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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 “TORCAMPâ€? 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.

In line with the counter-culture ethos of the unconference, this BarCamp marks the un-official un-launch of Toronto Technology Week, which features both Enterprise 2.0 Conference & Camp and the Mesh Conference. I will be attending BarCamp and plan on facilitating a conversation about the future of Mozilla as a product or a platform, based on Chris Messina’s recent rant on the subject.

If you’ve never attended an unconference before, you really need to try it. (Hint: DemoCamp IS NOT a BarCamp) Once you’ve had an unconference, your expectations for what a conference should be will never be the same. Participants only. Bring a presentation you want to share, or sometimes participation means active listening, engaging presenters, bringing a question you want to explore or an intention to meet some like-minded folk. It’s about sharing and learning in an open creative environment.

Register by adding your name on the wiki. (Click “edit page”, password: c4mp)

Technorati Tags: barcamp, torcamp

CODE: Building the New Agora explores current perspectives on the contemporary perception of hardware/software and investigates how open source/open access alters our approaches to professional and social networks.

Less than five years ago the cultural theorist Lev Manovich claimed that while the 1990s were all about the virtual, the next decade might be about physical space and interactions, albeit augmented by electronic information. To explore these rapidly changing paradigms you are invited to join CODE.

CODE introduces Prof Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of Brown University and brings together an array of local speakers for a critical analysis of innovative initiatives in networked public life. The panels in the round will start with informal 5-7 minutes long presentations aiming towards an open dialogue with the participating public.

CODE’s goal is to foster discussion on these issues examining the impact of community building in Toronto and beyond.

I will be participating in one of the Wednesday afternoon panels with David Crow of Toronto BarCamp, David Humphrey of Seneca College, who has students who are making contributions to the Mozilla project and Tobias c. van Veen of the Upgrade Montreal community.

I will be bringing a political economic and policy perspective to the conversation. I am interested in how open source software development communities provide a rich source of data for social scientists to understand commons-based peer production and its application to other forms of creative knowledge work. I am interested in the places of intersection between online communities or networks and physical place and space, something I’m calling open creative communities.

I look forward to the panel-in-the-round format, which will allow for a lot of audience participation and contributions. If you are driven by similar questions, I encourage you to come out and participate in the conversation.

Technorati Tags: open+source+economics, opencreativecommunities, opensource, torcamp

Swarm

The TorCamp community has a stable ad-hoc always-on chat room in Skype. I thought it might be interesting to start a weekly summary of the conversation for those of you who might be interested but don’t need the distraction, or just for posterity’s sake. Or this could just be a giant inside joke, you decide.

The TorCamp Chat Swarmâ„¢ is a gathering place for smart tech blogger BarCamp types in Toronto, with special guests visiting from Vancouver, San Francisco, Atlanta, London, Rome and other places I’m probably forgetting. The Swarmâ„¢ is a virtual water-cooler for independent, creative, entrepreneurial or self-employed and community-oriented folk. Conversation varies from banal to brilliant to steamy, depending on the flavour of the moment.

Out of Context Quote of the Week:

mark raheja:
depends. if you’re both wearing baby panda costumes…then yes, definitely cute.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, chatswarm, torcamp

When is the ConceptShare Party?

Favourite sons ConceptShare continued to bask in the afterglow, having rocked Under the Radar getting huge attention around the internets. Bernie, Scott and Chris are regulars in the Swarm and give credit to the TorCamp community for their support since demoing at DemoCamp9 in September. ConceptShare is a great TorCamp success story, and they’re doing it from Sudbury, making the 3-6 hour commute (depending on weather conditions) for events in Toronto which usually means brutal hangovers for their weak-kneed Toronto cousins the next morning. Members of The Swarm like to mention ConceptShare whenever possible cause we all want into the massive party they’re going to host someday.

WTF is Up with Will Pate?

Will Pate

Seen here looking part 007 and part Colombian drug lord, Community Guy Obi-Will Pate left for Africa this week. Fresh from his new gig as co-host for commandN.tv with AmberMac, Will begins an amazing new adventure working for a pending new venture called Mazava that has something to do with Africa and disease outbreaks. We’re looking forward to occasional updates in the Swarm, via Twitter and maybe even a blog post or some photos.

How Many Canadian VCs Does it Take to Recognize a Great Investment Opportunity?

Swarmies debated the ironies of the dearth of Canadian VC activity in the web space while a disproportionate number of the most important names in tech these days are Canadian. The conclusion: a collective WTF?!

Welcome Allen Stern

Allen Stern from CenterNetworks.com found The Swarm and quickly fell in love with the vibrant Toronto scene. Allen’s been covering tech for a long time and right about now should be moving to NYC to make the big time. Apparently Hotlanta isn’t that hot tech-wise. In any case, Allen works hard covering tech stuff from CenterNetworks Central. I imagine him in a one-man CNN studio.

TechDads Breeding Like Rabbits

TorCamp babies are coming in a major baby boom wave this fall. Watch for GeekDads and TechDads to emerge as a powerful new community force.

Virtual ScotchCamp – The Swarm at Its Best

April 2nd, fresh from the ETech conference in San Diego, David Crow continued to push for greatness at future DemoCamps. As usual when the scotch and bourbon start flowing, things got a little loose:

James Walker:
it’s all been done
David Crow:
no, i think we stopped looking for hard problems
David Crow:
and decided that everything needed a web login form
David Crow:
and a fucking social network

A fast-flowing and intelligent back and forth ensued, talking Turing machines, Twitter, collective intelligence, free culture, culture & technology, human evolution through/with technology, telcos, wireless data rates, CRTC and regulatory capture, online film funding, net neutrality, OpenMoko, Joost, ATM fees, Public Enemy (“911 is a Joke”), Yochai Benkler, Bruce Sterling @ SXSW. And then my brain exploded.

Maybe it was the hangovers from all the scotch/bourbon, but there was more than half-serious consideration given by The Swarm to buying a hotel (Hotel 2.0?, Swarm Hotel?) a Hotel Chelsea-like creative community for geek living/working. It’s a crazy idea. It also appears to be inevitable.

If you want into The Swarm, ask your favourite TorCamper to invite you in. BarCamp principles apply – no spectators, only participants, two-feet rule.

Next Week in Swarm: Will Jevon tame his wild chat bot? Or will he be voted off Swarm island once and for all? And what is behind the mysterious hatch in David’s shoe closet?

Ryan really stepped up the plate, added a whole new dimension to our community and facilitated a whole new conversation. And because he setup the wiki using the BarCamp event pattern, this one event will trigger more and will almost certainly go global. The goal (visually presented, of course):

So who is this nascent new community? Well, this is it (for now):

See Ryan’s full presentation on SlideShare:

Technorati Tags: ryancoleman, torcamp, visualthinking, vizthink