Oct. 14, 2009 - Issue #730: North of Nowhere
Changecamp: Web 2.0, government 1.0
ChangeCamp comes to town asking how we can 're-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation'
The Internet has affected us so broadly, it's easy to overlook areas of
our lives that haven't adapted to its profound shifts, its new ways of
gathering and disseminating information or connecting ourselves. This must be
the reason why, though so much of our world has changed, one of our most
important institutions remains firmly rooted in the ways of the past: our
government is still organized and enacted along the same basic principles as
it was well before the information age.
Some people, though, want to drag our governing institutions into the modern
age. ChangeCamp, which started in Toronto last January but has since spread
to cities across Canada, with the Edmonton iteration set to take place this
Saturday, October 17, is a conference that asks a very basic question of its
participants: "How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of
participation?" It's a question that needs some unpacking.
"The web-enabled technology that has developed over the last five or 10 years
particularly has changed the world in a way that it allows everyone who has
access to the Web to be part of the conversation," explains Justin Archer, a
member of the volunteer committee that has put together the one-day event.
"The whole zeitgeist has changed, so that rather than being passive observers
of the body politic, now anyone with an Internet connection can have an
opportunity to participate. One of the main points of ChangeCamp is, given
that reality, what do we need to do in our institutions to accommodate that
new dynamic?"
Keeping with its participatory theme, ChangeCamp is a conference of an
entirely different stripe. Rather than having set speakers and workshops
throughout the day, it will begin instead with a large group session where
attendees—all of them—will have a chance to brainstorm and put
forward ideas that go towards answering that question. After some debate and
dissection, the topics deemed most worthwhile of further investigation will
be given allotted times later in the day where people can break into smaller
groups and discuss them further. From there, action groups will be formed out
of participants with an eye towards enacting the ideas that have come up. To
make this even more accessible, all the conversations and conclusions will
also be documented on a wiki page, so that people off-site can also
contribute (available at wiki.changecamp.ca/ChangeCamp_Edmonton).
The open-source format of the conference means it could quite literally go
in any direction, though Archer expects that Edmonton will likely follow in
the footsteps of conferences that have already happened in Toronto, Ottawa
and Vancouver, which tended to focus on things like the uses of social media
in making government more transparent and opening up government-collected
data to the public.
Though the latter has particularly caught on in Toronto, where the city has
expressed an interest in letting citizens gain access to information on
everything from education stats to transit plans, with an eye towards letting
individuals create services or data pools that they feel the city is missing,
it's the former that particularly interests Doug Elniski, who will be
attending ChangeCamp. Elniski, the MLA for Edmonton-Calder, created a
controversy in June with remarks he posted to his personal blog. Despite his
early setbacks, though, he feels that social networking tools will be vital
to politicians for both spreading the word about what the government is doing
and for hearing from their constituents.
"You hear citizen participation quicker than ever before, and that in and of
itself is valuable. Their perspective on things is still valuable, and you
can look for trends and spot issues," he explains. "If I'm going to use these
tools, it's very important you understand the context of how these tools get
used ... and I think people ignore this stuff at their peril."
Similar concerns are at the forefront of Sue Huff's mind. While Huff, public
school board trustee for Ward C and an active blogger and tweeter, admits
she's still just a dabbler in these new media tools, she sees them as being
the tip of a wave that could transform not just how people interact with
government, but how we go about governing ourselves.
"If you think about where representative government came from, it was because
we were limited by geography and how long it took to travel," she explains.
"Now, though, those limitations have been wiped away, and I think people are
waking up to that fact and asking, 'With all this new technology, why are we
still doing things the way we were 100 years ago?'"
With events like ChangeCamp, though, we may not be asking such questions for
much longer. V
Sat, Oct 17 (8:30 am – 4:30 pm)
ChangeCamp Edmonton
Maple Leaf Room, Lister Conference Centre, U of A (87 Ave & 116
St)
For more details or to register visit changecampedmonton.ca
More stories in front »
New comments for this entry have been turned off and any existing ones are hidden. We apologize for any inconvenience.