TVO: AgendaCamp

Context: TVOntario is the province’s not-for-profit, educational television broadcaster and its flagship current affairs program, The Agenda with Steve Paikin had decided to do a monthly broadcast from smaller centres around the province that would focus on the changing nature of the provincial economy. Further to its mandate of engaging the citizenry of Ontario through the media, TVO was interested in providing a platform for citizens to engage in face to face and online conversations.

With the nature of media changing and evolving in a tumultuous world, TVO is exploring what it means to “engage with community” and combined elements of traditional broadcast media, community generated digital media and face to face collaborative methodologies to provide a platform for citizens to take charge of the change they wished to see in their communities.

Solution: In partnership with Remarkk Consulting, Omakase designed and facilitated a program called AgendaCamp, a series of day long, participant driven collaborative events that allowed for face to face and real-time online conversation about topics that were proposed by the participants. In the style of OpenSpace or *Camp methodologies, participants volunteered to lead conversations about topics important to them and we provided the tools and process to capture the output from those conversations. Not only did we address the collaborative challenge of the day long event, but we designed a process and combination of online tools for people who didn’t attend AgendaCamp to engage before, during and after the event. AgendaCamp took place the day before the television broadcast with the content and participants from the Camp being incorporated into the broadcast.

A diverse set of citizens, politicians, policy makers, educators and business leaders were combined in a non-hierarchical construct in order to create the most productive, authentic conversations. The diversity resulted in true insight and greater understanding of community issues as well as providing additional insight for the producers of the following day’s live television broadcast.

Challenges: The biggest obstacles to overcome were to provide people with social media tools such as YouTube, Wikis, FlipCams, Flickr and Twitter as well as a documentation process for people who were unfamiliar with such. For the first AgendaCamp in Windsor we did not provide too much instruction but that changed as we went along. By the end we were providing short workshops for anyone who wanted to spend part of their day learning about the tools. Another goal of AgendaCamp was to keep the conversations going AFTER the Camp and linking the work from one camp to the next and the previous. The job description of “Community Manager” was not something that a television network is typically charged with doing so we had to quickly figure out what type of work had to get done in order to support the developing conversations.

Conclusions: “Success” within the context of a public media broadcaster is difficult to measure. The AgendaCamp highlighted the organization’s commitment to digital media and fostering citizen engagement while effectively incorporating traditional broadcast programming. Over the course of the season there was  consistent growth in traffic on the wiki, tagged Flickr photographs and YouTube videos. For a media organization that doesn’t measure itself solely on advertiser revenue or Nielsen ratings, how does one measure the impact on a community?

There was good coverage from local media in advance and during the events. There were city councilors who saw the potential of social media tools as a way of engaging with communities of interest. Politicians were truly listening to and engaging with their constituents and it was easy to tell by body language and the collaborative conversations. Communities around psychogeography were formed in Windsor after AgendaCamp. AgendaCampers received job offers from fellow participants.

Peter Block writes that the key to strong communities is accountability that comes from connectedness that comes from great conversation. From Windsor, Sault Ste. Marie, Kingston, Thunder Bay and Windsor we facilitated a minimum of 167 deep, meaningful conversations with hundreds of people, face to face and online, about how the citizens of Ontario can collectively make their province a great place to live.

Click here to look at the wiki pages from previous AgendaCamps.