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.

Technical stuff:

I was able to record the audio from several sessions and video from a few. That consumed quite a bit of my time on the day and I learned a lot from covering the event. I hadn’t planned on bringing my video camera, but I’m glad I did. I focused on individual sessions and tried to cover them completely. I’ll be posting to Flickr, YouTube and other locations as I get the files processed.

I haven’t watched all the footage but it seems good, generally. I’m not a post-production video guy, so processing the video and posting it has been a learning experience. I’d just like to say I hate YouTube’s 10 minute rule.

Things I’d do differently?

  • Bring my video camera charger and an extra battery.
  • Bring more SD cards for my video camera.
  • Bring a proper microphone for my video camera.

What I did right

  • I brought my tripod (I hate shaky video).
  • I brought two audio recorders & fresh batteries (to record sessions I wasn’t in).
  • Brought my point and shoot digital camera.

I really enjoyed covering the event the way I did (I still miss being a reporter). While I didn’t participate as much as I would have liked, I felt an obligation to record what was happening so it wasn’t lost.

Links, media, photos, video

Photos of ChangeCamp Edmonton

Youtube videos/audio about ChangeCamp Edmonton

Blog posts about ChangeCamp Edmonton

Media about ChangeCamp Edmonton

ChangeCamp Edmonton – official

Social media

alainsaffel on Dec 2, 2009 · Filed Under Uncategorized

Comments

One Response to “ChangeCamp Edmonton success!”

  1. Hello world! Hello Windsor-Essex! : Windsor-Essex ChangeCamp on February 23rd, 2010 3:01 pm

    [...] there have been several ChangeCamps that have been held in other Canadian cities including Halifax, Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver, and [...]

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