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In March, the net neutrality issue finally made the front pages and broadcast media in Canada, triggered by news of Bell Canada’s throttling of third-party Internet Service Providers’ peer-to-peer traffic. The unilateral action was seen by advocates of a neutral and open Internet as anti-competitive and a dangerous precedent, and it triggered a backlash against Bell Canada. Bell confirmed advocates worst fears in May, when it launched its own online video store after having throttled P2P traffic, much of which is dedicated to video - both legal and otherwise.

Thompson provided some excellent background on the issue drawing from his experience on the U.S. campaign around network neutrality, which is well advanced compared to the debate in Canada. Matt shared the U.S. focused viral video, Save the Internet!, which won a 2007 Webby People’s Voice Award:

Thompson presented a clear description of the principles underlying the neutral and open web and its importance to Canada’s future as an innovative economy and a free society. He also articulated a nuanced understanding that the last-mile monopoly providers (principally Bell and Rogers in Canada) aren’t evil, they are merely doing their job and lobbying for rules that are in their shareholders’ interests. He described that what is really missing in Canada is everybody else - all the many stakeholders that are damaged by a set of norms that currently allows for discrimination of content on the web by these monopoly providers.

Canada needs a plan. Thompson made a passionate plea that the real underlying issue is that the government of Canada’s laissez faire approach (”we don’t regulate the Internet”) shows that Canada has no plan for its digital future. It has no vision about the infrastructure for everything else, and how we’re going to compete in a global digital future when other countries have long passed us by in terms of broadband policy, infrastructure speed, access and costs. Compare this situation against Barack Obama’s Technology policies. and it’s clear that there is a political opportunity to show leadership on the technology file.

SaveOurNet.ca promises to be a vehicle for everybody else. SaveOurNet.ca is intended to act as a broad, inclusive coalition of strange bedfellows: freedom of speech activists and technology entrepreneurs; unions and third-party ISPs; large technology companies and broadcasters.

SaveOurNet.ca needs our community’s help. Effective awareness campaigns like the Save the Internet video, coalition building, media relations, community engagement, participation in CRTC hearings and direct lobbying of elected officials requires dedicated resources - volunteers alone won’t do it. Big players are being lined up to support the effort, including major public sector unions and companies like Google Canada and Teksavvy.

But the campaign needs a vote of confidence from Canada’s web/tech/media and other communities of interest to trigger the pooling of additional resources from larger organizations and foundations. In fundraising terms, SaveOurNet.ca is looking for Angels.

What You Can Do:

1. Sign onto the coalition at http://SaveOurNet.ca/, either as an individual supporter or as an organizational supporter.
2. PLEASE DONATE what you can to the seed fund for SaveOurNet.ca, and then blog about it, share it on Facebook, send to your networks and communities, talk about it.
3. Contact your MP’s office and arrange for a sit-down chat about the issue during their summer hiatus from Parliament. Just booking the appointment will force your MP to get briefed on the issue, which is the first step in educating our elected officials and raising it on the political agenda come the fall.

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Now this shouldn’t really be a surprise to those who have been paying attention to social network analysis, tipping points and the new behaviours enabled by the social web.

What is a surprise is that the nonprofit/charitable sector has been fairly late to the social web party, while corporate brands trip over themselves to build brand communities, develop social media strategies and deploy viral campaigns as budgets increasingly shift from broadcast to digital.

When it comes to helping to shift societal behaviours to more sustainable and humane patterns, the tools, practices and methodologies of social media and social change were made for each other.

If you (or your clients) are involved in social change and looking for an intensive, practical and productive training into these technologies and practices, Social Tech Training being held June 22-24th in Toronto could be just the thing. I sit on the advisory board for the event.

A co-production of Web of Change and MaRS, this is an amazing opportunity to learn from some of the global leaders in this space. Check out the amazing faculty. The agenda is pretty rich and allows for plenty of opportunities to make the program fit individual needs.

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We had a standing room only crowd at the end of Day 1, with many government folks in the crowd from all levels of government. The reviews were great, with several people coming up at the end to say it was the best session they’d see in the day, so I’m happy with how it went.

We were caught short on time for discussion, so I hope some of the participants in the workshop find this post and leave questions here in the comments. Nice to meet you all!

