ChangeCamp Ottawa

ChangeCamp Ottawa

MP’s… what are they thinking?

MP SurveyCitizen Engagement in Public Policy – A Survey of Canadian Members of Parliament

What does your MP think about online campaigning? Do they prefer hand-written letters over emails? Has a Facebook group ever changed their mind on an issue? Do they Twitter? These are some of the questions that will be asked in a new research project by Nanos Research, J. Thompson Communications and Five Stones New Media Consulting.

The survey will be administered throughout the spring 2009, with a final report appearing in The Hill Times at the end of April and online in various places (including right here!).

We have posted the draft questions on the Wiki for comment:

http://wiki.changecamp.ca/Change_Projects/MP_Survey

What do you think? Are we missing anything? Your suggestions and comments are greatly appreciated!

Participation Public of Spectrum

The IAP2 present a very compelling, well constructed and well-adopted framework for public engagement.  Something no doubt honed and developed over many years of successful public engagements and policy reform.

Only it’s wrong.  The stages may be fine, but it is 100% wrong in that is is completely backwards.

What I’ve come to understand in exploring engagement from the point of view of passion and within the context of our present day world is that “business as usual” is over.  There are some significant opportunities to enable and support deeper levels of engagement but it requires us to change our approach.

The need

You want to reach a group of people.  You have something you wish to accomplish.  The first step is to break down the underlying values and passions that are driving your initiative and then begin to identify who you are looking to engage with.

Stage 1: Empower

As Rahaf Harfoush might say, the first step is to pay attention to who among those you are trying to reach is already taking action and the tools they are using.

It is not about us.  Repeat with me.  It is not about us.  It is about supporting these individuals and groups. It is about answering this question, “What can I actively bring to these people to help them accomplish the goals they are already committed to achieving?”

This takes time but it is quite straightforward to being to identify and find these passionate individuals.  A topic for a later post.

Stage 2: Collaborate

You have connected with the most passionate and likely your view of the world has been lifted and changed as a result.  And if you have done Stage 1 even moderately well, you have built relationships with real people.

This is critical. Unlike the traditional approach where you hope to have strong bonds of trust by the end, in stage 2 you should have a platform of trust built with the most active and passionate people you can find.  This can now be leveraged to engage these people (and their networks) to work towards something larger or tangential but that aligns with their passions and actions to date.

This is about working together towards a common goal.  This is about you being seen as someone who helps them to accomplish that which they believe in.  A facilitator for their passions.

Stage 3: Involve

It can start with a simple invitation to a place or platform that can better harness or support a larger community of people united by common passions, values and/or beliefs.  Or it can be shifting the spend on conferences to become a series of community engagements where you are supporting the communities to further their own interests.

This is the realm of co-creation.  I’m reminded of a quote from Brains on Fire that remains one of my favorites.

“And believe us, it’s not about influence, because influencers can be MADE. But passion can’t. And it’s not about evangelizing your brand. It’s about your brand being the jumping off point that allows people to evangelize what’s important in their lives.”

Stage 4: Consult

The world of prototyping, participatory design and mass collaboration open up many opportunities to more actively consult those you value and trust to offer insight, manpower and feedback to what you are working to accomplish.  Here they begin to work together with you to build your platform to support your goals, actions and passions.

Stage 5: Inform

This is my favorite.  This is no longer about posting notices, or publicizing town halls or making sure your point of view or platform is up on some website.  This stage is now about reaching out to all those who have been involved to date and showing them clearly what you have been able to build together with them.  And also the launching off point to loop back into an earlier stage.

NOTE: In my conversations with Lina Srivastava and Aaron Dus it has been quickly raised by both that the terms (names of the stages) need to be updated and there is also the opportunity to grow and evolve this model.  I’m very interested to see what both Lina and Aaron come back with.

