In the immediate wake of the stunning come-from-behind election of Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, there was a palpable sentiment of “We have achieved something remarkable! What else can we do? What next?”

What next indeed. Mayor Nenshi has a clear plan moving forward into his term, but what about the rest of us? Are we content to let the emotions of a hard-fought campaign subside and get back to our lives, leaving the Mayor and Council to their governing? Or is there some way of channeling enthusiasm for the Purple Revolution into some form of meaningful, ongoing civic participation?

Herein lies the rub: participation in political campaigns and civic engagement have very different dynamics.

Political Engagement

At its core, political engagement involves expressing support for a candidate during the election cycle. It is process of clearly defined tasks: Display a lawn sign, change our Facebook profile photo, attend a campaign event, engage friends and family in conversation. It is a game of winners and losers, with clearly defined outcomes: electoral victory or defeat. Once the election is over, we take down our signs or change our Facebook profile picture to snaps of our kids in their Halloween costume. Job done, game over.

Civic Engagement

On the other hand “civic engagement” or “civic participation” is much harder to pin down. A Wikipedia definition gives us: "Individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern." Which means, well, almost anything can be considered civic engagement. This is not really so bad, it just makes our goal of ‘increasing civic participation’ a little more challenging.

For the sake of argument, let’s take the number of friends on Naheed Nenshi’s Facebook page as a rough estimate of the number of people who were actively engaged in the political campaign. At the time of writing, this was about 16,299. Now, lets say that you were interested in transferring that enthusiasm in to some form of civic engagement (and not another political campaign). What would you propose? What would be a meaningful way of engaging these 16,299 citizens?

At the moment, two weeks after the election, the Nenshi Facebook page is combination of well-wishes and polite wish lists of ‘Mr. Mayor, I think you should fix/focus on [insert problem].’ To his credit, Mayor Nenshi has found time to remain somewhat engaged on this page, recently soliciting comments about the South LRT extension. I read about 30 of them, which actually took some time, as most posters spoke, not just in full sentences, but in short-form essays. While this public response is heartening, I don’t see that it is sustainable, or scalable.

Civics 2.0

To be transformational, any form of engagement must be able to scale. It must be just as meaningful for 10 as it is for 10,000 or 1,000,000. I’m not convinced that such forms of engagement even exist yet, but the technical and social foundations are being laid as we speak. If anything, this would be a time to call for civic entrepreneurs, engineers and artists to step forward and build on the pledges of openness and transparency that governments are increasingly making. Can we see government not as the source of our problems, or even as a solution, but as the platform for building stronger, healthier communities. Can we imagine civics, not as additional work to be carved out of our busy lives, but as integrated work that is as essential to our sense of living in a great city?

Epilogue

On a personal note, I am currently living in New Zealand trying to find ways to feel connected in a meaningful way to the events back home. So what do I do? I write apps. If I were an artist, you could think of them as sketches or studies. Open source technology is at the point where a single engineer can whip off a simple prototype in a day or two. So, to put my money where my mouth is, check out www.BetterWorldVille.com (It's a Facebook app, sorry Dad.)