Results tagged “changecamp”

Mesh, as "Canada’s web conference," is naturally tricked out with tech goodies—Microsoft made an appearance with the new Surface, for example. You’ll find podcasts and video streaming and Twitter feeds for the two-day conference, so that even if you didn’t attend you’d still have a good idea of what went on. Through live-blogs and Twitter, this year’s talks and panels were boiled down into a jambalaya of Coles Notes, quips, and talking points. With as many as four sessions going on simultaneously, participants could use the tech to catch up on the ones they missed. (We got into the fun by live-tweeting mesh, which you can check out here.) Mesh, started only in 2006, often catches the zeitgeist of the web scene, as one person noted. This year it became very clear that whether you Twitter or Facebook or instant message or blog, ich bin ein Computerfreak.

Last night, hours after the budget was announced and the day before a confidence vote could throw Canadians back into an election, over a dozen people gathered at Idée in the city's east end to change the way citizens communicated with their government, whether it be at a municipal, provincial, or federal level. Frustrated by the slow adoption of technology in collecting and tracking street-level issues, the group of developers, entrepreneurs, and communicators set out to develop an easy-to-use site for citizens to alert needs to the government and to each other. Inspired by the British site Fix My Street.com, the project, code-named Shamen, could help report problems that often get shoved to the backburner, such as a growing pothole in a decaying road or an unclear or misdirecting sign that confuses elderly citizens. (While small, these everyday problems accumulate and can create a nagging perception that the government is unable to—or unwilling to—respond to immediate issues.)