Yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion at the ConnectIT conference, entitled Global Knowledge Cities: Does Toronto make the cut?:
Among other factors, powerful global corporations, emergence of Web 2.0 technologies, and the increased ease of information displacement have changed our social landscapes. In light of this shift, how will cities, like Toronto, be using technology to gain a competitive advantage in the changing global landscape? Are they improving the quality of life for its residents? What defines a fully developed/knowledge city? Where does Toronto stand?
The panel was moderated by the engaging James Norrie, Associate Dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management with fellow esteemed panelists Dave Wallace, CIO – City of Toronto, John Cannon, CIO – Toronto Transit Commission and Diane Francis, Editor-at-Large, National Post. The panel was introduced by our Twitter-obsessed Mayor David Miller (@mayormiller), who likes to tweet photos of journalists, clearly feeling empowered and tickled by the opportunity to turn the camera on the press.
It was a wide-ranging conversation, and provided a great opportunity for the City of Toronto to tell the audience of Ryerson Information Technology Management students, alumni, faculty and members of the technology community and industry about the City’s initiatives and vision for the future.
Congratulations to organizers, Matthew Merritt, Dimitry Sapon and Jaime Sorgente (@jsorgent) for a very pro-style conference. As a tech conference created by students for the wider Ryerson and Toronto community I was very impressed with their professionalism and attention to detail.
There was a lot of audience interest in the TTC’s new information initiatives, include next bus/train information, and the upcoming trip planner and Google Transit integration. Dave Wallace shared an update about the City’s 311 program, spoke about the important lessons they learned at the Web 2.0 Summit about fast, iterative web development approaches and listening to the community. He is also clearly excited to be a leader in municipal open data and is working out some of the difficult issues around privacy, standards and industry and community collaboration. He did drop a little mention about dark fibre in the city which I had hoped we could follow-up, but we ran out of time. Diane Francis opened the panel discussion with a high-level overview of Toronto’s natural advantages as a global financial capital and reviewed the current state of the imploding media industry and the radical transformation underway in this important sector of Toronto’s economy. Read her very insightful piece, It’s not about AIG, stupid…, about the massive global financial system bailout happening with AIG as a conduit.
I was there to bring a provocation about the creative city, the importance of social technology and place, the future of community and the responsibility and opportunity for students and graduates to get involved in co-creating our future city. I was pleased that both the Mayor and Dave Wallace recognized ChangeCamp as an important forum for exploring future community collaboration, and that John Cannon also recognized the impact of TransitCamp in helping inform the future direction of TTC.ca and it’s customer information initiatives.
I am excited by the growing momentum we have in Toronto right now towards open, participatory, creative and effective government that recognizes how technology can enable a transformation in our city. 2009 is looking very promising!
Below the jump are my full prepared remarks for the panel discussion. Enjoy.
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!)
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:
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!
Twitter is the human swarm: an always-on, open, global and decentralized conversation. Twitter has undergone a phase change as a communications tool, and we see its effects globally, from news of the attacks in Mumbai to Toronto’s tech scene. Something new is emerging, something very powerful: Twitter is becoming a platform for collective action.
Whale in the sky, by Gail Johnson
In Toronto, #HoHoTO was a holiday party held December 16, 2008 to raise funds for the Daily Bread Foodbank that has had a big local impact and received coverage all over the online and traditional media. I think the Toronto tech community will look at this event the way some of us look back at the first BarCamp in Toronto in November 2005, a milestone in the emergence of a new community made possible by technology.
Since then, a myriad projects have hatched on or been assisted by Twitter. #thmvmnt is reimagining how free-agent creative and design professionals work, collaborate and make the world better. #ChangeCamp is changing the way we think about government, democracy and citizenship. #tsTO is a conversation about “TwitterSpace” – garages and war rooms provided by Twitter patrons that act as distributed temporary incubators for projects born in the swarm. #svc is looking to launch a Social Venture Commons leveraging the power of the hyper-connected twittersphere.
What is going on here?
Jay Goldman recently described it as ant colony communication – we’re leaving little pheromone signals in our digital wake. They act as attractors to trigger self-organizing behaviours among others in the colony.
