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”?

Back in 2007, Tom Steinberg and Ed Mayo published a report on the Power of Information proposing the better use and development of state and citizen-generated information in the UK. They state that their paper is an unusual review, in that it focuses on opportunities rather than problems. “When enough people can collect, re-use and distribute public sector information, people organize around it in new ways, creating new enterprises and new communities. In each case, these are designed to offer new ways of solving old problems.”

The pair came up with 15 recommendations based on a literature review, three in-depth case studies and interviews with 60 decision makers, website operators and users inside and out of government. They argue the government could grasp opportunities that exist in the creation, consumption and re-use of information, but current policy and action is not yet adequate to seize these opportunities. The report recommends a strategy in which government:

• Welcomes and engages with users and operators of user-generated sites in pursuit of common social and economic objectives;
• Supplies innovators that are re-using government-held information with the information they need, when they need it;
• Protects the public interest by preparing citizens for a world of plentiful information, and helps excluded groups take advantage.

Check out the full report and list of the recommendations - The Power of Information: An Independent Review

Garth Turner brought the system out of the dark by reaching out on his blog. This week, he’s shutting it down. What remains will be a record of what he set out to accomplish by using technology to communicate with the people of Canada. He states on his Website that he’s received 60 million hits over the past 4 years – that is a significant amount of traffic!

Our current mainstream political parties are very much about control. Everything must go through the proper channels and no one should go off on their own without expressed permission of the party leadership.

During the recent federal election, most parties used the internet in some form or fashion to communicate their message, but in most cases, it was very much a one way conversation. The Bloc and the NDP were much more engaged, but the Conservatives and Liberals did not invest much time in listening to the electorate. The Greens have connected better through technology and have made significant inroads (http://danforthgreens.ca).

The notion of Open Parliament does exactly that, it opens channels between the people and its members of Parliament. No longer are MPs required to do everything by handshake, hold town hall meetings, or spend a significant amount of time in their constituency offices. There will always be a need for some of that, but as the digital divide shrinks, there are more opportunities than ever to engage their constituents and open the channels of communication. It also means more transparency, which is not a good thing for many politicians.

Garth paid the price for doing what he thought was right, but he also stood up and said “I believe there is a better way”, which is what we want to see more of.

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/

This is more excellent work by Jennifer Bell, the Executive Director of www.visiblegovernment.ca.

A couple of great quotes to focus on:

“Open Systems Make Failure Less Costly

Finding the best ways to analyze government information and collect value from public feedback is going to take a lot of experimentation. The probability of a successful solution is what author Clay Shirkey might qualify as a scalar distribution pattern: one where there’s a very large number of failures, some modest successes, and a few solutions that will do amazingly well. Being
prepared to accept a lot of failures is the key to finding the successes.

Government bureaucracies are failure-averse for very good reasons. Public scrutiny and the spectre of being accused wasting of tax payer funds make for a cautious environment, where money is only spent on guaranteed successes. By publishing data in open, standardized formats, governments can off-load the costs and stigma of failure to external organizations. Like Goldcorps, governments can take the open approach to innovation by challenging advocacy groups, the nascent community of armchair egovernment-geeks, and the for-profit market to ‘build a better way’. The government can then take advantage of the value created by the best solutions. Solutions that don’t work can die quietly, without any tax dollars having been spent.”

And why not adopt the “Camp” approach to change? …

“Ways Forward

In the last two weeks, more than one grass-roots forum has appeared to advance a new era in civic participation.  ChangeCamp[1], originating in Toronto, and Communeautique’s Forum Ouverte, in Montreal, are two such movements calling for an open exchange of ideas around using technology to re-define the role of the citizen.  The spontaneous emergence of these groups shows the demand for new ideas and tools in the Canadian government.

The non-profit VisibleGovenrment.ca seeks the expertise and participation of grass-roots groups, advocacy organizations, and citizens across the country to make online tools for civic participation based on open government data a reality.  If you share this goal, here are some concrete steps for action:

-         Host a ‘Change Camp’ or ‘Forum Ouverte’ in your city.

-         Research resources and strategies on the VisibleGovernment.ca, Sunlight Foundation, or   MySociety websites.

-         Contribute to a VisibleGovernment.ca project.

-         Start a dialogue with your public representatives on how they can be more open.”

Transparency Through Open Data and Open Source-Scribd

Jennifer Bell is the Executive Director of Visible Government.  Check out their mission:

VisibleGovernment.ca is dedicated to promoting online tools for government transparency in Canada.  VisibleGovernment.ca will champion the development of open source tools that allow citizens to share, organize, and analyze government data.  By promoting the creation of these tools, VisibleGovernment.ca seeks to increase government accountability and engage citizens in the democratic process.  The ultimate goal of VisibleGovernment.ca is to make Canada the world model for open governance.

The concept for VisibleGovernment.ca was inspired by the paper ‘Hack, Mash, and Peer: Crowd-sourcing Government Transparency ’ , by Jerry Brito of George Mason University, and by the example of the Sunlight Foundation in the US.

With her permission, her recent post to the ChangeCamp group is a guest post here.  Thanks Jennifer!  Jennifer’s cooperation here is a good example of how we would like to encourage non-partisan input.

Great thoughts & links on example policy & principal statement …

1.  Really, my favorite, in terms of clarity and concision, are the
Open Transition principles that Mark Kuznicki already mentioned:

http://open-government.us/

2.  OpenGovData principles are a comprehensive defition of what open
government data means:

http://wiki.opengovdata.org/index.php/OpenDataPrinciples

3.  The reccomendations from the US group OMBWatch's report: 'Moving
Towards a 21st Century Right to Know Agenda' (the result of a long and
well-funded research effort spanning a multitude of stakeholder groups
and expert panels) has some good stuff in it, but it's a bit long and
unevenly applicable.  My favorite ideas are the creation of an 'Office
of Open Government', and reccomendation D-9, quoted at length below.

http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2008/11/17/the-right-to-know-agenda/

4.  While principles are nice, concrete examples of how a change will
improve society are powerful too.  The Illinois Data Exchange
initiative has put together some nice ones that support their
principles here:

http://www.chidataexchange.net/usage_examples.htm

5.  Norway's recent e-Citizen report, written by the 'Norweigen
Ministry of Government Administration and Reform' is fairly
revolutionary for something coming from a government agency, but it's
a report, not a policy statement.  Two key findings from the summary
are:

 - core aspecs of public sector data should be made accessable and re-
useable
 - e-government initiatives should participate with external
developers, both locally and internationally.

It's worth a look for a balanced section on positives and negatives of
public participation in section 9.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8694619/eCitizen20The-Ordinary-Citizen-as-a-Supplier-of-Publicsector-Information

(There are of course, other reports and reccomendations from different
agencies/countries, but the Norway one is the most recent.)

Jennifer