Originally posted at: craphammer.ca

what’s the benefit of open?

when i read Sean’s post about Obama and his memo/manifesto for open government i couldn’t help but think about how big a challenge it’s going to be to make the very real changes that memo calls for.

a transparent, participatory, and collaborative government? not just at the political layer but penetrating all the way through the various organizations that perform the day to day business of government? this will be tough work.

while i don’t doubt his resolve, i wonder how even a determined leader like Obama can accomplish this. certainly he carries a big stick; he’s president, with a supportive democratic congress, in the midst of a serious crisis and with a significant mandate from the electorate. anybody within the bureaucracy should be wary of crossing him on one of his main campaign goals, but what about the carrots?

how will he sell skittish and habitually secretive organizations on the benefits of openness?

certainly he can talk about all the things he talks about in his memo;

“Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset.”

“Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. ”

“Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.”

but i don’t think that alone will be enough. it’s too vague and generalized to be effective levers for getting an organization to change it’s collective behaviour. each department or agency will be in a specific business, and for the most part set in their ways of getting that business done. there will be cost, both in terms of money spent and time and energy expended, in opening up each organization. how will organizations bear the cost of opening up? and more importantly what will the Obama administration offer them?

these are unsexy questions, but they need to be answered. if government is going to be truly open it can’t only be the result of top down drive, the bottom and the middle need to start to actively incorporate openness into standard operating procedures.

if the Obama team were asking you for advice, what would you tell them about the benefits of transparency, participation and collaboration, above all – openness – to a large public organization?

d_c

The Impact of ChangeCamp

As one of the instigators of ChangeCamp at MaRS in Toronto on January 24th, I have spent much of the past 10 days trying to process all the content, ideas, outcomes and possibilities that it generated. It’s been a little overwhelming. Clearly we tapped a rich vein of attention.

So what did we do together? Let’s do a quick rundown of the numbers:

• 140 participants (one person for every character in a Tweet!)
• 100 wiki pages
• 40 YouTube videos
• 450 Flickr photos
• Thousands of tweets, the #1 trending topic on Twitter in the world that day!
• 96 blog mentions from around the world
• one story in the Globe & Mail:
• one beautifully produced segment on CBC Radio’s Spark:  (full unedited interview)
• one piece by Kris Reyes on CityNews
• one piece by Jamie Woo in Torontoist
• one Best of ChangeCamp piece by Matthew Hayles in BlogTO
• many new relationships
• several new projects initiated
• several existing projects accelerated
• VanChangeCamp organizing already underway
• and one great big meme propagating through the underbrush

That’s a lot of heat from our ChangeCamp fire! But how much light was there? How much change was made? What was the quality of the products of our co-creation?

To my mind, the jury is still out on this question. A lot will happen not at ChangeCamp, but in the weeks and months to come because of ChangeCamp. We need to hear, share and tell those stories. We need your help:

Powered by AskItOnline

1. Please complete our Participant Survey
2. Please leave your comments on this blog post. Don’t be shy, don’t be overly polite. We have thick skins.
3. If you prefer to be discrete, send an email to changecamp@remarkk.com.
4. Have more feedback? Write a post about what worked, what didn’t and ideas for the future, like this, this, this, this or this.

The organizers came to this event with modest goals: to ignite and accelerate a new conversation about the shifting ideas of government and citizenship in this “age of participation”, enabled by new tools and thanks to the web. Based on the buzz in online social media, traditional media and face-to-face conversations, I think we can safely say that we achieved that modest goal.

For people in other cities and countries that have been inspired by the ChangeCamp idea, it is important to understand all the preparatory ground work that made ChangeCamp a success in Toronto. An event of this kind is all about having the right mix of participants. Engaging that mix from government, technology, design, social innovation and media-making was key to our success.

Toronto is blessed by a dense cluster of some of the most talented designers, developers, creators and social innovators in the world. Toronto is also home to one of the most connected and innovative BarCamp and Twitter communities in the world, who have been using online tools together with face-to-face events to create change in areas of civic life outside the technology sector. We have leaders like Mark Surman of Mozilla Foundation who laid the groundwork within our City government, opening the door to open data. We had a recent “Web 2.0 Summit” event at City Hall where social media and open data in the context of government had centre stage in front of an influential audience both at the City and the Province.  We have a Mayor who said:

When you open up the data, there’s no limit to what people can do. It engages the imagination of citizens in building the city.

