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.
The ChangeCamp community is growing and continuing to build momentum. After ChangeCamps in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver and with organizers coming together in Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal and beyond, this felt like a good time to reflect and share what we’ve been doing together and explore some possibilities for the future.
To that end, I hosted a cross-Canada conference call for past and prospective ChangeCamp organizers and allies to share where we came from, what we’ve accomplished and learned and where we might go. Detailed notes are available on the wiki. We are building relationships across Canada so organizers can support and learn from each other. If you are interested in joining us, please join the Google Group.
A Point of Departure
A second goal of this call was to share a synthesis of my own accumulated thoughts, conversations and inspirations over the past six months, describing what I believe is under the hood of ChangeCamp and to describe a vision for what ChangeCamp might become. I am embedding my slides here to share with the wider community.
Change Camp: Next
View more documents from Mark Kuznicki.
This vision is speculative, blue-sky and from my own point of view. I am sharing it to begin a deeper discussion and to begin designing the kernel of ChangeCamp. A fuller description of this vision and your comments follow after the jump…
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!