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The convergence of these forces in the context of tremendous global economic, environmental and political uncertainty signals an opportunity for renewal by change-makers, social innovators and social entrepreneurs for the benefit of us all. The complexity of the world requires better solutions, and we know from the open innovation literature that the ideas we need today do not live within a single organization.

Is this a truly transformative moment at a critical point in human history? Is a new social, economic, environmental and cultural resilience possible, or will status quo forces reassert themselves?

Full essay after the jump…

The New Great Transformation

Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest and his talks paint a picture of an emergent immune response to global environmental and social injustice in the form of a global and decentralized social movement unlike anything that has come before. When you have some time to reflect, I recommend the video of the full Long Now talk.

Hawken describes an emerging movement of NGOs around the world concerned with values of economic, environmental and social justice - projecting a set of global cultural creative values throughout the world.He describes this as a movement unlike any other in history. It is new, because it is not driven by a single charismatic leader with a unifying ideology. This movement is not devoid of ideology, of course, but it is primarily pragmatic and solutions-oriented about propagating memes, while being driven by a unifying set of values rather than an integrated ideological system.

Up to now every ism became a schism. This movement is born atomized.

This movement is also not trying to aggregate power onto itself, but rather it seeks to disperse pathological concentrations of power that are harmful to the sustainability of human and other life on earth. It is less about gaining power than it is about permeating our institutions with ideas and memes, trying them out to see what works, letting them go if they don’t.

Hawken claims that we are observing the end of isms. Moving from a world of privilege to a world of community. In his view, Neo-conservatism, religious and economic fundamentalism are vestigial reactions to the threat to traditional concentrations of power that is posed by this movement.

The Social Web

The emergence of a self-organizing global civil society movement that Hawken describes is enabled and accelerated by social web tools. Those who are building these tools, learning about how they are eliciting new kinds of human behaviour, and developing practices to connect those tools with the challenges and opportunities of contemporary global life are engaged in building the architecture for Hawken’s Great Transformation.

Whether in social movements, government or corporate life, the technologies and behaviours of the Social Web are already having a huge impact. This is only beginning, and these impacts will become more and more visible in the years to come, as Generation Y grows into itself and assumes its place in our organizations and our politics.

The Obama Moment

We may see a truly transformational leader take the world stage in January 2009.

Barack Obama’s recent speech on race in America, A More Perfect Union, is the closest thing I have witnessed to transformational leadership in action. This is a new style of leadership, one born out of a deep understanding of complexity of the post-modern world, steeped in grassroots community organization, recalling the best oratory from history and realized through the enabling networks, technologies and participatory practices of the Social Web. Just one of the reactions:

What I heard today, though, was not a political speech in the sense we have gotten used to in this country. I heard instead a speech that, as much as it was about Obama and Wright, was also about us. Our politics does not quite know how to handle such a thing; campaigns are meant to tell people what they can expect to receive, not to ask them to understand, forgive, and reach out. [The Plank]

A politician promoting self-help and social change. This is new. It is not the nanny-state, nor is it laissez-faire neo-liberalism. Hillary Clinton says “I will do this for you”, Barack Obama says “we can do this, but only together”. Absolutely progressive, but pragmatist and post-ideological. Somebody who does not shy away from complexity, his 37 minute speech receiving 3 million views on YouTube in a few days thereby bypassing the 15 second sound-bite horror show that is cable news. Obama is a politician who uses the Social Web not only to communicate but, as Sean Howard argues, to gain insight and enable our participation:

Even if Obama fails to achieve his goal of becoming President of the United States, I predict he will have a deeper and more powerful understanding of the American people than anyone in the history of politics. He will have engaged at a level yet to be fully grasped or understood. [CrapHammer]

The importance of Obama isn’t so much his policies, the man himself or even his potential to transform US and international politics. His importance is that he is the FIRST of his kind - a political leader that understands and is able to intelligently tap the forces of Hawken’s “New Great Transformation” using the tools of the Social Web - in order to bring participation back into democracy. This is my great hope: that others will learn and will follow.

My Work - Government 2.0?

These converging forces and my own recent work is giving me greater focus about the direction for my consulting work and greater clarity around my social mission. What is it that I do, and why am I doing it? I am wrestling with some key questions:

1. What is the relationship between the world of control (corporations, government, governance, policy, politics) and this emerging decentralized global social movement?
2. What is the interface between hierarchies and heterarchies? How do we break the boundaries between them and create a fusion of these categories for mutual benefit?
3. What is the relationship between global, networked movements and place? How do we reimagine the local in the face of a profoundly changed global context?

