I'm Mark, and I first heard about Change Camp Toronto from @christaggart through Twitter.

I work for the City of Ottawa in our e-Media division - a team formed last summer to guide the strategic directions of our public website www.ottawa.ca and our Intranet site from a departmental communications perspective.  One of my keen areas of interest is social media, and I've been working hard to introduce people to social media platforms and more open and transparent business processes that are enabled through web 2.0 tools.  We've done some very interesting things at the City in the past few months, which I spoke about at the ALI Social Media & Government conference in Ottawa (Feb 11).

In the late 90's I worked for the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), working to help the development aid community collaborate more effectively through the use of Internet technologies.  This was pre web 2.0 era, and we worked on some pretty amazing projects to connect groups working on similar development aid initiatives through web-based tools and human behavioral processes (some knowledge sharing work).  One of my lead projects was Dgroups (founded on the e-Groups idea, which later became Yahoo Groups), for which I created the initial code base, and then later moved to the project management, partnership development, and strategic process administration side of things.

I'm looking forward to sharing some ideas about more open, transparent and collaborative governance, and how government bodies can do a more effective and efficient job through engaging the public as contributors and partners in governance processes.  There's a lot of great things happening out there, and I'm keen to learn from others and bring some new ideas back to the City.

Mark Faul 

BLOG: http://www.markfaul.ca