Tim Hwang looks like a super cool guy. And not just because Joi Ito took his portrait. Nope. Most important? He founded ROFLCon, the internet culture/celebrity conference. (Which my amazing friend Kate covered for CBC radio’s Spark. Yay!)

Maybe he’s cool because of his work at Harvard’s Berkman Center, where he does research with Yochai Benkler as part of the cooperation group.

Or maybe because he helps out on the Internet & Democracy project.

Or maybe because he knows so much about online community and the history of internet culture. Ethan wrote a nice post on Tim’s explanation of Internet memes. (Some of it is gross. But you may, nevertheless, find yourself compelled to look at it. You’ve been warned.)

I wrote previously about the rocking good job that the Participation Camp organizers did. Distant participants felt like they were right in the room. I couldn’t “attend” the second day, so I missed Tim’s talk — Gaming Open Government Data. But now here it is for you and me. It’s pretty damned cool. Games and citizen engagement. Some great ideas in here. Maybe this is why he’s super cool. Hard to decide…

Via Karl.

If you’d like to contribute to the preservation of the garden as a wild space Emily posts community updates on her blog. And imagine (le) mile-end has been doing lots of great organizing. Here’s their report from the last meeting.

From the introduction:

Lot #2334609 is a terrain vague — owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, owned by the City of Montreal as of June 2009, used and cherished by the community, the only green space in the Mile End. People feel free in this space. They don’t ask for permission to picnic, grow things, create art, or gather around a campfire. It’s open and wild, unlike most city parks.

To outsiders, it may look like an abandoned field. But, as you will read here, the community has appropriated this space and wants a say in how it will be developed. Development is scheduled for 2009-2010, as part of the city’s $9-million revitalization of the neighborhood.

Emily Rose Michaud, through the Sprout Out Loud! gardener’s collective, created the Roerich Garden project in November 2007. Using this project as a starting point, this book provides a history of the meadow and documents the many ways the community uses and relates to this space. It then connects what’s happening in the Mile End to similar local, national, and international initiatives. It documents what the community wants for this space, as captured through a series of participatory consultations. And it asks questions about how we engage as citizens to imagine and create more open cities.

If you’d like to get (infrequent) updates about this project and the book you can sign up.

Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) is an experimental web platform that crowdsources crisis information. People can submit reports via text messaging using a mobile phone, email, or the web. Looks like it can be deployed (sorry, geek speak) for a specific crisis. It was most recently use to track events in Gaza and was also used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Users can submit or track by category: riot, looting, sexual assault… (reads like humanity’s list of shame). The results are aggregated onto a map. They can also upload photos and post links to videos and news stories.

The project is free and open source, with developers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands, and the United States. If you’re a developer and would like to participate you can join here.

And on top of everything, the design of their site rocks ;)

Related: Blogging for Good Governance

Station C is a space that fosters community, collaboration, innovation. People come here to work and connect. We are a hub for creators and innovators: entrepreneurs, geeks, artists, social activists.

Station C is part of an international coworking movement, which brings together the best elements of the office, cafe, and salon. This movement is built on a set of common values:

• Community — We are a community that thrives on connections and mutual support. Everyone participates, contributes, and benefits. Station C members take the initiative to care for our collective space, welcome visitors, orient new members, start conversations, and host events. We also reach out and contribute to our local community.
• Collaboration — We work together, intentionally as part of project teams or in an ad-hoc way when  someone needs a hand. We help each other out by sharing ideas, learning, solutions, resources.
• Openness — It is beneficial to share and build on each others’ ideas and knowledge. We encourage this in a concrete way by working at shared tables in an open space. We’re a modern agora, providing a public space for informal community gatherings and encouraging folks to drop in and work with us for the day.
• Diversity — We want people with different ideas, perspectives, and ways of working. People from different backgrounds. People at different stages in their life and career. Diversity means occasional misunderstandings, annoyance, and arguments — all of which are a small price to pay for sparking creativity and avoiding groupthink.
• Sustainability — Financially, Station C was designed to sustain itself and the community, not to make a profit. Each of us is responsible for finding our own work. Environmentally, like everyone, we are still learning and finding ways to lower our impact and promote sustainable products and behaviors. We need to do more and welcome help with this.

