“Why wouldn’t I want to be here?” Andrew McIntyre excitedly asks.

“Look at this!” he exclaims as he motions to a room of 100 people looking to change the world.

It’s Oct. 17, and McIntyre is at the University of Alberta’s Lister Hall, where Edmonton’s first ChangeCamp is taking place. He’s not even an Edmontonian. He came up for the weekend after a business trip Friday and decided the event was too good to pass up.

ChangeCamp is a new event to Edmonton, but not a new event itself. Other Canadian cities holding days of change include Toronto and Ottawa. The main aim of the gathering is to find ways of improving the relationship between government and citizens — and to that end, it’s brought together citizens, city councillors, and MLAs in a series of rotating sessions which are web-enabled but also face-to-face. 

“Don’t criticize something happening, or something that’s happened in the past,” pleads Chris LaBossiere, 38, a broad-shouldered, affable man, and one of the event’s organizers. “It’s about the future, reimagining the future.” And with that, participants are off to discuss that future.

Many of those in attendance had heard about the day through Twitter, blogs, or other online outlets. Social media is all about participating in the conversation (whatever the topic) and ChangeCamp organizers feel it’s really sparked the idea that regular people really do have the power to change the way things get done.

“The philosophy is the Internet was invented long after government,” says Justin Archer, 29, another organizer. “Had our government been invented in the Internet age, maybe they’d have developed differently.”

A big part of the debates, and the demos of various new websites, is using technology to improve the conversation between the government and citizens — for instance, by getting more people in government online and getting more government data into the hands of a burgeoning tech crowd so that private citizens and the private sector can build applications and software to improve everyday life.

In three weeks there’s another meeting to discuss what plans and actions have risen from the gathering. As LaBossiere says in his parting remarks to the crowd, “Go change the world.”