ChangeCamp is a free, participatory web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, change-makers and government employees
How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation? ChangeCamp addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and government. We seek to create connections, knowledge, tools and policies that drive transparency, civic engagement and democratic empowerment. ChangeCamp is a solutions playground open to anyone, where admission and ideas are free. Our mission is to innovate how Canadian governments engage with citizens in an age of mass participation on the Internet. We hope to ignite a distributed and self-organizing movement in cities across the country.
What is ChangeCamp? It is the application of 'the long tail' to public policy.
It is a long-held and false assumption that ordinary citizens don't care about public policy. The statement isn't, of itself, false. Many, many, many people truly don't care that much. They want to live their lives focusing on other things - pursuing other hobbies or interests. But there are many of us who do care: Public-policy geeks, fans, followers, advocates, etc... We are everywhere, we've just been hidden in a long tail that saw the marketplace and capacity for developing and delivering public policy restricted to a few large institutions.
Today, the technology to enable and aggregate people their ideas, to connect them with peers and to create community, is still more powerful. Our capacity to challenge, push, help, co-operate, leverage and compete with the institutional public-policy actors has never been greater. This, for me, is the goal of ChangeCamp. What concrete tools can we build? What information can we demand be opened up? What new relationships can we build to reimagine how we - the citizens who care - participate in the creation of public policy and the effective delivery of public services? Not to compete or replace the traditional, institutional actors, but to ensure more and better ideas are heard and more effective and efficient services are created. Source: http://wiki.ChangeCamp.ca
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In a corner of his wife's office in the Centre for Social Innovation, in an old red pile on Spadina, Mark Surman is trying to find a spot quiet enough for a phone interview.
"Tonya, can I sit here or will I drive you guys nuts?" he asks above clattering keyboards.
"You'll drive us nuts, but we love you."
The space is a bit too open to afford much privacy. The centre is a buzzing hive of glass offices and wood beams with a movie-set quality to it; it's an open-concept home for dozens of social-minded groups. Tonya Surman, 39, is the centre's executive director. Her husband, also 39, is the new, Toronto-based executive director of the open-source Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the popular Web browser Firefox.
"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.
Nobody ever accused Toronto of being Silicon Valley North. But the ethos of open-ness has caught on, and it's starting to turn Toronto into a capital of a different kind.
The Surmans are in the midst of an emerging scene that's sprung from geek culture to embrace not only programmers and designers, but also wonks and activists and politicians, right up to the mayor's office. Social change and Internet ideals have gotten hitched, and the results are going to change the way Torontonians live.