Hive, a short film by The Movement co-founder and instigator Alan Smith, foretold the story of its emergence:
Clay Shirky has talked about how online social networks and communities are entering a new phase of development, one of collective action. We’re watching this new form emerge from its cocoon, and it’s fascinating.
Humanity appears to be undergoing a techno-social evolution right in front of our eyes. Is Hive’s superorganism being born, and are we part of it? Is the Web truly Us?
I believe it is, and I believe that this is not only good, but it is critical to our survival. All around us are huge, intractable problems of collective action: crisis and the risk of collapse are in our ecological, economic, political and cultural environments. What better evolutionary development than a collective intelligence enabled to in a decentralized way coordinate collective action to these very problems?
To realize the potential of this collective intelligence, we have problems to solve:
How do we involve, include and reflect the values of the non-connected periphery in our hyper-connected core?
How do the myriad fleeting ideas that emerge find stable structures to see them through to execution?
How will existing structures have to adapt in order to allow this new potential to be realized and harnessed?
Whose interests are served by the new emergent order and whose interests are harmed? How will those conflicting interests be negotiated?
If you’re interested in these questions and have some ideas on how to solve these meta problems, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or better yet join the conversation on Twitter: #swarmintelligence, I’m @remarkk.
David Eaves is somebody you need to know and love as I do. He’s been doing some great work on public sector renewal, negotiation and how government can learn from open source software.
His recent post Why StatCan is (or could be) Google is fascinating and well worth a read. David’s thesis is that StatCan needs to give away the data for free while at the same time attracting a whole new generation of creative Gen Y geeks to build its relevance in the future.
First, distinguish and separate what you do: “Creating and organizing information about Canada” from what makes you valuable: making this information universally available to citizens.
Second, make yourself the centre of a data gathering, sharing and analyzing eco-system: There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people out there who could do amazing things with StatCan’s data.
Eaves poses an amazing challenge to an institution that is, like many public service agencies, under pressure to act more like business, looking at new business models and additional revenue opportunities. This orientation isn’t bad in itself, but often public institutions learn all the wrong lessons from the private sector. At the same time, their public good mandates are often well-suited to their being linchpins in the coming network economy. Look to Umair Haque’s work on “Edge Economy” for clues on what the emerging economy looks like.
Publicly funded content creation can create huge downstream innovation and public good possibilities in a world of long-tail and so-called “crowd-sourced” economics. But the management of many publicly funded institutions have been moving in the wrong direction – trying to capture, limit and monetize content instead of making it freely available to the public. Eaves’ piece on StatCan is an important shot across the bow of why this approach is counterproductive to its stated goals.
Join the conversation on Twitter. tag: #ChangeGovCA
Recent political developments in Canada have taken us all by surprise and left many of us confused and disillusioned, but also super-engaged. This a tremendous opportunity and a moment for real dialogue among Canadians about our politics, our democracy and our individual citizenship.
Many of us are watching with rapt attention what’s going on in the transition to an Obama administration in the United States. I’ve been amazed at how the technologies of participation are being married to the philosophy of transparency in very real and exciting ways. An administration-in-waiting that blogs with open commenting! And offers a Seat at the Table for open policy conversations and submission of documents!
Inspired by these developments and the work of Laurence Lessig and Joe Trippi with Change-Congress.org and Open-Government.us, I registered the domain ChangeGov.ca, with an eye to it being a place for a new conversation for a multi- and non-partisan movement of Canadians interested in changing our institutions of government to reflect our times. I don’t know what this might become, but I’m inviting people interested in democratic renewal and the principles of politics embedded in the philosophy of the open web to join and open the conversation.
Leave a comment on this post, or join the conversation on Twitter by using the tag: #ChangeGovCA. You can follow the conversation at search.twitter.com or using the awesome search pane on the powerful TweetDeck twitter app.
The panel was moderated by the engaging James Norrie, Associate Dean of the Ted Rogers School of Management with fellow esteemed panelists Dave Wallace, CIO – City of Toronto, John Cannon, CIO – Toronto Transit Commission and Diane Francis, Editor-at-Large, National Post. The panel was introduced by our Twitter-obsessed Mayor David Miller (@mayormiller), who likes to tweet photos of journalists, clearly feeling empowered and tickled by the opportunity to turn the camera on the press.
