I recent met Joseph Cariati and I think his new blog at the intersection of politics and sports is going to be a home run.  See what I did there?

Check it out …

Are you excited about the 2010 Olympic Games being held in Vancouver, but you can’t make it out West. Your only chance to take part and enjoy the festivities is to attend the Official Torch Relay making its way across Canada. The only problem is, if you do not live in a Conservative riding your chances of getting a peak at the torch is limited. Check out why at http://bit.ly/7nf75l

Cheers,

Michael

I am east coast connected (President, Class of ‘90, MSVU) and East Coast Connected and I would like to take this opportunity to voice my support for Chris Crowell’s nomination in Halifax.

The only time that I have met Chris was while he was networking at a Rotman event, working the same circles as David Peterson and an auspicious collection of Canadians who care about our country’s future.  He mentioned East Coast Connected.

A while back I launched a blog designed to help connect the over 700 Mount Saint Vincent University graduates in the Toronto area and I have written my share about social media, so ECC immediately interested me.  I looked it up, joined and the success of this initiative continually impresses me.  Score two for Chris …

At the time, Chris was about to start as the Director of Investments at Social Capital Partners.  In my view (and I am not alone), social capital is key to a new economic model that is emerging and Chris’ commitment to this kind of economy can not be questioned.  Score two more Chris …

Above all, I think Chris is part of the solution.  I think he is committed to an innovation led economy.  A lack of innovation and productivity is not a East Coast problem, it is a Canadian problem that in my view requires a cultural shift.

I am not a personal or business connection of Chris’.  I hope this post is received with the conviction that it written.

Sincerely,

Michael Cayley

To make a long story short comments on the site were broken for a time due to human error.

If you have made comments in the past and they are not posted on the site, our apologies. Please, please, please post them again.

We assure you that no attempt was being made to stop the conversation, it was just a result of admin overload (i.e. real jobs getting in the way of this volunteer effort).

Feel free to @redliberals on twitter with comments or email me at michael at socialcapitalvalueadd dot com and now, once again … comment here and we will respond accordingly.

Mark Kuznicki and fellow ChangeCampers …. thank you for such an admirable amount of work and investment of personal time.

The ChangeCamp: Next post up at www.changecamp.ca is a jumping off point for the rest of this post.

A few thoughts come to mind …

I agree that the big, hairy, audacious goal is the right way to go and spreading ideas are the primary goal. Just having 1 million Canadians understand the ideas of personal empowerment & accountability, the resurrection of active citizenship, open source, open innovation, social media, scaled up forms of social capital etc. is a formidable, worthy goal.

To achieve this, I agree that you need a clear “kernel” as Mark describes or what I might term as a memetic strategy.

We talked about two ideas in that first ChangeCamp planning meeting that I think are worth resurfacing.

“ChangeCamp in a box” – perhaps this just means exploring each ChangeCamp’s participants for a connection to another community and then following them there with facilitation support and local PR.

How many ChangeCamps happen if each person who has thus far participated in one is recruited/persuaded/supported to facilitate one with the largest community that they might personally rally?

We also talked about collaborating with educational channels. I would like to think that students from senior high school years, through to colleges & universities would activate freely around these themes but that may be more difficult than I imagine.

I wonder if funding and scaling go hand in hand. Perhaps it is too early to worry about that. The classic start up issue – spend your time & energy building the initiative or spend your time & energy looking for money. Seth Godin, I think suggests putting off dealing with the funding issues as long as possible and I think this is a critical issue.

It is critical because I believe that the elephant(s) in the room (or not in the room as the case may be) are the paid political and bureaucratic classes in this country.

They are entrenched in closed social networks designed to maintain their status quo.

There are a few effects from this:

- they are a filter for the movement that ChangeCamp is trying to lead. By directing your activities “outside” of traditional institutions you maybe steering around the biggest potential to advance ChangeCamp goals. If you for example, attempted to have ChangeCamps within traditional institutions (i.e. government departments, political parties, etc) you might quickly set off rapid memetic effects and faster adoption across the country.

- as soon as you get money involved, you enable regular citizens to abdicate. I feel that there is an armchair ethic in Canada. Folks pay their taxes, cut cheques to the paid politicos & bureaucrats in charities & non-profits and then they are free to go about their day to day “real lives” as long as they keep well read on the resulting antics through broadcast media. In addition, there is no quicker way to loose the enthusiastic engagement of collaborators and dedicated volunteers then to start paying some of them while not others.

