ICT Toronto Meeting: A Quick Summary

“Let’s hug it out, bitch!”

The best-known line from the television series Entourage — “Let’s hug it out, bitch!” — is probably an apt summary of the meeting between a group of some of the most active DemoCamp/BarCamp participants (myself included) and a some of the people from ICT Toronto, the group charged with raising the profile of Toronto as a hub for information and communications technologies.

To say the least, the discussion was animated, with lots of disagreement over whether ICT Toronto adequately represented the smaller players in the Toronto tech community, whether their goals were too vague to actually be achieved and even over the name of the organization, which is perceived by many in the DemoCamp contingent to be a made-up term that never gets used in our line of work. In spite of the heat generated, the meeting was a first step towards understanding between both groups, and as ICT Toronto’s project manager Alicia Bulwyk said after the meeting, compared to some city council meetings, it was a tea party.

Canadian Thanksgiving weekend is keeping me a bit too busy to post a full writeup right now, but there will be one from me this week, and hopefully, from these other attendees as well:

• Leila Boujnane
• David Crow
• Mark Evans
• Jay Goldman
• Malgosia Green
• Estelle Havva
• Rob Hyndman
• Rohan Jayasekera
• Sutha Kamal
• Mark Kuznicki
• Tom Purves