What direction does ChangeCamp go next? That’s another post. We want to make sure that our emerging community has lots of opportunity to inform its future direction, to participate in it, to get involved in many new ways. We can’t do it all, we can’t do it alone, we can’t boil the ocean, but we can start with some small steps that in the long-run can enable major change.

Please read after the jump and give all the originators, organizers, contributors, sponsors and supporters some love. They deserve it. I’m sure I’ve missed a couple of people, so raise your hand at changecamp@remarkk.com if I missed you!

Read more

“We will see,” they say…

It happened again.  Two days since the inauguration and three people have uttered the words “We will see,” in regards to Barack Obama.  They appear to speak from a place of doubt and dread, as if the hope for drastic change was too much to ask for.

I feel the same forces.

But let’s look at what this Administration has done in these 2.5 days in office, shall we?

• Launched whitehouse.gov on an open community platform with updates, RSS feeds and more.
• Created the space on whitehouse.gov where non-emergency executive orders will be available for five days of public comment before signing
• Called for a suspension to the trials at Guantanamo Bay
• Signed an executive order for the closure of Guantanamo Bay.
• Created an inter-agency task force to identify lawful options for how detainees are handled and treated.
• Halted the use of torture by America and it’s agents.

And last, but certainly not least, he wrote a manifesto in memo form for open government that caused me to break into tears.  It is based on three principles:  Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration.

An Open Government Directive.  Within 120 days.  Holy bat farts.  But it gets better.  He then directly attacks those who have worked to weaken the Freedom of Information Act.

I’m assuming this is legitimate.  It’s not yet posted to whitehouse.gov (ironically).  Source: http://www.dowire.org/notes/?p=451

I started this post in answer to this urge to wait and see.  For how long, I have to ask?  Barack has done more in his first few days than I could have ever dreamed possible.  But if we think this is about him, then he will fail. This is about each of us around the world, regardless of our citizenship, and whether we will choose to take action and make our community a better place.

This global crisis affects us all.  And not all of us are so lucky as to have a leader with such moral strength and conviction.

cross posted from craphammer.ca

ChangeCamp: Pulling people and creativity out of the public policy long tail

ChangeCamp is a free participatory web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, change-makers and government employees to answer one question: How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?

What is ChangeCamp? It is the application of “the long tail” to public policy.

It is a long held and false assumption that ordinary citizens don’t care about public policy. The statement isn’t, in of itself, false. Many, many, many people truly don’t care that much. They want to live their lives focusing on other things – pursuing other hobbies or interests – but there are many of us who do care. Public policy geeks, fans, followers, advocates, etc… we are everywhere, we’ve just been hidden in a long tail that saw the market place and capacity for developing and delivering public policy restricted to a few large institutions. The single most important lesson I learnt from my time with Canada25 is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Did Canada25 get a new generation of Canadians, aged 20-35 engaged in public policy? I don’t know.

What I DO KNOW is, that at the very minimum, we harnessed and enourmous, dispersed desire of many Canadians to participate in, and help shape, the public policy debates affecting the country. Most importantly, we did this by doing three things:

1. we aggregated together the people who cared about public policy, we gave them peers, friends and a sense of community
2. we provided a vehicle through which to channel their energy
3. by combining 1 and 2, and by using simple technology and a low costs approach – we dramatically lowered the barriers (and costs) to entry for credible participating in these national debates

Today, the technology to enable and aggregate people their ideas, to connect them with peers and to create community, is still more powerful. Our capacity to challenge, push, help, cooperate, leverage and compete with the institutional public policy actors has never been greater. This, for me, is the goal of ChangeCamp. What concrete tools can we build, what information can we demand be opened up, what new relationships can we build to reimagine how we – the citizens who care – participate in the creation of public policy and the effective delivery of public services. Not to compete or replace the traditional,institutional actors, but in order to ensure more and better ideas are heard and more effective and efficient services are created.

Individually, none of us may have the collective power of a government ministry or even the resources of most think tanks. But collectively, linked together by technology and powered by our energy and spare capital, the long tail of policy geeks and ordinary citizens is bigger, nimbler, more creative and faster than anything else. Do I know that the long tail of policy can be set free? No. But ChangeCamp seems like a fun place to start experimenting, brainstorming and sharing ways we can make this country better.

