spacer

Getting, Sharing, Using City Data: The DataTO.org Story #opendata

Digg It!
July 18, 2011 1:05 pm
Comment
It’s a Remarkk-able life posterous.remarkk.com

Creating Space for Community

Digg It!
June 19, 2011 8:10 pm
3 Comments

I was privileged to be asked by Kevin Magee to speak at Tweetstock5 in Brantford Ontario. It gave me an opportunity to update and refresh my Community talk that I’ve given off and on over the years.

Now that I’m moving into a new phase of my work, it feels good to at least attempt to summarize and share what I’ve learned over 5 years of work, distilled to the key ideas in about 25 minutes.

Creating Space for Community
View more presentations from Mark Kuznicki

The Moment has arrived!

Digg It!
June 10, 2011 10:19 am
8 Comments

spacer

I am excited to announce that I’m beginning a new stage in my changemaking journey: together with my amazing and talented partners Daniel Rose and Greg Judelman, we are launching a new enterprise focused on collaborative innovation and systems change work called The Moment. We just launched publicly for the first time June 8th, as co-sponsors and facilitators of GovCamp.

We describe The Moment as an innovation studio. Our vision for how change happens and how new value is created is embedded within our name:

You already know The Moment.

You know that moment when you’re working with people of diverse talents, focusing on creating something remarkable, sensing the possibilities of the future and working in flow together as you create a new reality or a new opportunity?

That is the moment we are dedicated to creating. We want to make that moment more accessible to more people and organizations as they navigate increasingly complex and rapidly changing environments for achieving their missions.

We are also focused on this moment – now, today, our time. We are living through the most amazing and most challenging period of transformation, perhaps in human history. In the everyday world of action and reaction we sometimes forget this. The Moment is dedicated to being present and attending to this incredible transformation as servant leaders.

I am very privileged to have found my professional soul-mates in Dan and Greg, joining with them as co-creators of this exciting new venture.

Dan Rose is someone I’ve worked with on and off over the past few years. Dan was the person I wanted at my side when we launched the first ChangeCamp in January 2009. Dan was my partner in the project that helped create AgendaCamp for TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin, an innovation in hyper-local, hyper-connected, co-creative issues-based journalism. Dan’s skills are very deep in strategic process design, facilitation and visual-thinking and like me he’s been operating as a sole practitioner for a number of years creating ad hoc teams under the name Omakase Group.

Greg Judelman is someone I’ve come to know more recently, but when we met it was with a sense of “where have you been all my life”? Greg is a brilliant designer, having proven himself in the much esteemed work of Bruce Mau Design, including his recent contributions to the innovative OCAD U branding project. But design is just the beginning of Greg’s talents. He has a deep connection to social change work and a belief in the value of dialogue. Greg is a co-founder of the Design with Dialogue community that meets monthly at OCAD and is involved with great change-making organizations like Ashoka and Waterlution.

For me, this new venture is the best answer I have to the question that prompted me to change careers over 7 years ago: how do I align my life’s work with my passions and the needs of a very challenging time of accelerating change and increasing complexity in the world?

Along my journey, I picked up some skills, tried some experiments, learned some hard lessons, sought new teachers and found great community among some of the most passionate and creative people in the world. I am very blessed to have had these opportunities. Today, this experimental learning phase is transitioning to a new and more intentional mode of engagement with large scale innovation problems. Together with Greg and Dan, I will be looking to amplify, scale and deepen the impact of our combined toolset in order to sustain innovation and systems transformation for clients and multi-stakeholder partnerships.

We’re looking forward to launching our full website soon at TheMoment.is. For now we have a placeholder page there and  you can sign-up for updates via Twitter (@TheMoment_is) and email.

The Moment has arrived. I’m ready.

spacer

How to thrive in Zombie World

Digg It!
April 12, 2011 6:20 pm
3 Comments

Step 1: Recognize that you’re in Zombie World.

I had a conversation with some friends, where we discussed recent events like the Arab Awakening and the triple disaster in Japan. I got a seed in my brain about the nature of 21st century life. Later, I tried to sum it up in a tweet:

spacer

I was of course referencing the William Gibson quote “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Looked at in a certain way, we already live in a post-apocalyptic world, but many of us are too trapped in bubbles of privilege or zoned out by media pablum to see this with clarity.

In places around the world, normal life and the institutions that support it have already collapsed. And we’re not just talking about Africa or the Middle East. We’re also talking about the Developed North. Within the evacuation zone of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, recovery is probably a generation away. In Detroit, population decline of 25% over the past decade calls for the city to shrink. There are some bold ideas circulated about returning parts of the city to wilderness or farmland. This is post-apocalypse in the heartland of the American industrial age.

In addition to evidence provided by current events, I’ve also taken note of the post-apocalyptic turn in our pop culture. Zombie apocalypse movies and TV shows and Zombie Walks in our cities show our culture’s fascination with post-apocalyptic themes. The interesting thing about zombie stories is that they’re about the struggle of life after the apocalypse. The world as we know it is gone, but life continues. It’s definitively NOT the end.

spacer

Welcome to Zombie World

I think we can see evidence of Zombie institutions all around us: Our Zombie Parliament. The Zombie Media. Zombie Politics. Zombie Capitalism. The Zombie Welfare State. Zombie Security. And let’s not forget Zombie Consumerism. We live in Zombie World.

