Change Camp Halifax
Yesterday’s Change Camp Halifax at The Hub was an engaging day of conversations. The open-space un-conference asked the question What does Halifax as a vibrant city mean to you?
Participants posted topics for discussion and then attended the talks they were most passionate about. I was particularity interested in #Barrington2010 discussing the future of Barrington Street in Halifax.
Barrington Street has some beautiful historic buildings. However over the past year, a number of these properties have become vacated and left in limbo as properties managers such as Starfish Properties await the right time for development. Some of these properties already have plans and others are awaiting approval. Rather than leave these vacant properties with covered windows, the group discussed creative ways to use them as as transitional spaces:
- flash galleries like Nocturne to display local artwork
- open mic nights for local musicians
- indoor bike parking lot
- venue for buskers
- Christmas present wrapping station
- mini-golf course
- quiet reading space
- display historic Halifax information in store front windows
- flee markets, book sales, bake sales
- Lego competitions inside store front windows
- web cams that create a portal into other cities
The group will continue to discuss the future of Barrington Street on January 9th at The Hub. Checkout the Barrington Street photo gallery; any ideas for creative uses come to mind?
Huge congrats to Emily Richardson on organizing an incredibly successful Change Camp and for The Hub for once again being the perfect venue in Halifax for open-space conservations.
ChangeCamp Halifax Live
ChangeCamp Edmonton success!
(Originally published on 10/22/09 at Alain Saffel’s blog)
By all accounts, ChangeCamp Edmonton was a huge success. While we may not have changed the world that day, we made connections with others and had encouraging debates about the way our world is run and our visions for how we’d like to see it run. Change is a process and hopefully we’ve started the ball rolling (along with the other ChangeCamps in Canada!).
If you hadn’t heard about ChangeCamp happened October 17 at Lister Hall at the University of Alberta. The goal of ChangeCamp was to answer the question: “How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?” It’s an “unconference,” which means that there’s no set agenda. The agenda is set that day by the participants in the room.
Our goal was to get 150 people out to the event and it seems that we succeeded. The room was full and we had about 25 people pitch topics to discuss that day. There were so many interesting topics; I would have really liked to have been at more sessions.
Overall, I was really impressed with how smoothly the event was run. The team running the event did an excellent job! I heard a lot of good feedback and everyone seemed pretty happy.
Who was missing?
Many people attended who billed themselves as “average citizens” which was nice to see. If political change is going to happen anywhere, in my opinion, it has to start from the bottom up. There are a lot of unhappy citizens out there. The evidence? What was the voter turnout in the last Alberta election? 40%? There are a lot of people frustrated with status-quo politics.
The rumour was that provincial employees were ordered not to attend. We only saw a few local politicians and, I believe, two MLAs. Granted, our politicians are busy people and this is the first ChangeCamp event we’ve had, but a few more would be nice. I’m hoping we have more ChangeCamps and get better attendance by our leaders.
There are some great posts I’ve listed below that go more in depth about what happened and their views on the events of the day. I’ll let the video and audio content I’ve posted speak for itself.
Read more
ChangeCamp Edmonton: Evolution, Not Revolution
(Originally posted October 18, 2009 on my blog, Alex Abboud)
I attended the first ever ChangeCamp Edmonton yesterday.
I wrote about ChangeCamp on Friday, ahead of the event. What follows is my post-event reaction and thoughts.
Justin Archer introduces ChangeCamp and provides an overview at the start of the day
The day got started around 9am, with an overview of the event concept, process, and “rules of engagement”. I was impressed with the level of turnout at the very start – there appeared to be 100 people or so there by the start, and people trickled in throughout the day. I’d say around 150 people participated throughout the day, but I haven’t seen an official count. There was a pretty good balance in gender, and good mix of ages, which I was pleasantly surprised to see. There wasn’t, however, much ethnic diversity. That’s nobody’s fault, but this is something we’d ideally see more of at future events, especially given that Edmonton is a city with growing immigrant and visible minority (especially aboriginal) populations.
5 items from ChangeCamp Edmonton.
(This post was originally published at daveberta.ca)
On Saturday October 17, over 180 engaged citizens converged to participate in the first ChangeCamp Edmonton. Here are five items that I found to be the most interesting parts of the day-long event:
5) Diversity: Participants came from many diverse backgrounds and I was pleasantly surprised that there were many people who I didn’t recognize from other political events. The large majority of participants were non-partisan (which was extremely refreshing) and sincerely interested in changing the way citizens interact with their governments (and vice versa). I would like to see future ChangeCamps reach out more actively to new Canadians and underrepresented communities in our city who face very unique challenges to participating in governance. Increased outreach will be important for any sequels to this event, but overall I was very impressed with the range of citizens who gave up their Saturday to participate in re-imaging citizenship.
