I’m not an Agile coach. As an outsider, I see in this group many people who feel that Agile is more than a vocation, it is a calling. I see a sensitivity to human social needs and a dedication to bending human social and technology systems towards improved value creation. I see a group of people who see themselves as agents of change, and who have the capacity to make the world a better place.

I’m honoured to have been asked to help this group have the conversations they need to have, to become better Agile coaches, build better teams and to become a better community.

Posted via email from accc’s posterous

On June 1st GovCamp Canada is happening in Ottawa, and a great group of people are already registered and attending: http://govcamp.eventbrite.com/

Thanks to the support of Microsoft and CIPS and with the involvement of a government 2.0, open government and government transformation practitioners and leaders from both inside and outside government, this event provides a unique opportunity to accelerate knowledge and practice as part of a national conversation at multiple levels of government in Canada.

I was honoured that organizer John Weigelt asked me to help by facilitating the unconference portion of the day and moderating the opening panel discussion. I will be looking for participants to propose and lead session topics.

But what do we need to talk about? What are the key issues and topics in the so-called government 2.0 space in Canada, and what can we do to advance the conversation, thinking and practice in Canada?

Please leave a comment and/or tweet with the hashtag #GovCamp with your must-have session topics.

If you haven’t already, please register to attend this event, either in person in Ottawa or via the livestream being provided by our friend Walter Schwabe of FusedLogic.

Posted via web from It’s a Remarkk-able life

via apps4climateaction.gov.bc.ca

Here’s an interesting new take on an Apps contest for developers. This one is sponsored by the Province of British Columbia and is being launched in tandem with a climate change data catalogue. The contest is open to residents of Canada, so if you care about climate change and want to show off your skills, check it out.

Posted via web from It’s a Remarkk-able life

What I took away was that all of the participants felt that a bottom-up approach enabled by web technology was really necessary to create opportunities for Canadians to tell their own stories of how they came to be Canadian, what it means to them, reflecting on where we’ve been, who we are and where we’re going. I was also struck by the strong desire to reflect the diversity of Canada’s multicultural present while recognizing our aboriginal past.

I think there is a role for the ChangeCamp community in this project, inviting our fellow citizens into conversations to tell those stories and to imagine Canada’s future in creative new ways. What do you think?

For an archive of the liveblog from the full event, see below the jump:

Posted via web from It’s a Remarkk-able life

Posted via web from It’s a Remarkk-able life

The event was called ChangeCampTO: Designing a Civic Engagement Toolkit and it took place Tuesday, February 16th at the Bram and Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library.

The event was envisioned as an opportunity to engage a diverse cross-section of people from Toronto (and beyond) who care about civic life into a big, bold collaborative project: using the 2010 municipal elections as the excuse to gather people together in community-based dialogue both face-to-face and online.

This post will be a central place to archive links to content created by our participants at and about this event. That content is after the jump, and this post will be updated as content is published.

Once we collect this content and digest it, we’ll post our analysis of what we did together and some reflections on lessons learned from the event.

A Note on Event Process

This event was not an unconference format at all like a typical ChangeCamp event. It was designed more like a very large scale ChangeLab session that we’ve seen before in Toronto and elsewhere. It focused 200 participants in 3 hours around a single goal: to generate ideas for the kinds of processes, tools and methods that might be in a toolkit we are calling a “Change Kit” also known as “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box”.

This section describes the process, which was developed in collaboration with Erika Bailey, Ryan Coleman, Daniel Rose, Mark Reheja, Greg Judelman, Peter Jones and members of the Design with Dialogue community.

1. Reception bar
2. Participants gathered in plenary, theatre style seating
3. Context setting presentation
4. Warm-up talk to your neighbour based on provided questions
5. Overview of the design exercise
6. Randomized table assignments to breakouts of 8 people with one assigned scribe
7. A design brief provided at the table with instructions for the assignment
8. 60 minutes of brainstorming ideas, captured on Post-Its and through a table-specific liveblog
9. One presenter stays behind to share, while the rest of the table moves one table over to hear report back
10. Report back by presenter captured on digital video recorder
11. Marketplace, where participants can wander from table to table, leaving comments behind on Post-Its
12. Return to plenary, this time standing in closing circle
13. Sharing insights and main ideas, giving thanks, recognizing diversity
14. Ballot for personal commitment
15. Open forum for announcements
16. Break to reception bar

Our detailed event design plan is published in this Google Document.

