technowonk

WIREDcamp was a huge success, and we owe it all to everyone who attended or participated online.

Some interesting stats:

• Over 100 people attended from all three levels of Canadian Government – federal, provincial and municipal
• We kicked-off the day with 4 awesome Ignite! style presentations
• 25 different sessions were proposed and hosted by participants, generating pages of collaboratively produced wiki notes
• We’ve got lots of multimedia – including video, and photos
• The #WIREDcamp Twitter hashtag generated interest far and wide, keeping everyone engaged and interacting

What’s next?

Well you all have your action items, but just in case you’ve forgotten they are here

• As you can see the idea of a govloopnorth was pretty popular, so Nick went ahead and started a govloopnorth group on govloop, join the discussion!
• Pub night! – Casey is getting this off the ground. He’s created a special twitter account you might want to follow to be sure you’re the first to know @wiredcamppub
• Get rid of IE6 – there was a big desire to kill IE6 – each and everyone of us should do something to advocate for that change
• And we should all be making sure to continue discussing and collaborating across jurisdictional lines, which I’m sure we’ll all do. Probably a good start to use the govloopnorth group on govloop – http://www.govloop.com/group/govloopnorth

Technowonk.ca – the unofficial website of #wiredcamp – will remain up and running for at least the next month.

Have photos or video? Please upload all your content to the web and share the links in the comments below. We’ll soon be importing the content to OPSpedia (OPS internal wiki) to share with colleagues who couldn’t attend.

Thanks again for helping make WIREDcamp such a success!

Darren and Lara

WIREDcamp organizers

Ps: a very special thanks to Mark Kuznicki for his support and for facilitating WIREDcamp.

WIREDcamp is tomorrow ! We’ve refined the schedule and tweaked things a little, we’re sure you’re going to like it.

Date: Tuesday Sept 22, 2009
Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm
Location: Showcase Ontario @ the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, North Building, Room 205

WIREDcamp is a participatory event for public servants of all stripes to come together and answer the following questions:

• How do we re-imagine government and public service in the age of participation?
• What we can do to help make government more open and responsive?

ChangeCamp’s Mark Kuznicki will be our host for the day!

Schedule

• 8:30 – 9:00am – Registration & coffee/tea/treats

Inspire

• 9:00 – 9:10am - Introduction & Welcome

• 9:10 – 10am Ignite-style presentations*
• 10:00 – 10:45am What is Open Space?

Converse

• 11:00 – 11:45am - Open space 1
• 11:45 – 12:30pm - Open space 2
• 12:30 – 2:00pm - Lunch break/Richard Florida keynote (1:00-2pm)**
• 2:15 – 300pm - Open space 3
• 3:00 – 3:45pm - Open space 4

Action

• 3:45 – 4:30pm - Report back & conclusions

* Ignite-Style Presentations

WIREDcamp will kick off with 4 short inspirational presentations. These fast-paced 5-minute talks will introduce ideas and topics ranging from open source organizing to social Innovation. Our presenters are:

• Mark Kuznicki – Mark has worked with many public sector organizations and is currently with the City of Toronto’s Open Data initiative. He is also our WIREDcamp host and instigator of the broader ChangeCamp movement.
• Lisa Torjman – Lisa works for MaRS and is involved in developing their social entrepreneurship program.
• Nick Charney - Nick works for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada and also writes a blog on public service renewal.
• David Tallan – David is a manager in the e-Government Branch of the Ontario Government.

** Keynote

Between 1:00pm and 2:00pm Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, will be speaking to the broader Showcase Ontario audience. For those who are interested in attending, we will be breaking for lunch during this time.

Lara and Darren

WIREDcamp Organizers

WIREDcamp is just one week away!

Date: Tuesday Sept 22, 2009
Time: 8:30am – 4:30pm
Location: Showcase Ontario @ the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, North Building, Room 205 A/B

Our central questions:

• How do we re-imagine government and public service in the age of participation?
• What we can do to help make government more open and responsive?

WIREDcamp is interactive! Please bring:
1) Laptop (*please RSVP here for free wifi)
2) Digital camera
3) Video camera 
*Remember, if you want wifi, please let us know on the wiki.

