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.

Metronauts Event #1

After much planning, discussion, speculating and sweating, the first face to face Metronauts event took place on Saturday at MaRS. In case you weren’t there, you can absorb all of the fascinating content on the wiki page. Based on the spirit of BarCamp, or the Open Space Technology model, Metronauts is an offline/online community that is committed to using the spirit of the community powered unconference to help inform and shape the Regional Transportation Plan that Metrolinx is responsible for producing.

Check out some pictures from the event.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the idea of Open Space, it’s a cool methodology that simply introduces a question or broad statement to a group of passionate people, and people can volunteer to lead a 1 hour discussion on a topic of their choosing, so each 1 hour time period has a bunch of conversations occurring in parallel. And that’s how the agenda gets set. 

One thing that I found of interest during the planning process with Metrolinx is how they referred to a typical public consultation event as a “formal” consultation and the events that we were proposing as “informal”. However as the day unfolded, I noticed that the jargon seemed to be making a switch to “traditional” vs. “non-traditional”. I like this switch because I personally feel that “informal” seems to connote “less important”, whereas “non-traditional” seems to imply “different” as opposed to better or worse. Hopefully this perceived shift is true, pervasive and sustained.

My hope is that after the community begins to really take off in an online and offline way that there will be additional richness and perspectives offered to the policy makers and planners within Metrolinx and the Regional Transportation Plan will reflect the conversations in some way. Rob MacIsaac, Chair of Metrolinx, made it pretty clear that they won’t be able to integrate every single recommendation.  And of course they can’t. I think the challenge that Metrolinx has is listening to all of the conversations that are occurring and being able to recognize high level themes and trends and being able to shape their plan accordingly.

It seems to have potential for a classic “Wisdom of Crowds” scenario where nobody in the community has the one right answer, but if Metrolinx can pull of the wisdom together and come up with something that is greater than the sum of the conversations, they will have done their job as a (arms length) government agency. (Take a look at “The Scorpion” example in James Surowiecki’s “Wisdom of Crowds“.)

All in all, the effort to engage the citizenry in a “solutions” environment rather than an adversarial dynamic is an important shift in how government engages with people.  Here’s hoping today’s “non-traditional” is tomorrow’s tradition.