This is the last week to vote in BlogTO’s Best of Toronto. I’m nominated for Best Web or Tech Evangelist along with my esteemed colleagues and friends Mark Kuznicki, Will Pate, Joey deVilla, Eli Singer and Amber Mac. This is a fantastic group of people that have contributed to building a strong community in Toronto.
- Mark Kuznicki is a self described policy wonk. Mark has been working to build a culture of innovation amongst local, provincial and federal governments. Helping to describe policies around community, collaboration, innovation and grassroots efforts. His work, in collaboration with Jay Goldman and Eli Singer to host Toronto TransitCamp really shows his commitment to open creative communities and his stewardship in the context of ideas outside of the tech space.
- Will Pate unfortunately we lost Will to the northern suburbs. He joined ConceptShare as their Community Manager. I helped “recruit” Will to Toronto from Victoria. He is a great guy who has helped build successful companies, Raincity Studios, communities around new products, Flock, and participated in the community since his arrival. His reporting on “CommandN”: http://www.commandn.tv/ is entertaining and informative.
- Joey deVilla is the Accordion Guy. They don’t call Toronto the Accordion City because of all manufacturing of accordions in the accordion district. It’s because of Joey. Joey was the community evangelist at Tucows. He recently left Tucows and joined a startup. Joey has hosted karaoke night, AJax Pub Nites, and Rails Project Nights. Joey was part of the crew at the now defunct OpenCola. He is technology in Toronto 2.0.
- Eli Singer is a close friend and conspirator. He saw the power of participatory conferences to change the landscape outside of technology and started CaseCamp. Eli helped organize Toronto TransitCamp and served as the official translator from geek to business. He has an incredible nack for seeing what’s next and figuring out how it should be positioned.
- Amber Mac is designer, a journalist and a media personality. She recently left CityTV to pursue activities here in Toronto and San Francisco. She is the closest thing we have to a Internet superstar here. She’s known around the world for her excellent reporting and coverage of technology and culture.
The other category is for the events that have been held in Toronto over the past year. There’s DemoCamp, StartupCamp, FacebookCamp, CaseCamp, TransitCamp, and PhotoCamp. All great events. In 2007 there were 5 DemoCamps, 2 FacebookCamps, 2 PhotoCamps, 1 TransitCamp, 1 CaseCamp and 1 StartupCamp. Awesome! My favourites were Toronto TransitCamp and StartupCamp because I get to participate without the full brunt of being the instigator. But each one of these events is key to driving the community.
Just make sure that you vote, it doesn’t matter for whom, just vote.