One of the major parts of PodCamps is the Law of Two Feet. At its core, the means that anyone who is in a session and wants to leave is encouraged to.

However, my fear is that this in fact encourages a type of attention deficit disorder. If the speaker isn’t engaging you, you just get up and  leave. But perhaps if you were to “stick it out” an attendee would benefit from staying there.

These thoughts lead me to to look around the web, and eventually the “user guide for the open space world” and this quote:

Finally we come to the One Law of Open Space. It is a law only in the sense that all participants must observe it or the process will not work. We call it the Law of Two Feet. Briefly stated, this law says that every individual has two feet, and must be prepared to use them. Responsibility for a successful outcome in any Open Space Event resides with exactly one person — each participant. Individuals can make a difference and must make a difference. If that is not true in a given situation, they, and they alone, must take responsibility to use their two feet, and move to a new place where they can make a difference. This departure need not be made in anger or hostility, but only after honoring the people involved and the space they occupy. By word or gesture, indicate that you have nothing further to contribute, wish them well, and go and do something useful.

I know that personally I’m going to work harder to exercise the law in this way and when I leave, its because I wish to further the experience for others and not just myself.

The results from the general election are all in, and we have both a similar and radically different government. The next four years will be an interesting time in Canada and I’m both nervous and excited to see what will happen now. Its been a long time since we last had a majority government and I hope no one get to excited too quickly.

Also on my mind, and the reason I’m in Stratford today, is the Canada 3.0 conference. This is my second year attending and I”m hoping for a radically different impression then I had last year. Already I know that London Ontario is going to make a difference and a scene here and that will help the overall conference feel. Check out www.ldn30.com for London content live from the event and our live video broadcast.

Canada is at a cross roads now, both politically and digitally. I’m hoping that I can play a role in the latter and shape the future of Canada’s digital space. I’m raring to go and show what can be done through dedication and commitment and how the digital future will be driven by grassroots efforts.

Yahoo! has come out firmly as a content company. They want to produce and package information to be consumed by the masses of internet users. If we applied a Technographics profile to their ideal audience it would be Spectators.

Now the interesting thing about being successful at creating content; you need to produce information that enough people want to engage with. Ideally you need to have a finger on the pulse of society before society knows that they really want to learn about.

The best way to find out that information is to crowd source it. Essentially take advantage of a thousands of people who are curating the web and identifying trends as they become trends.

See where I’m going with this? Delicious provides Yahoo! (and anyone else for that matter) with real time information about what people are finding interesting and what to know more about. For a media company this information should be incredibly valuable.

And this is why Yahoo!’s decision to divest themselves of Delicious is so confusing. They’re throwing out their best research tool; information they paid nothing for and which they can easily monetize around. However because you can’t make money off the raw materials they ignore the potential when its combined with other arms of the business.

Maybe I’m overly pessimistic, but is this the beginning of the end for crowd-sourced information gathering?

One of my volunteer commitments is with the Marketing and Development committee at Museum|London.  On Monday night some of the volunteers got together to call Museum donors, partners and patrons for their support over the past year. To accomplish this, we built a complete virtual call centre; powered by the internet and completely mobile.

Skype came in very handy to make the phone calls. Their inexpensive unlimited Canada wide calling and the ability to set the Caller ID made this an almost professional setup.

Because we were only calling to thank sponsors and not to raise additional funds; it was easy for anyone to sit down, grab a script and dial some numbers.

I’m excited about where this idea could go next. It was simple to assemble, setup and use and could be easily redistributed to any organization or group that wants to make a lot of phone calls quickly and easily. If you have an idea please get in touch with me.

However, I was left with a couple of thoughts after the evening.

Many people focus on the concept of ideas and get very excited hearing new ones and feeling like they are part of a club that “gets it”.  Unfortunately too many people don’t think that they should implement those ideas and put them into action

So to everyone who was there last night, or people who participated on Twitter, here is my call out to you:

What are you going to do, today, tomorrow and in the coming months to put into action one of the many things you heard Scott say? It shouldn’t be too hard, his talk was full of “actionable items”.

Pick something and make that change in your personal and corporate life. Once we all start implementing ideas rather then just taking about them then we’ll be really “Un” Marketing.

• Facebook for friends and family
• LinkedIn for colleagues and work contacts
• Twitter for new acquaintances and information

I think if we start to use this organizational method then fewer people will be worrying about privacy and “information leakages”.

I wrote a post last week, but never published it, about how I felt that Londoner’s weren’t getting enough recognition for the many awesome things that we are doing in the new media / digital media space. By recognition, I meant outside of the 519 and 226 area codes. Honestly I think this can be traced back to a larger London problem; that of humbleness to a fault and the urge to rather talk about a solution that actually implement one.

After spending an evening at Aeolian Hall listening to my friends, peers and acquaintances give short, from the heart, pleas about what we could be doing and what they already are, I’m starting to feel renewed.

Its no longer a bunch of people talking about how we could improve Municipal politics; its ventures like Hack the Vote.

We don’t have people complaining that the arts are inaccessible; events like SMarts continue on.

Innovation in the digital media space continues to flourish, and by an active community with varied insights and experiences. They collaborate to build an application like London Trash.

This is just a small sample of the projects in the city that are looking at a problem and tackling it head on. There are many more initiative either in the works and I’m excited to follow them into fruition.

This is a result of the hard work of a variety of individuals, including Shawn Adamsson and Aaron McGowan.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that I think this is a great step forward for the City of London. As more and more information and data sets are released and become publicly available the better our society will become.

I’m also excited about this recent announcement because of the potential for further collaboration that UnLondon and the UnLab could help facilitate by connecting like minded individuals who will continue to iterate and improve upon various ideas, projects, and platforms. .

A citizen led initiative around Open Data has already started in London, and I suggest any interested parties connect with them for more information.

At this point it’s by no means exhaustive; some announcements just aren’t ready for prime time yet. So be sure to check back again soon!

Until then there are a couple of projects that I’d love to draw your attention to.

The first is ChangeCamp London, which is an event that I’ve wanted to do here ever since I heard about it a couple of years ago. I’m ecstatic about the team that is involved, and I’m sure its going to be a great program with definite benefits to the city.

Secondly is the annual PodCamp London that is coming up on May 8th. Be sure to check out the wiki for a list of speakers and sessions. I’m sure regardless of your skill level or interests you’ll find a topic that piques your interest.

In addition to the main technology sites covering the details about the new phone; the Internet has been awash with comments about the actions of all the parties involved. Questions about whether the finder was morally right to sell it to Gizmodo, and did the tech site act properly in purchasing and ultimately dissecting the phone for their website.

However, what’s missing in all of these accounts is a discussion about the public, and our role in encouraging these behaviours. Its no surprise that any item that comes out of Cupertino is received with the same amount of fan fare usually reserved for the winning soccer teams of South America. And how much more excited do we get when we can combine our lust for Apple with our natural and insaitable curiousity for tech voyeruism.

Rather then criticizing Gizmodo for their actions, I think we should take a look at ourselves. Are we getting caught up in tech envy and would put aside our own morality just to learn a bit more about a consumer product? I’ll be the first to admit it, I get swept up in the excitement too. But I’ve decided to incite a change and I’m going to work harder to make sure that my love of objects justifies behaviour.

I’m not suggesting that having new toys is bad, or that the capitalist culture of “stuff” is inherently evil. All I want to point out is the double standard we create to satisfy our own interests and desires. Most of us wouldn’t engage in the same dubious practices that some tech journalists use, so why should we reap the rewards?

What do you think? Can we reclaim morality in concepts and no longer let our love of “things” tell us what is the right thing to do?