Toronto Open Data Lab, part of the Toronto Innovations Showcase
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
1:00 – 4:30pm
City Hall Council Chamber and Members Lounge

Special Guest Speaker: Peter Corbett, iStrategy Labs and AppsforDemocracy.org

The Open Data Lab is an opportunity to explore the innovation possibilities of open civic data in Toronto. Join City subject matter and technology experts, community stakeholders and talented members of Toronto’s vibrant technology and design communities in an interactive and collaborative afternoon imagining commercial, social and civic applications of the City’s newly launched open data program.

This extended series of sessions kicks off with an aspirational talk about the Future of Open Cities from Peter Corbett, one of the open data leaders behind AppsforDemocracy.org and the success of Washington DC’s open data program. We will also hear from City of Toronto CIO Dave Wallace about the launch of Toronto.ca/Open and the future direction of Toronto’s open data program, and invited guests from the community will have an opportunity to inspire us with their open data dreams.

Participants will then have the opportunity to explore the first datasets to be released to the public from Toronto’s open data program. Facilitated by ChangeCamp organizer Mark Kuznicki, this is a unique opportunity that organizers hope will generate much interest and spark some ideas for new applications that will demonstrate the kind of value that open data can create for the City government and the community at large.

If you don’t want to miss this, or if you have an Ignite-style presentation proposal on the theme My Open Data Dream App, please let me know using this form:

Backgrounder

In April of this year, Mayor David Miller announced at the Mesh Conference [iTunes] [Podcast] that the City would open the vaults of its vast data and publish an initial number of City datasets in machine-readable open access format through a new home on the web at Toronto.ca/Open in fall of this year.

It was an announcement that was highly anticipated, from the challenge posed by Mozilla’s Mark Surman at the City’s Web 2.0 Summit in the fall of 2008, through the very popular session on open data hosted by Senior Advisor to the Mayor Ryan Merkeley at ChangeCampTO in January of this year, momentum had been built up towards the Mayor’s announcement.

More background after the jump…

A lot did and didn’t happen since then. The Open Data movement has gained momentum internationally and in Canada. San Francisco launched DataSF.org. O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 Summit has accelerated this movement. The project “Code for America” was launched. The Vancouver Open 3 resolution made key principles of the open city part of government policy. Other cities in Canada have been making strides, including Nanaimo and Ottawa. The world of geo-spatial data got a big shot in the arm with the relaunch of GeoGratis for free, open access mapping data. Microsoftie and DemoCamp godfather David Crow put a call out for open data ideas. Greg Wilson at University of Toronto has built an innovative graduate level computer science course around the possibilities of open civic data, which is very exciting, and City CIO Dave Wallace came to the first class this week to brief the class about the Open Data project.

With all this growing momentum, the folks inside the City who are charged with implementing this vision and meeting these expectations were dealt a major blow in the form of this summer’s Toronto municipal workers strike. For six weeks staff were out of commission and managers were filling in for staff under in some cases nightmarish conditions to ensure essential services were kept up and running. Only now can you say that the effects of the strike have been unraveled as people get caught up on the backlogs of day to day operations. Nonewithstanding this blow, they have pulled out the stops to deliver on the Mayor’s commitment and begin opening municipal data in a meaningful way that can demonstrate value to the community, the City and it’s many stakeholders.

City CIO Dave Wallace asked for my assistance in advising the City on its community engagement efforts on the Open Data project. I have been looking forward to begin the process of inviting community participation in the project. This event on November 2nd at City Hall is the first major opportunity to bring together the people who can bring life to data being freed. It is a beginning, not an end. It is part of a much longer term process of integrating open civic data in the everyday operations of City government and into the lifeblood of the community.

These are very exciting times, and I can’t wait to see you be part of it. I hope you consider joining us.

The ChangeCamp community is growing and continuing to build momentum. After ChangeCamps in Toronto, Ottawa and Vancouver and with organizers coming together in Edmonton, Halifax, Montreal and beyond, this felt like a good time to reflect and share what we’ve been doing together and explore some possibilities for the future.

To that end, I hosted a cross-Canada conference call for past and prospective ChangeCamp organizers and allies to share where we came from, what we’ve accomplished and learned and where we might go. Detailed notes are available on the wiki. We are building relationships across Canada so organizers can support and learn from each other. If you are interested in joining us, please join the Google Group.

A Point of Departure

A second goal of this call was to share a synthesis of my own accumulated thoughts, conversations and inspirations over the past six months, describing what I believe is under the hood of ChangeCamp and to describe a vision for what ChangeCamp might become. I am embedding my slides here to share with the wider community.