Cross posted from eaves.ca

What can we learn from Obama’s first days?

The BBC reported Wednesday that Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems co-founder, has been asked to prepare a paper for the Obama administration on how Open Source software can help government save money and be more secure. While saving money is great when governments are thinking of blasting through previous deficit records, governance and citizen engagement can benefit more from open information and free data from governments. In this regard, Obama’s early actions to make his administration open and transparent, and to have a general presumption in favour of providing rather than witholding government information, are more what Canada should be adopting.

Canadians need to build on earlier successes in improving government transparency and accountability by re-thinking government processes designed for a pre-Internet age so that citizens are enabled to do more.

Current government procedures for releasing information under FOI laws are much more like Bush than Obama. Requests from journalists and activist citizens are flagged for special time consuming treatment, and the political pros and cons of releasing stuff along with communications strategies are prepared for political staff who make final determinations on releasing stuff. When political rather than legal considerations dominate disclosure decisions, and illegal delays regularly prevent releases in time to help citizens participate in and evaluate upcoming government actions, it’s bad for all of us. Well, maybe there are some short term advantages to the party in power, but it’s bad for society and bad even for that party in the long term.

Even more important than projects related to improving freedom of information are those about liberating government data stores. It’s crazy that data that would help citizens communicate with their government representatives, like StatsCan tables correlating postal codes with ridings, cost thousands of dollars. Significant economic and social benefits could come from the innovations that would be sparked by shifting from cost recovery for data towards free data. Halting progress in small areas is being made on this – for example, developing and releasing wind maps for Canada that help identify good locations for wind power locations.

Openness. Transparency. Engagement. Innovation. All good things. All enabled if we free more government information, liberate government data, and create more tools with open source software.

the l-word

Whoddathunkit? ChangeCamp blogger expectedly expressing love of transparency and, plot twist of all plot twists, turns out to be a lobbyist. Yeah, I just dropped the real taboo L-word.

So I’m @withoutayard, meegs to my friends & a registered lobbyist in the province of Ontario. And you may ask yourself-well…how did she get here?

Living in Austin during the last not-quite-as-amazing American federal election, led me to blogging & playing with online communications tools to affect change, raise awareness & spread awesome.  Returning to Canuckistan, I served a tour at the Pink Palace, but never quite mastered the mysterious machinations of political parties.  Unlike @dchartier, I couldn’t cut it in the civil service, even though sound recording policy at Heritage Canada was pretty darn close to a perfect policy-wonkette fit during a brief federal foray.

Combine the forces (read: career failures & bad-fits) & it sort of makes sense, right?  Witnessing the Dean machine go off the rails as a viral video trainwreck, seeing Meetup’s potential beyond UT Japanese exchange & making campaign donations as easy as Amazon blew my mind in ’04 (& broke my heart the night of November 2^nd).  True patriot love of responsible government, parliamentary democracy & social justice/equity brought me home & hoping to see these transformative tools used in a Timmy’s.

I doubt I’ll ever get to geek out in a war room or a party HQ.  Partisan politics brings out the agnostic in me.  The thought of hundreds of thousands of dollars spent during a campaign on balloons, signs, buttons & miscellaneous paraphernalia drives me absolutely bonkers.  Working within the system, keeping abreast of legislative issues, regulatory nerdery & jealously eyeing the open source enthusiasm, technological progress & federal government’s paradigm shift to the South is a great fit for now.

Blogging about the last provincial & federal elections, especially the creative campaigns on provincial electoral reform & federal vote-swapping was encouraging.  A taste.   But not enough.

Enter ChangeCamp. Citizen-initiated, non-hierarchical, collaborative & generally all things old-school civics.  We have the tools, skills & thanks to some shindig yesterday in DC, the enthusiasm & momentum.  So let’s do some heavy lifting & make our standards for transparency and engagement the new status quo.  Liberate APIs, wiki-fy policy docs, de-PDF the whole shebang.  Easy.

ChangeCamp: The Ad!

Thanks to Mark McKay for producing this great little ad that explains ChangeCamp. Please pass it on and embed!

ChangeCamp ’09 from Mark McKay on Vimeo.

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