Change Camp Ottawa 2009 – fertile ground for the imagination

Today I’ve been meeting all kinds of interesting and inspiring folk at Change Camp Ottawa, an “unconference” on reimagining government and citizenship in the age of participation.  It’s been a really neat event – the participants set the agenda collaboratively, people were free to roam between sessions, there were lots of great discussions, and people were live-tweeting the whole thing (see #cco09 if you’re interested).  Seriously, I’ve never seen so many iPhones in one room!

Here’s a description of ChangeCamp from the site:

ChangeCamp is an event format, an open community and a set of tools and ideas designed to give citizens and governments the ability to work collaboratively in new ways to make change and to better address real-world challenges in our communities.

A ChangeCamp event is a participatory and web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents and media creators to answer one question:

“How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”

ChangeCamp addresses the demand for a renewed relationship among citizens and government. We seek to create connections, knowledge, tools and policies that drive transparency, civic engagement and democratic empowerment.

All that to say, there were a whole lot of enthusiastic and tech-savvy people gathered together to imagine new ways of doing things.  It was hard to get out of bed so early on a Saturday, but definitely worth it!