 Does now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Good morning everyone and welcome back to the economic development webinar series. I hope you all had a fabulous summer and I'm happy to be back today without webcams but I promise I'll come back in the future. My name is Susan Lowe. I'm with the design coordination and outreach branch of the ministry of jobs trade and technology and I'm providing technical support for today's webinar and moderating the Q&A sessions. I'm located in Victoria, BC on the unceded Coast Salish territory of the Esquimald and Songhees First Nations. I'll be joined today by Steve Thompson who will be our moderator for the panel. Still Steve hails from Ferney which is in the traditional territory of the Tnaha Nation. We'll also be hearing from Rose Hoer it from Nelson which is the land of the Cinex Nation and Jim Gibson who's in Calgary the traditional territory of the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Suthina and Stoning Dakota First Nations. Before we go any further I'm going to review some housekeeping items for you who are perhaps new to the webinar platform. Let's have a look at your tools for participation. So the orange arrow lets you shrink the panel the control panel to the side of the screen. It automatically shrinks to the side if you don't do anything for a while. Don't panic we're still here. The orange microphone tells you that you are muted and when we start discussion generally speaking we're handling questions by having you write in to the enter a question for staff box. Other times we may do discussion so that's what that is for. The the little gray box allows you to expand the whole webinar interface to the full screen and the little hand lets you raise your hand to show that you want to speak. But as I said before the best thing to do is put your question into the question box. Finally you've got two options for connecting to the audio for this webinar via your computer or by phoning in. So right now if you want to phone in you can click on the little phone call button or radio button and it'll give you a phone number that calls in with an access code for this webinar and a personal identification number for you individually. If you're connecting via the instant join web app things look a little bit different but it's the same principles computer audio or phone call. The session is being recorded. The go-to webinar platform captures the audio feed and the screen sharing. Any questions that you type into the question box are saved as part of the session record but not publicly. The presentation slides will be made available as well so give us about a week after this session to get it all get it all together and then you'll find it under the BC ideas exchange link in the webinar section on the economic development part of the website gov.bc.ca slash economic development. Okay let's get moving. Oh before we go too much further I have to put out a call for people to participate in our 2018 local economic development in BC survey. My colleague Alex Ashnok send out an email invitation to approximately 3,000 people through the province. We got 400 responses in 2016 when we did the survey and we were hoping we can beat that. The survey gives us an opportunity to learn about what each of you are doing in your communities and how economic development is structured what you feel is effective and also how we can design our tools and resources to be more helpful to you and we're doing it in partnership with Union of BC municipalities. So I will pop that URL into your chat box very shortly and you can click on it from there after the webinar copy and pasted after the webinar and go and give us your knowledge. So without further ado I'm going to introduce Steve Thompson who's been a big part of the popular tech dev 101 workshops that have been delivered throughout the province since March this year. Steve and his colleagues Beth Gallup and Cindy Pearson delivered the first of our tech dev 101 webinars in June and yes you can watch that online. Steve is back to moderate a fascinating exploration of community building and culture in the context of a tech and innovation sector. Steve will introduce our other speakers so I'm going to hand it over to you now Steve coming your way. Great thank you Susan and welcome everyone can you see my screen? I think we can yes great so Susan mentioned I'm Steve Thompson I'm a principal consultant with capacity consulting we're here in Furney British Columbia and we've come here through a circular route through the technology clusters of Waterloo, Toronto and Vancouver. I have a history as a technology product development manager and our consulting practice is split between working with directly with startups and working with or enabling organizations whether that's governments nonprofits or social enterprises that work to build and support technology ecosystems. As Susan mentioned since March of this year we've been traveling around the province doing one-day workshops with communities across the province called tech dev 101 of which this webinar is a component. If we haven't been to your community Susan will I think have some information at the end of this session on how to request that we come in and help you. Today we've got a couple of fabulous speakers who I could probably listen to all day so I'll go quickly through a very quick contextual recap so we can get into their content. To start I want to introduce or remind you of a model that we've created for developing technology strategies called the innovation ecosystem. It's something that I first crafted probably 10 years ago now out of frustration more than anything else having read and worked on various technology industry strategy documents I have found these strategies often had many of the same came components in them yet they still