A couple weeks ago, Brock Hart invited Kwartzlab out to Culture Camp at Kitchener’s City Hall. The event ran on Saturday.
(Digression: I can’t believe I haven’t posted about Kwartzlab yet. It’s consuming a good chunk of my mental and temporal energies at the moment. Remember when Michael posted about needing a hackerspace? Yeah. We totally did it. Kwartzlab was open and in the black in under 6 months. I’ll post more about it later).
Culture Camp was an Open Space style Unconference, where there is no pre-planned agenda, and the participants discuss topics of interest to them. The format ended up working really well, with plenty of interaction and participation all around.
I put the word out to a few of my Kwartzlab compatriots to talk about the Lab and how it might figure into the local cultural community. My first session was exactly that: describing what Kwartzlab was and fielding questions.
Next, Brock got me into his “mapping” project. It started out as a fun exercise in mapping your Waterloo Region—the places that are important to you. The real focus seemed to be to identify resources and locations that could be valuable to arts organizations.
The third session focused around Twitter, if only because I’ve begrudgingly come to like it over the last few months. I hope it was a reasonable introduction for cultural organizations who need to get their message out. Joseph Fung will be hosting a more in-depth session later in January.
Finally, Eric and Gus decided to outline the concept of do-ocracy, one of the guiding principles behind Kwartzlab. In the end, it’s what you do that matters, not the talk and discussion, however great that is.
The turn-out was great, and the energy in the room was fantastic. I’m hoping that the discussion generated plenty of action items that will result in concrete action that will mean a more vibrant cultural community in KW.
