There are some places you don’t expect to hear the words “Change Camp.” That place for me, about two weeks ago? Ukelele Night at Our Town Café. I didn’t get to dive too deeply into where the person had heard about it, but it’s got me thinking pretty hard about the strength of the movements, and how it went from FOOCamp to BarCamp to the woman sitting across from me, describing herself as a newbie to “all that Internet stuff” (though she is certainly not averse to getting her hands, as an avid cyclist) and skimming and skipping most of the talk on the vanchangecamp Google Group, being unfamiliar with Twitter.
You know that acronym, IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer)? This post gets a IANAOSE disclaimer:
I Am Not An Open Space Expert
What I’ve been continually chewing on, since my immersion into this community thinking began with Transit Camp, is how profoundly social these events are. That’s what makes them oodles of fun – more fun to organize than other events, fun to attend, fun to write about, fun to tell others about. For me, it’s also what makes them a tad frustrating, because many of the assumptions underlying the social ties that are central to the character of the event cannot be communicated or duplicated through a design pattern. That’s what makes it a pattern, not a precise duplication – but what is necessary, and what translates into success? Solidly defining what success looks like is something I feel I didn’t do enough of, and could have done a lot better.
BarCamp’s design pattern – orientation towards local small tech startup companies, the use of Open Space and its participant-centric rules, concentration on (largely web) technologies, solutions-based, hands-on, collaborative atmosphere, organizing in the open and flat organization – made its way into many other specific applications and areas – transit, government, cupcakes, wine, life. I think part of the difficulty of transposing the events is that success can be defined more objectively for some events and more subjectively for others, depending on their scope.
Toronto TransitCamp had, compared to most camps I’ve been to since (and resembling more events like Design Slams), probably the narrowest scope – Update the Website – but, importantly, the event didn’t exclude those who didn’t contribute directly to that endgoal. That decision is possibly the biggest contributor to making it a movement. Open space often has an emphasis on including the right people who bring required skills and mindsets, and are in the position to act in the ways that are needed. There’s an equal need for eventual consensus among those attendees on the desired end state, the obstacles to getting there, the methods to overcoming them, and the reasoning, often formed by direct experiences, that inform those recommendations.
Iceberg Theory of ChangeCamp
David Eaves has written before about the relationships that lead to the ChangeCamp in Toronto. During one of my conversations with him, I came up with the Iceberg Theory, which basically says that if ChangeCamp the event is a participatory event open to members of the public (geeks and non-geeks alike) and attended by government staff to collaborate on using technology for social change, then that represents only the tip of an iceberg of activity that is visible above the water.
What is below the water? For a start, it’s whatever enables people from government in the room – working the system to sell the benefits to the people calling the shots – talking to people in the social tech sector, who are closely acquainted with the benefits of exposing issues and problems to empowered individuals who can brainstorm things that people can do about it. But we work the issue from both sides of the gap: it’s also about empowering citizens to do the things that they may have previously “outsourced” to government but which they need done now.
The work that has to happen under the surface of the water exists there right now because of a lot of reasons: among them, relationships and ideas might not grow out in the open with permalinks completely when not everyone’s on Twitter. The government cone of silence that exists now is there for certain reasons, and while I’m certainly all there in making things More Awesome through more transparency, I think locating where and how the work exists within that cone has a lot of value.