failed to convey the interrelatedness and interdependentness between the various elements. So common to most strategies are the following ingredients access to capital access to talent access to markets the community's infrastructure such as broadband access regional airports and a community and culture that supports innovation and the willingness to take risk. These elements are typically bundled as four or five components with varying names for the elements include streams, themes, pipelines all of us consultants have to call it something else to make it where they are like we're doing something and to me all of these names imparted a sense that the ingredients are discrete and that they're not interconnected and I thought that this was a mistake that we were making so in the innovation ecosystem we call these components biomes and these biomes work together to create the complete ecosystem. The model the inspiration for the model is BC's coastal temperate rainforest and anyone who's walked through an old growth rainforest knows that they're very special places you know somehow even the air feels different in the rainforest and the rainforest itself is comprised of several biomes typically viewed as layers from the soil layer up to the understory layer to the canopy layer and finally to the emergent layer which touches the sky hundreds of feet up and independent to a degree each biome teams with a wild variety of life forms yet each layer works in concert with the other layers to create this unique and self-sustaining ecosystem and the rainforest feels both wild and chaotic yet at the same time there's a very organized and predictable structure to it and to me this is what an economy thriving on technology and innovation should feel like. It should be an environment that's wild and chaotic with various forms of life forms and creations yet with as economic developers this certain structure and predictability that in the background and that's why we use the analogy of the rainforest for the innovation ecosystem. The ecosystem consists of five biomes capital talent infrastructure and place-making community and cultural support and external connections and as an ecosystem our objective is to build it in balance if we put too much focus on one part of the ecosystem we're not enough focus on another part we can bring the system out of balance and and miss a lot of the results that we're trying to produce and you'll see that we've designed the ecosystem in blocks and for instance we've broken out the capital biome into a number of smaller blocks that we've in and we've also added in this case you'll see a feedback loop or feedback loops and feedback loops are incredibly important to the building of an ecosystem as we want to constantly reinvent the capital and and and experience that we're creating in our ecosystem into the next generation of technology companies always building bigger and better generating more exports that etc so we're constantly reinventing ourselves but with an ever-increasing amplitude in our in our metrics so because our interest industry is built on people even more so than than companies and emphasis on the community biome is very important and for municipalities and First Nations on today's call the in the absence of anything the best place to start is with building your community and culture and hence the the need for today's webinar so in our strategies you know there's often a lot of focus on capital on infrastructure but it's important you know that we but an important area that we often miss is culture and you want to get culture right from the start because it's a lot harder to change later on and with that I have the privilege of introducing you to Rose whore rose is the community manager for the Nelson technology community and she's the founder of the Nelson Innovation Center and everywhere we go across the province with the workshops everyone always asks us what's happening in Nelson and I always reply well Rose is happening in Nelson she's a great friend she's an amazing story to tell and I just wish we could clone her and and bring her energy into every community across BC so with that Rose I'm looking for oh am I unmuted yeah okay thank you to everyone for joining us today I'm really looking forward to sharing our story about the great things happening here in Nelson and we are where we are heading in our community I think there's lots that other communities in BC can do to attract and support knowledge the workers in your community Nelson is definitely not unique but we're it's unique but it's not that unique there are lots of attractive and livable communities across BC and across Canada I'm not a public speaker honestly I'm not a trained economic development person I've never held a title with the words economic development in it but I'm an entrepreneur I'm someone who's very very passionate about our community and I'm someone whose Croatian roots mean that I just keep bulldozing through a problem until I get it done and I won't stop if you're looking for a civil bullet or a shortcut today on how to build your community quickly you won't hear one from me what you will hear is that building your community is really a lot of work for me it's taken probably about three years it's a lot of hard work it's weekends evenings early mornings it's will never attack entrepreneur come to our area feel they would like to meet with us and when you get to the point where the things are happening and you're getting momentum as a community you'll feel you'll find that there's even more work to do it's extremely rewarding it's different work but it's still work nonetheless for instance we have 36 jobs to fill this fall for two tech companies who are coming to Nelson we need to help these companies find offices we need to find these companies attract attract people to these