A ChangeCamp event is a creative face-to-face gathering that is citizen-led, non-partisan and social web enabled. ChangeCamps bring together citizen change agents to answer questions like:

How can we work together to create our desired future?

ChangeCamp addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and between citizens and our civic institutions. We seek to create connections between people and their civic passions by using new tools of communication.

The ChangeCamp community is open to all. We hope to ignite a self-organizing movement for positive change in cities, towns and neighbourhoods across Canada.

Off the Blog

Open Space, Social Media and Open Data

Mark Kuznicki on Mar 3, 2010 · Filed Under Uncategorized

This video of a talk I gave at the wonderful Reboot conference in Copenhagen in June 2009. I’ve delivered different versions of this talk at a number of venues, and I think it’s the best synthesis of the theory of change that is the foundation of the work of the ChangeCamp project and community. I also think it needs a lot of work, but that’s life.

ChangeCampTO 2010 live-blogs, videos, photos

Mark Kuznicki on Feb 18, 2010 · Filed Under Uncategorized

A huge thank you to our sponsors (Toronto Public Library, Peapod Studios, Samara Canada, Ascentum, Microsoft and OSSTF District 12), our volunteers and our participants for an incredible start to our project to create a civic engagement toolkit and a self-organizing movement of people who create spaces for civic discourse, community dialogue and citizen action.

The event was called ChangeCampTO: Designing a Civic Engagement Toolkit and it took place Tuesday, February 16th at the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library.

The event was envisioned as an opportunity to engage a diverse cross-section of people from Toronto (and beyond) who care about civic life into a big, bold collaborative project: using the 2010 municipal elections as the excuse to gather people together in community-based dialogue both face-to-face and online.

This post will be a central place to archive links to content created by our participants at and about this event. That content is after the jump, and this post will be updated as content is published.

Once we collect this content and digest it, we’ll post our analysis of what we did together and some reflections on lessons learned from the event.

A Note on Event Process

This event was not an unconference format at all like a typical ChangeCamp event. It was designed more like a very large scale ChangeLab session that we’ve seen before in Toronto and elsewhere. It focused 200 participants in 3 hours around a single goal: to generate ideas for the kinds of processes, tools and methods that might be in a toolkit we are calling a “Change Kit” also known as “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box”.

This section describes the process, which was developed in collaboration with Erika Bailey, Ryan Coleman, Daniel Rose, Mark Reheja, Greg Judelman, Peter Jones and members of the Design with Dialogue community.

Reception bar
Participants gathered in plenary, theatre style seating
Context setting presentation
Warm-up talk to your neighbour based on provided questions
Overview of the design exercise
Randomized table assignments to breakouts of 8 people with one assigned scribe
A design brief provided at the table with instructions for the assignment
60 minutes of brainstorming ideas, captured on Post-Its and through a table-specific liveblog
One presenter stays behind to share, while the rest of the table moves one table over to hear report back
Report back by presenter captured on digital video recorder
Marketplace, where participants can wander from table to table, leaving comments behind on Post-Its
Return to plenary, this time standing in closing circle
Sharing insights and main ideas, giving thanks, recognizing diversity
Ballot for personal commitment
Open forum for announcements
Break to reception bar

Our detailed event design plan is published in this Google Document.

A big thank you to event manager Kate Richards and the contributions of hard-working volunteers Lee Dale, Behrouz Hariri, Natasha Mckenna, Susan Pearn and Duane Brown. We would also like to thank our volunteer table scribes: Michael Cayley, Ian Macpherson, Lori Smith, Natasha Mckenna, Darren Chartier, Meghan Warby, Chiara Camponeschi, Jonathan Laba, Neha Thanki, Connie Crosby, Chad Craig, Marco Campana, Chris Berry, Michael Jones, Jonathan Laba, Bernard Fernandes, Graham Scott, Chris Hayden, Dragan Stojanovic, Patrick Connolly, Melanie Gorka, Greg Judelman, Christopher Wulff, Carsten Knoch, Brian Frank, Nabil Harfoush and Dragan Stojanovic.

Context Setting Presentation

ChangeCampTO Feb.16, 2010

View more presentations from Mark Kuznicki.