I am also thinking of one of the themes that popped up in several sessions during ChangeCamp Toronto.

Open space/Open source reduces risk.

The complex problems that we face are not new and the intellectual capital to deal with them is de facto state of the art. What is new is our capacity to deal with these complex problems with optimum solutions rather then compromises. That is being driven by bandwidth, cheap computing & storage and search (i.e. emerging ubiquitous access to the best information). It is the gap between optimum (or best possible) and election cycle driven compromise that is at the heart of ChangeCamper discontent in my view.

Politicos, bureaucrats and government are even more risk adverse than Canadian businesses. There is virtually no upside for taking a risk for a politico or bureaucrat yet risk must be involved in adopting the innovations that ChangeCamp hopes to advance.

This may be a key. Getting across the message to governments, politicos and bureaucrats that open space/open source enables them to outsource risk while taking responsibility for innovation may make ChangeCamp irresistible.

The agenda for more open governance (or whatever labels best describe) in the United States did not take a purposeful walk in the political wilderness. It was not naive about “post-partisanship”. Hundreds of years of institutional tradition will not be eclipsed by a new form. What IS happening is that all of our traditional institutions are going through a creative destruction/redesign period … adjusting to the network era … re-architecting to the new scale of human proportions. Reform (not the political party) is a Canadian tradition that ChangeCamp is championing here IMHO.

What happened in the U.S. was a kind of piggyback/incorporation/hijack of a budding political force. Does Obama become President without co-opting the open space/open source, social media movement? Does the movement obtain fast political power without co-opting the Obama campaign?

So the “kernel” to the unassociated or “freely associated” Canadians anchored by 100,000 digerati types (10,000 facilitators) that ChangeCamp hopes to activate may be empowerment – encapsulated in the question, “How do we Re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”.

But for the sake of ChangeCamp goals and the future of Canada, I urge ChangeCampers to consider how power is wielded in this country and how very real, consequential transitions are undertaken(like it or not & by the way, I must say I am more comfortable in the “not like it” category personally).

Do your one million ChangeCampers need to be unassociated? If they are part of the existing establishment of power in public service what is in it for them? Please consider the “kernel” of outsourcing risk and methodology that enables parties, bureaucracies and governments to generate wide support for best possible solutions (instead of compromises). As I have mentioned before, but not fully reasoned, a question that does not threaten the status quo by re-imagining it, but incorporates/co-opts it, might be “What does “Responsible Government” mean in the age of participation?” Since the beginning Canadians have demanded no more or less from government.  Go ahead be consistent with Eaves but honour Lessig and be cognizant that creativity and innovation always builds on the past.  Wake up one million Canadians to the fact that Responsible Government means open data, open source, online collaboration, etc (because it does) and you have an election issue.

By the way, I am not suggesting a semantic revisit of “the Camp question”. Don’t waste that kind of energy or time.

Let’s just recognize that we are all participants in inevitable “Change” being driven by broadband connectivity, cheap computing, mobility & GPS. As far as I can tell, ChangeCampers seem to be a vanguard of this change. It is happening everywhere – we are just temporarily positioned to make it more evenly distributed.

Preston Manning might advocate the creation of a completely separate movement. But I wonder, if in this case, that would be something like creating a political party to advocate the adoption of the personal computer.

As an aside, Nan Lin’s network theory of social capital is more forward looking than Putnam’s in my opinion, but who cares in this context.

The point is that building social capital (particularly online, but also IRW) for rapid adaptation to the network era is a great purpose and it is critical to Canada’s position in the world.

The change must be achieved across our entire society so why hold back from advancing it in any quarter with any group that we can infiltrate … especially political parties and government departments.

In Vancouver this weekend at our Biennial Convention, the Liberal Party of Canada will most likely adopt a Weighted, One Member, One Vote system for electing our future leaders of the Party.

It will be disappointing if the motion does not pass on many levels.

Since 2004, when broadband connectivity overtook slower connections for the first time in North America, we have experienced a giant shift in the scale of an individual’s ability to project their opinions through online forms of social networking and social media.