companies and then we need to help those people find where to live housing we also need to support their spouses and their children and to become part of our community so now that I've scared almost everyone off the call today I look forward to lots of questions from three or four of you who are still left behind to hear us so let's proceed uh Steve do you want to do the next slides thank you so a little bit about Nelson itself I'm sure that most of you have heard about Nelson but I'd like to share a little bit about our community to start we're a lot more than just hippies and pot this we do have a unique culture in a few in a few slides we'll talk about the culture and the importance of finding a culture fit within the companies that we're building and attracting here and as Steve mentioned earlier really that's the key is is the culture component um Nelson is a former mining town located in the west kootenai region on an arm of the kootenai lake like most resource towns um we've had no shortage of ups and downs over the years we're a very picturesque community with about 10 000 people and because of our history we have some tremendous um and beautiful heritage homes and buildings that line the steep slopes there are no bad views in Nelson or at least that's what they say uh we're the regional economic center for the west kootenai so we're the hub of something around 50 to 60 000 people in our area yeah that live probably within an hour an hour and a half of Nelson we've a great and thriving downtown line with historic buildings we have is the envy of many as well as a music community we have decent internet throughout our community it can always be better we've shown tell us in a fiber loop through our downtown core to which businesses can connect and we're literally in the middle of nowhere inside of vc which is both a good thing and a bad thing we're about eight hours drive to vancouver a similar drive to calgary and about three hours to spokane and spokane in the us unfortunately our regional airport in castelgar which is about 30 minutes away from nelson does have a bit of a reputation as a difficult place to fly in and out of our times which is challenging we have a great ski resort whitewater and we have just about every cultural and recreation or pursuit that you can name which is a huge attraction to many people we're a place that's hard not to love and if you've lived here and had to move away for whatever reason it's a place where you're probably like to come back to and that is something that we're capital capitalizing on very well and well we'll touch on that when we talk about our business attraction strategy in a few minutes lastly we're the northern anchor of an emerging west cuny technology corridor that starts with metal tech alley and anchor companies like thought exchange and roslin and trail which are about an hour and 15 minutes from nelson going through castelgar uh next slide please thank you um because nelson's a great place to live we've now actually attracted and retained technology knowledge workers over time so like many livable bc communities we have people living here and quietly doing their thing as either remote workers lifestyle businesses and some smaller growth focused technology companies as a community nelson has had a few small technology companies come and go over the years but unfortunately not enough to create a true nucleus and so we had an incidence of people here but we didn't necessarily have a community which is something that we're calling invisible tech they are therefore our first job has to connect those people who already exist here into a community with that community we were then able to start adding value with traditional economic gardening tools such as for example the venture acceleration program a bunch of co-work spaces probably four or five and building on the nelson innovation center which is our most current project once we have the community pulling together we were able to elevate the nelson technology community above all of the noise that's out there and so people were able to see what we were creating something unique here once we had the community pulled together we had a story that we could tell investors and to people who were considering moving here and we're seeing that the emergence of our community largely pulling together of what is already here has really helped to de-risk decisions for others looking at our community it has helped de-risk decisions for people in the lower mainland or people in Europe or Asia who are considering moving their families here it has helped de-risk investment decisions for people interested in building housing or commercial space for a tech community it has helped de-risk investment decisions for entrepreneurs considering creating companies or satellite operations here on investment attraction I should mention that the first wave of entrepreneurs that we are attracting are people who have literally you know some existing connection to nelson and the companies perhaps they were raised here and moved away for school or work perhaps they just visit here or they have a secondary home here whatever it is our first investor's way tends to already have some connection to the community and that has been key we don't need to boil the ocean looking for technology companies to locate in Canada in nelson sorry we need to find the nelsonites who have or have had technology oriented businesses elsewhere and are wanting to come home this is important as we don't have deep pockets to go elephant hunting we don't have generous tax breaks either for that matter that we can give to companies to locate here ask the next slide please thank you this is my favorite topic I get very passionate about this because this was the early big beginnings of things but bringing the community really together is a