This vision is speculative, blue-sky and from my own point of view. I am sharing it to begin a deeper discussion and to begin designing the kernel of ChangeCamp. A fuller description of this vision and your comments follow after the jump…

A World in Crisis

I believe that much of what causes us to gather around the word “Change” from such diverse walks of life comes from the reality of the world in which we find ourselves. Our problems are outstripping our capabilities to solve them. They are multiplying and they are complex. Our institutions charged with managing the world on our behalf are straining to keep up to the accelerating pace of change. From financial to economic crises, from climate to broader environmental and social crises, it is becoming clear to many that what has worked for us in the past is no longer working. This global reality poses risks to each of us, the communities we call home and civilization as we know it.

Complexity

Much of this mismatch between our problems and our capabilities to solve them comes from the increasingly complex and hyperconnected systems around us. As individuals, as institutions and as a society we lack the necessary tools and skills to perceive complexity and make sense of it, much less to manage it. We need new tools and new institutions for this new world.

Community, Social Capital and Connectedness

From Putnam we know the importance of social capital to community resilience and success. And yet throughout the industrial age, our communities have become increasingly disconnected. Our suburban model of urban planning separated work from life and people from each other. Professionalization and specialization of everything separated capabilities into silos of competency managed within command and control systems. Mass media and politics separated people into clumsy demographic categories that denied much of our humanity. Our public service model took lessons from mass commercial enterprise and began to look at citizens as customers. We’ve lost our sense of civic belonging and participation.

The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.

- Peter Block: “Community: the Structure of Belonging”, p.2

Social Web

Into this vacuum of disconnectedness comes a new world of social connection, participation and collaboration enabled by the social web. The set of new social behaviours enabled by social web technologies are, in the view of Clay Shirky, retrieving some much older patterns of human social behaviour. The return of peer to peer, of leaderless organizations, of the circle as the form of social gathering, of tribes, of reputational authority and of trust are all enabled and embedded within the nature of the social web and the technologies that underpin it.

We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.

- Clay Shirky: “Here Comes Everybody”, p.106

What is ChangeCamp?

ChangeCamp is both a platform (online and face-to-face) and a community.

ChangeCamp is a platform for citizens to convene other citizens in order to transform their communities and help create change. It is a third-space commons for collaboration that sits outside government, private and institutional structures. ChangeCamp activates and engages what community member David Eaves dubbed the Long Tail of Public Policy.

Long Tail of Public Policy, David Eaves

Methods: Open Space + Social Media + Open Innovation

Embedded within ChangeCamp are three primary memes and methods.

1. Citizen-led large group participatory gatherings similar to Open Space (“ChangeCamps”)
2. Online participation and collaboration using social web technology; same time/place and different time/place
3. Open innovation approaches to value creation: open source, open data, open access, creative commons

A Community of Values and Interests

ChangeCamp is a post-partisan community of citizens interested in using these methods to create change. As a community, we are interested in open government, social innovation, citizen engagement, participatory democracy and public sector renewal. We are interested in exploring the use of social web technology and open innovation approaches as enablers of of positive social change. The ChangeCamp community is both local and national/global, and comprises a network of networks at a variety of scales.

David Eaves began an important conversation on the values driving many in the so-called “open movement” with his recent post dubbed A Neo-Progressive Manifesto. While some of the specific values he proposes may be debatable, the themes of human-scale, sustainable, participatory, open, community values and vibrant, creative, remixable and hybrid solutions to public/social problems outside traditional institutions seem to resonate for many drawn to ChangeCamp.

Further work and dialogue on these values is important and of interest, but our action does not depend upon a final and definitive exposition of community values.

ChangeCamp Purpose

Given all of the above observations of the context, values and methods emerging within the ChangeCamp platform and community, I would like to propose this statement of purpose for discussion by our community:

ChangeCamp spreads the emerging ideas, tools and methods of a networked society and builds social capital to accelerate community transformation. ChangeCamp is both a platform and a community of action.

The fundamental work of restoring community and facilitating a shift from industrial age to network age institutional structures is the core work that binds together the disparate threads of the ChangeCamp community. That work is focused on making positive social change happen and transforming our communities in line with our values.

A Goal Designed for Action

Enable the organization of 100 ChangeCamps in communities across Canada in September 2010.

This goal is something that Daniel Rose suggested to me in conversation as a useful tool for designing an approach to the future of ChangeCamp. It is intended to be big, bold, actionable and useful for the purposes of creating action and a direction for ChangeCamp.

I converted this initial goal into very rough estimates about reach and impact. Assuming 100 participant co-creators at face-to-face events and an online participation platform for ongoing engagement that follows the online community 90-9-1 rule, we can see how achieving such a goal might translate into 1 million Canadians aware and engaged in the activities of community transformation.

