The observation was made by Tim O'Reilly that the best part of the conferences he attended were the conversations he had during the breaks. When you gather a group of engaged people who are passionate about a subject, great things can happen - seating them silently in a theatre listening to keynote speakers isn't the best way to harness all that potential serendipity.
From that simple thought, the next step was to try have a conference stripped of almost all the trappings. O'Reilly gathered a group of tuned-in tech savants, put them together in a room and they camped out. Over the course of a night, they set their own agenda, figured out what common problems they were wrestling with and applied the combined intelligence of the group to them.
Keith Robinson, the man who oversees the content for TVO.org, attended a few camps and recognized this kind of community action as exactly what TVO is about.
Varieties of the form have developed since then. Last year, we were lucky enough to have veteran campers Mark Kuznicki and Daniel Rose on board helping us get AgendaCamp off the ground (if you're going to be in Toronto on Feb. 16, make sure you go to ChangeCamp and see these two dynamos in action). After five successful events last season, we were ready to make a few tweaks.
This time around, we started the conversation weeks before the event, opening the AgendaCamp wiki for people to propose sessions. In the past we'd had a free-for-all after some introductory remarks, with people charging an empty grid with markers and paper and filling it up with their proposals. By getting a head start on this process this time, and putting some sessions that were proposed online into the timetable, a picture was emerging about the themes Londoners wanted to talk about before our vans had even rolled out of HQ. (The wikis to propose sessions for our upcoming camps in Brockville and Timmins are already up.)
Mark McKay, who does great work on TVO's YouTube channels, talked to some of the participants as they arrived and had them share their expectations for the day.
The format of AgendaCamps 1.0 left it largely up to the participants to decide how or if they wanted to go forward with what was discussed. This year, we wanted to try focus the event so that it helped move the conversation toward action and a focus on clearly articulated key themes that ran throughout the day of discussion. To that end, we adopted the World Cafe model. In it, groups have their discussions while a designated scribe takes notes. Then the group breaks up and goes to visit another group, with the exception of the scribe who sticks around to explain what his or her group had discussed and their conclusions. Then everybody goes back to their first group and explains what they heard elsewhere. Sound a little confusing? Here's TVO's Christine McGlade to talk you through it:
Through the course of the day, the groups have identified some key issues that are important to their community. This difference is crucial to the producers at the Agenda, because it allows us to make our program tonight a carbon copy of the themes and discussions that happened at the camp.
To aid that process, and team of TVO staff assembled during the lunch break and sorted the content from the morning sessions until the broader themes became apparent. From there, four mega-sessions were laid out for the afternoon.
The producer for tonight's program, Daniel Kitts, has been working incredibly hard on this for months. To ensure we could harness the discussion and insights of yesterday's event, he needed to assemble an excess of potential guests who would attend the camp, and from them pick those that were best able to handle a discussion of the themes that emerged for the broadcast. He, along with executive producer Dan Dunsky and others, also had to examine the afternoon sessions and take measure of exactly what conversation was most important for London, Ontario, and therefore for the Agenda.
Look at is this way: a byproduct of yesterday's discussions and actions is a television program. When you add a public broadcaster to the camp event, you harness its expertise and resources to seek out participants from government, the business community, academia, etc., and also to take the work that participants have done and forge it into a debate to probe and share the insights revealed at AgendaCamp.
To me, this seems like a natural extension of the work that goes on at all camps. There, the community comes together to gather the information, to mold it into useful forms, and to spread that information. Public television is truly a part of that community, and events like this are a great example of public television doing exactly what it is meant to do.
Tune in tonight to watch as we broadcast live from the University of Western Ontario (and please join me on the live online chat that will go with it). What you will see is something new that TVO is working hard to help develop: open source television. This program is entirely the product of the community we are in, their ideas and concerns, and the resources here to help articulate their particular perspective on the province in the world. It's very much like a bottle of wine, whose flavour and character is determined by the soil that nurtured the grapes.
