Here is a group that we are participating in and we think you should too, regardless of your partisan or not so partisan leanings.  Jennifer also refers to it in the prior post.

From the Centre for Social Innovation news letter:

Saturday, January 24th
8:30-5:00pm
MaRS Centre
101 College Street

ChangeCamp is a participatory and web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and media creators to answer one question: “How do we re-imagine government and governance in the age of participation?”

This is the first ChangeCamp Canada event, which is intended to ignite a national, distributed and self-organizing movement. For more information, please visit the ChangeCamp Canada Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/changecamp. A web site for the event will be launched soon at http://changecamp.ca/

READ the entire post by Lisa Torjman on MaRs Innovation blog.

Last Thursday, I went to the Rotman School of Business to learn about Obama’s social media campaign strategy from a member of the team that planned this grassroots, state-by-state online takeover. She’s passionate, intelligent, poised. She’s a new media strategist. She is also Canadian. Perhaps the most impressive, Rahaf Harfoush is a mere 24 years old. Her story was both inspired and inspiring.

The applications used in the campaign (such as Facebook and SMS), were not new (Greenpeace is a 2.0 vet). But the fact that they were employed by a political campaign is the innovative part, some would say, the risky part. The risk obviously paid off, since the numbers speak for themselves:

More than one billion emails were sent out and “hyper segmented” or customized according to three different factors: geography, key issue concerns and personal donating history.

READ MORE of Lisa’s post …

See Rahaf’s post covering the Rotman gig …

And here are the slides Rahaf presented …

See a CBC piece featuring Rahaf on her blog.