As I have continued to talk to people, think, read, reflect and generally be obsessed with the idea of a TransitCamp in Vancouver, I find myself confronted, again, with the unassailable truth that I don’t know nearly as much about Vancouver as I would like to think I do. You’d think this would be obvious to me, but it’s not because I don’t conceive of myself as having came of age a bit in Toronto.
With regards to TransitCamp, this means coming to terms with the fact that:
- I was watching people who made it look easy.
- I am attempting to emulate (not too much, being an Asian woman and all) people who spent a lot of time building something up that people seemed to feel really good about. By the time they were ready to put a TransitCamp together, all this groundwork had been done, and was close at hand when the ideas were taking shape.
- The same goes for a lot of other things that contributed to the feel of a TransitCamp.
- Maybe environmental factors also come into play. The Gladstone was damn cold that day.
I’m still in the process of convincing myself that these are not good reasons to stop looking into having a TransitCamp; it just means it will unfold in its own good time. It feels like there are a lot of dots to be joined, between people who are just getting going with what they are doing and feeling the ground; and, in the grand spirit of diversity and competition fueling cooperation, I shouldn’t be feeling bad about still wanting to do my thing.
I’m feeling kind of torn between the fact that I want the event to grow out of a community, and my impatience with making something happen. It feels like I shouldn’t be cart-before-horsing by putting too much out there before it’s gotten momentum. I’ve been encouraged by some to do things that I don’t feel I’m at the right stage to do, though they certainly are the right things to do to get the event going. Is that the only thing I should be concentrating on? My instincts say no.
I remember the first time I heard about TransitCamp. It was at EnterpriseCamp2.0, when Micha Glouberman was having the meta-BarCamp discussion. It sounded like absolute genius the moment Jay Goldman mentioned it. What, I wonder, would it take for me to be able to have that kind of reaction from someone here?
6 Comments
maybe i’m not a real vancouverite since i arrived here in 1998 via germany and england from ontario BUT TransitCamp still makes sense for me personally in Vancouver, Toronto and elsewhere and it made sense instantly from the moment i heard about the concept
Thanks, Roland! And your opinion totally counts – you have so many frames of reference to draw from, after all. That reminds me of another thing 0506HK touched on, which is that if you stay in the place where you grow up, you might take its features for granted having never been anywhere else. Leaving it for a bit and living somewhere both shows us the alternatives, and brings more into focus the stuff we never knew we couldn’t live without.
TransitCamp didn’t sound like genius because I said it – it sounded like genius because it is
The tiny little seed of the idea may have sprouted from my head, but it’s only because it was germinating in a rich soil laid by the Toronto community. It also sounded like genius because we live in a city which loves and hates its transit in equal parts, and longs for a still remembered day when it was an amazing system (it seems even more relevant given yesterday’s announcement of deep cuts).
Getting people involved in something that is obviously sick and broken is easier than getting people involved in something which is only slightly limping along. I don’t know the transit issues in Vancouver, but I think you’ll find yourself facing a challenge if the system is “pretty good” or works “most of the time”. People don’t get passionate about mediocrity so you need to position your problem in the extremes. Figure out who you want to have at your TransitCamp – define the community – then figure out the pain points that the members of that community have when it comes to transit. If you can position TransitCamp as a means to solve those pains, you will get passionate participants.
Good luck!
Thanks for your insight and support, Jay, especially on how to position the message of TransitCamp. I was initially quite hesitant to take a super-firm stance on it, but I’ve been getting more and more confident with it as I’ve spoken to more people about it. Perhaps I need to get a crash course in selling things from Sacha
I think it’s interesting that you are recommending making things more black and white instead of occupying grey spaces (though I completely understand why) – because I have perceived Vancouver to be very much about the extremes, with many of the things that are happening in the “direct action” vein of things. I’ve been wanting to position TransitCamp as an alternative to those actions because of the focus on creativity and bridge-building. It’s probably more just a delicate wire act, of being constructive and critical and respectful and effective.
I almost feel like it’s a Canadian national attribute: we’re comfortable in the grey spaces and scared to push things to extremes. Creativity and bridge-building are absolutely the goals, but I would argue that both actually thrive more in an environment of restrictions and hard edges than in a warm and fuzzy space. People are motivated by the extremes and will rise to the occasion if forced into it more than they will if gently prodded. I would say that you’ll have more luck if you make TransitCamp into a (positive, creative) battle to improve transit in Vancouver than if you position it as a touchy-feely help group type of thing
Organic change out of the community vs. impatience: the same battle I fight at strata. Glad to know it affects us all.