Ignite Toronto 3: Digerati Throwdown

via vimeo.com

My ChangeCamp talk at Ignite Toronto 3 is online. My apologies if it’s a bit rough around the edges.
If you’re not familiar with the Ignite format, it is 20 slides, 15 seconds per slide, with the slides changing on a timer outside the speaker’s control. It’s hard to keep up to, but a fun and challenging format to distill ideas into intense 5 minute nuggets.
It’s a fun evening of community sharing ideas. I’ve also incorporated the format into full day unconferences as a way to prime the pump of ideas and get the day off to a high energy start.

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Mark Kuznicki on Mar 15, 2010 · Filed Under Toronto

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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.

Mark Kuznicki on Jan 1, 2010 · Filed Under Toronto

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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.

Wordle (Merkley, transcribed) by Suzanne Long

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

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:

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  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!

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Mark Kuznicki on Feb 4, 2009 · Filed Under Toronto

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