Design thinking learning opportunity by Exhibit Change

Just re-tweeted this as well - Exhibit Change (Jenn, from GovJamTO) has a couple of (paid) learning opportunities for design thinking, on August 21, and August 22-23.

From the website:

EdCamp BootCamp

This will be a one day training ALL about unconferences and facilitation. Unconferences are participant-driven, the content is created on the spot by the people who are in the room. This training will give an overview of a few different techniques and facilitation methods that can be used for EdCamps. Coming to EdCamp and meeting like-minded people is awesome and being able to facilitate when you get back to your place of work is equally as powerful.

EdCamp BootCamp is happening on Wednesday August 21st, 2013 with a social to follow.

Design Thinking for Impact

This will be a 2 day training on the design thinking process and working for social impact. Over the course of two days, participants will get the opportunity to learn design thinking, practice the process and to work with others on how they are bringing it back to their work places.

Design Thinking for Impact is happening on August 22nd & 23rd 2013.

Learn more & register at Exhibit Change's website.

Growing the core economy - an opportunity for co-production

Our friends at Social Innovation Generation (SiG) @ MaRS have a great event coming up this upcoming Monday evening featuring Lucie Stephens, who will talk about co-production as a new way of thinking about public services. Here's the invitation we were sent.

When: Monday July 15, 2013, 5:30-7:00pm
Where: MaRS, Auditorium, 101 College Street, Toronto
Cost: $25 - register through Eventbrite

Social Innovation Generation is very pleased to invite you to the next event in our Inspiring Action for Social Impact Series, to hear Lucie Stephens, the Head of Co-production in the Social Policy team at nef (new economics foundation). Join us on Monday, July 15, as Lucie describes co-production as a new way of thinking about public services.

Public services face great challenges: increasing demand, rising expectations, entrenched social problems and reduced budgets. Reform is not enough to overcome these―radical innovation is needed, and must move from the margins to the mainstream.

But what should inform this radical innovation?

Co-production has the potential to revolutionize how we deliver health, education, policing and other services, making them more effective, efficient and sustainable.

What is co-production? Co-production has been described as the means of delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where beneficial activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change. (Download Co-Production: A manifesto for growing the core economy by nef to learn more.)

Come learn more as Lucie presents this innovative methodology.

Hope to see you there!

Guest post - Cristian Contreras reflects on GovJam 2013

I have attended several hackathons in the past but none have been as focused on the big picture as GovJam. For two and half days, a group of public servants, social entrepreneurs, and government aficionados took to designing better public service systems in the hope of creating a better place to live. Thanks to my previous exposure to design thinking, I was familiar with the constructive chaos that characterizes the creative process between teams of relative strangers working on ideas at an embryonic stage. The creative tug-of-war from this multidisciplinary collaboration was as it always is - an incredibly rewarding experience.

The idea of improving the quality of public services by redesigning them to include citizen input was a recurring theme during GovJam. Our team was no exception. We decided to work on designing a revolutionary approach to citizen engagement that gives people an opportunity to shape their community by letting them vote on projects with real tax dollars.

In addition to creating more opportunities to participate, a relationship between education and engagement was also present in many of the projects. I, for one, echo both of these ideas. In my work with Next Parliament, I have learned that there is a very real need for a more participatory democracy, but I have noted that solutions to this need are being held back by lack of widespread political engagement. Often, lack of confidence in the system is cited as the reason for this growing political apathy, but in my opinion this is simply the go-to excuse. The real problem lies in the fact that the wider public needs to be much better informed about various issues affecting their lives.

Next Parliament is my attempt at fixing this problem. I have created a site dedicated to educating Canadians on every issue related to politics. Next Parliament works as a Wikipedia-style website where every entry can be edited by the community. Every issue and community recommendation has an argument in favour, an argument against, a community discussion thread, and links to more information. Visit NextParliament.ca to learn more.

We are privileged to be witness to a Cambrian explosion of innovative Gov2.0 initiatives taking place all around the globe. It can sometimes be easy to lose sight of these new government breakthroughs in the sea of cloud, crowdsourced, mobile, and other social innovations, but we must never lose sight of the fact that this space represents one of the most fundamental transformations of the digital era to date.

Last day to register - Human-Centered Design course by IDEO/Acumen

Thought some of you might be interested in this Human-Centered Design (HCD) for Social Innovation course being offered for free this summer by IDEO and Acumen. The registration deadline is today.

The course is five weeks long, and will take about 4-5 hours per week of your time. HCD is at the heart of design thinking, the same methodology we loosely used during GovJam (and based on our Jammers' post-event feedback, it sounds like people wanted to learn more about the process, so here's a good opportunity!)

Course Description

"Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation is a five-week course that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and help you use the design process to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change. No prior design experience necessary."

To register, you need to sign up with at least one other person and form a team; ideally a team has 4-5 people on it.

I hope some of you are able to take advantage of this opportunity!

Post-Jam reflections

Thanks to all who were able to attend our post-Jam reflections meeting in the wee hours this morning (ok, 9am isn't exactly "wee" but seriously, who has a meeting at 9am??). With a last-minute venue change due to our home building being shut down (generator/power failure yesterday), I wasn't sure everyone would still be able to attend. Thanks for being so flexible.

You might have noticed a couple of new links on the sidebar of this blog. I've created a post-Jam links section for lessons learned from GovJam Toronto to share with all of you, as well as anybody who might want to attempt a Jam in the future.

• Read the ideas we were able to come up with at the meeting this morning. We brainstormed some solutions/ideas around several topics that came out of the post-event survey I sent out a couple of weeks ago.
• Read the raw data/comments we received from participants. This was feedback we got from the SurveyMonkey (names/email addresses have been removed).

As always, if you have anything else to share, or the links above jog some ideas, reply below or email me/connect with me on Twitter. And keep checking this blog every now and then for news and info on what's next for GovJam Toronto. Hope to re-connect with you all soon.

P.S. - why not sooner than later? Come to our meetup tonight!