• DIYcity – people make groups to “mak[e] their cities work better with web technologies.” There’s a group in Toronto and there’s a section for Transportation Informatics.
• John Bollwitt at sixty4media muses on how local governments can make use of social media. It runs down the gamut of tools – Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc. – and sprung from a comment made at a Parks Board meeting. My reaction? It’s one thing for a politican to say it should happen for the good reasons we think it can happen (“budget”, “free and easy”, and “direct contact” are the reasons John highlights)…it’s another thing for city staffers not to find 10 gazillion reasons not to do it. Granted, a handful of them may actually be valid, and the part that interests me the most, personally, is the part where it can be integrated and streamlined into their already (undoubtedly) hectic, overloaded plates of processes.
• Via a comment on the above post, MetaGovernment is an initiative around open source government. Their current thing is developing MetaScore, “the software to aid and manage community-based open source governance systems.”
• Vancouver ChangeCamp has a date! June 20-21. I’m horribly out of the loop at the moment. Right now the action’s been happening mostly in the Google Group – hopefully (as part of the tech logistics committee!) we’ll start freeing the details from long, obscure URL-land.
• Friends from Toronto, Tom Purves and Rohan Jayasekera, are quoted in this excellent piece about IT departments and their shifting role as gatekeepers to productivity-making applications. It’s become almost a cultural trope, among the people I’ve talked to, to view IT as an irritant or an obstacle rather than a partner or enabler, with people I have talked to in large organizations (though there are some notable exceptions as well, and having worked with security folks I know often have good reasons for saying what they say). I have no firsthand experience, but what I’ve seen of SFU since I’ve left, I’ve been impressed with (blogging platform, Mediawiki). To contrast, I hear getting a Drupal website for a department website at UBC can be a small nightmare.

Happy Monday!

As the ninth member of our team, you’ll work closely in Vancouver with Social Signal’s senior strategists to manage client engagements, create innovative online community strategies, and launch new social media projects. Your responsibilities will include:

• managing client relationships
• planning and managing projects
• developing social media strategies as part of a team
• writing engagement plans and engagement audits
• developing estimates and writing proposals
• creating Keynote/PowerPoint presentations and assisting in training
• facilitating workshops and writing workshop reports
• writing blog posts and white papers about social media

Thus far, I’ve been fairly mum about my work with Social Signal on this blog, but this definitely should not be taken as commentary on the company by any means: I love every single person that works here to pieces, and the work is amazing, engaging and incredibly meaningful. (It just so happens I work under the cone of silence.) I would definitely encourage anyone who feels like this would be up their alley to apply.

Best reasons to work here? Awesome, ultra-cool people doing kickass, inspiring, lovely work, and often with equally passionate clients.

2007 was a hectic year, so I hadn’t been keeping my books very well. As a result, I have no idea how much money I was actually able to put towards my personal goals for spending money on people other than me and those close to me. My usual course of action would be to try to keep a better budget. However, a Christmas present from my brother has inspired me to think of something a little different.

For Christmas, my brother gave me $25 to lend out through the micro-loan website Kiva. Though it had hit my radar previously (through Darren as well as at least three other websites in my RSS reader), I didn’t go to it – you know, the usual excuses. Don’t want to get my credit card, don’t feel like surfing a site and reading status reports, busy, yadda yadda yadda. I’ve known about microcredit for ages – reading about it through NextBillion, signing up for e-mail updates that I never receive for the Agents of Change micro-credit on-campus group at SFU (Update (1/25): Sean has sent me a copy of their newsletter since I posted this, and now I have more reading material about their project than I can shake a stick at. Thanks, Sean!).

I think Kiva’s onto something here. Because my brother gave it to me, I found myself in the position of having abundance to share. Despite my relative well-offness, I haven’t often been encouraged to feel this way in my life. In fact, I think I may feel this least when I’m actually confronted with someone who’s desperately asking for something from me, which just makes me feel extra-guilty and powerless aside from giving people handouts that may not go towards what they really need in life, whatever that may be.

So, I am committing to giving two people, for each month of 2008, for their birthdays, the exact same gift my brother gave me: $25 in Kiva credit, to loan out to people in developing countries to work on projects to better the lives of themselves, their families, and their neighbours. The lucky recipients are 24 people from my Facebook Friends list, a mix of people I’ve met in school, co-workers, and other random people who might not be expecting to receive it from me.

