Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to be one of 240 attendees at ChangeCampTO. The intent of the conference was to bring creative people together to create a grassroots movement to improve citizen engagement. The event attracted an incredible diversity of people from seemingly all walks of life.
As Mark Kuznicki commented in his opening remarks, the recent explosion of social networking tools and touchpoints is unprecedented. Our ability to converse and connect with each other has taken a leap not seen since the invention of the printing press. The collective objective of the people in the conference was to find a way to use these tools to transform civic apathy into action.
The deliverable from the conference was meant to be a “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box” – basically a recipe book that anyone could use to begin the conversations around civic engagement in their community. The ideas for these recipes were segmented around issues of time and space (same time/same place, different time/same place, etc).
My group was tasked with devising a mechanism for getting people together and engaged in the same time and same place. Despite the fact that this is the most “traditional” of meeting styles and that a lively discussion ensued we still struggled to decide what our kit would contain. How do you get people to the meeting? Do you want to attract everyone or a discrete group? What do you do with everyone once they’re there? How do you measure progress?
I’ll save the substance of our idea for another post. The issue I was left thinking about was that while our idea was interesting I’m not clear on how it can be translated into action. Am I really going to run around my community engaging my neighbours in a discourse about the upcoming municipal election? Perhaps I should – but somehow that approach doesn’t sit well with me. My dislike of “going it alone” is what drove me to go to ChangeCamp in the first place.
So the central issue that ChangeCamp then highlights is: how do you tap into the energy of all the creative people that were assembled and enable them to succeed? I think it’s unfair to leave the burden of answering this question solely on Kuznicki’s shoulders. Why should he be responsible for working out the next step? If we claim to be engaged then that’s how we should act – not simply wait on the sidelines for someone else to have a good idea. Nevertheless, the challenge remains to maintain and grow some of the cohesiveness that was found at yesterday’s conference. I, for one, am looking forward to the challenge.
1 comment:
Interesting stuff. The challenge is a valid one for sure. Watching the "Tea Party" movement is very instructive since it appears to have significant momentum, ambition and thus far, success. Although they aren't how you or I would necessarily define "progress" politically, there is no doubt that they have been able to organize and mobilize. They would be worth a reflective moment of study to understand how a group like that has come together and mobilize so effectively.
Also, I'm often cautious about the over-hyping of technology and its ability to bring about political change. The telephone helped people talk about things, not necessarily agree about things.
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