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. 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...

A World in Crisis

I believe that much of what causes us to gather around the word "Change" from such diverse walks of life comes from the reality of the world in which we find ourselves. Our problems are outstripping our capabilities to solve them. They are multiplying and they are complex. Our institutions charged with managing the world on our behalf are straining to keep up to the accelerating pace of change. From financial to economic crises, from climate to broader environmental and social crises, it is becoming clear to many that what has worked for us in the past is no longer working. This global reality poses risks to each of us, the communities we call home and civilization as we know it.

Complexity

Much of this mismatch between our problems and our capabilities to solve them comes from the increasingly complex and hyperconnected systems around us. As individuals, as institutions and as a society we lack the necessary tools and skills to perceive complexity and make sense of it, much less to manage it. We need new tools and new institutions for this new world.

Community, Social Capital and Connectedness

From Putnam we know the importance of social capital to community resilience and success. And yet throughout the industrial age, our communities have become increasingly disconnected. Our suburban model of urban planning separated work from life and people from each other. Professionalization and specialization of everything separated capabilities into silos of competency managed within command and control systems. Mass media and politics separated people into clumsy demographic categories that denied much of our humanity. Our public service model took lessons from mass commercial enterprise and began to look at citizens as customers. We've lost our sense of civic belonging and participation.

The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole. - Peter Block: "Community: the Structure of Belonging", p.2

Social Web

Into this vacuum of disconnectedness comes a new world of social connection, participation and collaboration enabled by the social web. The set of new social behaviours enabled by social web technologies are, in the view of Clay Shirky, retrieving some much older patterns of human social behaviour. The return of peer to peer, of leaderless organizations, of the circle as the form of social gathering, of tribes, of reputational authority and of trust are all enabled and embedded within the nature of the social web and the technologies that underpin it.

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. - Clay Shirky: "Here Comes Everybody", p.106

What is ChangeCamp?

ChangeCamp is both a platform (online and face-to-face) and a community. ChangeCamp is a platform for citizens to convene other citizens in order to transform their communities and help create change. It is a third-space commons for collaboration that sits outside government, private and institutional structures. ChangeCamp activates and engages what community member David Eaves dubbed the Long Tail of Public Policy. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="532" caption="Long Tail of Public Policy, David Eaves"][/caption]

Methods: Open Space + Social Media + Open Innovation

Embedded within ChangeCamp are three primary memes and methods.

1. Citizen-led large group participatory gatherings similar to Open Space (“ChangeCamps”)
2. Online participation and collaboration using social web technology; same time/place and different time/place
3. Open innovation approaches to value creation: open source, open data, open access, creative commons

A Community of Values and Interests

ChangeCamp is a post-partisan community of citizens interested in using these methods to create change. As a community, we are interested in open government, social innovation, citizen engagement, participatory democracy and public sector renewal. We are interested in exploring the use of social web technology and open innovation approaches as enablers of of positive social change. The ChangeCamp community is both local and national/global, and comprises a network of networks at a variety of scales. David Eaves began an important conversation on the values driving many in the so-called "open movement" with his recent post dubbed A Neo-Progressive Manifesto. While some of the specific values he proposes may be debatable, the themes of human-scale, sustainable, participatory, open, community values and vibrant, creative, remixable and hybrid solutions to public/social problems outside traditional institutions seem to resonate for many drawn to ChangeCamp. Further work and dialogue on these values is important and of interest, but our action does not depend upon a final and definitive exposition of community values.

ChangeCamp Purpose

Given all of the above observations of the context, values and methods emerging within the ChangeCamp platform and community, I would like to propose this statement of purpose for discussion by our community:

ChangeCamp spreads the emerging ideas, tools and methods of a networked society and builds social capital to accelerate community transformation. ChangeCamp is both a platform and a community of action.

The fundamental work of restoring community and facilitating a shift from industrial age to network age institutional structures is the core work that binds together the disparate threads of the ChangeCamp community. That work is focused on making positive social change happen and transforming our communities in line with our values.

A Goal Designed for Action

Enable the organization of 100 ChangeCamps in communities across Canada in September 2010.

