Reflections on #changecamp

Whew. It’s been a few days since we threw the first ChangeCamp. There was lots of energy and activity and if nothing else, people had their views and opinions go through a creative destruction process to create some new thinking and gain new perspective.  But there was lots more accomplished. In fact, I’m still going through the work that was done because there was so much. Here are some musings on how I thought ChangeCamp went.

ChangeLab

We wanted to play with the framework of the Open Space model which has sessions of 1 hour in length as the standard. I do believe that sessions longer than 2 hours start to have diminishing returns but we introduced the idea of a 3 hour session with specific sub-objectives for each 1 hour segment. The intent was to select project ideas that had been planned out a little bit and give people a 3 hour segment in which to recruit talent to bring the idea as far along as it could go. Rough code, wireframes, schematics, strategy, project plans….something tangible that a community of professionals could quickly build.

I would give this idea a passing grade with room for improvement. We refined this idea pretty late in the process so in the future I like to receive ideas for ChangeLab a few days in advance, perhaps via a standardized template, and have some trusted folks review the proposals so we can start the day knowing exactly which ideas will be going through the ChangeLab process. This will give the project owners a bit more time to prepare and we can announce at the beginning of the day which projects are a go and what kind of talent is needed to see those ideas through. We kind of made it up on the fly the day of and it was a bit muddled. It’ll be better next time.

The great thing was that it resulted in a meetup a few days later to continue the work of the initial ChangeLab. People got together on their own to refine the idea, codenamed Project Shamen. Awesome. (Interesting side note: the ChangeLab dealing with face to face meetups drew a crowd of programmers and the ChangeLab dealing with a web application drew the policy wonks. Thanks to Sean Howard for making this observation.)

Dotmocracy

Jason Diceman was kind enough to offer his services and tools as a dotmocracy facilitator throughout the day and next time I would like to work with him in advance to see how we can build in his process so that it’s a bit more planned. I don’t think we gave it its due. That said, there are still some good results on the ChangeCamp wiki.

Meet and Greet Module

We decided that the Intention Question for ChangeCamp should be broad but with a desire to get it more focused. We realized early in the planning process that trying to narrow it down with the planning team was counter-productive. As a combination “meet and greet” and work activity we randomly divided everyone at ChangeCamp into about 15 small groups and gave them the same question to ponder for about an hour: “What Problem Are We Trying To Solve?”  We knew that each person would introduce themselves but also talk about what drew them to ChangeCamp. This would help draw out from the crowd how the ChangeCamp movement should be more focused. But it’s also a flexible question in any context because the “Problem” in Toronto will be different than the “Problem” in Moose Jaw.

While I don’t like starting any event from a “Problem” mindset, I think the question worked in this context. We then tried to pollinate the conversations by having 1 person stay behind while the other members of the group dispersed and wondered around the space for 45 minutes, kind of like at a tradeshow going from table to table, seeing what other groups had talked about. My sense is that most people found another group and then stayed there for the duration of the time rather than wandering but that worked well enough.

This was a very generative exercise with lots of ideas being proposed. A super valuable exercise would be to bring all of the notes together and try to extract themes. As an event designer, I might try to force this activity in some way by making it a permanent part of the grid or by suggesting that at least one person take it on as a task. I didn’t have to do either in this case because Patrick Keenan and Indra Behrouz rocked it by picking up on this idea and running with it. First they tagged and created the themes, then they created a visual model of the themes. Truly stunning work in a couple short hours.

Twitter

Not sure what to say about Twitter except we broke it. #changecamp was the number one tag on Twitter for most of the day, the Search function on Twitter broke and Twitter served to bring people from outside Toronto and Canada into the conversation. We had people at ChangeCamp trading information within the session via Twitter. We organized the event through Twitter. Lots has been written about how Twitter is bringing communities and movements together. A great local example of how Twitter has served the community is with the #hohoto event that was hatched and planned on Twitter in 13 days. The resulting holiday party had 600 guests and raised $25,000 for Daily Bread Food Bank. Hyper connected communities=success.

Other Thoughts

As part of another project, I’m working with TV Ontario on the AgendaCamp project and we did a bit of outreach to the community and got an interesting note in reply. One of the AgendaCamp participants from Windsor in October said that while the activity on the wiki had slowed down, the face to face activity had picked up. Windsor’s bloggers are meeting monthly, walking tours of the downtown have started and there is talk of a collective of artists buying a factory to create a live-work space. In this case it seems as though the AgendaCamp wiki was a place to start but the activity became too important to keep online and it was elevated to actual face to face contact, which is the most powerful form of human engagement. That said, keeping a record of the progress, photos of the projects and videos help spread and solidify the word so keep that wiki fresh!

It’s so cool to see the ChangeCamp activity heading down a similar path. I would love to hear some comments on how you thought ChangeCamp went (if you were there) or if you have any experience in OpenSpace/BarCamp/Unconference would love to hear your thoughts.

#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.

