It's a Remarkk-able life

I had the pleasure of working alongside colleagues Daniel Rose, Ryan Coleman, Liisa Sorsa and Disa Kauk to bring various kinds of participatory engagement for the Collingwood Conference 2010: Imagining Ontario's Future. This was a long-term focused ideas conference put on by the Ontario Liberal Party, organized by Laura Miller and wrangled by Kelly Legris.

We all enjoyed bringing our skills to the table with a large and very professionally-run conference like this one, with its clear connection to important public policy issues and the challenges of our shared future. These are the kinds of issues that my practice was created to help address by bringing social technologies (both digital and analog) to enable participation, public engagement and collaborative problem-solving for the public good.

I remain an agnostic non-partisan, but I have to say that I was genuinely impressed that a provincial political party was willing and able to create a large-scale event like this with big ideas, bold content and then share it with the world in new ways. Hearing personally from the Premier himself that he appreciated the participatory nature of the event was very gratifying.

The conference was a hit online, with live streaming video and online discussion, it was the #2 or #3 trending topic on Twitter in Canada most of the weekend. The liveblog took almost 5,000 comments!

The in-person experience was as (ok, more) important as the online experience, so we brought a variety of graphic facilitation methods, included beautiful live graphic recording of Friday night's keynote addresses from the Premier and Malcolm Gladwell by Liisa and Disa and a massive 500-person sticky note theming exercise.

You can see all the conference content (session videos are still being uploaded) by visiting http://www.cc2010.ca/. Check out the participant-created interviews on the YouTube channel and the great shots created throughout the conference on Flickr. And you can still follow the ongoing conversation on Twitter at #cc2010.

A pretty convincing lead held by the bike lane.

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.

Fascinating what you can figure out from public Facebook pages. I'd like to see something similar done in Canada.

Look at is this way: a byproduct of yesterday's discussions and actions is a television program. When you add a public broadcaster to the camp event, you harness its expertise and resources to seek out participants from government, the business community, academia, etc., and also to take the work that participants have done and forge it into a debate to probe and share the insights revealed at AgendaCamp.

 

To me, this seems like a natural extension of the work that goes on at all camps. There, the community comes together to gather the information, to mold it into useful forms, and to spread that information. Public television is truly a part of that community, and events like this are a great example of public television doing exactly what it is meant to do.

 

Tune in tonight to watch as we broadcast live from the University of Western Ontario (and please join me on the live online chat that will go with it). What you will see is something new that TVO is working hard to help develop: open source television. This program is entirely the product of the community we are in, their ideas and concerns, and the resources here to help articulate their particular perspective on the province in the world. It's very much like a bottle of wine, whose flavour and character is determined by the soil that nurtured the grapes.

I'm happy to see TVO continue the work we began together with last year's AgendaCamp, making their own and tweaking the model from what they learned last year. Big thanks to Mike Miner for the shout out on this post!

Good to see TVO doing this kind of educational content about using online tools for organizing. What do you think about it?

Time to take out the trash, wouldn't you say?