CommunityNorth

imply attending any live event–from the three-person lunch meetup to the 100-person local user group can give you the most positive effect of being at an event like SXSW.

In my talk, I mentioned two implications of the importance of face-to-face:

1) We should encourage our (human) users to get together in the offline world.
2) We should add more human-ness to the interactions in our software.

– Kathy Sierra

Events are an important part of helping foster community. Face-to-face connections are important for building connections between people and helping them to share their passions. The benefit of events like DemoCamp have never been in the presentations but in the connections created between people.  Tech entrepreneurs around the world seem to find inspiration and passion from connecting with others. Whether they are demoing their products, pitching their companies, sharing information, or having a drink there are a variety of different organizational formats happening around the world. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and after dinner drinks. What ideas should we be bringing to Toronto?

• TECH Cocktail
• Web Innovators Group
• Ignite Seattle
• SF Beta
• Founders & Funders
• STIRR’s Founders Hacks, Founders Table, PITCHLab, DealHacks
• Founder’s Lunch
• SF NewTech
• nextNY
• Pecha Kucha Night
• Launch Party
• StartupDrinks
• DemoCamp
• OpenCoffee
• Social Media Breakfast
• Girl Geek Dinners
• Austin Tech Happy Hour
• SFentrepreneur Challenge
• Powerpoint Karaoke

Tell me your favourite conference or event experience/

Kieran Huggins announced the MyTTC project today. This is the public release of 2 guys that met at TransitCamp back in February 2007, and have continued to collaborate to provide open tools to transit information for residents of Toronto.

MyTTC was born out of a desire for free, open access to transit data. The amount and quality of the data currently available from the TTC is somewhat lacking, with fewer than twenty percent of the stops and stop-times available. We hope, with your help, to change that for the better.

We are not the TTC, nor are we affiliated, endorsed, or otherwise associated with them. This is a community effort to make using the TTC a better experience for everyone. We hope you’ll join us!

The MyTTC guys have done a wild job working on visualizing transit using estimated stop departure times. "each burst represents a bus departing from the stop in that location. Generated fresh every week with our current data set using Brandon Martin-Anderson’s GTFS Processing algorithm.” It is assumed that this is based on the timetable information for each transit route, and not real-time GPS or other data of the actual vehicles.

TTC Weekday Service (small) from Kieran Huggins on Vimeo.

Mark Kuznicki has continued to evolve the participant-driven tools for enabling a community around transit. His efforts are part of the Metronauts series of events and community site. Metronauts is sponsored by Metrolinx as a bottom-up component in their public consultation process to improve transit in the Greater Toronto Area.

Mark has taken the lead on applying the participatory tools and online community tools in their application to citizenship and public policy.

What I am most amazed and pleased by is how this project has brought together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in open and participatory research, media, policy, innovation, technology and culture into an agile team

By placing the power in the hands of the people to affect change in their world, Mark’s efforts remind me of the radical shift called for in Emergent Democracy [PDF] by Joi Ito (more on Extreme Democracy). It’s a shift from "representative democracy to direct democracy” where citizens are given the tools to participate in decisions and shape policy.  I am curious at the results meet the expectations of both the participants and of Metrolinx. Just fantastic work by Kieran, Kevin and Mark. 

How are you using participant-driven tools to change your community?

Chris Gurney, who presented at DemoCampToronto18, and Chris Herbert are working to bring ProductCamp to Toronto. ProductCamp is a participant driven conference focused on product marketing and management. The goal is to bring people interested in the product management, product marketing and product development together to discuss the challenges they experience and solutions to common challenges.

I’ve always been more interested in product design and development. But I’m am starting to see a very clearly defined role for product marketing managers that is present in Canada. Where much of the product development effort happens outside of Canada, however, there are unique challenges to building a marketing plan and tracking performance over the year. I suspect there are a number of non-technology organizations that experience a similar process.

A date has not been chosen for the event. As someone who has run a large number of participant-driven events, sometimes you just need to find a venue, choose a date, and run with it. I hope that Chris and Chris are able to get some traction and move the idea forward and attract a great group of product managers.

Richard Dice has made it possible for one of my favourite DemoCampToronto speakers, Damian Conway, to return to Toronto and present again. Damian is in North America obviously for OSCON 2008 because from what I can tell, he is presenting the entire Perl track with 5 separate sessions:

• Programming Vim
• Perl Worst Practices
• Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy!
• Perl 6 Update
• The Twilight Perl

We’re incredibly lucky to get a preview of what is going to be an engaging presentation. Richard is also taking up a donation collection to help cover Damian’s expenses:

This is to help defray expenses and to provide Damian with an honorarium for the talk.  Donations are completely voluntary.  If you feel motivated and/or in the right place financially to make a donation please get in touch with me or visit the Paypal links at http://hew.ca/.  The Toronto Perl Mongers and the other groups who have attended Damian’s talks have always been incredibly generous in supporting Damian whenever he has visited in the past and both he and I thank everyone for all the support he has received over the years.

Hopefully the community will come together and help support world-class talent with some donations.

Ben Lucier has details about a June 12, 2008 event where 100 kids are set to receive PCs from the Little Geeks Foundation. The Little Geeks Foundation is hosting an event to give away 100 computers to families of underprivileged children, free of charge. This is 10% of the 2008 goal. Little Geeks has a fantastic mandate:

To enhance the lives of children by providing computers to the underprivileged families within our community.