Rural/Urban Divide? Meh.

We had another great AgendaCamp on Sunday, this time in Kingston. Close to 100 people from all over Eastern Ontario braved the snowy roads to spend a day talking about how agriculture fits into Ontario’s changing economy. There were 44 separate and distinct discussions over the course of the day and one theme I noticed was the idea of a “Rural/Urban” divide and thoughts on how to solve it.

This notion of a “divide” didn’t sit quite right with me. Was there really a divide? If so, is it really about rural vs. urban? Some ideas that got tossed around on Twitter during the AgendaCamp included notions of “producer/consumer” and “grower/eater”. Something that bothers me about this is the linear construct that the proposed dichotomy inherently suggests. Things are grown, they magically appear in cities, they’re digested and it’s all over. The fact of the matter is that it’s circular and cyclical. It’s systemic. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “Farmers Feed Cities”, highlighting the importance of the relationship between rural dwellers and city dwellers. I saw a build on that phrase that read “Farmers Feed Cities. Cities Feed Farmers.” I thought that was a great way of describing the relationship.

Local food movements, slow food and the 100-mile diet are all gaining in popularity which is a good thing but there is a long way to go. What is a better way to describe the lack of appreciation (the divide) for the food production eco-systems that feed Canadian cities and farm communities? Is there something more accurate or an entirely different construct?

So far we have:

• rural/urban
• producer/consumer
• grower/eater

Thoughts?

Violins, Patterns and Context

The Washington Post recently published an article on a little social experiment they did. In short, they asked a violin player to stand at a DC subway station and play for 45 minutes during the morning rush. They wanted to see how many people would stop and listen and/or throw some money into the open violin case. The catch is that the player was Joshua Bell, arguably the finest classical violin player in the world, playing one of the most difficult compositions ever created, on a $3 million violin wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Seats at his concert will routinely fetch well into the hundreds of $$$.

The results of the experiment are in the article, but the upshot is that very few people stopped, fewer gave money and only 1 person recognized him. The discussion in the article focuses quite a bit on context. Does context matter when experiencing a work of art? Is it genius if nobody notices? In further questioning, some people didn’t even notice a violinist on their way from the train.

Why do I care about this experiment? It’s all about patterns. The brain is a pattern making machine, for better and for worse. It absorbs data and categorizes it according to previous experience. All of this happens at a pre-cognition level so we don’t even know it’s happening. This is a good thing because it means we don’t have to evaluate every piece of data we encounter in our day to day lives. The over-stimulation would render us practically useless.

The flip side of this amazing phenomenon known as the human brain is that it becomes difficult to absorb new information when we are engaged in a familiar pattern. That’s why some people didn’t even notice the genius of Josh Bell as they went past.

That’s why it’s so difficult to think creatively when engaged in familar patterns. It’s important to put people in unfamiliar surroundings with fresh stimulation in order to get them to come up with new stuff, make new connections and break out of old patterns. The old phrase, “we tried that two years ago and it didn’t work” is partly borne from the fact that the person saying that is sitting in the same physical location when it didn’t work two years ago. Put that person in a fresh environment and it is more likely for that person to pick up on a new piece of information that will encourage them to say, “even though it didn’t work two years ago, here’s why I think it’ll work now…”

I’ll let the philosophy majors flesh out the debates of Leibniz, Hume and Kant about the nature of beauty but I can tell you that if you want creativity, innovation and new direction people have to be physically and cognitively moved out of comfort zones that reinforce old patterns and power structures. In events that I design I will often introduce elements that are meant to do both. Holding collaborative events at art galleries, zoos or patios overlooking Whistler Mountain are all designed to remove people from their typical patterns. Playing punk music to indicate the end of an activity is designed to disrupt patterns and highten observational powers. It’s all part of the experience.

Phrase of the Year so far: Back Up

I wish I had a deeply insightful post to kick off the New Year, but I don’t. Two weeks in Hawaii followed immediately by two weeks of a holiday/food/cottage/single malt coma has resulted in a dearth of quality posts from me despite all the good stuff going on right now. I’ll get to something good soon.

In the mean time, this post is very tactical. While I was away my computer was stolen and if weren’t for my automatic, hourly backups to an external drive I would be in serious trouble. Thankfully this whole experience will only cost me a few hundred dollars and a few hours of my time.

The message to my legions of loyal followers is this: Get an external drive if you don’t have one and set it to AUTOMATICALLY back up your data. No DVD’s, no plug in hard drives every 6 weeks when you remember. Dedicated disk, automatic backups. It’s the only way to go.

The other only way to go is online backups. I’m just lucky my backup drive wasn’t stolen too. I’ll be adding an online backup solution, such as mozy.com to be doubly safe.

Let me ask you this: If all of your data was stolen and I said to you, “Would you pay $150 to have all of your stuff magically re-appear?” you would probably nod enthusiastically. That’s what it costs to buy a network drive with the right software.

So that’s my first message for ’09…back up your stuff!