Hogtown Consulting

2007 has comes with various changes and milestones (Aimee and I planning to get married, looking for a home, 1 year self-employed and 30 years alive to name the big ones). All this has brought with is a lot of thinking, here are some of the pieces that seem like they might fit in the puzzle whose shape I can’t quite make out.

David Crow thinking about the nature of community, having kicked off BarCamp Toronto

Tara Hunt blogging about community and integrity in marketing

Indoor Playground launches, for a cool shared co-working space in Toronto

Centre for Social Innovation expands, providing shared office space for social innovators

Robert Patterson blogs with hopefulness on a huge range of things, like education, energy and wood stoves

Jevon on thinking about Enterprise 2.0 and radar

Steve Jobs on Digital Rights Management (it’s bad and we need a new, less double-speak name for the damn stuff)

Seth Godin, more integrity in marketing

TransitCamp, bringing the BarCamp ethos into the real world in Toronto

Worldchanging condensing thought about how we can best approach the possibilities and threats in our near future, with hopes for a Bright Green future

Wikinomics, telling it to business like the Web 2.0 geeks amongst us always knew it was (collaboration good, industrial age business models in the information age bad)

Unto This Last, a shop building smart furniture on site using a stack of plywood and a computer controlled machine

I’m going to try to make something more considered out of this mess of stuff, but it felt worthwhile just getting it out there for now.

TorontoTransitCamp describes itself like this:

An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto’s talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto’s transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.

You can read a good background on the event here and register here.

This promises to be a very interesting development in lots of ways. It’s an evolution of the Unconference and BarCamp movements. What I find particularly exciting is that it is moving proven, if still new, concepts about sharing and developing ideas out of the tech world (where BarCamps are a big hit) into the ‘real world’.

Seems a lot of people are excited by the idea. TransitCamp has already received coverage on the blogs of WorldChanging and Boing Boing, which is the blog equivalent of getting a cover feature in Mother Jones and The New York Times.

An other interesting aspect of this event is how it’s all enabled using technology. This is no less than a full fledged mini-conference (or unconference) for around 100 people that was put together in two weeks flat with all the organisation that entails (sponsorships, venue, publicity, programming, press, catering…).

All of this was done by a group of enthusiatic volunteers using electronic communications to get it all done. There are plans to document the way TransitCamp happened and how the Internet makes this type of thing possible, which could be fascinating I think.

[disclosure: I'm one of many people involved in planning TransitCamp, mostly as 'the wifi guy'.]

David Akin, a CTV reporter, has the text of a letter on Kyoto that our esteemed (cough) Prime Minister apparently sent to supporters back in 2002. You can read the full letter over here. Here’s the section I found particularly fascinating (in a car wreck sort of way):

‘It would take more than one letter to explain what’s wrong with Kyoto, but here are a few facts about this so-called “Accord”:

• It’s based on tentative and contradictory scientific evidence about climate trends.
• It focuses on carbon dioxide, which is essential to life, rather than upon pollutants.

…’

Seriously, in the same breath we have Mr Harper questioning the scientific evidence and then going on to imply we don’t need to worry about carbon dioxide emissions, after all CO2 is essential to life. Stupid or deceitful? You decide.

Seriously, water is essential to life, but I still don’t fancy the idea of living under water. Balance in all things, including CO2, say I.

Last night was the first open house for Indoor Playground, the new coworking office space that’s opening up on Richmond in the next month or so. Actually, I’m not sure that the Indoor Playground is going to have a slide, though that would be cool. It does look like it will have lots of other good stuff, particularly a really nice space and interesting people doing interesting stuff.

I’ve been waiting and hoping for a coworking space to happen in Toronto for pretty much the whole year I have been Hogtown Consulting, working from my home office. Then two come along at once.

As timing works out, I’m very close to signing a lease on some office space in the soon to expand Centre for Social Innovation at 215 Spadina, just around the corner from Indoor Playground. So really I don’t need any more office space right now. But, I really love the idea of Indoor Playground, so I’m considering signing up for one of their very reasonable usage plans, perhaps off-peak plus one day a week, to be part of that community.