Those from the fundamentalist tradition of apocalyptic Christian belief warn us to “repent, for the end is nigh”, but they are missing the point. The world as we know it is already ended. We’re past the point of no return, and look around: I don’t see any evidence of the Rapture anywhere.

But we’re not beyond redemption. In zombie apocalypse mythology, human redemption is still possible in the midst of destruction and the walking dead.

Once we realize that the world is ended yet life continues, we will adapt, we will rebuild. Belief that the world can be restored as it was or that the end is nigh are beliefs that disable action because our desired goals are impossible and our actions futile. We cannot do what humans have always done and adapt to our changing environment as long as our mental models are out of touch with the realities of that environment.

In contrast, a post-apocalyptic worldview is tremendously liberating and enabling. Rebuilding in the wake of the apocalypse gives us the freedom to question underlying assumptions. In fact, it requires us to do so. We see the world around us not as given and static, but as a vast expanse of raw material and tools available for reuse and reinterpretation. The post-apocalyptic worldview is therefore more radically creative than either an apocalyptic rapture worldview or a restoration of stability worldview.

So, in order for life and civilization to thrive again, does this mean we need to first understand that we’re already beyond the apocalypse? Maybe the revolution we need is first and foremost a revolution of thought, of sense-making and of acceptance of the true nature of 21st century life.

Maybe we should embrace the Zombie Apocalypse as our great hope for the future.

It’s a Remarkk-able life posterous.remarkk.com

An edited version of this post appeared in The Mark News. Yes, Mark of Remarkk was published in The Mark.

Hacking for Good

Digg It!
December 9, 2010 3:48 pm
4 Comments

On the weekend of December 4th/5th, we saw a remarkable global movement of people come together in their communities to contribute their skills and precious free time to making the world a better place. In remarkable contrast to the controversy surrounding the WikiLeaks phenomenon, there was no controversy about what these developers, designers and storytellers were up to.

Random Hacks of Kindness and the International Open Data hackathons came together in Toronto, bringing together two global movements in one face-to-face gathering of community. There was great work by Heather Leson and the rest of the organizers of RHOKTO for creating this opportunity. Please check out the RHOK site for updates on the many projects created by this global event across 20 cities focused on helping communities mitigate and recover from the impacts of natural disasters.

I wanted to highlight a few Toronto-based projects that came out of the open data aspect of this event in Toronto. Please check out David Eaves post for a run-down of the immense success of the overall International Open Data Hackathon across 73 cities around the world. Have a look at the Toronto Open Data hackathon wiki page for a full run-down of all the project ideas.

spacer

Hackathon Winner: IsThisBikeStolen

A great app idea given life originally by John Taranu on the DataTO Google Group. This app accesses the CPIC database for stolen goods to help used bike purchasers to check whether a bike they’re looking at has been reported as stolen. By reducing the demand for stolen used bikes and improving the likelihood of recovery, this is an app that’s built to create real impact in the community.

Where Not to Rent

Find landlord baddies and bedbugs with this web app, also featuring a mobile-friendly version. Informed renters are able to make better decisions and hopefully help make deadbeat landlords more accountable.

City Budget Navigator

Still a work in progress, but I helped kick off this audacious team to do three things: 1) to liberate the city’s budget data out of its PDF report prison, 2) implement a web-service API to this data to support developers who want to provide visualization and analysis applications and 3) demonstrate some example visualizations. The power of these tools will be to enable a more informed electorate to improve understanding and community dialogue around this cornerstone of city policy and life. Many thanks to our London compatriots who inspired us with their own budget API project, which provided a great starting point.

Special thanks to sponsorship and participation of the City of Toronto CIO Dave Wallace and the City’s open data team. Also, a big thank you to GlobalNews.ca for sponsorship and for helping explain the hackathon phenomenon to a wider audience.

2010 Ideas Festival, Nov 24-26, 2010

Digg It!
October 27, 2010 9:54 am
Comment

I will be attending the 2010 Ideas Festival in St. Andrews-by-the-Sea, New Brunswick November 24th to 26th. I’ve been asked by the folks at Public Policy Forum to present a 5 minute talk on what keeps me up at night. I want to talk about the problem of bridging the industrial to the network age, which may be too much to chew in 5 minutes, but we’ll see what I can do to drop a couple of idea bombs into the mix.

More on the Ideas Festival:

Our communities and region are changing.  Our population is aging, the economy is slowly recovering, innovation is the main driver of economic growth, the war for talent intensifies, values are evolving and technology rapidly shifts.  The convergence of these effects demands knowledge, innovation and leadership that enables our organizations and communities to thrive in the 21st Century.

The 21inc Ideas Festival is the premier opportunity for business and government leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, artists and change-makers in Atlantic Canada and across the country to engage with the people and ideas shaping our world.

Interested in joining us? Register here: www.ppforum.ca/events/ideas-festival

UPDATE: My speaking notes for my brief “Reframe” talk is below the jump.

Read more

Tags: events,policy,speaking

Next Page →

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.