ChangeCamp Halifax was held Saturday, December 5th at the Hub and from all reports was a great success. Congratulations to Emily Richardson, the lead organizer. I gave Emily some coaching along the way and she had some great help in facilitator Sera Thompson of ALIA Institute. For more about the Halifax event and other ChangeCamps across Canada, see the ChangeCamp blog and wiki.
Cross-posted from ChangeCamp.ca
As one of the instigators of ChangeCamp at MaRS in Toronto on January 24th, I have spent much of the past 10 days trying to process all the content, ideas, outcomes and possibilities that it generated. It’s been a little overwhelming. Clearly we tapped a rich vein of attention.
Wordle (Merkley, transcribed) by Suzanne Long
So what did we do together? Let’s do a quick rundown of the numbers:
- 140 participants (one person for every character in a Tweet!)
- 100 wiki pages
- 40 YouTube videos
- 450 Flickr photos
- Thousands of tweets, the #1 trending topic on Twitter in the world that day!
- 96 blog mentions from around the world
- one story in the Globe & Mail:
- one beautifully produced segment on CBC Radio’s Spark: (full unedited interview)
- one piece by Kris Reyes on CityNews
- one piece by Jamie Woo in Torontoist
- one Best of ChangeCamp piece by Matthew Hayles in BlogTO
- many new relationships
- several new projects initiated
- several existing projects accelerated
- VanChangeCamp organizing already underway
- and one great big meme propagating through the underbrush
That’s a lot of heat from our ChangeCamp fire! But how much light was there? How much change was made? What was the quality of the products of our co-creation?
To my mind, the jury is still out on this question. A lot will happen not at ChangeCamp, but in the weeks and months to come because of ChangeCamp. We need to hear, share and tell those stories. We need your help:
- Please complete our Participant Survey
- Please leave your comments on this blog post. Don’t be shy, don’t be overly polite. We have thick skins.
- If you prefer to be discrete, send an email to changecamp@remarkk.com.
- Have more feedback? Write a post about what worked, what didn’t and ideas for the future, like this, this, this, this or this.
The organizers came to this event with modest goals: to ignite and accelerate a new conversation about the shifting ideas of government and citizenship in this “age of participation”, enabled by new tools and thanks to the web. Based on the buzz in online social media, traditional media and face-to-face conversations, I think we can safely say that we achieved that modest goal.
For people in other cities and countries that have been inspired by the ChangeCamp idea, it is important to understand all the preparatory ground work that made ChangeCamp a success in Toronto. An event of this kind is all about having the right mix of participants. Engaging that mix from government, technology, design, social innovation and media-making was key to our success.
Toronto is blessed by a dense cluster of some of the most talented designers, developers, creators and social innovators in the world. Toronto is also home to one of the most connected and innovative BarCamp and Twitter communities in the world, who have been using online tools together with face-to-face events to create change in areas of civic life outside the technology sector. We have leaders like Mark Surman of Mozilla Foundation who laid the groundwork within our City government, opening the door to open data. We had a recent “Web 2.0 Summit” event at City Hall where social media and open data in the context of government had centre stage in front of an influential audience both at the City and the Province. We have a Mayor who said:
When you open up the data, there’s no limit to what people can do. It engages the imagination of citizens in building the city.
What direction does ChangeCamp go next? That’s another post. We want to make sure that our emerging community has lots of opportunity to inform its future direction, to participate in it, to get involved in many new ways. We can’t do it all, we can’t do it alone, we can’t boil the ocean, but we can start with some small steps that in the long-run can enable major change.
Please read after the jump and give all the originators, organizers, contributors, sponsors and supporters some love. They deserve it. I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of people, so raise your hand at changecamp@remarkk.com if I missed you!
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!