meshU

Mark KuznickiOpen Government Workshop:

What do we mean by open government? How is the web making new forms of governance and social innovation possible? Participate in this highly interactive workshop where facilitators Mark Kuznicki and Daniel Rose guide participants through an intense collaborative exploration of these topics. Together, participants will create physical and digital artefacts of their work together and leave a legacy that lives on after the mesh Conference is done. If you’re a technologist, designer, communicator, policy-maker, social entrepreneur or armchair policy wonk, we’re looking for you to help.

Biography:

Mark Kuznicki is a thinker and practitioner working at the intersection of technology, public policy and social innovation.

Mark’s work and life are driven by a social mission: To reinvigorate community resilience and adaptation in response to accelerating global change.

Mark’s consulting practice focuses on researching, developing and deploying innovative methods, practices and tools that contribute to this mission, including:

  • participation through social web technology (so-called “web 2.0″)
  • engaging creative communities in co-creative solution-building through face-to-face events
  • community management practices and methods
  • community engagement strategies
  • design-thinking approaches to complex problem spaces

Mark helped organize Toronto TransitCamp, an open-source “solutions playground” that looked at the future of Toronto’s transit system and the transit agency’s website. Mark wrote about this case study for Harvard Business Review. Mark brought a similar model to TVO’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin, combining face-to-face community-based events, social media and broadcast journalism to engage citizens around issues relating to Ontario’s changing economy. More recently, Mark helped organize ChangeCamp, an event designed to “re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation” that became the #1 trending topic on Twitter and which is propagating a model for open government and citizen participation across Canada and around the world.