As you may have heard, we recently picked a date, time, and place for ChangeCamp Edmonton! We’ve been talking about it for months now, and for a while it really felt like we’d never make any progress. We had a really hard time defining the event, though it sounds simple in concept:

Let’s get as many citizens, politicians, policy-makers, technologists, design-thinkers, change agents, and media creators as possible together in the same room to explore one central question: “How do we re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation?”

Was it a single day or many? Physical or virtual? A spark or a process? How much should we define up front? How do we get people interested? Should we borrow from cities that have already held ChangeCamps or try something completely different?

We still don’t have all the answers, but we’ve decided to move forward anyway. In the spirit of ChangeCamp and other unconferences, we’re going to have a conversation, and you’re invited! Here are the details:

WHO: You, everyone!
WHAT: ChangeCamp Edmonton
WHEN: Saturday, October 17th, 2009 from 8am to 4pm
WHERE: Lister Conference Centre, University of Alberta (map)
WHY: To start a conversation about re-imagining government and citizenship in Edmonton, Alberta

We are still working on defining how the day will unfold, but it’ll be similar to ChangeCamps in other cities. Stay tuned to the official website as well as our Google Group for updates.

If you’d like to help out, just let us know! Right now we need help spreading the word, more than anything else. Tell your friends, tell your colleagues, tell your elected representatives. Let’s make October 17th a day to remember in Edmonton!

Tonight we held our first planning meeting for ChangeCamp Edmonton. Though it went a lot longer than I expected, it was definitely productive. Lots of great ideas and discussion. ChangeCamp is an event in the spirit of BarCamp or DemoCamp, but focused on government and citizenship. The central focus is to “re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation.”

Here’s how the idea is described at changecamp.ca:

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.

We didn’t form any really solid plans tonight about what the Edmonton version of ChangeCamp will look like, but did set some goals and came up with a list of things we need to consider. We’ll meet again in a few weeks to progress things further. In the meantime, check out the wiki for our meeting notes and to get involved.

Here’s who attended (yes we’re all on Twitter!): @fusedlogic, @Imparo, @ChrisLaBossiere, @JillLaBossiere, @jdarrah, @davecournoyer, @mastermaq, @paulney, @eadnams, @dibegin.

A bunch of us will be at IDEAfest tomorrow at the University of Alberta, so if you drop by ask about ChangeCamp and let us know what you think!