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TransitCamp!

Most of the unconference "camp" type events that I attend are technology-related, but today I’m attending TransitCamp in Toronto, originally conceived by a few of my TorCamp friends and now happening in other cities as well as becoming a vital part of the greater Toronto area transit planning process. What started out a year ago as an informal collection of people interested in transit has evolved into a much more mainstream channel for sharing the conversation about transit amongst the providers, consumers and any other interested parties.

One of the general managers of Metrolinx said a few words in the opening session; it’s great that they’re participating directly although this isn’t their event. This is the first in a series of events that will happen around the greater Toronto area, since transit is not just about downtown, but also about how all the regional transportation options tie together.

If you’re attending TransitCamp or want to follow along with the sessions, they’re all on the wiki (or will be, once all the notes are entered).

If you’re interested in transit in Toronto, join the community at the Metronauts site.

You can follow a collection of the conversations on the Onaswarm Metronauts swarm, or through Twitter on the #metronauts or #transitcamp hashtags.

2008 04 05 TransitCamp Comments (1)

Even public service organizations can ‘camp

Normally I would just provide a link to this in my daily Links post, but this is such a great example of how Open Space technology (e.g., BarCamp, MashupCamp) can be used for more than just holding geeky tech unconferences: last year, three people from the TorCamp community organized TransitCamp to provide a place for the Toronto Transit Commission (North America’s third largest, serving 2.4 million riders each day) and the local community to come together and generate new ideas about how to really make the TTC “the better way”. Today, the story of TransitCamp, “Sick Gloria Transit”, hit the Harvard Business Review as one of their breakthrough ideas for 2008. The article is written by Mark Kuznicki, Jay Goldman and Eli Singer; Mark’s post also contains a number of reference links, including a page of links on the TransitCamp site covering both unconferences and TransitCamp itself.

I’ve attended several unconferences, although I missed TransitCamp last year, and I’ve been promoting the idea of the unconference as a format for business and technology conferences in the BPM space, but it’s a hard sell. One group of conference organizers that I approached with this had many reasons why it wouldn’t work, even though they have never attended an unconference, and most didn’t know what it was before the subject was broached. One response: “hopelessly techie.” I disagree: the unconference format has been used for many non-technical gatherings since Open Space Technology was first defined in 1986; it’s just that the tech community made it popular in the past few years. To quote the Wikipedia article, it “has been used in over 100 countries and in diverse settings, industries, cultures and situations - for program and product design, knowledge exchange, interdisciplinary thinking, conflict resolution and conferences.”

TransitCamp is a great example of how unconferences can be used with a primarily non-technical group of participants to generate ideas for a definitely low-tech endeavour: improving our local transit.

2008 01 28 business Comments (1)

DemoCamp 15 in Toronto

We’re having our 15th DemoCamp in Toronto on October 29th, where anyone with something to demo can sign up to show their stuff in 5 minutes. There will also be some Ignite-style presentations (a 5 minute presentation with 20 slides x 15 seconds per slide where the presenter does not have control over the slide show). DemoCamp is always a great time: you see some interesting stuff, and meet a lot of creative people.

If you want to demo or present, submit your information here. 

If you want to attend, sign up here. It’s free, but space is limited.

If you want to sponsor the event (maximum $200/sponsor), contact David Crow.

These have always been evening events in the past, but this one starts at 3pm, the demos kick off at 4pm, 5:30pm for the presentations, then we adjourn to the pub around 7pm.

2007 10 05 Comments (2)

Why Facebook beats LinkedIn

I’ve been a big LinkedIn fan in the two years or so that I’ve been using it, but there’s a couple of things that really bother me about it. First, until recently, you couldn’t remove someone from your list of contacts, you had to email LinkedIn customer support to make it happen. It happened pretty quickly, but I wonder how many contacts were left languishing on lists because most people are too busy/lazy to email and have them taken off. The second thing is the completely opaque process that you have to go through to start a LinkedIn group. Members of the Toronto BarCamp community, also known as TorCamp, have very active online lives, and many of them are on my LinkedIn contact list. I thought that a LinkedIn TorCamp group would be a great idea, and when someone told me that they had tried and were turned down, I figured that I could do better, and I applied on the LinkedIn site to start a (free) TorCamp group (I point out the free part because I suspect that the paid groups might be given much better service). A long wait ensued, then I received an email telling me that some information was missing, and that I should reapply. I did, and now (months later), still nothing. I’ve given up on LinkedIn groups; they’re just too damned hard, and social networking should make it easy to connect, not hard.

Facebook, on the other hand, is being seen as a replacement for LinkedIn by many, and although I’ve primarily been using LinkedIn for professional/business contacts and Facebook for personal contacts, there’s been quite a bit of crossover with business contacts finding me and inviting me to be their Facebook friend.

Ever since Facebook opened up its platform a few weeks back for developers to create add-on applications, it looks like it might sweep the popularity contest, especially if LinkedIn stays with the walled garden/not-so-social network philosophy. In Toronto, which held the record for the biggest number of Facebook users until London overtook it last week, we’re even having a Facebook Camp.

