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
At the same time, I would be humbled and grateful if you chose to support my insurgent campaign as the Dennis Kucinich of this crowd of well recognized tech gurus. (Oh wait, he withdrew!)
But I WILL campaign vigourously in these final days for TransitCamp for Best Unconference. I am very proud of what our community did there, how we jumped out of our tech niches and into the mainstream discourse of city-building. Lucky for TransitCamp, the BarCamp mothership wasn’t nominated in competition.
Happy New Year! It’s been an overly long holiday vacation from the blog. I thought I would start the year with a declaration of intent and an ask for your help and insight.
It’s a busy time for Remarkk! at the moment. I’m moving into the final strategy and writing phase for the Creative Convergence Project, completing the engagement strategy and web site launch for Municipal Cultural Planning Partnership and exciting TransitCamp-related developments are coming including the pending publication of an article in the February Harvard Business Review with co-authors Eli Singer and Jay Goldman. Every week, exciting new prospects, ideas, community projects and startup opportunities pop up. I am looking forward to chatting with the folks at the Founders & Funders dinner as well as the inspiring Lift Conference in Geneva. It’s a great outlook for 2008.
While we’re at it, maybe work-life balance should be on this list somewhere. The wonderful thing about this life I have is how work and life really make up a meaningful and integrated whole. Maybe this is my rationalization for not “having a life” in the traditional domestic bliss sense. It may be an integrated whole, but if I’m honest with myself, it’s not really that balanced and I need to work on that.
I’m wrestling with the question of how to scale my business while maintaining my focus on the things I find personally meaningful, my purpose and the strength that has come from my independence. My preferred mode of taking on more and larger projects is to collaborate with other independent or freelance creative pros whom I know and trust. People who, like me, want to innovate, make meaning and change the world while offering each other complementary skills and capabilities. Maybe you are one of those people.
So, what kinds of capabilities am I looking for in my soulmate-collaborators? Well, here’s a list of the things that tend to be asked of me by clients and prospects:
community research
community engagement strategy
branding and graphic design
web design & implementation (yes, social media/community sites!)
open space/unconference style events to support creative collaboration
community management and evangelism
policy, technology and industry research in entertainment, cultural & creative industries
innovation strategy development and writing
project management
My strength has always been my ability to cross these various domains with relative ease and to synthesize it all in a meaningful way. But I know I can’t keep DOING it all if I’m going to be effective and deliver all the value I have to offer. Meanwhile, I’ve got some work to do in focusing my service offering, positioning my brand and rationalizing my workflow and project portfolio.
I stubbornly resist well-established methods of growing a service-based business. I want to know:
How can a network of innovative professionals work in a way that effectively competes with a traditional integrated firm?
Because I talk the talk of open source, co-creation and community-driven innovation, I want to live it. I’m putting myself out to my community to ask for your insights as I develop Remarkk further in 2008. If you’re part of my community and have insights to share on these questions, or have some of these complimentary capabilities, I’d love to hear from you. Coffee is on me.
I really don’t give my good friend David Eaves nearly enough link-love. I’m making a conscientious effort to correct that, and now is a good time to start. He and Taylor Owen have co-written an Op Ed in the Toronto Star I recommend, “Failed strategy connects Afghan fields, city streets”:
In the coming months, under the leadership of the former U.S. ambassador to Colombia, U.S. private contractors will likely attempt to fumigate poppies in Afghanistan. Around the same time, the Canadian government will decide whether to shut down the Insite supervised injection site in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
The two policies are inextricably linked and unambiguously bad.
What’s really sad in both cases is how evidence is ignored because of ideological blinders. Fumigation in Colombia failed to achieve its goal (coca production actually increased) and introduced many dangerous and immoral externalities including damaging the health and legitimate livelihoods of local people. Supervised injection sites have proven effective at harm reduction and increased access to appropriate care for addicts.
