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’.]