2007 07 23 Comments (2)

Enter a survey on technology business in Toronto, win an iPod

There’s a new survey for technology-related businesses in the Toronto area available from now through September 7th; fill it out and you’ll be entered in a draw for a 30GB iPod. If you’re involved in the Toronto BarCamp community, use “TorCamp” as your survey code.

Update: More from Mark Kuznicki on the importance of the survey:

In a first for an unincorporated-unmember-unorganization, Toronto’s Barcamp community is partnering with the big guns - the Board of Trade, MaRS, ITAC and others - to gather a profile of the needs and opportunities facing Toronto’s technology community.

We are at the table trying to communicate on behalf of the thousands of small/micro-businesses who tend not to be members of these larger established member-based organizations.  It is important to communicate to the policymakers that it is the small/micro businesses that drive innovation and business development in this town!

2007 07 20 Comments (0)

Enterprise 2.0 and Toronto Tech Week

Time for another Enterprise 2.0 event in Toronto, this time in conjunction with Toronto Tech Week. Our last one was a less formal, more camp-like event back in January; this one will be a breakfast panel with Anthony Williams (co-author of Wikinomics) followed by a camp-style workshops for the remainder of the day. As Tom Purves puts it:

The plan is to bring together the worlds of the leading minds from the technology and consulting side of Enterprise2.0 with business leaders (CxO’s, executives and IT/HR professionals) to bring a practical and real-world perspective to these ideas.

It will be interesting to see how — or if — the “business leaders” interact in an unstructured, unconference environment.

2007 03 15 Enterprise 2.0 Comments (0)

EnterpriseCamp (the unconference edition)

EnterpriseCampI’m not sure why Bryce Johnson thought that he’d have full turnout at 9:30am on a Saturday, even for something as exciting as EnterpriseCamp, but a few of us managed to make it on time. Of course, my brain is still in a time zone some where east of here and I’m waking up at 5am so it’s easier for me this week.

We kicked off a bit late and the attendance was lower than the signups, but there were some great sessions (and I’m not just talking about mine). Like other unconferences, there was no set agenda, just a blank grid of time slots for sessions and a pad of Post-It notes; those of us interested in leading a talk outlined our topic verbally to the group, then posted it in an open time slot. The schedule was pretty fluid all day long, which fit well with the mood of the group and the small number of simultaneous sessions (3 at most, I think), but we still managed to fit in all the proposed sessions and finish up on time.

People taggingOne cool thing that the organizers did was create icon stickers that we could put on our nametags to designate our interests: people tagging, if you will. They also provided great food (breakfast and lunch), a huge variety of herbal teas (important for us non-coffee types) and a notebook containing some Enterprise 2.0 articles and the all-important key to the people-tagging icons.

The first session that I attended was Carsten Knoch talking about bringing Web 2.0 features into the enterprise, which was a perfect lead-in to my session on a specific example of this, namely, integrating Web 2.0 functionality into BPM software. Carsten talked more in general terms about what features and techniques could be introduced, techniques for building applications, and why all of this Web 2.0 stuff is scary to the enterprise. He had a pretty comprehensive presentation, a bit unusual for an unconference, and I hope to see it posted somewhere.

I followed immediately after Carsten, and although I had the best intentions to prepare a little presentation the night before (but ended up out for dinner with friends) or at least a few notes on the subway on the way to EnterpriseCamp (but ended up chatting with a South African backpacker on his way around the world), I took the floor with a blank flip-chart and wrote four lines:

  • tagging
  • RSS
  • zero footprint
  • mashups

I then riffed on each of these, with lots of great input from the audience, with my focus on how they apply in the world of BPM but some expansion into other types of enterprise software. Great discussion: I love it when I can learn something while giving a presentation. I could have gone on for hours, except for the smell of pizza wafting in from the lunch area.

In the afternoon, I sat in on Tom Purves and Jevon MacDonald discussing adoption of Web 2.0 technology (specifically their product, for the most part) within the enterprise. That evolved into a discussion about Consulting 2.0 and a variety of other topics.

I also attended Bryce’s session on tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies, which generated some really interesting discussion. The idea of creating tag relationships rather than tag pruning as applicable to Enterprise 2.0 tagging applications: you want people to be able to add tags that are meaningful to them, but if others are using different tags that mean the same thing, find some way to relate the tags.

Definitely a worthwhile way to spend my Saturday. Many thanks to Navantis and Microsoft for their sponsorship of EnterpriseCamp.

2007 01 15 BPM
Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 Comments (2)

BlogHerNorth at BarCampTdot

On the weekend, I attended BarCampTdot (aka BarCampToronto aka TorCamp), where we semi-officially launched BlorHerNorth. We held a session to talk about the vision for BlogHerNorth and to gather ideas on what participants might want to see; lots of ideas, no decisions. We won’t be running a full-scale conference this year, possibly in the spring, but some meetups or smaller sessions likely during the rest of this year to get the ball rolling.

Although the presenters will all be women since one of the main purposes is to highlight women in technology and blogging, the attendance is not restricted and we’re happy to hear input from anyone on what you’d like to see at a BlogHerNorth session.

Tagged
2006 05 15 Comments (1)