I suppose you could say that I work in the Government 2.0 space. I do spend a lot of time working on projects related to public policy and planning, but I’m reluctant to attach myself to 2.0-anything. The term “Web 2.0″ didn’t help us understand the Social Web with any particular insight, so I’m reluctant to hop on the Gov2.0 bandwagon. But I will try to give some definition to how these emerging trends impact the public sphere.

My reading of whatever “Government 2.0″ is is not about “E-Government”. It is not about info-age efficiency from automating government services using web tools, however useful and beneficial these applications of technology might be. E-Government is not transformational change, it is incremental change.

The E-Government discourse does not allow for insight about what public policy should be and how its goals can be achieved. Nor does it provide guidance about how the private and public spheres collaborate in new ways to produce those public benefits.

My focus on public engagement and open innovation models in Government and governance is in part about enabling a new conversation about how we develop policy and plans, how regular citizens can become part of a solution-making process and how we can reconsider and reconfigure the public sphere in order to get better solutions. It is about open innovation applied to developing public policy solutions - inside or outside government.

And yes, this is an emerging field of practice, with much that is not yet well understood. So I look for collaborators and clients who are interested in doing innovative work in this emerging space; groups of passionate individuals interested in playing midwife to something new that is actually pretty old: nature reasserting itself as a form of social resilience to global change.

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This unusual convergence of open/unconference events all happening the evening of the 29th and CaseCamp steward Eli Singer’s booking of the amazing megaclub CiRCA presented an opportunity too good to pass up. Many thanks to CaseCamp sponsors comScore, Thornley Fallis, InterCom Search, Social Media Group, Pigsback.com, Segal Communications, FreshBooks and nextMedia for making the space available. Special thanks to Rob Hyndman|Hyndman Law for helping us pickup some extra expenses to make SummerCamp a reality.

Creative convergence happens on the dancefloor!

SummerCamp Dance Party

CaseCamp along with its sponsors transform CiRCA into ground zero for Toronto’s creative communities: art, design, communications, technology, media, social change and entrepreneurship. DJs, interactive art, and the closest friends you haven’t met celebrating their passion for participatory culture, creative practice and society.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 9:00 PM - Close
CiRCA
126 John Street
Toronto, Ontario M4V 2E3
RSVP on the Facebook event.

Enjoy a late night party and a great lineup:

• Andrew McConachie (DJ Set)
• Jimmy Blak (DJ Set)
• Abdul Smooth (DJ + Visuals)
• Gabe Sawhney (Interactive Visual Installation)
• Newmindspace (Cool Stuff TBA)

Trust me, you won’t want to miss this. Book off the next morning and celebrate with Toronto’s emerging creative leaders who are remaking the city. A glance at the Facebook guest list shows one of the most exciting gatherings of creative change-makers and rabble-rowsers in town. Just some of the groups and communities represented:

CaseCamp, StartupCamp, CopyCamp, DemoCamp, PodCamp, FacebookCamp, SciBarCamp, Third Tuesday, Emerging Arts Professionals, ArtsScene, Mercer Union, The Movement, FlashInTO, CFC Medialab, Metronauts/TransitCamp, Centre for Social Innovation, The Overlap, The Beal Institute, VizThink, OpenCities/OpenEverything, Newmindspace, Trampoline Hall, Mobile Jam Fest, Spacing, BlogTO, Talk20 Toronto, WirelessToronto, Mesh, nextMedia, CIX, and many many more. (sorry, my linking finger got tired: Ed.)

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At ICE08, we learned that Ontario’s Ministry of Research & Innovation is investing $9 million in OCAD’s’ Digital Futures Initiative to expand training and research programs in digital media. Sara Diamond, President of OCAD, is a remarkable force of nature and under her leadership, OCAD is aggressively pursuing a reinvigorated research agenda and building partnerships with technology and content industry partners large and small.

We also learned that $10 million is being invested in a new Stratford campus for the University of Waterloo, bringing UW’s acknowledged strength in technology together with Stratford’s vibrant arts and culture community, focusing on digital media.

