1. Collaboratively create a first draft using a wiki. The city of Melbourne, one participant pointed out, uses a wiki for Future Melboure, the community of Melbourne’s long-term plan for the future direction of all aspects of city life. (Broader endeavor, but nice example.)
2. Use the tag “planqc” when writing or researching so we can aggregate. (I imagine we’ll have to figure out a way to aggregate and synthesize all of this tagged content. Stay tuned.)

My job was to go ask folks at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) for resources on this. I also asked Jennifer Bell, from VisibleGovernment. Jennifer suggested we look at

• The Obama campaign technology platform, especially the section on that deals with opening up government to citizens (section 2).
• The OpenGovData manifesto
• The Obama CTO priorities site — it uses a tool called UserVoice to collect opinions, build consensus, and track implementation (maybe a good model for our project)
• OMB Watch’s Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda: Recommendations to President-elect Obama and Congress

Jennifer also said the digital plan should include something about re-writing government software procurement laws to favour open-source solutions.

As for IDRC, so far I’ve received a list of websites and initiatives: Pan Asia Networking project websites, LIRNEAsia, LIRNE, DIRSI, ICANN, ORBICOM, ITU, LACNIC, ARIN, CANARIE. Too many! Where to start? If anyone knows the top five please let me know.

If you recall, we were talking about conversations and community.

A community has to have:
1. une memoire / a memory
2. des sujets communs / shared topics

I relate to the idea of a shared memory. I met a fellow Franco-Ontarian this summer and was surprised to hear from him the same stories and perceptions that I had passed down to me in my family. Things given to you and taken in without thought, like milk. (Lots of it, unfortunately, I define now as a victim mentality. Topic for another post.) We had a shared narrative of the past and a clear sense of “the issues” — immediately understood. But as to whether or not a community has to have these things. Well, I’ll have to think on that. Certainly it needs boundaries, even permeable ones. Isn’t that the task of a facilitator? To moderate and maintain the boundaries of a discussion so that together we can achieve something or get somewhere?

Then talk switched to the overload of conversation. And to whether or not we are just building ourselves bigger echo chambers. There’s a need to organize. For better filters to handle the overload. As the number of books became overwhelming we developed the dewey decimal system. What will it be now?

Mitch (I think) said the next big trend is that each blog is its own social network. There was agreement that people are less interested in “me” blogs and more interested in content that is about community. Beyond the self. Blogs are becoming magazines. (My vision for this blog was always that it would have a number of contributors writing about how to change the world. Damn! And I thought I was running with my own idea. But, once more, simply being carried along by a wave that is bigger than me.)

Then we went back to this idea of limiting, filtering, and defining communities. The best communities, someone said, limit the number of participants. They set rules or at least find a way to put in filters so that people with similar interests can find each other.

Sylvain mentioned that his kids are not at all in email. They go where their friends are: to msn, facebook.

Then my mind started wandering and I started thinking about serendipity. Wondering can you define it as openness to the unexpected, for what we’re were not looking for.

Ohhhh. There’s more. About Quebec’s Digital Plan. But Steve just called and we’re going out to supper now so I’m gonna have to tell you the rest later. Part 3 here we come!

Rules
1. When you first arrive start by listening
2. Write the topics that interest you on a sticky
3. If someone has already suggested the same topic put a heart on it [stickers were made available]
4. Enter into the conversation by following the flow

Non-Rules
1. We discuss ideas, not business
2. Everyone has the right to express their opinion and to disagree politely
3. The moderator is the prince, not the king
4. Follow the flow!

Warning: I have a spotty attention span. So what follows is a list of the shiny stuff.

We discussed the face-to-face versus online communication and communities. The points that stuck with me are what you’d expect.

Face-to-face

• so much more bandwidth
• million times richer
• get instant feedback via non-verbal cues, animal instincts
• silence means something
• synchronous: can move together faster
• can build a common territory quickly
• allows serendipity
• enriches subsequent online connections

Online

• can create communities not bounded by geography
• reduced inhibitions can facilitate self-expression and connecting with others
• easier then to follow up f2f
• negative side: always in your bubble of people who think like you
• online: packets with beginnings and endings

Mike: It’s all one community. No distinction between online and offline. Increasingly people have a foot in both.

Sylvain: Une augmentation qui nous diminue. Increased dependence on technology can diminish us. It may be that online does not augment does not augment each other. People are less with you when they’ve got their laptop open. Not totally focused.

Twitter as ambient intimacy. Later I was talking to Mitch that sometimes I feel badly about reading people’s tweets, like I’m stalking them. He mentioned that he wrote a post a while back where he called it “permission-based stalking”) see his recent post and the original post.

Mitch: Loss of serendipity. Not much of a conversation anymore. Each blog posts destroys the previous one and ends the prior conversation. Twitter is only PR. There’s just content and more content. Serendipity is important because allows you to find wonderful things you were not looking for. To expand your circle.

I disagreed with Mitch on loss of conversation and using comments as a metric. That’s only one way to tell. Conversations are the sharing and exchange of ideas and opinions, which can happen in many ways and over time. Just because I don’t leave a comment on your blog doesn’t mean that what you wrote did not touch me or that I won’t respond later. Also I may read something you wrote and then share or discuss it with someone else. It’s like trying to document the result of events. You can try but you’ll always miss a lot unless folks report back to you. Bringing people together matters and it’s critical and you’ll just never know if a year or ten later a connection made at the event you through resulted in wondrous change.

Stay tuned for Part 2…