A Set of Activities to Achieve this Goal

In order to scale the ChangeCamp platform and community to this level, a program of work to create the enabling framework would be necessary. The actual work in local communities would be undertaken by groups of community organizers, but those organizers need tools and support. An initial scope of activity might include:

• Identify and provide tools, support and training for local organizers
• Develop and publish design patterns for events, both large-scale and small
• Design and develop an integrated online organization and collaboration platform at ChangeCamp.ca
• Build partnerships with organizations with shared interests: citizen engagement, public sector renewal and social innovation
• Deploy social media analytics tools to translate unstructured content into useful information and to measure community engagement and action

Thinking Big

While this vision is large and daunting, I believe that it is achievable. Within our community, we have the talent, networks, methods, skills and capabilities to deliver something truly transformative. I am encouraging us all to think bigger than we normally allow ourselves, to imagine possibility and to bring that imagination of the possible to others.

My questions are:

1. Is this vision attractive to you?
2. Can you imagine yourself within it?
3. Is the purpose and goal described worth pursuing?

I look forward to our conversation. You can leave a comment on this post, join the Google Group to discuss, reach me on Twitter (@remarkk) where we are using the hashtag #ChangeCamp or email me at mark@remarkk.com.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend ChangeCamp Ottawa (the first ChangeCamp since we created the format in January) myself, due to the inevitable post-event exhaustion (and likely hangover) from organizing the SpinTO fundraising launch event on Friday, May 15th. The stars just weren’t aligned for this one. But no matter, because Mark Faul, Ian Capstick and many other great Ottawa folks have been doing a great job with minimal advice from me. Which is perfect for me and shows that the model can scale and propagate.

For those who are able to come to the Ottawa SMB, here’s a little preview of what I’ll be talking about:

Social Web, Social Change & the Return of Community.

The social web is making possible new and exciting capabilities, new ways of participating in a global conversation. However, often those interested in social media and online community leave something very important, and very human, behind: our need for face-to-face interaction, to meet people around our shared passions and to have an impact, to create meaning.  Drawing from his work creating hybrid online and face-to-face participatory experiences, Toronto-based ChangeCamp organizer and consultant Mark Kuznicki will outline some theory and practice about how the social web meets physical community.

For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

My work with TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin has been fascinating and rewarding in this context of massive change in the media business model and questions about the future of journalism as craft and practice. I think that what is important during this transformation is to unpack, unbundle and reconfigure the elements that we think of when we think about “broadcaster” or “newspaper” and reimagine how they can be reconfigured to deliver more value to more people. Value that people want to pay for.

The Agenda: on the Road project is an interesting experiment along the lines of what Shirky describes above. What began as a way to bring TVO’s flagship current affairs program into local communities has developed into an ongoing experiment in open source journalism and community engagement.

The editorial direction of this series of on-the-road broadcasts was conceived last summer, before the true depth of the economic crisis had taken shape. It was to focus on Ontario’s changing regional economies, to reflect local realities and to bring as many local voices into the conversation as possible. AgendaCamp became a full-day unconference event to explore these issues with passionate community leaders and citizens prior to the live-to-air broadcast of The Agenda. Participants created fantastic digital artifacts of highly informed conversations that would never be able to be fit inside the parameters of a 60 minute broadcast.

While all this user-generated content is being created and uploaded to TVO.org, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc., the editorial team from The Agenda and Steve Paikin himself mix and mingle through up to 40 conversations on topics proposed and led by over 100 participants. Steve Paikin says it best, that every time he does this, he learns something new. He is learning from the community with locally relevant knowledge, he is able to further inform how he approaches the panel of experts, politicos and pundits during the broadcast and identifies interesting ideas, questions and people to call upon in the audience. Overall, we notice that the pre-planned questions to the panel tend to be completely reworked based on the new insights the editorial team glean from AgendaCamp participants.

So it came to be that I sat down with Sandra Gionas, The Agenda Producer responsible for the next in this series of on the road broadcasts, this one taking place in Waterloo on Sunday, March 29th and Monday, March 30th and focused on Ontario’s innovation economy. (AgendaCamp spaces still available.) In the interest of further experimentation and to encourage earlier, deeper engagement with the content, Sandra agreed to “open source” her research and thinking as she produced the show with the AgendaCamp community, via the blog, the wiki and her Twitter stream.

The idea is to both reveal a little bit of the work that a producer undertakes to help assemble a show like this one, and to share with the community some of the source material and research that have been undertaken. People with an interest in the topic of the innovation economy can edit the wiki page, suggest experts, link to reports and online resources, and otherwise add to Sandra’s research space that she’s sharing with the community.

Is this a signal of an open source future of journalistic media? Are we seeing possible new models for public media renewal? Time will tell.