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.