Please post comments here. See comment, below.

For the record, here’s what I’ve come up with. I have a hard time reading it because, well, I find it hard to say nice things about myself. But by posting it here I’m sure y’all will let me know if it’s bull ;)

SUMMARY
Communications consultant with a focus on technology and social change. Excellent strategic planning, creative direction, content production, client service, and management skills. Experience with all sectors: corporate, academic, public, nonprofit. Enthusiastic, innovative, visionary.

SKILLS

• Communication — Develop strategies to increase awareness, share knowledge, and change behavior.
• Creativity — Creative thinker and problem solver with an entrepreneurial mindset. Able to help clients get results with very little resources (taking advantage of free tools and applications).
• Technology — Bridge geeks and clients. Obsessed with social media, networks, and new ways to use technology to inform, connect, collaborate, organize, and do business. Experience producing and maintaining websites, wikis, team workspaces, and online communities.
• People — Strong interpersonal, intercultural, and facilitation skills. Experience with distributed teams and clients. Able to keep projects on track. Natural coach with positive approach and ability to lead, motivate, and inspire.

SERVICES
Advisory services, strategic planning, content development, project management, and training. Focus on helping clients achieve business and social objectives by creating an authentic presence, using open approaches, building relationships with customers and stakeholders, and improving internal and external information flows. Connected to a network of talented freelancers (social media and web development experts, designers, copywriters, translators, editors) and can pull together flexible and responsive teams.

That’s it for now. Still needs work, but it’s a beginning.

À la Station C, en plein coeur du Mile End, les utilisateurs, qu’on appelle des membres, insistent effectivement sur l’attrait du contact avec les gens. Dans le grand loft, il n’y a d’ailleurs pas de bureaux fermés, seulement de grandes tables de travail communes. Deux salles de conférence peuvent servir aux appels de nature privée ou de longue durée.

Christine Préfontaine, membre assidue de la Station C, n’est même pas travailleuse autonome!

Elle est conseillère principale en communications pour un organisme gouvernemental, qui lui permet de travailler à distance.

«J’ai un bureau chez moi à cinq minutes de marche, mais je préfère travailler ici», affirme la jeune femme de 39 ans, qui a décidé de payer l’abonnement de sa poche. «Ça me donne accès à une communauté.»

Comme chacun est plutôt occupé à sa petite affaire pendant la journée, elle a mis en place un concept d’”Open Salad”. Tous les mardis, les membres sont invités à apporter quelques ingrédients pour créer un buffet de salades improvisé. Il y a un frigo et un lave-vaisselle sur place.

Glad she got it that I pay for my spot out of my own pocket! Read the full article on the La Presse website: Autonome, mais pas seul.

We survived. Liam, my son, drew a lot and played with Keva planks and Playmobil and Lego (the old-school plain blocks, not the crappy new over-engineered co-branded sets). He’s 11 now and writes beautifully, has excellent grades, and consumes books at an alarming rate. He approaches playing tennis and piano with an amazing level of focus and discipline. I believe that this is due, in part, to the fact that early on he became a producer of content, rather than a consumer.

Iíve been thinking recently about consumption and production. I believe that producing — creating — is a revolutionary act. And I have been pushing myself to create. To make things. To write. What you’re reading now, and this web site, is a result of that push. It’s important for each one of us to engage, participate, and share.

I ran across this video yesterday, of Clay Shirkey speaking at the Web 2.0 conference, held in April 2008 in San Francisco, which touches on some of these ideas. It’s 15 minutes, and well worth your time. You can also read the transcript of his speech. Let me know what you think.