Both announcements came out of are in addition to the new Next Generation of Jobs Fund, a $1.15 billion initiative modelled after Ontario’s Auto Investment Strategy, which put $500 million into strategic projects and leveraged private investment of $7 billion. The Next Generation of Jobs Fund focuses on three broad sectors: green/clean tech, bio/pharma/health and digital media/ICT. There are three program streams:

• the Biopharmaceutical Investment Program
• the Jobs and Investment Program (focused on projects with specific job targets, including attracting Foreign Direct Investment) and
• the program of most interest to my community, the Strategic Opportunities Program, which is open to “creative industries such as digital media and information and communication technology” to fund public/private partnerships

What is a “Strategic Opportunity?”

An opportunity where:

• A large scale global market opportunity exists, coupled with a unique strategy to deal with the competition, or a niche global market opportunity where Ontario has significant capacity and little competition and;
• Ontario has a demonstrated competitive advantage such as strong private sector strengths including global market leadership, and globally competitive research strength.

Now, here’s an innovation challenge for the Strategic Opportunities Program itself:

How do you identify and evaluate the best strategic opportunities?

The Ministry is holding a series of workshops and doing a SWOT analysis within each of the three focus areas. (sigh)

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good SWOT analysis as much as the next strategy consultant. But have you seen a SWOT analysis yet that provides the needed insight or foresight implied by the goal of developing “next generation jobs”, particularly in an environment of accelerating tech and cultural change?

In the auto industry, panning for job gold is pretty straightforward - you call up the Big 3, the major import manufacturers, the parts and auto technology makers and you’ve got a pretty manageable group to work with. Eventually BIGCO installs some equipment or builds a plant somewhere. Now look at a map of the 11,000 enterprises in the entertainment and creative industries in the Toronto CMA, including digital media and ICT, and you’ll see the problem: 77% of this $9 billion industry are sole practitioners or micro-enterprises. That’s a mighty big river to pan in!

In order for this strategy to be successful, strategic opportunities have to be found, validated by expertise and evaluated against investment criteria in order to be funded. Is there a community engagement strategy that could support this process? What role does strategic foresight, design thinking and collaborative innovation play in its execution? I’m interested in finding out. Leave a comment if you have some thoughts.

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Bell Canada Associate Director of Media Relations Jason Laszlo made a real boner move, boasting on Facebook of his ability to snow journalists with his network management bafflegab, referring to journalists as “lemmings” in a recent status update. [DIGG] Clearly a super-fun guy in real life (note colourful hat and armband tattoo), he further demonstrated the Bell Media Relations department’s apparent unfamiliarity with modern web tools by leaving his Facebook profile wide-open to the public to see. Oops. [UPDATE: Profile is closed now.]

The blogosphere, 3rd party DSL providers, regular users, technology developers, net neutrality advocates and public sector employees unions have suddenly woken up. This is all thanks to Bell’s politically stupid move to throttle third party DSL providers P2P traffic. The silent, simmering battle is now finally out in the open. Thanks to the indominatable Michael Geist for keeping the embers alive.

How bad is it about to get for Bell and other monopoly last-mile providers in this PR and regulatory battle? Very bad. It’s a perfect storm of factors:

1. CBC was receiving raves for distributing “Canada’s Next Prime Minister” on Bittorrent file-sharing networks, being recognized as an innovator(!) in digital content distribution. CBC’s move effectively killed the argument that bandwidth throttling of P2P traffic only affects pirates.
2. Bell Canada’s wholesale customers are now mobilized against it, into lawsuits and advocacy efforts. TekSavvy, Ontario’s technology community’s preferred DSL provider is leading the charge.
3. The National Union of Public and General Employees (340,000 members strong) has taken on the issue with a letter to the CRTC accompanying a report it produced on the subject of network neutrality.
4. The F2C: Freedom to Connect conference is happening Monday and Tuesday in Washington DC. This will raise the profile of the net neutrality issue in general, as well as many of the other implications of citizen journalism, human rights and beyond. At the ICE08 after-party there was talk of bringing this conference to Ottawa too.
5. The technology developer and startup communities in Toronto, Waterloo, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver are frustrated with the state of broadband in Canada and can be mobilized to action in ways that will bring the investment community along with them. Anti-competitive broadband policies inhibit innovation and startup growth.
6. The U.S. is making moves to open up the debate on net neutrality legislation. Barack Obama’s technology policy supports network neutrality unequivocally.

Watch this space.

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