Toronto

The Toronto Open Everything was a tasty cocktail of an event: featuring insipirational talks (10 in one hour), unconferency conversations and a great dinner party all mixed up together. Here's what happened:

1. What's open? Mark Surman gave us a quick tour of open things happening everywhere, followed by a 'what the heck is open?' convo amongst participants.Speaking notes on Mark's blog.
   
2. Open Toronto. Nine high speed presentations by Toronto people and projects that have baked openness into the DNA of their everyday work. Included talks by: software geeks; artists; a lawyer; a community organizer; and salad geek. Video of these talks now online here including:
   1. Creative Commons 101 speedgeek video. A quick primer on how to open license your content in Canada by Marcus Bornfreund.
   2. Open Salad speedgeek video. Using open source techniques to make lunch and meet new friends while you are at the office by Dan Howard.
   3. Unconferencing public policy speedgeek video. Applying the BarCamp model to redesign an urban transportation network by Mark Kuznicki. 
   4. Jane's Walk. Toronto as user generated content. Jane Farrow gives port-mortem on Jane's Walk: over 60 neighbourhood tours led by everyday Torontonians, all self-organized. It's like 60 living blogs with sneakers.
      
   5. Intro to Ubuntu. Find out how simple and fun it is to open source your computer by Myles Braithwaite.
   6. linuxcaffe. David J Patrick talks about how "open everything" works in a retail/ restaurant setting.
      
3. Case study: classroom in the (open source) community. David Humphrey from Seneca College provided an under-the-hood look at a class where where students work hands on in the Mozilla Firefox community. Then Dave was interviewed by Nora Young, Tonya Surman and Michele Perras. Notes by Amanda Yilmaz here. 
4. Bootstrapping an Open Source organization out of triviality. Richard Dice president described his approaches to change The Perl Foundation from a frustrated volunteer organization into something that can affect large-scale positive change. Notes by Ryan Kelln here.
   
5. Mapping open. We tried to create a digital map of what's open out there. We got some okay input, but mostly didn't make much progress.