community is an open platform for collaboration, where the interests and resources of a diverse set of private industry organizations, educational and public sector support institutions can be pooled for shared benefit. So who's not getting it?

More after the jump... I'm sad to report that the City of Toronto has yet to engage Toronto's emerging technology community in a truly meaningful way. The ICT Toronto committee asked people from the community (myself included) to participate in advising their initiative, the last visible rump of which is represented by Toronto Technology Week. The City never quite figured out the difference between a community and an industry association and those involved were distracted by the competing agendas of several old-school tech industry associations. Some members mused at one time of creating a new Mega-Association and spoke gleefully of "drowning puppies" as the means to get there. I kid you not. The Toronto Technology Week concept, a "week long festival of technology" remains interesting in theory. However, Toronto's tech community is NOT rallying behind it for a number of reasons. Time to face reality: here, here, here, here and in many other more private conversations. The protagonists behind TechWeek fail to understand what makes a great tech community and cluster tick and how to solicit real contributions from its members. Most critically and fatally, they have no way of separating the wheat of tech awesomeness from the chaff of wannabe pretenders and bottom-feeders. Without that judgement, community gardening is impossible. Without a Golden Compass of Tech Awesomeness and lacking the community's trust and buy-in, I'm afraid the ICT Toronto project is doomed to failure. If the City is serious about growing a vibrant tech cluster, it will not continue down this path towards failed mediocrity and will take a moment to re-evaluate its approach in the face of a profound lack of enthusiasm in the tech community. Fortunately, the Community is Open and it is Creative, and the City of Toronto can join it at any time. But the City first needs to humbly acknowledge that it cannot claim any form of leadership in an area, like technology, that it clearly and admittedly does not understand.

I delivered a Ignite version of Cocreating the Creative City to the DemoCamp community at DemoCampToronto16. View full screen on Slideshare if you want to be able to read the speaking notes. If you aren't familiar with the Ignite format, it is 20 slides, 5 minutes, 15 seconds per slide on an automatic timer. The format enforces quite a lot of discipline on you - and decisions about what to communicate with images, text and speaking notes are fun to play with. This was the first attempt, and I'd love to practice it some more to improve my delivery. As a follow-up, I am challenging interested members of the DemoCamp community to take the open source code behind FixMyStreet and localize it for Toronto and the GTA. FixMyStreet is a bug tracker for city services that sits outside government control. Users identify, report and map local issues and the system forwards them onto the appropriate local authority for action and follow-up. If some developers in the community want to take this on, I will work with them to connect this to city halls across the region.

Well, it looks like the TransitCamp meme we launched in Toronto back in February has gone round the globe and landed right back in Canada with Vancouver TransitCamp coming up fast on December 8th. Congratulations to Karen (Quinn) for surviving the existential angst and politically charged atmosphere just getting to launch. Karen was at the first TransitCamp in Toronto and has been passionate about bringing it back to her home city of Vancouver ever since. When David registered the transitcamp.org domain last year, we envisioned that maybe someday many city.transitcamp.org subdomains might propagate for cities around the world that wanted to look at transit and community in a new way. I'm really glad to see someone has taken the ball and run with it. In February, TransitCamp returns to BarCamp ground zero at Bay Area TransitCamp. We heard some rumblings from Australia, Boston and Washington DC. Time will tell if they surface. If you need advice on organizing a TransitCamp in your city, just send an email. And, hopefully, Toronto TransitCamp '08 will be bigger and better.

Technorati Tags: transitcamp

While I was in Vancouver, Jevon, Jonas and co-conspirators over at StartupNorth announced and quickly sold out StartupCamp Toronto1. For those curious about how this "community thing" works, notice how the model is the defunct Canadian Venture Forum turned on its head. Tickets are allocated based on your community of practice: Entrepreneurs, Students and Gurus are free. Service Provider tickets are still available at $199 and you get recognized as a sponsor for supporting the community! $199 for that kind of whuffie is a fantastic deal. Now if the Board of Trade could get hip to the model, we might see a few more tech innovators at those Tech Innovators Breakfasts! In my experience, these breakfasts are an old-skool sausagefest of service providers trying to catch a deal, and if it weren't for the odd enlightened friend of the community like RBC, Idée, Microsoft/David Crow - you would never see a garage startup show its face in such an environment. (I'd link to the next one of their events, but the Board of Trade's website is too painful to navigate and doesn't use permalinks! Hello??) I'm looking forward to putting my community co-creation ideas in front of more people in the startup ecosystem as the BarCamp community continues to gain traction in the eyes of policy, corporate and capital players. I see my role in this is to help these people perceive community and give them tools to engage with it in a way that creates new value for the whole system.

The Toronto BarCamp scene is one of the most vibrant in the world. Until recently Toronto was also the most active Facebook network in the world. So what happens when you bring the two together: a massive gathering of developers and others who can't get enough of all things Facebook and with an itch to create. Unfortunately, a huge pile of work waiting for my return and my status as a non-developer TorCamper kept me away. With a 400 capacity crowd in MaRS' main auditorium plus a 70-person overflow room with closed-circuit coverage, they certainly didn't need another warm body. Congratulations to the organizers and presenters on a milestone event. AmberMac covered it for City News International. And for the technically minded among you, Craig was nice enough to upload a couple of the presentations to Slideshare:

Technorati Tags: barcamp, facebook, facebookcamptoronto, torcamp

While Jay Goldman and Leila Boujane work on a very cool subway-map of Toronto's tech community similar to the one in Montreal, Toronto's tech community can put itself on the map in other ways too. The TorCamp community is "partnering" (in what must be a first for a non-organization that puts on unconferences) with the Toronto Board of Trade on getting the word out to the thousands of small and micro-businesses about their ICT survey. I am encouraging anybody who sees themselves as part of the greater Toronto technology community to fill out the survey and put themselves on the map for policy-makers who are looking for new ways of supporting that community's development in the global race for technology leadership. Plus a new iPod would be nice! (Mine has be acting up lately). Please blog about it, Facebook it, pass it on to people you know in the Toronto region involved in technology, and put out to any email lists you may be on. Thanks! Here are the details:

Simply visit http://www.whatsyouropinion.ca, enter "TORCAMP� in the field marked Survey Code and follow the easy steps through a short questionnaire which should help us identify issues and opportunities within Toronto’s growing ICT community. For providing us your feedback, we'll send you the aggregate results and analysis, but you’ll also be eligible to win a video iPod or tickets to upcoming Technology Innovators Breakfasts at the Toronto Board of Trade. Thank you in advance for participating in this survey and helping to champion a competitive and vibrant ICT community in Toronto.