#Changecamp coming on Saturday

One of the great pleasures of being in the event design and facilitation practice is that I get to see human potential being expressed almost every day that I’m working. Unfortunately not everyone can say that about their jobs. I’m pretty lucky in that regard. With that being said, it’s especially rewarding to see great intellect and passion being directed towards something so important as democracy and government.

On Saturday, I will be leading an event called ChangeCamp, which is going to be a “solutions playground” for how people can reimagine government and citizenry in an age of participation. In a lot of ways participation means “the internet” or technology at large because as we’ve seen from Barack Obama’s political campaign, new social media tools can inspire and empower people to get very real, very important things done. With our own government hanging a “Gone Fishin’” sign on parliament, Mark Kuznicki took the bull by the horns, ‘rassled up a bunch of volunteers and organized ChangeCamp.

It will be at the MaRS Centre in Toronto and they’ve bent over backwards to accommodate such a large event. Lots of people have helped to make this happen, but there are only so many places to get 150 people together with projectors, tables, wifi and flipcharts. Big props to the crew at MaRS.

The intent of ChangeCamp is to start a conversation and a movement. This isn’t the end. This is the beginning. The ChangeCamp site will have a blog and wiki as platforms for knowledge capture from Saturday and to allow ongoing conversations after Saturday. As well, it’s important that people in cities and towns all over Canada have their own ChangeCamps so we’ll be providing “ChangeCamp in a Box” for people to host and run their own events.

I’m not particularly political, but I obviously believe in the power of crowds and collaboration. The idea that got me really stoked about ChangeCamp (besides what Obama was able to pull off) was an article by David Eaves, a policy commentator and big proponent of open source. He argued to Statistics Canada that they should open up all of their data to the public and allow anyone in Canada to take the data and create their own applications and studies. That to me was a great example of what government could be. Organize some things that no other institution could possibly accomplish and then let the innovative, motivated populace do all kinds of important things that will be done faster and more cheaply than StatCan themselves. Right, left, centre…how could you not appreciate a government that acted like that?

If you aren’t coming to ChangeCamp, follow along with the real time wiki, Twitter (follow the #changecamp hash tag) and keep the conversation going after Saturday.

Here’s a video that Mark McKay, one of the volunteers at ChangeCamp, made about what ChangeCamp is. Enjoy.

ChangeCamp ‘09 from Mark McKay on Vimeo.