A big thank you to event manager Kate Richards and the contributions of hard-working volunteers Lee Dale, Behrouz Hariri, Natasha Mckenna, Susan Pearn and Duane Brown. We would also like to thank our volunteer table scribes: Michael Cayley, Ian Macpherson, Lori Smith, Natasha Mckenna, Darren Chartier, Meghan Warby, Chiara Camponeschi, Jonathan Laba, Neha Thanki, Connie Crosby, Chad Craig, Marco Campana, Chris Berry, Michael Jones, Jonathan Laba, Bernard Fernandes, Graham Scott, Chris Hayden, Dragan Stojanovic, Patrick Connolly, Melanie Gorka, Greg Judelman, Christopher Wulff, Carsten Knoch, Brian Frank, Nabil Harfoush and Dragan Stojanovic.

Context Setting Presentation

ChangeKit Design Assignment

Live-blogs of Breakout Table Conversations

List of all ChangeCamp live-blogs on Scribblelive: http://changecamp.scribblelive.com/

Aggregate live-blog (all tables in a single stream):
http://changecamp.scribblelive.com/Themes/site/4/AllPosts.aspx

Individual Table Live-blogs

| Table 1 | Table 2 | Table 3 | Table 4 | Table 5 | Table 6 | Table 7 | Table 8 | Table 9 | Table 10 | Table 11 | Table 12 | Table 13 | Table 14 | Table 15 | Table 16 | Table 17 | Table 18 | Table 19 | Table 20 | Table 21 | Table 22 | Table 23 | Table 24 | Table 25 | Table 26 | Table 27 | Table 28 | Table 29 | Table 30 |

Photos of Breakout Table Artifacts

Thanks to Kiana Hayeri for shooting these photos of our work together: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuznicki/sets/72157623487376076/

Videos of Table Report Backs

Ballots and Results

Will you join us and help make our collective vision a reality?

Total attendees: 192

Yes – 82
Yes, but not sure how – 41
Maybe, I’ll stay in touch – 42
No or blank ballot – 8
No ballot returned – 18

Participant Feedback

View these results in a Google Spreadsheet

View these results in a Google Spreadsheet

Twitter Excerpts

Blog Posts About or Inspired by ChangeCampTO

Thoughts on being an Engaged Citizen by Jeremy Vianna

ChangeCamp: Toronto to London by Brian Frank

The Social Analytics of #ChangeCampTO by Christopher Berry

The Opposite of Open by Mike Smith

A letter to ChangeCampTO exec by Devinder Lamsar

ChangeCampTO in photos by Connect IT

Notes on #ChangeCampTO by Civic Footprint

In a fun-but-focused 3 hours, registered attendees will contribute to the creation of a toolkit for a self-organizing, people-driven, nonpartisan movement for positive change in Toronto and beyond.

We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations across the City of Toronto and beyond through community-based leadership.

We are tentatively calling this open toolkit “ChangeCamp-in-a-Box”. This idea was born in a ChangeLab session at last year’s ChangeCamp, and this year we plan to make it real.

Thanks to the Toronto Public Library for donating the beautiful Bram and Bluma Appel Salon space.

Agenda

5:30 – Gather in the Appel Salon Prologue space for drinks and networking prior to the event
6:00 – We move to the main space to set the context and describe the structure of the design exercise.
9:00 – We wrap the design exercise and break for the evening.

What to Expect

If you attended last year’s ChangeCamp, this event is different. It is not structured as an open-space style unconference. Instead, this is more like a large-scale ChangeLab session, where participants roll up their sleeves at tables of 8 around a single purpose.

Expect a great room filled with smart creative engaged people like you, working in small groups, learning by doing.

Registration Process:

1. Visit http://changecampto2010.eventbrite.com/
2. Find the ticket type that best describes you in the list
3. Enter the amount of your Pay-What-You-Can donation (suggested $10, min $1)
4. Pay online using PayPal or choose At The Door.
5. Complete your contact information, and answer the question of what gifts you bring
6. You will receive an email confirmation of your registration. Paper tickets are not required

You are welcome to attend without paying a donation online. Simply put “1″ as the quantity and click on “Pay at the Door” on the order screen that follows. We ask those who are able to help keep the event accessible to all by giving the suggested donation to help cover event costs.

Your Donations & Sponsorships:

Your donations and sponsorships will be used to pay for, in order of priority: equipment rental, supplies, snacks/food. Any surplus will go toward the project, building the toolkit. The organizers are donating their time.

Bar

We will have a cash bar offering drinks and sandwiches at the venue from 5:00 to 6:30 pm.