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!

A series of happy coincidences conspired to give Toronto a great new event that's taking off like a rocket! SummerCamp falls hot on the heals of CaseCampToronto7, CopyCamp2008, CIX and StartupCampToronto2, a major mid-week after-party that CommunityNorth calls "one camp to rule them all". This unusual convergence of open/unconference events all happening the evening of the 29th and CaseCamp steward Eli Singer's booking of the amazing megaclub CiRCA presented an opportunity too good to pass up. Many thanks to CaseCamp sponsors comScore, Thornley Fallis, InterCom Search, Social Media Group, Pigsback.com, Segal Communications, FreshBooks and nextMedia for making the space available. Special thanks to Rob Hyndman|Hyndman Law for helping us pickup some extra expenses to make SummerCamp a reality.

Creative convergence happens on the dancefloor!

SummerCamp Dance Party CaseCamp along with its sponsors transform CiRCA into ground zero for Toronto’s creative communities: art, design, communications, technology, media, social change and entrepreneurship. DJs, interactive art, and the closest friends you haven’t met celebrating their passion for participatory culture, creative practice and society. Tuesday, April 29, 2008 9:00 PM - Close CiRCA 126 John Street Toronto, Ontario M4V 2E3 RSVP on the Facebook event. Enjoy a late night party and a great lineup:

• Andrew McConachie (DJ Set)
• Jimmy Blak (DJ Set)
• Abdul Smooth (DJ + Visuals)
• Gabe Sawhney (Interactive Visual Installation)
• Newmindspace (Cool Stuff TBA)

Trust me, you won't want to miss this. Book off the next morning and celebrate with Toronto’s emerging creative leaders who are remaking the city. A glance at the Facebook guest list shows one of the most exciting gatherings of creative change-makers and rabble-rowsers in town. Just some of the groups and communities represented: CaseCamp, StartupCamp, CopyCamp, DemoCamp, PodCamp, FacebookCamp, SciBarCamp, Third Tuesday, Emerging Arts Professionals, ArtsScene, Mercer Union, The Movement, FlashInTO, CFC Medialab, Metronauts/TransitCamp, Centre for Social Innovation, The Overlap, The Beal Institute, VizThink, OpenCities/OpenEverything, Newmindspace, Trampoline Hall, Mobile Jam Fest, Spacing, BlogTO, Talk20 Toronto, WirelessToronto, Mesh, nextMedia, CIX, and many many more. (sorry, my linking finger got tired: Ed.)

I am proud to announce the launch of a new online community and a series of Transit Camp style events across the Greater Toronto region. The stewards are really excited to launch this new project, which builds upon the success of 2007's Toronto Transit Camp and takes it to new places and new audiences. Join the community.

What is a Metronaut?

Metronauts.ca is an open community of people from across the sprawling greater Toronto region who care about the future of their cities. Metronauts are explorers of the future form of our cities and the role transportation has in our lives.

This new project would not be possible without the sponsorship and active participation of Metrolinx (the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority) and we are grateful for their support right from the top of the organization on down, for their willingness to innovate new ways of engaging community as part of their public consultation process. What I am most amazed and pleased by is how this project has brought together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in open and participatory research, media, policy, innovation, technology and culture into an agile team - all of whom call Toronto home. The Metronauts project is an open innovation platform for refining our thinking as we adapt the tools of co-creation, user-generated content, social media and collaborative innovation into the unlikely world of urban transportation policy and planning. I am humbled and blessed to be able to work with some of the most talented leaders in their respective domains on this project. These creative individuals understand the tools and methods of participation and understand the value of pooling their expertise into a community framework for the benefit of their communities and for the development of their practice. And we will be sharing our learning with the community, 'cause that's how we roll. Meet the Band! Mark Kuznicki (Steward-in-Chief), Wendy Koslow (Cruise Director), Sean Howard (Participatory Research Strategist), Misha Glouberman (Conversationalist & Facilitator), Sameer Vasta (Storyteller), Jed Kilbourn (Cultural Anthropologist), Qasim Virjee (Online Community Architect), Matt Rintoul and Lee Dale (Community Site Design), Alistair Morton (Visual Identity Designer), Daniel Rose (Collaborative Innovation Facilitator), David Eaves (Public Sector Renewalist), Michele Perras (Innovation Design Strategist), Jay Goldman (Social Technology Advisor), Eli Singer (Social Media Advisor), David Crow (transitcamp.org Domain Steward), Joey deVilla (Accordion Guy), Mark Raheja (Experience Strategist) and Mark Surman (Professor of Open).

I missed this from my earlier post about Pedro's wonderful workshop at LIFT, but thought I would share it now.

