Canada 3.0v2 impressions
The second version of the Canada 3.0 conference has come to a close with, to me, a bit of a fizzle and pop much like the last time with an overwhelming sense of deja vu. What worked this year was the same thing as last year: attracted a great mix of people and from all accounts some great conversations. What didn’t work was the same again: panels lacked actual change makers in some cases and certainly passion on others, audience felt left out of the conversation, and the internet connection was not working that well (but Rogers did have some slower than edge 3G available). The internet connection is a big one if you don’t have the 3G as a backup (because it didn’t work either). You can’t keep on top of email — and that just drives some people (me) crazy.
“I was confused”
To me it felt like an event that was trying to do way too much with a challenging venue, an all encompassing topic area, and attendees that were for the most more knowledgeable (and more passionate) than the presenters on the topics they were presenting on. The last part is actually a great problem to have — you have the right people there — but it is a tough problem for a conference that was geared towards a mixed audience. There was amazing conversations to be had but those conversations weren’t happening at the sessions (that i attended) which is where I think they could have made the event much better.
A week later I am still not sure what to say. David Eaves has a great post that goes into far more depth than I and I agree with pretty much all of it. You could take that as me being lazy but honestly I had a big blog post written that I sat on for a week as I tried to figure out what I wanted to say. It speaks to my level of confusion: was I grumpy? Tired? Just burned out? or was there something serious missing? All of the above 
So here I sit a week later with a more positive mindset on the whole affair. My desire to just do things and motivate over people to do things is stronger than ever. Luckily I have one of the best jobs to do that and I just so happen to enjoy being disruptive (in a positive way of course) from time to time.
Note: the people that put together events like Canada 3.0 are awesome. I don’t know how they find time or how they manage to balance all the requirements placed on them and I certainly don’t have anything negative to say about them.
Converting the meeting rooms for VeloCity
The spring term 2010 has started off at VeloCity which includes something totally different with the VeloCity Entrepreneur Bootcamp (VEB) teams along with normal on academic term students. Like last term, the start of term means I don’t see my family for a week but I do get to spend time with the students as they develop theirs ideas and try to be ready to demo something after only a few days of work.
What we did differently this term is we moved the Saturday of coding to the Accelerator Centre on north campus. With the wind and rain making walking here a bit more challenging we still managed to have six active project teams plus the three VEB teams. We have essentially transformed some meeting rooms into coworking spaces, bring in tons of caffeine, sugar, and fruit, and try to get as much done as we can in a day.
The VeloCity site will have updates throughout the day and twitter will be a little more active than the average Sunday.
