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.

Long Tail of Public Policy, David Eaves

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The convergence of these forces in the context of tremendous global economic, environmental and political uncertainty signals an opportunity for renewal by change-makers, social innovators and social entrepreneurs for the benefit of us all. The complexity of the world requires better solutions, and we know from the open innovation literature that the ideas we need today do not live within a single organization.

Is this a truly transformative moment at a critical point in human history? Is a new social, economic, environmental and cultural resilience possible, or will status quo forces reassert themselves?

Full essay after the jump…

The New Great Transformation

Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest and his talks paint a picture of an emergent immune response to global environmental and social injustice in the form of a global and decentralized social movement unlike anything that has come before. When you have some time to reflect, I recommend the video of the full Long Now talk.

Hawken describes an emerging movement of NGOs around the world concerned with values of economic, environmental and social justice – projecting a set of global cultural creative values throughout the world.He describes this as a movement unlike any other in history. It is new, because it is not driven by a single charismatic leader with a unifying ideology. This movement is not devoid of ideology, of course, but it is primarily pragmatic and solutions-oriented about propagating memes, while being driven by a unifying set of values rather than an integrated ideological system.

Up to now every ism became a schism. This movement is born atomized.

This movement is also not trying to aggregate power onto itself, but rather it seeks to disperse pathological concentrations of power that are harmful to the sustainability of human and other life on earth. It is less about gaining power than it is about permeating our institutions with ideas and memes, trying them out to see what works, letting them go if they don’t.

Hawken claims that we are observing the end of isms. Moving from a world of privilege to a world of community. In his view, Neo-conservatism, religious and economic fundamentalism are vestigial reactions to the threat to traditional concentrations of power that is posed by this movement.

The Social Web

The emergence of a self-organizing global civil society movement that Hawken describes is enabled and accelerated by social web tools. Those who are building these tools, learning about how they are eliciting new kinds of human behaviour, and developing practices to connect those tools with the challenges and opportunities of contemporary global life are engaged in building the architecture for Hawken’s Great Transformation.

Whether in social movements, government or corporate life, the technologies and behaviours of the Social Web are already having a huge impact. This is only beginning, and these impacts will become more and more visible in the years to come, as Generation Y grows into itself and assumes its place in our organizations and our politics.

The Obama Moment

We may see a truly transformational leader take the world stage in January 2009.

Barack Obama’s recent speech on race in America, A More Perfect Union, is the closest thing I have witnessed to transformational leadership in action. This is a new style of leadership, one born out of a deep understanding of complexity of the post-modern world, steeped in grassroots community organization, recalling the best oratory from history and realized through the enabling networks, technologies and participatory practices of the Social Web. Just one of the reactions:

What I heard today, though, was not a political speech in the sense we have gotten used to in this country. I heard instead a speech that, as much as it was about Obama and Wright, was also about us. Our politics does not quite know how to handle such a thing; campaigns are meant to tell people what they can expect to receive, not to ask them to understand, forgive, and reach out. [The Plank]

A politician promoting self-help and social change. This is new. It is not the nanny-state, nor is it laissez-faire neo-liberalism. Hillary Clinton says “I will do this for you”, Barack Obama says “we can do this, but only together”. Absolutely progressive, but pragmatist and post-ideological. Somebody who does not shy away from complexity, his 37 minute speech receiving 3 million views on YouTube in a few days thereby bypassing the 15 second sound-bite horror show that is cable news. Obama is a politician who uses the Social Web not only to communicate but, as Sean Howard argues, to gain insight and enable our participation:

Even if Obama fails to achieve his goal of becoming President of the United States, I predict he will have a deeper and more powerful understanding of the American people than anyone in the history of politics. He will have engaged at a level yet to be fully grasped or understood. [CrapHammer]

The importance of Obama isn’t so much his policies, the man himself or even his potential to transform US and international politics. His importance is that he is the FIRST of his kind – a political leader that understands and is able to intelligently tap the forces of Hawken’s “New Great Transformation” using the tools of the Social Web – in order to bring participation back into democracy. This is my great hope: that others will learn and will follow.

My Work – Government 2.0?

These converging forces and my own recent work is giving me greater focus about the direction for my consulting work and greater clarity around my social mission. What is it that I do, and why am I doing it? I am wrestling with some key questions:

1. What is the relationship between the world of control (corporations, government, governance, policy, politics) and this emerging decentralized global social movement?
2. What is the interface between hierarchies and heterarchies? How do we break the boundaries between them and create a fusion of these categories for mutual benefit?
3. What is the relationship between global, networked movements and place? How do we reimagine the local in the face of a profoundly changed global context?

I suppose you could say that I work in the Government 2.0 space. I do spend a lot of time working on projects related to public policy and planning, but I’m reluctant to attach myself to 2.0-anything. The term “Web 2.0″ didn’t help us understand the Social Web with any particular insight, so I’m reluctant to hop on the Gov2.0 bandwagon. But I will try to give some definition to how these emerging trends impact the public sphere.

My reading of whatever “Government 2.0″ is is not about “E-Government”. It is not about info-age efficiency from automating government services using web tools, however useful and beneficial these applications of technology might be. E-Government is not transformational change, it is incremental change.

The E-Government discourse does not allow for insight about what public policy should be and how its goals can be achieved. Nor does it provide guidance about how the private and public spheres collaborate in new ways to produce those public benefits.

My focus on public engagement and open innovation models in Government and governance is in part about enabling a new conversation about how we develop policy and plans, how regular citizens can become part of a solution-making process and how we can reconsider and reconfigure the public sphere in order to get better solutions. It is about open innovation applied to developing public policy solutions – inside or outside government.

And yes, this is an emerging field of practice, with much that is not yet well understood. So I look for collaborators and clients who are interested in doing innovative work in this emerging space; groups of passionate individuals interested in playing midwife to something new that is actually pretty old: nature reasserting itself as a form of social resilience to global change.