VanChangeCamp – June 20th, 2009

VanChangeCamp flyer

Everyone who knows me *even a little bit* will tell you that I’ve volunteered countless hours for the local community, not only the Vancouver tech/social media/PR but also the “social media for social change” subset of the larger community. When the discussions on the possibility of organizing a Vancouver ChangeCamp started to emerge on our most beloved social network (Twitter), I jumped at the possibility of participating in the organizing committee. After all, I’ve done extensive research on public policy and citizen participation in environmental policy, and I’ve presented several times on the topic of how to apply social media to questions of sustainability, public policy and social change, in general. I participated in a few meetings, heck – I even liveblogged the first one and another one in the early stages.

However, as you can imagine, there’s only so much time I can volunteer and there’s only one Raul. And there’s about a gazillion things I have to do, amongst research, teaching, consulting and finding more work. Plus, if you need a reminder, I co-organized Mental Health Camp with the amazing Isabella Mori. So quite obviously, my participation in the VanChangeCamp organizing committee has declined substantially (for various reasons in adition to my being busy, but those reasons are only known to a couple of people in the organizing committee and a couple of close friends of mine).

Nevertheless, I recently saw a call for help from Reilly (one of the main organizers) asking to spread the word, and since I’m still participating with some tasks in VanChangeCamp, I figured it would be a good idea for me to blog about the fact that VanChangeCamp is actually happening. There is a number of amazing folks who are involved in some way or another (all of them in a volunteer, non-paid manner) to bring this event to fruition, and they should be commended. Having co-organized a full Camp on my own, and contributed to the organization of BarCamp 2008, I full well know how tough it is on everyone who is involved (just ask Isabella or myself – we were absolutely exhausted by the time MHC was over).

So, this post is just a reminder that Vancouver’s first ever ChangeCamp is coming to you on June 20th, 2009. After VanChangeCamp, there will be a party organized by the folks behind the Media Democracy Day and Save Our Net campaigns. You can register for VanChangeCamp through EventBrite, and learn more on their blog.

I had pitched a session for the structured, conference-type portion of VanChangeCamp, but it didn’t get chosen as part of the ’spine’ of the conference, and I’m not 100% sure I want to pitch it in the unstructured portion (BarCamp style). If there’s enough interest (i.e. if enough of my readers who will be participating in VanChangeCamp drop a comment here saying they’d be interested in hearing me speak about the topic) I might actually end up pitching my talk.

For those of you interested in what I was planning to present at VanChangeCamp, here is the abstract:

Session Title: Harnessing Social Media Tools to Mobilize and Engage Citizens in Climate Change Adaptive Strategies

Description of the session:
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) use a variety of strategies to galvanize public opinion and increase pressure on governments and industry to minimize pollution. My scholarly research has shown that NGOs have more effectively engaged citizens when (a) the issue is related to environment and public health and (b) there is ample room for information dissemination and a strong public awareness campaign. Climate change has become one of the most relevant environmental issues of the past few years. However, it appears as though BC residents are more concerned with mitigative measures rather than adaptive strategies. I am puzzled by why this would happen. I am wondering if one of the elements that is missing is a strong social media campaign on the part of the BC government to raise awareness and educate citizens about potential strategies to adapt to climate change.

The goal of the session is to:
Showcase a number of social media tools, as well as educate governments (and academics) on how to harness the power of social networking sites to disseminate rigorous research findings on adaptation to climate change in British Columbia. The session would be also intended as a brainstorming discussion on best practices on the use of social media to raise awareness in climate change policy.

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