The Reform and Conservative parties were motivated to change the relationship that they had with individual members in advance of this shift.  They could no longer afford to maintain the distance between MPs & their staff, party organisers, former Senators and ex officios running the party and members who are paying for it. They were primarily motivated by fund raising.

Now Liberals have this same motive, plus, undeniable trends in individual empowerment which are attributable to:

- a tripling of bandwidth every six months,
- mobility (i.e. portable computing power & connectivity through smart phones & ultra light weight laptops), and,
- integration of GPS (anyone can use an iPhone application that uses GPS to help us listen to and connect with local twitter users).

Some perceive adopting the forms of organization and communications that are designed to cope with these trends as a potential loss of control and a threat the Party status quo.

The truth is that the methods to adapt to these irreversible changes in broadband connectivity, mobility and integration of GPS are not the threat or the source of loss of control.  In fact, just the opposite …

The underlying trends of broadband connectivity, mobility and GPS integration are the source of loss of control.  The only way to manage in this new context is to adopt new forms of organisation and communications that are designed for the new scale of individual influence.

One Member, One Vote is a fundamental shift in the right direction but in my view it is more symbolic than anything else.

It is more important that we recognize that all of our institutions … corporations, government and the Liberal Party are changing to adjust to the new architecture required by individuals who have a different scale of power and influence.  This not my idea. It is known as the Canon of Proportions and was first articulated by a Roman architect and then depicted in a diagram 1500 years later by a guy named Da Vinci.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg

This is not theoretical mumbo jumbo.

The reality is that individual roles in leadership (power and politics) can no longer be reduced to a vote every few years.  Hard wiring constant engagement and empowerment of our members and Canadians into our systems is critical to developing, delivering and defending success.

If we do not accept this at our core, then we will experience instability both within our party and in any government that we may form.

Head on over to www.changecamp.ca to read up on the kinds of issues that will become part of the mainstream debate and Liberals have a chance to lead on.

Can you imaging Harper winning on the issue of “open government”?

Peter Jones is founder of Redesign Research, and spends time in both the US and Toronto. He’s a visiting scholar at U of T, a senior fellow of OCAD’s Strategic Innovation Lab, and has figured out the secret to making these commitments work: time travel. See Peter’s blog at Design Dialogues.  We are grateful for this guest post …

A week ago 150 people in Toronto started a movement called ChangeCamp, a rapid-response unconference of tech, design, and policy/government people who engaged the question:

How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?

I drove up from Dayton, Ohio the day before ChangeCamp and showed up at 9:00 ready to go. We do not create these types of opportunities for engagement in the US – we mostly work through issue groups, or local citizen activist groups. With the monstrous problems in the US over the last 8 years, we have been fighting for peace, justice, human rights, civil rights, and fair elections (I’m from Ohio and what you heard is all true). And we have celebrated the Obama era with hope, expectancy, and mostly relief.

But ChangeCamp was in my new hometown of Toronto, and I was delighted to be a supporter and to lead a session (co-led Citizen Participation in Policy Making with Karen Smith).

Just a few days later, back in my US homeland I was alerted to this news on the NCDD (National Council for Dialogue and Deliberation) list:

“Barack Obama has yet to announce who his chief technology officer will be. But he has hired a Silicon Valley exec for another role: Google product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton will be the new President’s “director of citizen participation,” starting in March, sources tell me.”

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090128/obama-gets-a-google-vet-but-not-for-cto/

Comments show respondents are quite disappointed that the pick has no bona fides in civic sector organizations. Critical responses were showing up elsewhere to rebut this appointment already.

“Stanton, sources say, will be part of the White House New Media Team headed up by Macon Phillips — putting “citizen participation” under the White House communications umbrella, it seems.”

It’s great to know such an office has been established at the WH, but hiring a technology expert without any evidence of commitments in social justice and civil society may be telling us that participation is considered to be – let’s be charitable and call it “scalable communications.” I find it an interesting paradox – the Google veteran probably stands for open government and can certainly coordinate technology efforts to engage mass citizen responses. But the need to engage citizen participation is social and cultural, and the social technology design should follow the values and vision of participatory democracy. Not enough info to go on, I know, but let’s consider this a new move for us to track and learn from.

