I’m very energized after attending ChangeCamp London yesterday at Museum London.  First off, the fact that about 100 people were willing to give up a Saturday in June to share their gripes, dreams, and plans about London is evidence that people care about this city, and want to be a part of making it a better place.  This fact alone gave me goosebumps - it is very heartening to see so many people who want to get beyond complaining about London and rolling up their sleeves to do something.  With few exceptions this was a room of thinkers and doers; if organized effectively, attendees could be a powerful force of good for the city.

Topics for the day included open data, enhancing citizen engagement, a range of transportation and  pedestrian/cyclist issues, retaining and attracting talent, and other planning issues.  All of the topics were generated by the participants themselves, not predetermined as is usually the case in traditional public consultations - while this made for a chaotic beginning (“you mean WE get to choose the topics rather than having them fed to us.  Um, wow…I need more coffee”) people got into the ‘unconference’ groove fairly quickly.  As a trained facilitator my preference is always for structure and a rigorous process to drive participants to decision, but as the day went on I came to appreciate the format of the day because user-generated topics yielded more passionate exchanges of viewpoints, and will also hopefully mean the action-items created through discussion will have some champions to move them forward.

From my persepective the point of the day wasn’t really to develop well thought out solutions to the priorities identified by participants - we scratched the surface of issues, at best.  What the day did was identify specific priorities shared by the group, allowed change agents in the community to meet each other face-to-face (many of us have been reading each other on Twitter…but human contact really gels relationships!), and finally created a means for those change agents to take the conversations had at ChangeCamp and refine them, research them, and take forward solutions to decision-makers (if you need City Hall on board, existing non-governmental actors, etc.) or just make the change if government or other established stakeholders aren’t needed.

If you didn’t get to participate in ChangeCamp, there will be more opportunities in the future.  You can also check out the ChangeCamp wiki and sign up with the citizen groups that will be created to move action items forward.

You can also read tweets from the day here: #ccldn