If the conversations I was in on at the open house were anything to judge by, this is going to be a really cool space to work in. Smart, engaged and at least slightly nerdy people who want to get stuff done. Plus the space is great, Jane Jacobs would approve I think (“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings”).

Mark Dowds has announced the pricing structure and an open house for the Indoor Playground coworking space that Creationstep are building at Richmond and Spadina.

I’m definitely going to be checking out the space, particularly as the price list looks much more affordable than an earlier iteration I saw.

I have an application in and my fingers firmly crossed for a space at the the very close by Centre for Social Innovation (215 Spadina, pictured), but spending some time in both of these spaces might be a good way to enjoy being part of two exciting communities. Anyway, being spoilt for choice in affordable and inspiring coworking space in Downtown Toronto is not a bad problem to have.

Over here Mark talks about strong opinions, weakly held (I prefer lightly to weakly, but love the idea).

Herewith then one of my strong opinions, lightly held. The minimum wage in Ontario should be increased, and I support the current attempt in Queen’s Park to raise the minimum wage to $10 immediately. I have even sent a letter to my MPP to tell them so (the old fashioned sort with a stamp and everything, apparently they prefer those).

The pro argument for an increase is fairly simple I think, people who work for a living should be paid enough to live on. The con is more complex, involving the potential impacts on the economy of such an increase.

In my opinion (and I’m definitely no economist) the economy should exist to serve society, and not the other way around. It is not acceptable to me that a person in this rich province of a rich nation can work a hard 40 hour week and still live in poverty. It’s going to take a pretty strong ‘anything else is bad for the economy’ argument to persuade me otherwise.

I realise this is a way off topic, even for me, but I feel strongly about this so I thought I’d just stick by virtual heart on my blogging sleeve here.

Some really interesting reads over at The Edge annual question 2007, asking a huge range of scientists and thinkers ‘What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!’.

There’s lots of interesting stuff there and I’ve only read a tenth, I particularly liked George Dyson talking about the potential for a return to sail powered cargo ships:

The trade winds constitute an enormous engine waiting to be put to use. When oil becomes expensive enough, we will.

This is a fascinating example of the bright green thinking which says we can manage the environmental and energy problems we face without having to step back into the ways of the past.

Also: New Scientist article on modern sail powered ships.

It was sometime in the early 90s and and I was reading The Hacker Crackdown, this was the first time I really became aware of the Internet. I had this idea that the net would be like a complete, instantly accessible library of knowledge and I wanted access.
The reality at the web at the time was a little underwhelming. But I think we’re finally getting to the place I, and many others, imagined.
This morning for example I needed to understand the concept of marginal cost, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found an excellent description. As I type I’m downloading an Ubuntu linux cd to do some work on a sick Windows pc, it will provide all the functionality of Windows (and more) at zero cost.
Now that’s a fairly typical (if geeky) way to spend a morning, and one I usually wouldn’t think twice about. But, giving it a little more thought, these are two awesome Internet enabled projects that were only imagined by a prescient few not so many years ago. That I can run my PC using a free, open source operating system and look up pretty much anything I can think of in a collaborative, online encyclopedia – there are pretty amazing things and it doesn’t end here.
I think, hope at least, that the next stage is for the use of incredibly powerful tool to become more widespread and really start making a difference, not just to geeks with time and curiosity, but to everyone.

2006 was my first year at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, TX (that’s the nerdy one, not the cooler one) . The encouragement of Neil got me there, and I’m glad it did. I had a great time.
As a first-timer I pretty much just quietly took everything in. This year I’m going to make more of an effort to make some connections, as the attendees are pretty much a who’s who of people doing good stuff on the web.
The added bonus of traveling from a cold Toronto late-winter to a warm Texas spring was pretty nice too.

End of 2006 approaching quick + feeling I’d like to blog more frequently = a look back at the year.

Stunningly original it ain’t, but it may just get me writing a little more.

Looking back on 2006 I’m going to start up with Democamp/Barcamp, the unconference weather system that descended on Toronto in 2006.

There were ups and there were downs, are there not always? But I have a definite feeling that there’s a there there, and that David Crow’s ambition to improve the tech community in Toronto is panning out.