I’m glad I get the opportunity to introduce them to the concept (or support them if they are already engaged in it), and to have the experience I had, of reading a story about someone trying something where they are. I expect I’ll get a raised eyebrow or two, maybe a curious stare or even someone who might feel annoyed, that they’re too busy to go read a story or follow up on a loan to someone in a country whose name we’ve barely heard of. Somehow, I’m hoping that the people I know and have varying kinds of relationships with, will not react this way, but instead enjoy the feeling of abundance, and carry it into other positive places in their lives, as I am trying to do. I also hope I’ll hear something from that at all!

I’m not sure know the purpose of the lender pages entirely (aside from the permalink-social idea, maybe), but here’s mine anyway.

Thankfully, all the people I’m giving to in January have birthdays at the end of the month; this could have gotten ugly for right after Christmas.

This is just a baby step in finding it easier, more generally, to acknowledge abundance and to feel good about sharing it.

It was great to finally hear Mark explain the Open Creative City concept, which I’ve been able to get bits and pieces of, but which I haven’t delved into deeply by any means. I’ve been reading about and critiques of the Creative Class concept, which has been really interesting as someone who doesn’t have a background in cultural policy, geography or economics. He brought in Toronto Transit Camp as an example of what it looks like to combine open space and will to bring culture into a collaborative space for shaping our civic life.

I really must say something about the venue. I pass and sometimes even through the Downtown East Side a lot, but I don’t spend an awful lot of time there – and part of it, of course, is having a place to actually stay there where I actually have a reason to be there. There are other places I can think of that are such venues – the Army and Navy, the Potluck Cafe – but I was glad to have the opportunity. The Gachet was also having a party for the opening of the (Not) Made in China exhibit afterwards.

We didn’t have very much time for open space, but I still found the experience valuable for being able to speak to people that I otherwise would never spoken to, and to hear thoughts on culture in the Downtown East Side. It was great to see people speaking with passion about the things they wanted and were concerned about – not always to unanimous agreement, but still accepted respectfully.

It was also interesting to hear about Fearless, the Downtown East Side Arts and Culture magazine, from Irwin Oostindie, as well as his thoughts on how Mark’s ideas fit into the DTES context of gentrification, the Olympic games, and work by groups like the Anti-Poverty Committee.

Great food for thought as we start to get TransitCamp going.

Being a student at Web of Change, I continually felt a little out of place, though in hindsight there was such a good mix of people that it never felt overwhelmingly one thing or another, and every one felt great about giving me their perspective on my poorly-articulated questions. There were grassroots community activists, organizers and campaigners from larger organizations, technologists and communicators providing services to organizations big and small, filmmakers, and developers all working to realize visions for a better world. A lot of people had corporate backgrounds and moved into non-profit work, which resonated with me as I am kinda-sorta making the same leap on a much smaller scale. The setting of Hollyhock encouraged such a warm atmosphere, and the honesty, curiosity and patience of everyone I met left me fairly humbled.

I’ve also typically felt a little out of place with the idea of leadership, but it strikes me more now as a series of little things rather than a lot of big things; or, that the big things come from the aggregation of those little things. Those little compliments that people were willing to drop my way about the things I had to say. I want to be able to be as giving with my praise and encouragement.

I’m also recalling some of the things people have said about the nature of mistakes and learning. You know that thing they say about how you should praise kids by rewarding effort instead of intelligence? I’m one of those kids that was told they were smart. I’m not very good at just jumping in and learning by doing, and I would like to be less hesitant about this. In the area of community organizing, this is on the double; because truthfully, it’s still a theoretical endeavor at this point, but it is time to move beyond that.

I’m feeling motivated to send letters/emails to some folks who have made an impact on me to let them know how much their contributions allowed me to feel good about being at Web of Change. It’ll take a while, but I ought to get in touch with them anyway, and this is a great way to do it. What do I want to do? What do I want to work for? How do I want to do it, and who would want to do it with me? For the last question at least, I’m fairly confident that the answer is people like those I met this weekend.

Mean what you say even if you fall short of what you proclaim. – Open Manifesto

Everything I write is an accurate reflection of how I felt at the time. – Richard

I strive…

• to mean what I say.
• to mean compassionately.
• to make my meanings unambiguous.
• to share, author and revise my opinions, the sum of my experiences, openly.
• to do justice to the complexities.

Please bear with me while I learn to uncensor myself, and then learn again how to avoid waving my uglies around.

