Consumers have no reason to trust you, so it is you who must open the relationship by placing your trust in them.
Collin Douma sums up radical trust for companies so well in this infographic. We’ll have to get him out to the next VizThink.
tags: business, marketing, transparency
Wohoo! My application for a Northern Voice travel bursary was approved. Thanks to the organizing comittee for choosing me as one of their six winners.
I’m super excited about this because I get to go a conference that I can’t say enough good things about, see my west coast friends and colleagues so near and dear to my heart, and get an infusion of social web goodness to take back to Toronto and beyond.
So TorCampers, what do you want me to do for you while I’m there? What do you want me to find out, what kind of people do you want me to connect us to? Let me know and I’ll make it a priority.
tags: Technorati Tags: vancouver, northernvoice, torcamp
The group of Toronto bloggers and technologists thinking about a better way for the TTC website is picking up steam and expanding our vision. This Sunday there is going to be a free all day event called Toronto Transit Camp at the Gladstone Hotel. If you live in Toronto and care about public transit, register now.
An ad-hoc gathering at the Gladstone Hotel of designers, transit geeks, bloggers, visual artists, tech geeks and cultural creators passionate about transit in Toronto and the TTC. It is a platform for Toronto’s talented design community and enthusiastic transit users and fans to demonstrate their creativity and contribute to a better way for Toronto’s transit system. The content and ideas generated in this open unconference will be delivered to the TTC for their consideration in their work.
What’s really interesting about Transit Camp is that it’s the first event I’ve seen that takes the principles and practices of a BarCamp event and pushes them outside of the world of technology and business. Mark Kuznicki, one of the core instigators along with Jay Goldman and David Crow; explained why we’re watching how it turns out with such interest.
We will be documenting Toronto Transit Camp extensively on the open web and will be publishing a case study (Creative Commons licensed, of course) on the event as an example of the power of Open Creative Communities, how they emerge, how they organize themselves and solve problems and how community gardeners can create space for their emergence.
You can find out more in announcements from Mark Kuznicki and Joey deVilla. Hope I see you there!
Bonus news: TTC Chair Adam Giambrone has decided to rewrite and reopen the RFP for the TTC website after the efforts of local bloggers. Wohoo, we’re making progress!
tags: toronto, ttc, transit, transitcamp, barcamp, gladstone, torcamp
Jay Goldman invited me to be a part of a group of Toronto web geeks thinking hard about how to make a better TTC website. Our first meeting included an all star lineup of developer David Crow, technology evangelist Joey DeVilla, TTC guru Madhava Enros, policy wonk Mark Kuznicki and your humble narrator as the “online community” guy. They all did a better job of explaining than I can right now, so click their names to find out more.
The current TTC website is quite outdated and needs a lot of work. With a new young TTC Chair Adam Giambrone showing signs that he’s willing to listen to the Toronto bloggers leading the call for a better TTC website, there is a great opportunity here to go from being a negative example to a positive one for the TTC and city of Toronto.
I echo Jay’s thoughts for next steps.
1. The TTC should re-open the RFP for the Website Redesign. The original RFP closed on Thursday, November 23, 2006 and received responses from a number of traditional web shops…The Planned Award date is February 1st, 2007…but we think a strong case can be made for the requirements having changed substantial as a result of the change in Commission Chair and the process kicked off by Robert’s post – strong enough that the original RFP should be replaced.
2. The TTC should completely embrace the community. Soliciting feedback via blogs is a great start, but we’d like to see Adam Giambrone extend that initiative by keeping the rest of this process open and transparent…Collecting feedback in such a public fashion is an amazing step forward and we salute it wholeheartedly! Let’s keep moving in the same direction.
3. The TTC should set a goal of building the best Transit Authority website in the world. Our former Mayor, Mel Lastman, was perhaps overly found of calling Toronto a world-class city, but he was often right. Even the best Transit websites out there don’t set the bar very high and we feel that this is an opportunity to demonstrate our technology and transit leadership by establishing a new watermark.
Hopefully we’ll have some good news on the subject soon. We’re on the right track. Bob Brent, who built the current website, says “where were you 6 years ago when I needed you? 
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Passion is very much like fire. If applied properly it can start new fires in people and groups. If applied improperly it can burn down houses, or get wasted trying to boil the ocean.
technorati tags:passion