Net Change Week: Toronto's social innovators are making Don Tapscott's predictions come true

By Joseph Wilson

Don Tapscott wants to provoke you.  The author of such seminal business books as Wikinomics  and Grown Up Digital is appearing on June 11 at MaRS' Net Change Week to challenge people to completely rethink the way large organizations operate.

Based on his vast knowledge of open-source success stories like Wikipedia, Linux and Mozilla, Tapscott is convinced that now is the time to reinvent the basic infrastructure of society: education, finance, healthcare, and publishing. It's fitting he's talking about this in Toronto as this city has become a hotbed of social innovation.

The key is using web technologies and open-source platforms to mobilize the efforts of average citizens across the world. Tapscott's ideas are fleshed out in his new book, MacroWikinomics, due out in September.

"To me MacroWikinomics is more than just a book," says Tapscott. "I view it as a mission. We need to reinvent many facets of society. In this new age of networked intelligence, business and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. We are altering the way our financial institutions and governments operate."

Tapscott is certainly devoted to his mission.  The websites that accompany his books are giant open-source platforms for writing policy, guidelines, even the last chapter of his book.  A new project he's working on with New Media Consortium is called the Net Gen Education Challenge, and is devoted to reinventing the education system.

"One-way broadcast models of education are outdated," he says. "Why are connected students at home suddenly disconnected at school?"  Students enrolled in the project will study current research in collaborative e-learning and will create wiki-reports with partners around the world.  They will then create videos with adult "expert advisors" which will compete for prizes in the MacroWikinomics Challenge.

Many Toronto-area social entrepreneurs have taken up Tapscott's charge by working furiously to update social institutions for the 21st century.  Michelle Hamilton-Page, also appearing at Net Change Week, is a Promoter of Sexual Health with Toronto Public Health (TPH). Hamilton-Page uses principles of mobile marketing and the "hypertag" to encourage people to get tested for STIs and to educate themselves.

In 2006, a report from the UK suggested that people (especially men) used their cellphones far more often than land lines to access sexual health information from the National Health Service. "When people access that information they want to be mobile, away from their desks," says Hamilton-Page. And these days, when people use their mobile phones, they're often sending text messages.

"People want reliable, trustworthy information, that looks like it came from a friend," she says. This is the basic premise of TPH's creation of a series of text messages around different STIs that people can access by texting TPH. "The only advertising we did was a facebook page," she says. "We're facilitating how youth get information and how they want to get it," she says. "The idea is to get the text-message and pass it on."

For Hamilton-Page, the next step is the release of an iPhone app that will be released during Pride 2010.  It maps out sexual health clinics, sites for free condoms, and gives sexual health information. It also includes a service to send an "e-card" to past sexual partners through sexual health website www.inspot.org suggesting they might want to get checked for an STI.

Ryan Coleman, a self-described Information Designer working in Toronto, is another social entrepreneur that will be appearing at Net Change Week. He is moderating a session called Future Labs, where teams work through digital solutions to social problems in 48 hours.  "While events like the Future Lab may help move the needle on a few projects directly," he says, "at the end of the day what I hope people take away from Net Change Week are new skills that they can put to work in their organization."

Coleman sees the web as an ideal platform for social entrepreneurs to scale their operations. "Many small, local groups are often working on the same ideas that others are in different regions," he says. "Now, those smaller groups that have created some traction in a local setting can easily co-ordinate … with other organizations in other areas of the world using open and social technologies."

Toronto is leading the way with philosophies like this and is the city of choice for innovators like Coleman and Hamilton-Page "We're the first public health unit in Canada to do this kind of thing," says Hamilton-Page. "It's been interesting working for a public health organization that is willing to take a risk on these new technologies -- and then to see that it works."

"As a city we're also big enough to get critical mass behind events and initiatives," says Coleman, "but not so big that just getting started feels like an impossible task. I think it's a perfect storm of a diverse population, a vibrant tech community and socially aware organizations."

Toronto has also been Don Tapscott's home base for his mission for over 30 years. "Toronto is a good city with leaders in many of these innovations," he says.  "There is a huge and growing social innovation community in this city," he says.

So the challenge to the public is clear: how are we going to change the world? The social entrepreneurs at Net Change Week are devoted to using the web to answer this challenge.  "It's all about collaboration and sharing insights," says Tapscott. "There can never be too much of that."

Sign up for Net Change events at www.netchangeweek.ca. Most events are free.

Joseph Wilson is a freelance writer on issues of science, technology and culture.