serendipityoucity

When I was in Montreal for a 2 week holiday, selflessly taking care of my Friends’ Condo and coco the cat while he and his wonderful wife were in Mexico, i had the good fortune to get a tour of L’auberge by Hugo the great, met one of the Koumbit members, heard lots about FACIL & Communautique, went to the Ile Sans Fil board meeting, monthly meeting and met their great pres Daniel, board members Denki, Benoit, Alexis, another wonderful guy with a great smile whose name i forgot!, met the Montreal contingent of Civicaccess.ca and got to spend some QT with Michael & Amy, Omar, Jessy, Amanda & Hannah, Afke, Jean-Chistophe, Heloise and had a great chat with Catherine and fell in love with the city. I also got to see the ever so wonderful Boris who saved me from starvation late one night, and met Julien & Ella too!  I even got to train where the National Judo Team trains at the Shidokan (ow!) and had a great dinner with Sayaka a visiting student. I have not had the chance to write about it all yet, as i needed to go back to work to get a rest.  I will briefly share one of the many reflections.

Bref! There is alot of grass roots hacktivism a la geek artsy community development variety going on, and it seems to be spilling over into the non-governmental-organization (NGO) sectors.  It seems like geeks are providing infrastructure - soft and hard - to community and art groups - and these geeks are also running their own community groups.  Seems like hardware, software, human resources, open source technologies, tek training, ideas and quite a bit of creativity all around are enabling community groups to get their work done, communicate and well develop technological independence.  The geek community groups are learning community development and art, and the whole scene is merging into a seamless whole of intelligent, artistic and civic activity. In fact, it seems hard to figure out who was what - artist, geek, hacktivist, community developer, entrepreneur, all of the above! The demographic i met was pretty much white guys (franco & anglo), between the ages of 20 and 40, but mostly near 30 from a variety of backgrounds. Denki, catherine and ella were in that age group, but a goils. And if i make a network map, there would pretty much be a major node connecting most of it all too!

This was the macro view! I will get into the details later! I did not even get to the cafe & fripperie, urban agriculture, art, food and serendipitous finds! What a great city that montreal! What fab people!