I’m on the board of a US non-profit, the Agoras Institute, that organizes design and decision making for civic sector and policy making stakeholder groups. We are currently holding a progressive (and voluntary) virtual session of structured dialogue (SDD) on the inhibitors to Obama’s vision of participatory democracy. As we are able to understand it, of course. We have conducted one round with about 15 international participants, with the online wiki for the dialogue at: http://obamavision.wikispaces.com/

Our inquiry may be relevant to this White House office. Responses to the focus question of:

“In the context of Obama’s vision for engaging stakeholders from all walks of life in a bottom-up democracy employing Internet technology, what factors do we anticipate, on the basis of our experiences with SDD, will emerge as inhibitors to the actualization of his vision?”

Show in the root cause mapping: http://obamavision.wikispaces.com/Round+5-Root+Cause+Map to include one of 3 deep driver inhibitors as: Corporate Control of the means of Democracy.

Most of my consulting is in the corporate sector, so I’m not anti-corporate. But I do believe we need a better champion, and Canada might learn from this mistaken selection. It’s not enough to just create a new role for citizen participation and then expect it to be a large-scale social network for contribution management. If government is going to be open, they must signal their intention to really listen. We need a citizen-centered policy advocate to be at the gov table, especially where our official representation via Congress or Parliament is weakened by years of the megaphone voice of corporate lobbying.

Citizen participation in the US may be emerging from a long consumerism-induced slumber and it’s got a weak voice – we need to be sure we’re being heard, not being managed by just more scalable social technologies.

First, thanks again to Rahaf for turning us on to ChangeCamp, it has been amazing to be part of this group from the first meeting on December 31st through Saturday’s frenetic day at MaRs.

Let’s open this post with a little announcement … our experiment here at www.redliberals.ca is being extended.  We had originally planned to can our learnings on January 27th and switch our focus towards engaging within the party on the issues of change.  After the first ChangeCamp event, we feel that we can learn & share more by staying engaged in this movement.

We are still going to focus our efforts here on coming up with a Liberal 2.0 Manifesto as quickly as possible and we hope that everyone who participated in ChangeCamp as well as those broader circles that we have connected with over this short time will help us.

Our main motives for launching www.redliberals.ca was to connect with great people & ideas in the drive to embrace change.  Check out all of the discussions and people who were contributing at ChangeCamp. It is all irresitable!  www.redliberals.ca and our twitter stream @redliberals is the best place to channel our enthusiasm.

Now a more focused reflection ..

There has been a lot of focus on the creation of a new software application that will emerge from ChangeCamp and that will be exciting.  I think that is part of the heritage of applying the “Camp” approach, which has its roots in social technology to public policy and governance issues.

Perhaps more exciting was the intensity of having almost 200 people together, most of them not part of the paid political clique or bureaucracy, all of them locked in deep, action oriented collaboration about what is wrong and how to drag our country into the 21st Century.  #ChangeCamp was a breath of hope of freedom from the closed social networks of political parties, entrenched interest groups and faceless government institutions.  It was an adhocracy at work.  Robert H. Waterman, Jr. defined adhocracy as “any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.”

That potential heritage of #ChangeCamp deserves as much attention focus.  Who & where will the next ChangeCamp be hosted within the next 30 days is big question in my view.”

MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES

SUBJECT:      Transparency and Open Government

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.  We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Government should be transparent.  Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.

Government should be collaborative.  Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector.  Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.

I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.

This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.

BARACK OBAMA

January 21, 2009

nice work … what does “responsible government” mean to you?

If you have not already registered, do it now.

This is going to be the start of something …

Great work by Mark MacKay.

More change has come to the White House! Continuing the push toward a more open and accessible government, the Obama Administration has revamped the White House Website and from CNN (source):

“The new design includes more interactive features, a prominent photo gallery displayed across the top of the site, the ability to get e-mail updates, and a White House blog. The site’s “briefing room” also includes places for a weekly video address, slide shows, proclamations, and executive orders as well as news about nominations and appointments. Visitors to the site are invited to e-mail the president and his staff, although — perhaps in a nod to the Twittersphere, where brevity is key — comments are limited to 500 characters.”

www.whitehouse.gov

This type of openness brings in a new era with regard to government accessibility. As we are becoming more technologically savvy, and the younger generations want more connectedness with their leaders, this administration is setting the precedent, established the benchmark, and wrote the playbook on how to use technology to reach and leverage the electorate.