lot of hard work that's what everybody always asks me and say it's a lot of hard work and it requires the right people to do it including a dedicated community manager we all assume that in small towns everybody knows everybody so it's it's pretty easy but many of the people who work in tech or who do remote work are people who have literally like quietly moved to our communities and they are just quietly doing their work you may come across some of them you know with your children in different sports playing hockey or at the chairlift but you're not sure what exactly they do and it's never been the source of your personal connection to them so as a community builder as a community connector we need to make those connections more relevant to technology innovation or knowledge work in order to create that the community that we seek which is where for us really the tech meetups monthly tech meetups have been extremely successful and we have been able to pool people so for me the community connect connection process is a three or four phase process firstly find the people who are already in your community that's really really important like to build it out from a grassroots movement is really the best way to go the second one is to help strengthen the connections between those people like introductions you know the tech meetups that take place for one month to the next a lot of people like finding tech are you know very busy doing their work and tend to be sometimes introverted so making those connections is really important whether they're just networking or meeting other tech people or you know pulling them together to do contracts so that they can bid for bigger contracts locally in our area has been extremely successful actually third bringing those people together on a regular basis that is so so important and yet last one is encourage the people to also meet on their own like outside of the group meeting to engage in some of those conversations and a good place to also start is with traditional asset mapping so it's identifying the companies and resources that are already you know in your community with an emphasis on the people within those organizations so companies really they come and go but what you want companies the community is more about the people in the companies than it is in the companies themselves because they will stay probably within the community um the companies themselves might relocate once they get bigger or they need to move you might have a company where the entrepreneur is happy being a lifestyle business and not wanting to grow beyond its current size which is totally fine that's why we choose lifestyle sometimes I'm living in some of these places but within that company you might have a technologist who wants to have a great growth startup and that's the person we want to put our energy into to help build some of those tech companies okay Steve next oh sorry um one more thing that's really important and my favorite topic also is um when it comes to identifying people the tactic that I did that people always ask me that I really love to share and and uh they love other people love to tell about what I do is my coffee shop approach so every time I was in a coffee shop I would spot someone working within their laptop and I would ask them hi are you in tech and they say yeah as how do you know I say well you have a laptop and would you like to come to our tech meetups and that was sort of the early beginnings of trying to gather some of these people all together so that we could have a very vibrant tech community so as I mentioned earlier the business attraction piece starts with finding entrepreneurs who already have some form of affinity for your community maybe they grew up here but moved away or they have a secondary residence here or maybe they just come for for a ski week every winter like that's totally possible or they come fishing or something whatever it is uh these are great targets these entrepreneurs already understand your community and its strength strengths and weaknesses you know all the issues you might have with within your own community their investment decisions are more likely to be driven by personal and emotional drivers rather than the matrix thought by you know the usual site selectors we might not be attractive to them and most importantly they are likely to be a good cultural fit for your community they've already come from here they understand the way we live and once you get these entrepreneurs on the hook this is really where the really really hard work starts because now you have to land them here because now you have to settle them into your community and this is where I'm at right now currently with some great companies and it's why I am actually crazy busy all the time as I alluded to earlier we have an exciting announcement from a company coming very soon to our area so watch for it I can announce it announce it yet but we will soon and we're looking for 36 jobs this fall for just two of our companies next slide please this is the investment required so lastly I just talk quickly about the kind of investment your community needs to make you need a community manager or a community developer someone has role it is to ensure the community gets built like that's just so so very important that the community events are happening like all the time not just randomly they need to be very specific you need economic guarding tools specific to technology and knowledge work you need the infrastructure required to support this community you know you need good broadband connection you need regional airport connections you need available and appropriate housing and you need support for their families once they they move here you need office space commercial space for them and their needs and you need to have this the sizzle that makes people