Many members of my extended Toronto community were profiled in a Globe and Mail article today, "Open Source Politics Breathe Fresh Life into the Big Smoke ". The extensive story covered three movements we're also at the focal point of: "open", "unconferences", and web activism.
Long time friends Mark Surman and Tonya Surman opened the story. Mark has been a leading non-profits and technology thinker for a decade, and now runs the Mozilla Foundation, creators of Firefox. Tonya, among other things, founded the hotbed of connection and community in Toronto, the Centre for Social Innovation (where we still maintain a virtual office...OK they're a client too we built their website, too many interconections to list).
The authour caught the vibe of this movement nicely:
"Open" is a hot item in Toronto these days. Mr. Surman is an evangelist for the cause of openness. It's not just free, open software like Firefox, built by a coalition of volunteers and paid staff. It's open ideas, open information, and now, open government. And activists like his wife are pushing these ideas into the realm of social innovation.
But it wasn't just about the culture of open, it focused on a particular and practical flavour of it which happened last weekend in Toronto, the "ChangeCamp
" unconference. ChangeCamp is "an event and set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities." It was hugely successful and the spin-offs are still landing.
If you are following our blog, you'll know that Communicopia, throuh our Web of 
Change work, co-convened and produced with Mark the "Open Everything" conference at Hollyhock last September. OE brought together leaders from tech, finance, education, activism, and government to explore how open principles can be applied towards innovation and change across disciplines. Like Web of Change, OE was not quite an unconference in that we do a lot of advanced agenda planning, but it is highly participant driven and open in its design. These events have a completely different energy from traditional top down conferences, and the connections among particpants tend to be stronger, more personal, and more resiliant.
Opening up government is where it's at. Beyond Obama's extremely high profile drive for transparency using tech in the US, Twittering Toronto Mayor David Miller is putting his political and leadership weight behind it as well:
The City of Toronto is taking the open-everything idea quite seriously. As the custodian of vast quantities of data collected from the public realm, it's looking at ways to pass some of it back to citizens. "When you open up the data, there's no limit to what people can do," said Mayor David Miller this week. "It engages the imagination of citizens in building the city."
A group of local citizens are bringing ChangeCamp to Vancouver, which is good timing given the citizen driven platform that our friends Vision Vancouver ran on. I even hear rumblings from the province that the Premier of BC is turning his agenda towards open. (!) As I often say, we live in interesting times.
If you want more info about the Vancouver ChangeCamp (dates TBD, sometime this spring), you can view or join the Google Group that's been set up to plan it, but be forwarned, these open things can be a little messy at the start! But, under the right conditions and if you stick with the process, open systems (and minds) can often produce the most magical, unexpected outcomes. And that's what these times of great complexity, challenge, and change demand from us.