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.
If open culture is thriving in Toronto, it's in part because Toronto is a conspicuously connected place. It's not just its modest but vibrant Web-startup scene, or the fact that Google recently opened offices in Dundas Square, in the heart of downtown. The city is a perennial front runner in social-network rankings, most recently coming in eighth worldwide in a survey of Twitter users.
That prevalence of social networks is starting to have unexpected real-world results. Just before Christmas, a spontaneous party for technology types, organized over Twitter in a matter of days, took over the Mod Club and raised a surprising $25,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank — one of their biggest private donations of the year.
Tools like Twitter, which encourage people to exchange small thoughts with each other in public, have helped knock Toronto's open-culture scene into high gear.
"It's intoxicatingly powerful," says Rob Hyndman, one of the organizers behind the #HoHoTO Christmas party, as well as one of the five organizers (along with The Globe and Mail's Mathew Ingram) of Mesh, a successful Web 2.0 conference now entering its fourth year that brings some of the biggest names in the online firmament to town. "You're in the face of everybody who matters to you in the community all the time."
D.I.Y. governance
Increasingly, Toronto's tech scene is bringing people face to face in real life, too.
A ways up the street from the CSI is Mr. Surman's 15-person Mozilla office, above a beer store just south of Bloor. Some of the most critical work on the software is co-ordinated from Toronto; Mr. Surman, whose role is more organizational, commutes to and from the head office in Mountain View, Calif.
"For a place that isn't known as a hub of technology, Toronto really has an amazing, amazing community," says Mr. Surman. His laptop is covered in logo stickers from various open-source software concerns. Openness, to him, is a transferable concept.
"It's transparency, whether it's a government or a piece of software. You can understand how it works, and look into it, and watch it in action."