This goal is something that Daniel Rose suggested to me in conversation as a useful tool for designing an approach to the future of ChangeCamp. It is intended to be big, bold, actionable and useful for the purposes of creating action and a direction for ChangeCamp. I converted this initial goal into very rough estimates about reach and impact. Assuming 100 participant co-creators at face-to-face events and an online participation platform for ongoing engagement that follows the online community 90-9-1 rule, we can see how achieving such a goal might translate into 1 million Canadians aware and engaged in the activities of community transformation.

A Set of Activities to Achieve this Goal

In order to scale the ChangeCamp platform and community to this level, a program of work to create the enabling framework would be necessary. The actual work in local communities would be undertaken by groups of community organizers, but those organizers need tools and support. An initial scope of activity might include:

• Identify and provide tools, support and training for local organizers
• Develop and publish design patterns for events, both large-scale and small
• Design and develop an integrated online organization and collaboration platform at ChangeCamp.ca
• Build partnerships with organizations with shared interests: citizen engagement, public sector renewal and social innovation
• Deploy social media analytics tools to translate unstructured content into useful information and to measure community engagement and action

Thinking Big

While this vision is large and daunting, I believe that it is achievable. Within our community, we have the talent, networks, methods, skills and capabilities to deliver something truly transformative. I am encouraging us all to think bigger than we normally allow ourselves, to imagine possibility and to bring that imagination of the possible to others. My questions are:

1. Is this vision attractive to you?
2. Can you imagine yourself within it?
3. Is the purpose and goal described worth pursuing?

I look forward to our conversation. You can leave a comment on this post, join the Google Group to discuss, reach me on Twitter (@remarkk) where we are using the hashtag #ChangeCamp or email me at mark@remarkk.com.

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. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="537" caption="Wordle (Merkley, transcribed) by Suzanne Long"][/caption] 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:

1. Please complete our Participant Survey
2. Please leave your comments on this blog post. Don't be shy, don't be overly polite. We have thick skins.
3. If you prefer to be discrete, send an email to changecamp@remarkk.com.
4. 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! ChangeCamp would not have been possible if not for the contributions of so many: Origins: Mark Surman at Mozilla Foundation, Tonya Surman at Centre for Social Innovation, Mayor David Miller and the City of Toronto Web 2.0 Summit, David Crow and BarCamp Toronto, TransitCamp, OpenEverything, TVO's AgendaCamp, #HoHoTO. Organizers & Contributors: Mark Kuznicki, Daniel Rose, Meghan Warby, Lisa Torjman, Ryan Taylor, Matthew Milan, Sean Howard, Meghan Warby, Gerry Kirk, Rohan Jayasekera, David Eaves, Ryan Merkley, Darren Chartier, Suzanne Long, Will Pate, Jennifer Bell, Michael Cayley, Duarte Da Silva, Blair Francey, Martin Kuplens-Ewart, Alistair Morton, Mark McKay, Dan Hocking, Michele Perras, Heather Williams, Matt Nish-Lapidus, Justin Kozuch, Mark Bondyra, Sandy Kemsley Sponsors: SiG@MaRS, MaRS Centre, City of Toronto, Churchill Society, MASS LBP, Torch Partnership, Samara, Remarkk!, Omakase Group, Peapod Studios, Apolitic, Unspace, BFDesign Community Supporters & Donators: Sebastien Chorney, Kevin Lee, Wesley Hodgson, Aidan Nulman, Lee Dale, Peter Jones, Phil Nelson, Pamela Quiroga, Andrae Griffith, Marc-Antoine Parent, Kieran Huggins, Peter Smith, Keith Stephan-Giermek, Ellen Michelson, Miroslav Glavic, Gillian Kerr, Jennifer Bell, Zeena Abdulla, Alex Sirota, Andre Gaulin, Mario Bourque, Patrick Robinson, Matthew Milan, Geoff Whitlock, Patrick Dinnen, Andrew Lockhart, Elizabeth Littlejohn, Eric Squair, This Magazine (Graham F. Scott), Lucia Mancuso Mancuso, Sappho Mullins, Ryan Taylor, Meghan Warby, David Janes, Ryan Merkley, Stephen Chanasyk, Darren Chartier, Duarte Da Silva, Kurt Gooden, Rohan Jayasekera, Michael Jones