Live-blogging from CityCamp in Chicago
I am attending CityCamp in Chicago, an unconference gathering of municipal open government folks from across North America. You can also follow the CityCamp Posterous liveblog.
Peter Block: A Primer
As we work toward an exciting new beginning for ChangeCamp, some of us have been very inspired by the work of Peter Block:
Peter Block has a long career of research and practice in systems transformation who in his retirement from private sector practice has turned towards his passion for community. The result of his work in his home of Cincinnati Ohio is called A Small Group, a network of citizens committed to creating a different future.
Block’s work, and that of other practitioners in community transformation, is driven by a profound belief in and experience of the power of dialogue and the bonds between people to create new possibilities. He flips conventional wisdom on its head as a means to help people get into a new and shared sense of community. For example, he uses some interesting examples of “inversion thinking”:
- The listening creates the speaker
- The openness to learn creates the teaching
- Problem solving occurs to create relatedness
- The citizen creates the leadership
If you plan to attend the ChangeCampTO 2010 event on February 16th in Toronto, please take some time to familiarize yourself with Peter Block’s work:
Workbook on Civic Engagement [PDF]: http://www.peterblock.com/assets/Civic.pdf
“Community: A Structure of Belonging”: [Amazon]
Daniel Rose and I shared a summary of Block with the Design with Dialogue community recently. I am embedding the slides here.
ChangeCamp 2010: Creating Impact
On December 31, 2008, twenty smart and talented designers, policy wonks, media-makers and social innovators gathered at the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto to determine the best ways to spark new conversations about open government and citizen participation. Today, one year later, we look back with pride having seen ChangeCamps inspire and spread seeds of change in cities from coast to coast. Our friends and colleagues across the country have inspired us, with each iteration of ChangeCamp having learned from what came before while adding important and significant improvements to the model.
Reflecting on this success and our growing movement, we can focus our energy on continuing the evolution of the model, increasing the momentum, mobilizing more participants, and making an even bigger impact in the future. This is why I am very pleased to announce:
The Centre for Social Innovation has agreed in principle to incubate the ChangeCamp project in 2010.
The Centre’s incubation support will allow us to develop the ChangeCamp community and models for connected citizen-driven change-making. The goal of this incubation project is to launch a self-sustaining nonprofit organization that can support the community, develop and share innovative civic engagement models and methods while creating tools that can be used by community organizers everywhere. The Centre is able to provide the project with space, administrative support and access to national networks of expertise (and potential funders.) This is an exciting development as it provides the project with a flexible structure for its development.
ChangeCamp Toronto 2010: Scaling Hyper-local
The first major project of this new venture will continue to develop the ChangeCamp model and our methods and tools. Using the City of Toronto in 2010 as a large-scale living laboratory, the goals of this project are to scale the model in a hyper-local manner across a vast city and to develop improved means to create and document the impact of citizen-led change-making using new tools of communication.
The context of this project in Toronto will be the 2010 municipal elections and the vision is large. The fundamental design question for ChangeCamp Toronto 2010 is:
How do we use the weeks leading into the 2010 municipal election as a catalyst for Torontonians to actively shape their desired future, one meaningful conversation at a time?
There are many other interesting problems to solve within this big bold vision. Here is a preliminary list of questions that need answers:
- How do we recruit and enable grassroots organizers across a vast and complex city, with its many neighbourhoods and communities?
- How can the ChangeCamp community be included in, and learn from, movements that are already occurring and provide valuable tools or expertise in return?
- How do we model and design a variety of event formats and online tools that can be easily utilized by citizens all across the city?
- How do we capture and share the content of thousands of face-to-face and online conversations in a way that is meaningful to the participants and valuable to policy-makers and politicos looking for insight and ideas for the future?
- How do we ensure that the ChangeCamp community remains a partisan neutral-zone? Can we advocate for specific policies/actions and remain inclusive to all political stripes?
How to Join and Support this Project
Throughout the beginning of 2010, we will use this site to explore these questions and many more, and will also host a series of events to inform the design phase of the project. We will also be looking to our collaborators in other cities, towns and digital places in between to help inform the design of the Toronto program. And after the event we will look to those same communities again to build on the model, running local (or hyper-local) ChangeCamps, adapting and sharing the results with the ChangeCamp community.
We are looking to host a large-scale ChangeCamp Toronto event in early February to collaboratively design this program. We want to gather a talented group that includes grassroots community organizers, representatives from public, social and private sector institutions together with individuals from Toronto’s talented social innovation, media, design and technology communities.
Organizations we see as potential partners in this program include Toronto Community Foundation, the City of Toronto, SIG@MaRS, Toronto Public Library, Toronto Community Housing, Toronto City Summit Alliance and Emerging Leaders Network, Maytree Foundation, MASSLBP, Samara Canada, United Way, Toronto Association of BIAs, Timeraiser/Framework Foundation, Toronto Neighbourhood Centres and many others with networks of local organizing capacity.
Individuals who are passionate about the importance of community dialogue, social connectedness and change are welcome to help us realize this vision. If this describes you and you would like to participate, please put your name on the list and you will receive information as soon as it becomes available.
For additional background on the thinking behind this project, you may be interested in this post from summer 2009: ChangeCamp Next.
