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

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”?

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.

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/

by Brandon Carlos

Politics and social media have a lot more in common than just the Obama campaign. At the the epicentre of both institutions rests one crucial similarity: connectedness. What a tangled web we weave… or so the old saying goes. But Canadian politics lack the layered finesse of their American counterparts.

Obama’s campaign points out what professional communicators have always known: targeting your audience appropriately is key!

Social media marketing is the practice of targeting your social media initiatives to sell a product, drive traffic to your website, boost awareness, etc. And it’s sort of like fishing.

Imagine you’re out on a lake populated with all types of fish. Your mission, though, is to catch a big, fat salmon for tonight’s dinner. If you want to catch a salmon, you do two things:

1. You use the appropriate lure (i.e. you don’t use a lure built to catch a bass)
2. It’s a big lake, but you know that salmon generally hang-out at moderate depths, so you fish where they hang-out (i.e. you don’t fish off the shores, where you expect to catch a bass)

In Obama’s case, his proverbial salmon were the American youth (18-34 year olds). And where do youth, now more than ever, spend a considerable amount of time? Online! Advertisers have known this for years – and the fact that Google’s #1 revenue stream comes from online advertising, of which they own nearly 3/4 of the market, is a testament to the internet’s influence.

Never has it been easier to find a group of like-minded people than with the advent of social media -there are blog communities for every topic from Star Trek fans to bacon recipe lovers. There are also other benefits to investing in social media marketing:

1. Canada’s population density is four times less than the United States. This means people are far more spread out and less connected. We know that social media communities typically reside more in metropolitan areas than in rural ones. This is largely due to word of mouth, the most powerful form of marketing. What this phenomenon has done is create hyper-groups – folks who have a similar interest in a very specific topic. We also know, however, that an interest in social media often overpowers the specificied interest. The result: communities like Twitter, where micro-bloggers initially follow people of like-minded interests and then branch out to other contacts as they explore the contact base of their contacts. What we see here, then, is a pangea effect: islands of people drift inwards to form entire communities.

2. It’s cheap!

3. It’s the perfect two-way communication initiative. What we get with social media platforms like blogs or discussion forums is the opportunity to pull, rather than push, our information. People naturally respond more favourably to the former and maintain their connection longer. Two-way conversations promote collaboration, and this is an essential step towards building the loyalty needed but lacking in the Canadian political atmosphere.

4. It has the potential to go viral. As mentioned above, social media campaigns breed word-of-mouth, and more word-of-mouth means more brand awareness. In an election with one of the lowest voter turnouts ever, what could be more essential?

Consider this a call to the folks in parliament. Step down from your archaic model of promotion and get people talking– er, typing– in red and white!

Brandon Carlos is a professional communicator and social media strategist from Cambridge, Ontario. He is the founder of the PR Ninja blog and a PR blogger on Brazen Careerist. You can follow him on Twitter at @bcarlos