Ideologies make me sad. They often create blinders to perception, creating more heat than light. At a time when we need better perceptive capacity in an environment of accelerating change, I’d like to believe we are evolving beyond ideology. I believe that part of the disengagement of mainstream people from politics has been the failure of both left-wing and right-wing ideologies to engage their imaginations and address the realities of modern life.
But apparently, humans need ideologies to make sense of their world and their place in it. Maybe we just need new ideologies. We’re accepting nominations for emerging and relevant 21st century ideologies in the comments section. Leave a link to the relevant Wikipedia page!
Students at a small town Nova Scotia high school rallied to support the victim of bullies who was targeted because he wore a pink shirt, which (of course!) made him gay. (Thanks to Bike Rally buddy Owen for passing this on.)
The story has been picked up internationally, and now the school is being contacted by others who want to bring “Pink Shirt Day” to their schools. A powerful meme about tolerance is released, and a million pink shirts bloom.
My friend Owen does amazing work in the small Ontario town of Peterborough and the Kawartha Lakes region. Among other work for PARN, Owen works with student GLBTQ groups and helps students set up groups in their schools. He told me of a school near the cottage country town of Bobcaygeon (pop’n: 3,000) with a vibrant queer youth group that includes many straight participants. I was astounded. As a kid who grew up in Owen Sound (pop’n: 22,000) in the 80s, I just couldn’t imagine that level of awareness, openness and support in a tiny rural Ontario town.
Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy”, an anthem for kids growing up gay in the 80s, tells the story of a gay boy who has to leave his small town, soaked in the melancholy that implies. Of course, this is still an all too frequent story, but one that is becoming less and less common thanks to the work of students, community activists and the culture at large.
I just realized it has been 3 weeks since my last blog post and I apologize, dear reader, for letting you down. I will endeavour to be more consistent in the future. I have also fallen WAY behind on my RSS feeds. I HAVE been busy. I rarely blog about work, so here’s a bit of an update:
I facilitated a net neutrality townhall conversation at nextMEDIA (video forthcoming, I hope)
I helped organize a successful first Open Cities unconference, which has begun a whole series of new conversations and activity
I successfully reframed theCreative Convergence Centres Projectinto the Creative Convergence Project, which the steering committee approved; the project is moving forward with a compelling scope that will focus on creative places at the building, district and city-wide scales
I developed a new service offering for community cultural engagement at the municipal level, including a great deal of online community practices and tools taken from our experiences with BarCamps and, particularly, from Toronto Transit Camp.
New business continues to come my way and the consulting pipeline is pretty much full through the fall. This has started me thinking about where I want to take Remarkk Consulting as a business.
Until now, Remarkk Consulting has been an umbrella for my own consulting work and personal passion projects. The positive feedback I get from this work tells me first of all that the combination of work and personal passion is key. It also tells me that my chosen domains at the intersection of Technology, Culture, Public Policy and/or Strategy are under-served and in need of fresh ideas and new energy at a time of profound change. So I’m in the right place, in what appears to be the right time.
As indie consultants know, we have choices to make as we grow:
We can stay independent, charge more, and move up the strategic food chain.
We can partner with other indies and enter into joint projects on an ad-hoc basis.
We can hire staff and start building a “Practice” and a “Firm”, leverage past work through reusable knowledge that can be transferred to junior consultants.
Management is not something I necessarily want to return to, although I enjoyed the mentoring aspects of management. I am drawn to loose and agile agglomerations of talented peers – Jevon’s Manifesto for an Emerging Consultant Counter Culture – rather than more formal large organizational structures. I am also not interested in becoming one of those consultants that is so caught up in the strategic stratosphere as to lose my connection to the tangible reality of grassroots communities.
These are some of the factors I’m looking at as I consider the future directions of Remarkk Consulting. If you’ve been there before, I’d love to hear about your experiences. How do you evolve your practice in sync with your passions in a way that gives meaning to both?