The PCs are refurbished computers complete with Windows XP and Microsoft Office. If you have a child in need of a computer, you can visit the Little Geeks Website to register. Once qualified, recipients will be contacted by a member of the Little Geeks staff to attend this event and pickup their free computer. NOTE: Don’t forget to register, you must register to be qualified to receive a computer.

The Ontario Science Centre is hosting their Innovators Ball 2008 on May 29, 2008. The event is a formal fundraising event (see the dress code suggestions for help figuring out that means a tuxedo or formal suit for men, and potentially something much funkier for women).

The 2007 Innovators’ Ball raised over $230,000 for the Science Centre. And it looks like you’ll get the chance to do some hobnobbing with others that support science and technology innovation. The Science Centre is a strange wonderful place with a great mission:

To delight, inform and challenge visitors through engaging and thought-provoking experiences in science and technology.

The exhibits are designed to bring back a child-like wonder to discovery, invention and exploration. I remember attending the Science Centre as a kid and it was one of the highlights of my travels to Toronto. More recently, we’ve made trips to The Museum of Science & Industry in Chicago, The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, and The Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I’m hoping since I work for a big company based in Redmond, WA to make it to the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

Supporting the Ontario Science Centre and getting a chance to preview the Facing Mars - Would you survive the journey? exhibit with valet parking and an a glass of champagne. It’s going to be a fantastic night with all of the proceeds going to a great cause. I’ll have to see if I can find a babysitter.

Coworking spaces serve as the hub of activity for independents. Coworking is an emerging work pattern for work-at-home professionals and independent contractor. It’s a community office space for self-employed developers and writers. After getting early coverage from The Globe and Mail, Toronto was very lucky to have 2 coworking spaces: Centre for Social Innovation and Indoor Playground. However, in January 2008 the Indoor Playground closed.

CSI is a fantastic, vibrant community space. It really shows the power of collaboration and connection between the residents and community members. With events like Metronauts, Open Everything, and others, CSI is a world-leading centre for social innovators. The challenge is that there are a lot of independents that just don’t meet the social change or social mission requirements of CSI. The focus for CSI ensures a strong community with shared values and purpose.

There is a strong need to rebuild a coworking space in Toronto. Wayne Lee (aka BunnyHero) is organizing a meetup to discuss building a new coworking space.

Come out and discuss building a future coworking space for independents in Toronto. 

Other Canadian coworking spaces:

• Vancouver
• Workspace - abetterplacetowork.com
• theNetWorkHub.ca
• Toronto
• Linux Caffe
• Centre for Social Innovation
• Montreal
• Station-C
• La Bande-Passante
• Out of the Blue
• Prince Edward Island
• Queen Street Commons

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Evangelism is…

It was used more in the evangelistic sense of preaching, pounding on the pavement, getting the job done, taking the battle to the customer - all that stuff. And that’s the sense. It was kind of a good way of saying that this is a real intellectual sales and marketing kind of hype job (laughs). - Guy Kawasaki

Evangelism is a sales and marketing kind of hype job. It really says it all. It’s all very simple, it’s about instilling a strong sense of loyalty amongst employees and/or customers such that they want to talk about your products. You get people to believe and they in turn get more people to believe. The difference is between sales and evangelism is between who is doing the preaching.

Sales is rooted in what’s good for me. Evangelism is rooted in what’s good for you. - Guy Kawasaki

Ulimately, evangelism is about "bringing good news" based on the Billy Graham Evangelistic Associations Ambassadors program. Fortunately, this has been digested and broken down into a marketing program. Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell have a great blog and 2 great books:

	Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force by Ben McConnell, Jackie Huba Read more about this book…
	Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message by Ben McConnell, Jackie Huba Read more about this book…

Jackie and Ben present a framework where "the ultimate goal is to create communities of influencers who drive sales or membership for your company or organization".

1. Customer plus-delta: Continuously gather customer feedback.
2. Napsterize knowledge: Make it a point to share knowledge freely.
3. Build the buzz: Expertly build word-of-mouth networks.
4. Create community: Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.
5. Make bite-size chunks: Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
6. Create a cause: Focus on making the world, or your industry, better.

We’re talking about using evangelism techniques to build community and drive revenue. This is very different than the altruistic ideals behind my involvement with BarCamp, DemoCamp and other.

Is there a difference between evangelism marketing and community evangelism?

Open Everything is a global conversation about the art, science and spirit of ‘open’. It gathers people using openness to create and improve software, education, media, philanthropy, neighbourhoods, workplaces and the society we live in: everything. It’s about thinking, doing and being open.

Where, and when?

There are two kinds of Open Everything conversation planned: a three day retreat in British Columbia and half day events in cities around the world.

• Centre for Social Innovation, Toronto, Canada - June 4, 2008 - half day chat [wiki]
• Young Foundation, London, England - July 10, 2008 - half day chat [wiki]
• Hollyhock, Cortes Island, British Columbia - September 3 - 6, 2008 - three day retreat [wiki]
• Lien Centre for Social Innovation, Singapore - September 15, 2008 - half day chat [wiki]
• Shuttleworth Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa - August 2008 - half day chat [wiki]

Wow has it been 2 years since the first CopyCamp? CopyCamp is participant-driven conference "for artists about the Internet and the challenge to copyright". True to the nature of citizenship through participation, there are no observers at CopyCamp. Everyone has something to offer and is expected to contribute. This was a primary driver of the initial BarCamps and is definitely true at FooCamp. It is great to see the open creative spaces and participant-driven conferences move beyond the bounds of the tech crowd.

Check out photos from CopyCamp 2006