Wow. 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.
The global economy is undergoing what appears to be the finance equivalent of a heart attack, the circulatory system of credit now frozen. The policy response looks like shock therapy. $700 billion in public bailouts (or is that ‘investment’) hanging in the balance, $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…
Together with Sean Howard, I co-presented a workshop at Mesh08, “Government 2.0: From Community Participation to Co-creation”. I have uploaded the presentation at Slideshare. This workshop was built around the still in progress Metronauts case study, an innovation in participatory research and engagement for Metrolinx as it develops a Regional Transportation Plan for the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).
We had a standing room only crowd at the end of Day 1, with many government folks in the crowd from all levels of government. The reviews were great, with several people coming up at the end to say it was the best session they’d see in the day, so I’m happy with how it went.
We were caught short on time for discussion, so I hope some of the participants in the workshop find this post and leave questions here in the comments. Nice to meet you all!
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: Read more
The goal of the Metagovernment project is to make the governance of any community as accessible as a free software project. No one is required to participate, but everyone is allowed to participate, just as software developers can contribute to open source projects and editors can contribute to Wikipedia.
This form of democracy, called open source governance, does not entail traditional voting or majority-rule. Instead, people may help govern any community as much or as little as they wish by creating, discussing, and supporting proposals. User input is weighed by other users through a scoring system and brought to the attention of other participants interested in that input. Please explore this site for a deeper understanding of the mechanics of this system.
The Metagovernment project governs and develops Metascore, the software to aid and manage community-based open source governance systems. It is a global project in the startup phase, and we encourage you to participate.
The Personal Democracy Forum is your place to meet the people who are making that change happen, discover the tools powering the new civic conversation, spot the early trends, and share in understanding and embracing this dynamic new force.
They’ve assigned someone the role of “Chief of Emerging Technology”, whose job is to develop strategy, policy and plans for the Air Force’s “communicators” and whose mission is to use or build web applications as a means of engaging Airmen and the general public in conversation. The goal is to make every single Airman a communicator.
“Transformation” captures the key changes already underway and can help guide us into the future. It implies that our lives will increasingly be organized around digital platforms and networks that will replace edifices and big organizations.
