A few of us travelled from London to a ChangeCamp event in Toronto Tuesday night to help design a civic engagement toolkit:

We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations across the City of Toronto and beyond through community-based leadership.

I'm always surprised by who I meet in these interesting social dynamics. Among just the eight members of my break-out group there was a social entrepreneur who runs a grassroots arts organization, a media executive and mayoral candidate, and a fair trade jeweler who isn't afraid to stir the pot.

The London contingent was there representing a bit of the "and beyond" category (the only category I'm ever comfortable in). We'll be helping bring ChangeCamp to London... more on that later.

What I love most about ChangeCamp is how the model continues to evolve. At the heart of it are are continuous & fundamental questions, What should we do next? What should ChangeCamp become? ... In fact, these types of questions are asked quite explicitly. 

A comment I keep seeing around ChangeCamp is "dialog is action" (or something like that). Initially I wasn't prepared to accept that, but as I thought and read about it more I realized how true it is.

Dialog subtly affects the vocabulary and perspective we use, which changes the narratives and working theories we employ, which influences the way we interpret events and how we conceive the need for action, and so on. There's a very basic change in mindset that needs to occur.

It takes time to condition new habits, and it's through communication that those core changes are made -- at least, certainly, in an area like civics, which is deeply nested in language.

As for exactly what kinds of change we should be aiming for, I love the way Peter Block explained it in this civic engagement workbook (our homework): we need to invert our mindset, from thinking of ourselves as effects to thinking of ourselves as causes:

The shift in thinking is to take the stance that we are the creator of our world as well as the product of it.

It immediately reminded me of William James. As a young man James was stricken with a deeply corrosive skepticism, especially when it came to the question of free will. He wanted to believe in it, but logically he couldn't prove that life wasn't merely a series of events that had already been determined beyond his control. Finally, after an especially desperate episode, he decided his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. It starts very close to home.

We have to make a leap of faith to believe we're a cause, and only then do we do the sorts of things that demonstrate it to ourselves. I remember watching via Twitter as ChangeCamp took shape last year, and it has been especially interesting to see Mark Kuznicki et al continue to push the concept forward, building on the ideas that emerge in these conversations, and incorporating others from people like Peter Block who only became known to organizers more recently.

This phase is especially interesting to me. The point of Tuesday night's session was to design a kit that will empower others to pick up the ball and run with it via their own initiative, turning ChangeCamp into a more self-sustaining enterprise. I'm looking forward to learning as new insights emerge through interactions among a wider range of perspectives.

(You can see the ideas that came out of the discussions, which were documented in real time via ScribbleLive. Check out the photos on Flickr. It was a lot of fun -- though not necessarily easy to record all of the surprising ideas bouncing around in the group I was in.)

When we talk about bringing ChangeCamp to London, we're talking about bringing this whole conversation and spirit with it. Don't just ask what effect something like ChangeCamp is going to have on your community.

You have to come out and articulate possibilities, and more importantly, you have to imagine yourself as one of the causal agents who will make those possibilities into realities.

There are a lot of great things already happening in London, but the world is changing, new democratic tools are emerging and groups are learning to use them to improve their communities. They're designing their own futures. We can do it too, when we decide to make ourselves accountable for that. The conversation can start here or anywhere. You're free to join -- and you're free to own part of these emerging processes... Now are you willing?

Saying "yes" in the comments or on Twitter is one way to start the conversation about where, when, and how to go forward »

[Originally posted at brianfrank.ca]