Interested in helping out at WIREDcamp? Please contact us and tell us what you’d like to do!
We need help with:

• Registration/Set-Up:  two volunteers to assist with registration (arrival at 7:30 a.m.)
• Interactive/Updates: six or more people to help update the Wiki and to assist at the upload station (for photos/video, wiki and Twitter updates)
• Video/photo documentation: we will have four digital cameras and two video cameras, we need volunteers to take photos and shoot video during the day

Lara and Darren

photo of whiteboard - WIRED schedule development

Further to David’s excellent post about why an unconference (and WIREDcamp specifically) is so cool I thought I’d take a moment and go over, from a practical point of view, what you can expect at WIREDcamp.

Location, location, location

We’ve secured a space in the north building of the MTCC, if you’re familiar with the convention centre then you’ll know that the north building is closer to front street, giving attendees easier access to coffee shops, restaurants, and perhaps most importantly, the delicious chip trucks that congregate in front of the convention centre. Also, the bulk of showcase occurs in the south building, so WIREDcamp will have some breathing room from the hubbub of the main event and all the vendors trying to sell us the latest and greatest widget.

The space is big enough for 200 people, although we’re aiming for somewhere between 75 – 140 participants (we’d love to get more, so tell your friends and colleagues!) We really want to diversify the crowd, so if you know anyone working in the public sector outside the OPS who may be interested, please let me know and I’ll send them the invite code for non-OPS’ers. When you arrive you’ll find a room with chairs arranged in a roughly circular fashion, with smaller break out areas lining the walls and the perimeter. Also, on one wall you’ll notice the grid, which is an important part of any unconference and is what we’ll use to organize our time together.

Unconference – unwired (internet access)

Normally nobody gets access to the WiFi network at showcase, but we’re really demanding clients for the showcase folks and managed to convince them that yes, you really need wifi access in order to run an unconference. Not only will you be able to connect your favourite WiFi devices to the internet at WIREDcamp, but we should have plenty of electrical outlets available to charge your devices with too.

We’re doing this of course so we can all document the event on the fly. Post to twitter (i’m thinking #wiredcamp is a decent hash-tag), upload photos to flickr (#wiredcamp tagged please!), upload videos to your favourite video service, and embedd all this into the upcoming very unofficial and very temporary WIREDcamp website (we wanted to do it on OPSpedia, but we won’t have intranet access so boo).

Speaking of our unofficial and temporary website, keep an eye open, I’m working on getting something setup which we can all access from the internet to document WIREDcamp (check out how changecamp did it for what we’re aiming for) in a way that can later be easily imported into OPSpedia.

A very rough itinerary

Here’s the schedule we’re hoping to go with:

• participants arrive 8:30 – 9am
• 9am – 9:30 opening remarks by the organizers (that’s me and Lara in case you weren’t paying attention
• 9:30 – 10:30 – small randomly assigned groups answering the question “What does public service mean to you?”
• 10:30 – 11:00 – one person stays, the rest mingle and find out how other groups answered
• 11:00 – noon – The grid – explain how the grid works, start filling it out as a group
• LUNCH! (ahem – budget includes coffee and snacks during the event – but not lunch. this is where proximity to front street is a good thing)
• 1pm – session 1 OR Keynote by Richard Florida @ Showcase
• 2pm – 2:50pm – session 2
• 2:50 pm – 3:40pm – session 3
• 3:40 – 4:00 – What did we learn? – Closing statements by organizers

REGISTER!

That’s it for now, we’ll be sharing more details as we get the work done. PLEASE REGISTER! If you’re interested in coming but aren’t sure you can spend the whole day don’t worry! We aren’t locking the doors and you’ll be free to come and go, but if you don’t register in advance we won’t have any idea of how many people are coming, and we might then not order enough coffee and snacks. Also you don’t have to be a “web person” to come, in fact, if you aren’t one then we definitely need you to come and share your thoughts and opinions!

This year, WIRED is sponsoring a one day unconference, WIREDcamp, at Showcase Ontario. I think it is realy cool and plan to attend. But I can see a lot of people scratching their heads out there?

