ChangeCamp is a free participatory web-enabled face-to-face event that brings together citizens, technologists, designers, academics, policy wonks, political players, change-makers and government employees to answer one question: How do we re-imagine government and governance in the age of participation?
What is ChangeCamp? It is the application of "the long tail" to public policy.
It is a long held and false assumption that ordinary citizens don't care about public policy. The statement isn't, in of itself, false. Many, many, many people truly don't care that much. They want to live their lives focusing on other things - pursuing other hobbies or interests - but there are many of us who do care. Public policy geeks, fans, followers, advocates, etc... we are everywhere, we've just been hidden in a long tail that saw the market place and capacity for developing and delivering public policy restricted to a few large institutions. The single most important lesson I learnt from my time with Canada25 is that it doesn't have to be that way.
Did Canada25 get a new generation of Canadians, aged 20-35 engaged in public policy? I don't know.
What I do know is, that at the very minimum, we harnessed and enormous, dispersed desire of many Canadians to participate in, and help shape, the public policy debates affecting the country. Most importantly, we did this by doing three things:
- we aggregated together the people who cared about public policy, we gave them peers, friends and a sense of community.
- we provided a vehicle through which to channel their energy
- by combining 1 and 2, and by using simple technology and a low cost approach - we dramatically lowered the barriers (and csots) to entry for credible participating in these national debates
Today, the technology to enable and aggregate people their ideas, to connect them with peers and to create community, is still more powerful. Our capacity to challenge, push, help, cooperate, leverage and compete with the large institutional public policy actors has never been greater. This, for me, is the goal of ChangeCamp. What concrete tools can we build, what information can we demand be opened up, what new relationships can we build to re-imagine how we - the citizens who care - participate in the creation of public policy and the effective delivery of public services. Not to compete or replace the traditional institutional actors, but to ensure more and better ideas are heard and increasingly effective and efficient services are created.
Individually, none of us may have the collective power of a government ministry or even the resources of most think tanks. But collectively, linked together by technology and powered by our energy and spare capital, the long tail of policy geeks and ordinary citizens is bigger, nimbler, more creative and faster than anything else. Do I know that the long tail of policy can be set free? No. But ChangeCamp seems like a fun place to start experimenting, brainstorming and sharing ways we can make this country better.
To all posts
View Comments so far ↓
1 Taylor // Jan 23, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I am soo further up the long tail than your silly graph… :)
2 countably infinite » Blog Archive » Prepping for ChangeCamp: Generation Y and the curious case of (my) civic engagement // Jan 23, 2009 at 4:45 pm
[...] like David Eaves’ post about ChangeCamp and the long tail of public policy; I think it explains where I am and how I’m liking my politics at the current moment. We [...]
3 Cimmetry // Jan 26, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Thanks for this post. I have recently been trying to get my head around changecamp, and I appreciate the context that you have provided here. Any thoughts on approaches to getting involved for a newbie?
4 Rohan Jayasekera // Jan 28, 2009 at 12:29 am
For me as well, this puts ChangeCamp into a context that I was already familiar with. Thanks!!!
5 Creating a City of Vancouver that thinks like the web | eaves.ca // Feb 4, 2009 at 11:17 am
[...] the services that could be created, the efficiencies gained, the research that would be possible. The long tail of public policy analysis could flourish with ideas, services, and solutions the government has neither the means nor the [...]
6 Towards Building Toronto 2.0 « False Positives // Feb 4, 2009 at 1:36 pm
[...] re-cap: The Product is Change; Reflections on #changecamp; Change Is Good; Column 2: ChangeCamp; ChangeCamp: Pulling people and creativity out of the public policy long tail; plus lots of good summarization in BlogTo Best of ChangeCamp, and a stream of flickr photo’s [...]
7 Dave Macdonald // Feb 20, 2009 at 6:29 am
This post explains a lot of what I felt from the VanChangeCamp meeting last week. There's something contagious about the energy that comes with community and engagement. There's innate feeling of inclusion while being involved with our communities and their organizational structures for folks like us – ChangeCamp seems to be giving us a way to be involved in a way that's consistent with our era. Embracing the long tail perspective now seems to make a lot of sense. Thanks for this, David.
8 homemade solar energy // Feb 24, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Changecamp actually outlines a good mind frame in understanding and implementing policy at the individual level. i wonder how much awareness campaigns and public eductation can borrow from this model
9 Douglas Wai-Chung Bastien // Mar 3, 2009 at 1:57 am
Let's write an academic paper on this. What say you?
10 Rikia // May 16, 2009 at 5:07 pm
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/seth_godin_o...
11 Inspiration #2, 2010 « N, Inc. // Jan 22, 2010 at 12:01 am
[...] moved onto a discussion of the long tail of public policy: the gist being that the intrinsic knowledge, skills, and experience in the silo-structured [...]
12 Open Data: An Example of the Long Tail of Public Policy at Work | eaves.ca // May 21, 2010 at 8:05 am
[...] was thus pleased to find out about another example of what I've been calling the Long Tail of Public Policy when I received an email from Victor Ngo, a student at the University of British Columbia who just [...]