Pedro talks about the possibilities of social software tools and online communities and the possibilities of technology enabling social change. We are working on this all the time, and my practice is more and more focused on the use of both online communities and events linked to social innovation goals. I hope that we can get Pedro to come to Toronto for Mesh, I think he'd be a great addition to MeshU and a panel conversation.

I love digital ethnographers and anthropologists! LIFT08 had a strong program of anthropological and ethnographic research and practice. Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist at Intel (which sounds like a great gig!). She gave an insightful presentation about digital deception based upon a solid understanding of human behaviour around secrets and lies. She argues that understanding secrets and lies provides better insight into issues of privacy and security.

Fascinating stuff - watch the video:

Presentation notes after the jump...

Presentation Notes:

Facts:

• UK survey 2006, nearly half of mobile users actively lie about where they are; Hi honey, "I'm on my way home" - yeah, right!
• 100% of people on online dating sites lie about themselves; men about height, woemen about we
• we are entering an arms race of deception; for every bit of transparency, there is a service to lie about it;
• people lie about where they are in mobile; people lie about height/weight in online dating; entering an era of accelerating deception;

What do anthropology theory and tools reveal about digital deception?

Perspective: technology transforms far more rapidly than social/cultural changes; difficult for us as technologists to understand this limitation, and is rather confounding to Intel (hence they have 30 anthropologists!)

Secrets and Lies; lies - untruths, secrets - knowledge that is withheld;

Cultural Ideals about Secrets & Lies: legal systems and religious doctrine always against lying and deception; there are certain exceptions in certain situations; bringing peace to households, between households and among nations; lies are ok if the end is good;

Cultural Practices about Secrets & Lies: we're telling lies all the time; we tell 6-200 lies a day - from greasing the social skids to much more complicated and intense; motivations: conceiling misbehaviour, not many about increasing popularity; men tell more lies, women are better at it; secrets are kept and broken irrespective of status at law or socially

Other Perspectives: Social theorists that argue lying is a necessary part of daily life; Steignitz - the lie is not about negating truth, but about negating a particular kind of reality; Sommer - self-deception is part of survival; a core behaviour as part of learning about identity; playful act of working out the rules;

Notion that all info should be avail to everyone is very recent; you see various cultures resist this and place gates around their traditions - Australian aboriginals; the secret and the sacred - not all knowledge should be in the public domain; the public domain is actually coded and you need to have knowledge to understand what you are seeing;

Similar playfulness and practice is happening in the digital sphere; avatars, playfulness, codes can be read in a number of different ways; withholding info is a way keeping it safe; what we withhold and why is about keeping ourselves safe;

New ICTs arrive in the land of secrets and lies; lying about where, who, what you are doing are all dissembled online; some of this is required

Dana Boyd looking at age on MySpace is lied about, stunning number of people over 100, which begs credibility; the price of participation is a lie - your must be over 14 to join because of law;

Online dating sites - unlike lies in physical world that result in guilty or shame, lies online results in something approaching glee; lies are flourishing;

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. e.g. "My prom date was gay...I pretended not to know."

Cell phones have tracking services attending them by the parent of children; surveillance can be culturally reconfigured; children with tracking said their parents love them more; alibi services - creative a backstory to support your lie;

Insights/Conclusions:

Tensions between cultural ideas and cultural practices are important and significant; a lot of what we see going on in tech and behaviour are us sorting these tensions out

Secrets & lies is a useful way of reworking notions around privacy and security; systems and networks infrastructure are concerned about privacy and security; people are concerned about they things they don't want to have told, their secrets and their strategy for getting around this is telling lies

What are the implications about how we build social networking sites, building web 3.0 on a bedrock of confabulation?

How does it fit into larger conversations about national security, safety and danger?

Pedro Custodio did a great workshop, an "Online Communities Clinic". Good material, really solid foundation for thinking about and planning user interactions for online communities. Once the slides are on Slideshare I'll update this post and embed. (If you want to see them when uploaded, leave a comment on this post.)

My rough notes follow after the jump....

Overview

Communities need to bring together a unity of goals and actions; they should display internal policies that guide social behaviour; online communities lay on top of computer systems that support the social interaction

Communities necessarily have boundaries; something ambiguous will not be joined; although it is necessary to have boundaries, those boundaries need to be permeable to encourage adoption and movement/adaptability

Online communities architecture:

virtual space -> user interaction -> virtual community -> information

Users Profiling:

Visitors - start as observers
Consumer - as interest raises, so does the involvment at tthis point users
Member - fully active, producing materials, engaging and helping others

Sort communities by kind of Interaction:

Low social interaction - users only interact with the platform, not with each other: e.g. Digg, Last.fm
Built upon "products" - Flickr, YouTube, Threadless - because of the tool, not the users
Highly collaborative communities - real-world communities, moving online for some reason,

...by level of Commitment:

