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/

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.