Creative Class

In the last few weeks I have been building a tremendous amount of what we in government call “human resource capacity,” which is just to say that I’ve been going to a lot of conferences. I don’t know if it’s just that the year is ending and things seem faster the closer you get to the bottom of the hill, but it has certainly felt like one thing after the other since the last post. And beyond these conferences, there’s been a lot going on – not the least of which being that I’ve moved. And TEDxOttawa is happening in the morning + I’ve got a gig at night! I thought there was a lot going on in this city when I was relatively broke and self-employed, but now that I can pay for stuff and work for the city I can barely keep up. While I’m sure I’ll forget something, let’s blast quickly through these past few weeks and see if we can’t make some meaning out of them:

• November 18 – 21:  I was privileged enough to join some of Canada’s best and brightest at the Trudeau Foundation’s conference on Rethinking the Urban Commons. I’ll admit, I sorta snuck in through having participated in a pre-conference put on by two of the Trudeau Scholars,  but what a time that was. Truly it felt as if I had somehow gained access to the secret society that is improving the world with their intelligence, even as we sleep. In conversation I was sure to preface everything I said by clearly stating that I was NOT a Trudeau Scholar just so that people could set their expectations appropriately. Other than Creative Spaces + Places, this felt like the conference to be at this year if you’re interested in cities and live in the east of Canada. The list of speakers was epic, it was at the Chatueau Laurier so atmosphere was far from an issue, the discourse was at a delightfully dizzying high level, and folks at the Trudeau Foundation treat conference crashers as nicely as some places that I’ve been to treat conference-goers. Highlights were honestly too numerous to mention.  In the question period after his keynote I surprised Witold Rybczynski with a question about the connection between North American  urban morphology and Hiphop that people seemed to respond well to, and Ilmar Reepalu of Malmö, Sweden seemed to inspire everyone to new heights. The main thing to take away from this is that everyone there was so smart.

• November 20: Time Kode celebrated it’s four-year aniversary! Wow, wow, wow, what a party. We had support from TK originators Bonjay who turned our already hot and sweaty dance party into a melting pot of soul. It was truly epic. Good lookin’ out to Phil Jenkins from the Ottawa Citizen who passed by to take it in! Sadly though, few-to-no Trudeau Scholars came through despite my persistent prophesying and inviting over the days of the conference. While a mind is a terrible thing to waste, I maintain that the same is true for a good party. In fact if one was to waste one’s mind, a good party would be the place to do it. I would have liked to see how our future leaders shake it down, but alas. Another time I suppose.

• November 23: After a full 24 hours of sleep it’s over to Algonquin College for the Corporate and Community Responsibility Conference. This was a cool opportunity to get a sense of what’s going on in Ottawa’s business community particularly with respect to social innovation and entrepreneurship. I learned more about Causeway who seem to leaders in Ottawa with respect to the practice, and I got to catch up with Allyson Hewitt again who was there presenting. We both made jokes about conference fatigue, but after the respective punchlines neither of us laughed.

• November 25:  Our head of state is pretty cool. Not only does she invite me over to DJ sometimes, but she and her husband have held great forums that commiserate with the presentation of national awards called Art Matters. Over 40 done in the last four years! Well, on that Wednesday literature was the theme, and I was in the house… or hall, rather. As one who writes, this was a great conversation to be a part of. Once again, more amazing comments were extolled than I can try to recall for you here. Great food too.

• November 27:  Alert and at city hall for 7:00 a.m. to participate in the Mayor’s Breakfast series put on by the Ottawa Business Journal. The “new” head of OCRI Claude Haw was presenting his innovation strategy for Ottawa. It was early, but I’m glad I was there. They seem to be taking their lead from this guy I know…

• November 30: The Social Planning Council of Ottawa held their annual Research in Action conference which was great and thankfully a bit more low-key than the rest of my month. I learned about an amazing collaborative tool that SPC Ottawa has piloted called CIMS – Community Information Mapping Systems. It was a huge boon to discover and I’m looking forward to getting into it more deeply. Kudos to the SPC for initiating it’s realization!

On the first of December I moved and that came with its own set of bullet points, but that’s neither here nor there. What did I LEARN from all of this hob-nobbing is the question: What are the deliverables? Well, that’s not so easy to say. As one of these newly termed “knowledge-workers,” I’ve certainly come in contact with a lot of knowledge over the past month that is for sure. But how do we value knowledge and network connectivity anyways?

Thankfully people much smarter than me at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya have thought about that and written a paper. Give it a read and think on that. I wish that I could be more profound, but I’ve gotta keep going  at TED when that sun comes up. I’m going to bed.

Music.

I’m sure that some people are just now recovering from the collaboration celebration par excellance that was the Creative Places + Spaces conference.  For those keeping track, this was my first “work-conference” (ooooooh!). For whatever reason it actually does make a difference somewhat.

Anyways, it was a pretty dizzying few days with incredible addresses from minds ranging from Toronto’s Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco challenging us to make the fabric of the city more like that of the family, to Cirque du Soleil’s Excutive Producer Lyn Heward taking us on a magic carpet ride to the seven doors of collaborative process.  There were more focused nuts and bolts type sessions on the second day, but in general it was like getting bowled over with good-idea-about-working-with-others after good-idea-about-working-with-others for three days, with peaks here or there depending on what you’re into, and more nudity than can be casually explained, even with Spencer Tunick in the house. Summaries are abound.

I personally had a few highlights:

• As much hyperbole as you might feel there was about Sir Ken Robinson, the man delivers when on stage. This is one wickedly funny, wickedly smart man.
• Favorite/Best Collaboration (in my books) goes to St. Michaels Hospital, the NFB and film maker Katerina Cizek for their exhaustively deep Filmmaker-in-Residence. How do you remake the form and process of documentary to be an agent of social change instead simply being of a window into the lives of others? Watch this movie/click this link to find out. I could gush on and on about how moved I was by this, but you really have to see what they’ve done. It’s an INCREDIBLE collaboration between media and medicine. Katerina and the NFB also announced that they’re taking that same process to the domestic urban landscape with their latest collaboration called Highrise about the apartment towers of the world. So good!
• The Most Unexpected Event (other than all of the nakedness) saw me on the final panel with Charles Landry, Tonya Surman, Allyson Hewitt, and Tim Jones. Is this what happens when you get a job? People invite you on panels?? Cool!

Charles Landry’s presentation about creative bureaucracy really made me sit up straight in my chair. I still have my bureaucrat-baby-fat and, thanks to my coworkers, my spirit has yet to be crushed by this job, so the challenge of his address resonated quite strongly with me: how do we make bureaucracy more creative?? Especially when considering the necessary dependable things they do that they can’t be creative about like payroll, or other such niceties.

It came up again on the the final panel,  and we talked a bit about how municipalities can help spur ad hoc or grassroots groupings of agents in their communities towards organization so that they can collaborate with the municipality in more meaningful ways – creative partnerships. While it wasn’t said explicitly, what’s also being inferred is that bureaucracies, in-large, don’t interface well with individuals. In the way that they operate it seems that government bureaucracies, at least, are geared towards dealing with groups – unions, church groups, neighborhoods, BIA’s.  These factors are still very relevant, but it’s interesting to note that people have access to a greater diversity of cultural inputs and that identities are increasingly individual, while also considering that bureaucracy is all about the experience of standardization. How will the creative bureaucracy keep up with increasingly individualized individuals? Hey upper management – collaborate about that on your next coffee break.

Music!