Communities of interest; very specific; will not be active for your whole life, but will join when you need it
Communities of passion; subtype of interest,
Communities of purpose; common short-term goal; afterwards it will dissolve
Communities of practice;

Better Usability means Better Communities? Not only user-centered interfaces...we need community centered interfaces! Need to plan ahead for the behaviour

Communities are conversations; so look for Conversational Maxims; Apply the same ground rules that run daily interactions in real life:

Quantity - the amount of information that each party should provide; should limit how users interact; length and frequency of posts
Quality - deals with truth and authenticity; credit and reference to expertise
Relation - relevancy of participation
Communicate in a fast and reliable way: post message, was it delivered?
Interface should be as transparent as possible; the tool mediates, but it shouldn't get into the way
Allow user to cancel

Community Design Pattern Types:

1. Community support - sustains the community itself
2. Group support
3. Communication support
4. Awareness - perception of the others, part of something bigger

Community Support Patterns:

Quick Registration: as quick and lightweight as possible, very important for them to enter quickly to evaluate the community; but still protect the community from strangers; leave profile info as a later process, noncontingent; need to track the process in order to identify dropouts; PROBLEMS - fear of commitment, because trust has not been established; BOTs are problematic - Catchas, email verification;

Login: force users to identify themselves before using/entering the community; easy recovery mechanisms

Welcome Area: list new members of a community and present them to other members, ensuring that new members won't go unnoticed; e.g. email communities, introduce themselves to each other; USE WHEN: a long-standing community who know each other very well, large collective history, subgroups inside the larger community, resistance to entrance of new members; PROBLEMS: newcomers may not want to attract so much attention at first; veterans have to be made sensitivie;

User Profile: virtual presentation; a personality and skills aggregator; the bridge between the real and the virtual individual representing the user across all interactions with the community; Digital Identity Mapping image - FredCavazza.net;

User Gallery: USE WHEN: hesitation on first contacts, hard to remember who's a member of a community; you know their names, but want to know more about them; PROBLEMS: must be searchable, carefully balance amount of public information without further involvement or identification (user levels-> information levels)

Buddy Lists: friends list is the new centre of the universe; "through others I define myself"; "Tell me who you go out with, and I'll tell you who you are!";

Group Support Patterns:

Groups: need ways to form, short-term and long-term communications; shared repositories; group awareness - feeling of being part of something; E.g. Flickr - friends or family, that's it; USE WHEN: send out multiple artifacts to same users multiple times; select multiple users before interactions; users don't clearly know who they interact with; PROBLEMS: by interacting with groups of users, one might not develop group awareness - no awareness outside the ; additional workload for users; group create strong borders within the community; group moderation;

Invitations: allow user to plan interaction with others; PROBLEMS: time to turnaround; rejection fear; need to sort out

Shared Editing: allow users to edit simultaneous user of data/documents; USE WHEN: need for collaborative editing; missing group collaboration in context of isolated user actions; PROBLEMS: single-user applications don't help collaborative environments; WYSIWIS - what you see is what I see

Reputation and Differentiation: metrics to store reputation, a projection of their status; users with more friends, more photos, more music;

Messaging: provide ability for direct messages within community

Chat: allow users to communicate synchronously; if messages aren't being responded to quickly;

Comments: on specific artifacts; not a message to you in particular, to the community about an artifact;

Forums/Blogs: provide means for persistent, asynchronous conversations; important role for newcomers, a way to learn about the community; persistent nature of the community;

Patterns for Awareness:

Overview: Give users a sense of the other; understanding or realizing the others' activities; communities with high awareness are highly collaborative; creates the feeling that there are many others, than they are; you are just a dot, but you're not alone

Neighbours: proximity pattern; providing information about user's interactions with the platform; Last.fm - people who played similar music; keyword discovery for people you want to meet; Proximity: six degrees of separation concept;

Interactive user Info: make information about others users clickable and connect it with means of communication; quick action spots

Activity Logs: record information about users activity; most famous - Wikipedia tracked changes; memory; users don't have a lot of time, can't be on all the time; need a reminder of what's been happening; merging past and present activities it's hard; scale - ensure many users can update simultaneously; ensure users know what activity is tracked

Timeline: e.g. Facebook news feed;

Period Reports: inform users at regular intervals of relevant changes/actions; weekly what happened in the community - brief;

Aliveness Indicator: show an indicator on the virtual environment that reflects user's activity

Conclusions:

It is about identity; the more I know about the others, the more I feel engaged in/by the community; Features for more advanced users will scare off less advanced users; overlap the experience level profile with the adoption of the features; Foster personalization, production and sharing of content; Plan the social interactions

Scalable Platforms: Can never know when your community will explode; can't predict; development, support, moderation; Open and well documented APIs; the Social Graph;