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.

I thought I would finally share the slides from my recent talk at the Ottawa Social Media Breakfast. Thanks to Robin Browne for capturing the audio MP3 which I sync'd to the Slidecast below. Enjoy!

For those in the Ottawa area, I will be speaking at Social Media Breakfast Ottawa 9 on Wednesday, May 6th. Thanks to Simon Chen and Mark Faul for inviting me to Ottawa in the lead-up to ChangeCamp Ottawa on Saturday, May 16th. Unfortunately I won't be able to attend ChangeCamp Ottawa (the first ChangeCamp since we created the format in January) myself, due to the inevitable post-event exhaustion (and likely hangover) from organizing the SpinTO fundraising launch event on Friday, May 15th. The stars just weren't aligned for this one. But no matter, because Mark Faul, Ian Capstick and many other great Ottawa folks have been doing a great job with minimal advice from me. Which is perfect for me and shows that the model can scale and propagate. For those who are able to come to the Ottawa SMB, here's a little preview of what I'll be talking about:

Social Web, Social Change & the Return of Community. The social web is making possible new and exciting capabilities, new ways of participating in a global conversation. However, often those interested in social media and online community leave something very important, and very human, behind: our need for face-to-face interaction, to meet people around our shared passions and to have an impact, to create meaning.  Drawing from his work creating hybrid online and face-to-face participatory experiences, Toronto-based ChangeCamp organizer and consultant Mark Kuznicki will outline some theory and practice about how the social web meets physical community.

Via Andrew Sullivan: The next generation - Generation Y, the Millennials, the Net Generation - emerges, announces itself and declares its intentions this year. I talk about these amazing, creative and post-partisan young people a lot in my work - their values, the way they work, their use of media, their learning styles. I usually explain that my role, and the role of my Generation X peers, is to act as translators and brokers between the Boomers and their Millennial children - transferring knowledge, power and capital to a new generation that will become the dominant force in our future. I know my place, and I have confidence in their abilities to fix the crap their parents have left in their wake.

I highly recommend reading my good friend David Eaves' article Progressivism's End co-written with his frequent collaborator, Taylor Owen. The analysis is very strong and it is the most effectively written articulation of what I believe to be the emerging realignment of policy and politics as influenced by web technology, the creative class and the steady transition of power from Boomers to Gen Y. Because I love it so, a couple of excerpts. On how the Left is killing Progressivism:

Seeing their hard-fought accomplishments under threat, traditional baby boomer progressives began to prioritize the survival of New Deal policies and institutions over the idealistic outcomes they were built to promote. Thus the central paradox of progressivism was born: its older-style advocates, entrenched against innovation and reform, even in the service of progressive values, had unwittingly become the new conservatives.

And on Obama's internet fundraising and engagement strategy:

...[it} creates a network of people directly and meaningfully invested in his campaign. The millions of visitors to mybarackobama.com are encouraged to use, remix and contribute to the Obama message, which in turn facilitates its breadth and scope. They are given some control and made to feel ownership over the very identity of the campaign. During the primaries alone, 30,000 completely independent Obama events were organized through the website. This is not command-and-control politics. It represents a decentralization of governance that is a harbinger of things to come: Obama’s online network was leveraged to assist victims of last spring’s midwestern floods.

Eaves and Taylor go beyond a simple reading of Obama's influence to the underlying forces that created such fertile ground for Obama's emergence. From technology change, to social movements to demographics - there is a compelling case that we are the cusp of a epochal change and realignment of politics, with Obama himself an early signal of the future and a midwife to this change. But what of Canada?

It is unclear whether any Canadian party is currently able to have this discussion. The political landscape is limited. The Progessive Conservatives are gone, and the NDP, because of its statist model, and Liberals, because of their years in power, remain caught in the progressive paradox — more often than not defending old institutions and approaches.

Readers will know that I am one of those swept up in the neo-progressive hope that Obama represents. I am also one of the many Canadians looking at our own politics with profound disappointment at the state of political leadership and politics in our country. As we enter our own election, we see a fractured "progressive" slate of four parties splitting votes and lacking coherence. We need political leadership with roots in social movements, as Eaves and Taylor suggest. In the search for such a leader, we should all have a look at Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party of Canada. Check out the full interview of her on Question Period, where she describes a post-ideological position that reflects her roots in the environmental movement as well as the Progressive Conservative party. With the entry of a Green Party MP into the House of Commons, and with a movement and a lawsuit to get May's participation on the slate of future leadership debates, we may finally hear an articulation of a post-ideological neo-progressive agenda that embraces Canadian values of environmental stewardship, without the statist baggage of the NDP, the historical privilege of the Liberals or the separatist non-starter that is the Bloc Quebecois.

Today the Washington Post reports on a study by medical sociologist Nicholas A. Christakis and political scientist James H. Fowler with the headline "Social Networks' Sway May Be Underestimated". Their work is pointing to the strong impact of social networks in behaviour - discovering that entire networks of smokers appear to have quit virtually simultaneously.

Now this shouldn't really be a surprise to those who have been paying attention to social network analysis, tipping points and the new behaviours enabled by the social web.

What is a surprise is that the nonprofit/charitable sector has been fairly late to the social web party, while corporate brands trip over themselves to build brand communities, develop social media strategies and deploy viral campaigns as budgets increasingly shift from broadcast to digital.

When it comes to helping to shift societal behaviours to more sustainable and humane patterns, the tools, practices and methodologies of social media and social change were made for each other.

If you (or your clients) are involved in social change and looking for an intensive, practical and productive training into these technologies and practices, Social Tech Training being held June 22-24th in Toronto could be just the thing. I sit on the advisory board for the event.

A co-production of Web of Change and MaRS, this is an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the global leaders in this space. Check out the amazing faculty. The agenda is pretty rich and allows for plenty of opportunities to make the program fit individual needs.