Transportcamp came and went last Friday after several months of preparation by a few volunteers, myself included, from the Car Coop.

Overall, the organizers — us — were really happy with how it went. We had a turnout of around 110 people – about half being transportation experts of some kind, and the rest being concerned citizens. It made for an interesting dynamic, and some really engaging conversations.

Andrea Reimer kicked off the day with a few quick comments about the Greenest City Action Plan and also with a few words on our lack of social infrastructure in current day civil society. Her point was that in previous decades we had stronger community social groups – and that much of the political organizing that brought about desired social change occurred within these groups. Churches, 4H, Kiwanis, bowling teams, whatever the form – people congregated in groups more and talked about their communities.

These points set the tone for the day, an early call to action.

The sessions I attended had a decidedly local flare to them. And as my friend William Azaroff put it, the conversation quickly  moved away from the specifics of transportation policy to the question ‘what kind of community, city, world do we want to live in, and what role would transportation have in that world?’

There were some amazing people with really great stories in the groups. People are involved in all kinds of grassroots activism, from urban agriculture movements, to cycling revolutionaries, to neighborhood houses whose role is to fill community voids. There were inspiring stories.

My favourite session was the ’social infrastructure’ session – with an explicit focus on non technological social infrastructure, we talked about how we don’t know our neighbours, how human connections and relationships are what make communities, and how we should go the extra mile to open our doors to new, diverse groups of people, and make an effort to reach out and build relationships of proximity. Of course, in this session we didn’t say much about transportation – but the implicit point was that if we build strong local communities, the transportation will follow. Aka – let’s walk across the street to find what we need. It’s all there.

We failed on social media at the conference. We didn’t have a live stream, we attracted few high profile bloggers or tweeters, and the internet connection was up and down throughout the day. Lesson learned for next year, though I think it was okay this year. People seemed much more interested in getting to know each other.

A promising sign early in the day was the fact that whenever there was a lull in the program, the room was buzzing with excited networking. It was hard to pull people’s attention back to the program at times because the whole event had an intensely social feeling to it.

I think the baby boomers who had never experienced an unconference were particularly enthralled. I had several older folks comment on how impressive it was that we could layout the whole agenda in twenty minutes and that everyone could have some input.

Comments at the end of the day were things like ‘wow, I had no idea you existed (referring to the fact that there isn’t a strong network around sustainable transportation in the city) to ‘we liked the software more than the hardware (referring to the focus on the human side of things rather than on the technical).

Gordon Price, from the Greenest City Action Team, and from the SFU City Program, gave closing remarks. His comments were short, not so sweet, and to the point.

He basically issued a call to action – more or less saying that if we don’t build this network into a coalition of networks spanning different interest groups, we’ll never get anything done. The main point was – you guys have great ideas, now how are you going to pay for it?

He cited the Gateway Project as an example of how other interest groups won the day through coalition building. Meanwhile, Translink is barely on life support. I tested people’s responses, and the message seemed welcome.

So now what? Now we get onto the business of building a sustainable transportation lobbying coaltion – one that spans beyond the choir to include groups who may not normally share the same interests as us.

We set out with this event to create a new social network, and from that perspective, it seems to be a success. However, like any unconference, the question always hangs in the air – now what?

Because dialoguing is the fun part – the hard part is putting these ideas and new relationships into meaningful action.

That’s where we’ll be turning our attention next.