A few months back, Mark Kuznicki asked us in the TorCamp chat, “When we say ‘open cities’ what does it make you dream?” I’m not a dreamer by nature, so I’ll forgo any real responses; instead I’ll just bring the question to others, and bring pieces of my own answers.

…right?

I’ve never been very comfortable with being green in the “inexperienced” sense.

• Networking and the fun World Cafe session, where we answered questions like, “How are you involved in enterprise solutions?” and “If you were the CIO of a large corporation, what would you do?” I also got to see Jen Nolan again, who’s looking very pretty in anticipation of maternity leave, yet just as into the Enterprise 2.0 as ever. I also met Mike Jones, a professor at Sheridan College – and, as it happens, an SFU communication alumni working in IT. Great timing, as those are ranks I’ll likely be joining soon enough.
• The first session, what I dubbed “metaCamp,” led by Mischa of CopyCamp, who is interested in using the Camp model in other contexts and applications, such as neighbourhood politics. While I initially hesitated going to this one because it meant I wasn’t starting off my day knee-deep in the Enterprise-y stuff, I got a lot out of this session (including Jay Goldman‘s event announcement, which I won’t spoil here, but which I have told others about and which I am extremely excited about). Mark talked about his OpenCities project (brand-spanking new…it’s coming up a bit blank for me right now) and I also met Himy Syed, who’s chock full of a lot of interesting ideas.
• I was so engrossed with the first session that I missed a bit of the second session, which, due to some poor planning on my part, really ended up being my only exposure to the enterprise for the day. Sandy talked about RSS feeds and got into a really interesting back-and-forth with Carsten on formats, data, and enterprise requirements. I ran to grab pizza while she was talking about zero footprint clients – hopefully she’s written about it somewhere so I can get caught up a bit!
• Chatted a bit with Goran, Michael Chen, Scott Srpring and Lev during lunch about their apps and interests, like photoblogs and open source software in educational IT.
• This is where the day gets a bit hazy for me. I went to the session led by Himy Syed, sparsely attended and a little too high-level for my post-lunch stupor – luckily, I got down the names of all the books he mentioned because they sounded really interesting! Then I joined the crowd at the other spot, and I have since entirely forgotten what was being discussed. Tom Purves was doing a lot of the talking.There was something which disturbed me a bit about this session, which was a lot of slagging of corporate organizational models. I am definitely not one to defend those models by any means, but I thought that at very least, I wouldn’t find myself mentally defending accusations of me or my co-workers as being lazy, self-serving drones. I work in an enterprise and however my feelings on the organization are, I felt that mud-slinging towards the character of my co-workers as individuals, is really counterproductive to finding an organizational model that can balance certainty for employees with creating value for customers and serving the markets with the least ill consequence.
• On my way out, I chatted a bit with Will Pate. At some point (maybe the next time Richard’s in town), I think I’ll do a “Vancouverites – past, present and transitioning” event at The Gorey. And it will be a waffle party.

So that was my Enterprise Camp! I haven’t yet decided if it has clarified my feelings toward the enterprise, but getting to know others who are in it certainly hasn’t hurt its case by any means.

I must admit, I wasn’t too sure what to expect. My Communication-bred cynicism has not given me the clearest idea of what marketing is actually about. Peter’s lecture helped straighten me out on that bigtime – marketing as market analysis, market segmentation, the kind of thing that makes businesses viable and economically trustworthy.

There was a question at the end that Peter answered really well. He talked about the two aspects of marketing – one part as promotions, the “marcom” sense of marketing, and the other as product management. The second one strikes me as being a whole lot more strategic – finding niches, coming to an understanding of the customer. In startups, Peter noted, product managers are often doing the translating of customer requirements to developers. This work of product management is quite different from the “marcom” stuff, which is probably closer to the sort of thing my cynicism likes to take the piss out of when I find out that yet another Communication graduate has skipped off to do ‘market research.’ (You know I’m only saying that because I work for a big corporation and am about to graduate from Communication and will hit the real world with a boatload of work experience and still have irrational fear about my degree, right? I jest.)

I think I’ll have to keep going to these. Not only are they free and have pizza at the end, the slides are posted afterwards and they are recorded as podcasts. The only thing that kind of bites? They have some kind of URL masking going on on their website, so I can’t link to a page with a list of all their upcoming events or the page for this lecture in particular. Let me know if these links break for you:

• Entrepeneurship 101 events
• January 9 – Basics of Marketing I

It’s interesting to reconcile that these concepts are not Evil.