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.
