Closing Comments

These were the prepared comments.

The Next Step - Open Creative Communities

Tor Camp is an Open Creative Community. We invite your participation in the interests we share. You can reach us by googling "torcamp".

I also want to challenge all of you. Take today's experience and talk about it. Blog about it. Tell your friends, colleagues and companions. Reflect back to the rest of us your thoughts about what you got from today's experience and your feelings about it - good and bad.

The Tor Camp Community is more than a tech community, it is evolving into a resource for other Open Creative Communities. We dream of seeing a thousand 'Camps fires sparked across the City of Toronto, and we will be here to help you become stewards and enablers of your own communities.

We will do this by sharing what we've learned about community practice in an increasingly interconnected world openly and freely.

We want to help others discover and use new tools to collaborate and we will play our part in creating a new city-wide practice in creative community stewardship. We truly believe that "Community is the Framework.", the framework for solving complex problems, getting things done, for learning, for realizing individual hopes and dreams.

As urban people, we are simultaneous members of many different kinds of communities and construct our identities as individuals from our belonging to those multiple communities. We want to help connect these communities. A technologist might also be a film-maker. An architect might also be a video game designer. A professor might also be a musician.

The challenge I pose to you all is to transform our City through the power of Open Creative Communities. We are far more alike than we are different, and together we will do amazing things.

The idea of Open Creative Communities will be among those explored by a group we are starting called Open Cities.

Open Cities is a joint community project between members or associates of the Tor Camp community and like-minded City dreamers. We are looking forward to holding the first ever Open Cities unconference in June of this year,which will explore the many manifestations of "Openness" in a city context.: Open source, open innovation, public space, open access, creative commons and beyond. From Toronto to the rest of the world.

Please watch OpenCities.org. I look forward to seeing you all again in 2007.

Thank you.