4) A little help from our friends: Videos from ChangeCamp Ottawa and ChangeCamp Toronto welcomed participants to a growing pan-Canadian ChangeCamp community.
ChangeCamp Edmonton Liveblog
The day started with a welcome video from ChangeCamp organizers in Toronto and Ottawa.
ChangeCamp Ottawa wishes Edmonton Good Luck! from Ian Capstick on Vimeo.
This liveblog is tracking the hashtag #yegchange on Twitter during ChangeCamp Edmonton, Saturday October 17, 2009.
ChangeCamp Edmonton
Date: Saturday, October 17, 2009
Time: 8:30 am – 4:30 pm
Location: 87 Avenue & 116 Street, Lister Conference Centre, University of Alberta (map)
Registration: http://www.changecampedmonton.ca/register/
ChangeCamp Edmonton will be a free one-day event that aims to bring all three levels of government together with interested citizens to encourage an environment of learning, sharing, and exploring innovative solutions. Our goal is to ignite a new conversation about what it means to be in government today, what it means to be a Canadian citizen, an Albertan, and an Edmontonian, and what it means to use new technologies and processes that enable discussion, exchange of ideas, and debate.
ChangeCamp is an interactive digital event, bring your:
- Laptop (free wireless)
- Digital Camera
- Video Camera
…as well as your energy and creativity!
ChangeCamp: Next
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…
Social Media and Social Change collide at Vancouver ChangeCamp – June 20th!
This post first originally appeared on TechVibes.
If you look closely, there’s a major trend happening in the exciting world of social media.
Mashable is organzing the Summer of Social Good. The next Twestival launches tomorrow at the 140 Conference. Techvibes recently sponsored Social Actions’ Change the Web Challenge. As I write this, #IranElection is the #1 trending topic on Twitter. As a community, more and more of us are beginning to see the potential of using social media as more than conversation tools – and more as tools for tackling local and global problems – helping us unite to change our world for the better.
A number of Vancouver’s community members are helping to define this trend – by organizing Vancouver’s first ChangeCamp. “VanChangeCamp” is a unique participatory conference happening June 20th to bring together technologists with changemakers, not-for-profits, business leaders and political & government representatives to explore new ways to collaborate for change and open governance in the digital age. Other successful ChangeCamps have already taken place in Toronto and Ottawa.
VanChangeCamp is unique in that it marries structured conference sessions and “unconference” BarCamp-like sessions – where attendees will be invited to create most of the program during the event itself. A few presenters already slotted include David Hume, BC’s Executive Director for Citizen Engagement, Jacob Glick, Google’s Canada Policy Counsel, and Kevan Gilbert, Union Gospel Missions’ Project Coordinator for Online Strategy. All participants are strongly encouraged to pitch a session for the “unconference” portions and share their experiences and expertise.
VanChangeCamp also builds on the motion recently passed by Vancouver city council endorsing the principles of open source, open standards, and open data — covered by Techvibes here.
Vancouver has an array challenges – VanChangeCamp represents an opportunity to gather diverse communities together to learn, share, and explore solutions in an open and inviting environment. We welcome Techvibes readers and interested technologists (developers, designers, entrepeneurs, consultants, etc.) to help make this event a great success.
VanChangeCamp is this Saturday, June 20th! Tickets are selling fast so sign up to reserve your spot at http://vanchangecamp.eventbrite.com. Please note that this is a no-barriers event, so if cost is the only thing that keeps you from attending this event, please contact our event coordinator Elijah van der Giessen at elijahv@gmail.com to register for free.
We look forward to exploring challenges and building new solutions with you at VanChangeCamp 2009! See you at the event!
Vancouver’s ChangeCamp is made possible thanks to the generous sponsorship of Open Web Vancouver, SAP BusinessObjects, Communicopia, and Social Venture Institute at Hollyhock.
ChangeCamp Ottawa Reflections
Citizens lined up at microphones and didn’t yell or make accusations like at most “town halls” in Ottawa. Instead, people proposed sessions, self-organized and taught each other about governance, the Internet and what it means to be part of the community of Ottawa.
I believe a real testament to the long-term impact of relationships built, ideas and thoughts shared at City Hall on May 16 is the ongoing work – online and in real life – because of ChangeCamp Ottawa.
Over 100 citizens came together around one question:
How do you re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?
And now, the conversation continues online and in real life – the ChangeCamp wiki is being tended to by participants and people are still posting, podcasting and processing their thoughts on the day. Ottawa was Canada’s second ChangeCamp. (Here is a great recap how ChangeCamp arrived in the nation’s capital.)
As organizers we knew the event was going to work when people “got it”: citizens pitched ideas, the grid was built and sessions started all with only mild guidance at a few key points. Organizers could sit back and see City Hall was abuzz with activity and ideas.
But, did we make “change”?