“What the heck is an unconference?” they are asking. And “Why should I take a whole day out of the great learning opportunities that Showcase provides to attend one? Especially since there is absolutely no indication of what I will learn there, what value I will receive!” Or “How can I make the case to come into Toronto for a day to attend this “unconference” when I don’t know what it is or what I will get from it?”

So let me explain a little about what an “unconference” is. Hopefully, it will give you some idea of:
- why unconferences are so cool
- why the organizers couldn’t list the topics and the takeaways in the program
- what are some of the things you might learn there

What is an “unconference” and why are they so cool?
There are a few ways of describing this. The easiest is to say that an unconference is the “2.0″ made physical/real world and applied to a conference. (I say it that way just to get Darren’s goat.)

Another way is to use mathematical notation for the geeks out there:
unconference:conference sessions::facebook:social relationships::flickr:photographs::YouTube:videos.

We can think of “old style” websites as ones where someone gathered content they thought interesting and others came to look, and “new style” websites as ones that are really a platform for visitors to bring their own content. Similarly, “old style” conferences are ones where someone gathered content they thought people might be interested in and others came to attend sessions and “new style” ones are really a platform for particpants to bring their own content – an unconference. The unconference provides the structure and infrastructure and the participants provide the interest and content.

At many conferences I’ve been to, the chief value lies in meeting other people who are working on the same sorts of things and the most productive time is that spent in conversation between sessions. Another way to describe an “unconference” is to say that it takes these, the best parts of a conference that tend to get sidelined, and makes them the centre of the attraction.

Why the organizers couldn’t list the topics and the takeaways in the program
Now that you know what an unconference is, it should be clear why they couldn’t list the topics in the program. The topics aren’t what they are providing. They come from you. At the beginning of the day they set out a big grid with time slots down the left side and locations for break away sessions listed along the top. Anyone who wants to lead (or facilitate) a session can put the session title in the grid. People can go to wehatever interests them (although if you’ve put a session up, you have to be threre, of course).

Since the grid is filled out by the participants on the day of the conference, it’s plainly impossible to list the topics of discussion in advance.

What are some of the things you might learn there?
Despite the fact that the agenda for the day hasn’t been set, there are some things that you can count on being on the agenda. All the e-Gov web folk will be there. You’ll notice that there are no regular Showcase sessions on OPSpedia and the other things we’ve been working on. This is your chance to hear about them, ask your questions, and find out where things are going. We are also expecting a good turnout from the Strategic New Media Office in Cabinet Office Communications. I expect they might also be filling some squares on the grid (I know they’ve been doing some research into best practices around blogging – perhaps we can prevail upon them to lead a session on that).

And if none of these catches your fancy, WIREDcamp is the one place you can be sure that whatever is most important to you gets put on the schedule for a session. All you have to do is put it there yourself!

See you at WIREDcamp! (Register now while spots are still available.)

“How do we re-imagine government and public service in the age of participation?”

This is the central question we all face as public servants – things are changing, society is changing, and the expectations of citizens are changing. How are we, as public servants, going to adapt and change to meet new challenges and seize opportunities to better serve the public?

WIREDcamp is a venue for us to discuss this question, create connections, knowledge, tools and policies that address the increased demand by citizens for transparency, civic engagement and democratic empowerment.

WIREDcamp is inspired by ChangeCamp, a national phenomena that started in Toronto, Canada where citizens are gathering to address these same questions. We need to be part of that conversation, and WIREDcamp is an ideal venue to either learn the language of online participation or share what you know with colleagues at all levels of government.

WIREDcamp is open to all public servants in Ontario, and we interpret public servant in the widest possible sense. We’re inviting participants from all levels in the OPS (including each and every person reading this post), from other governments (federal, municipal, and anyone who can be in Toronto on the 22nd) and from agencies and non-profits. By mixing up the participants we hope to break free from the same old inside baseball that is sometimes hard to avoid when we gather as a group.  If you know of an agency, non-profit, or other public servant colleague you want to invite, send me the name and I’ll get a special non-OPS invite out for them.

On September 22nd, 2009, please join us and help answer these questions.