“ChangeCamp Ottawa is being organized by the Ottawa community to bring together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy makers, political players, change-makers and government employees to discuss participatory governance in a web-enabled world.”

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

This seems a little out there and confusing so I thought that I would give you a bit of background on what this is all about.

I attended a fascinating session at MESH earlier this year, it was titled Open Government.

“What do we mean by open government? How is the web making new forms of governance and social innovation possible? Participate in this highly interactive workshop where facilitators Mark Kuznicki and Daniel Rose guide participants through an intense collaborative exploration of these topics. Together, participants will create physical and digital artefacts of their work together and leave a legacy that lives on after the mesh Conference is done. If you’re a technologist, designer, communicator, policy-maker, social entrepreneur or armchair policy wonk, we’re looking for you to help.”

Round 1: Each participant used a marker and index card to individually create a visual model of how they would express the idea of “Open Government” to someone who didn’t speak their language. The rationale behind the exercise is that by using shapes, line and colour it’s easier to see the assumptions and perspective that are naturally built into an abstract idea such as Open Government.

Here’s my version.

Here’s what everyone else came up with.

Round 2: Mark delivered a framework presentation.

Round 3: After listening to a 15 minute presentation from Mark, each group co-created a model of Open Government by sharing their index cards and using a big piece of paper to collaborate on a cohesive vision. Then one member from each group presented their work.

Our group came up with this.

Here’s Alistair Croll explaining our version.

This was just one group. To see what other’s came up fead the Change Camp Wiki.

So tomorrow citizens in our Nations Capital will get together the discuss what this means to them and how we can move forward with this.

Stay tuned for more updates on the Blog and on Twitter #cco09