want to live and work in your community which is beyond just building their companies here they're interested in you know good schools for their children they're interested in what sort of recreational activities are available for their families and things and for their you know potential employees like it's a very holistic approach to to building out a very successful tech community thank you so much there's any questions i'm happy to take them thanks rose so i'm just going to remind our audience that if you'd like to ask questions for rose you can enter them into that send the question to staff box and we'll set them up you can also save your questions and if something comes up you like to ask it excuse me towards the end then we'll have time at the end i hope as well we have a couple of poll thank you yeah thanks everyone uh so we're just going to do a couple of pop quizzes here just to get a sense of who we have and what kind of communities you're coming for these will pop up on your screen in just a moment and if you can take a moment if you're multitasking come back over to the webinar and answer what size of community do you represent so what kind of what size of community are you working in to do economic development work i'll keep the question open until we've got at least 75% voter turnout because i do love to see a good high voter turnout and i believe we'll probably have some more questions after this there's a couple of questions coming in for rose we'll just finish up this poll first multitasking on my end here right so we're still collecting responses going to leave it open for a couple more seconds here if you haven't voted yet i can see only 66% of the people on the webinar have voted so give that a shot ah excellent those last few people came in all right i'm going to close the poll and share the results that you guys can also see who what kind of communities are on the call so we've got actually a really interesting mix of community sizes quite diverse so it means we have people throughout bc we've got 15% on the call oh and there's just just there's 38 attendees on the call right now not including our guests the organizer and the presenters we don't get to vote so this is on the attendees only so 15% under a thousand population 15% and in 1,000 to 5,000 26% 5 to 15,000 19% 15 to 50,000 and 26% over 50,000 so that's a really broad range so i'm going to hide this and then we've got a couple of questions for rose that have come in uh rose oh who do you work for huh that's a really good question um i do some contract work for the Nelson area Nelson area economic development forum to build out this technology sector but i do mostly consulting work for various various technology projects okay so you work for everyone you work for the whole community i work for everybody yeah uh was what type of support did you receive from the municipality i i said i received a lot of support from the chamber of commerce the city of nelson uh the community teachers uh lots of uh you know entrepreneurs within our area um lots of just local people lots of parents and families and people just wanting to see this sector grow because we we wanted to have good good jobs and we wanted to be able to have people stay home and not have to leave our area um because the good jobs weren't here okay so lots of support lots of lots of support so do you have a um sort of a hub organization that you know is a non-provider has a board of directors or anything like that is there a good well uh my original yeah i originally started a contract with the kutney association for science and technology known as cast and i was uh responsible for running the venture acceleration program and so they were the key for our area for you know anything sort of tech entrepreneur and venture acceleration and within that contract i realized that there were a lot of uh people within our area and it was very funny and my boss at the time i said well where are these people it's just we have to go shake the bushes and go find them and i thought okay well that's what i'm gonna do so that's how i ended up sort of recognizing the fact that we actually do have a tech sector it was a matter of pulling them all together it really did start with cast okay uh did you have any resistance from community members as you were building buy-in for your initiative or and what strategies did you use uh to get the buy-in if there was resistance i did get it i did uh have some resistance at first because i think people thought we were bringing in amazon to our area and they were really kind of scared what it was going to turn into but i i i quickly realized that you know what we were really doing was we were building the assets that were in our community which was you know we wanted to support um technology folks that already lived here you know we brought up startup melson we brought up uh canada learning code and they were training for our local um you know our local folks here and then when they started realizing that we know the companies that we were attracting to come here were mostly born and raised kutney people um that really wanted to they were very successful outside of our area elsewhere in europe and in Vancouver in particular of two entrepreneurs i'm thinking of and they just want to come back home they wanted to raise their families here and so once you know they started seeing that it was really fit to the culture of melson they that they embraced it a lot more interesting okay um and how successful have you been in identifying housing for workers um well we have a very strong uh facebook page called the tech and knowledge workers we probably don't have 700 people on that uh and we've been able to as a community pull together for that housing piece people have um come forward and you know offered their rooms then their their investment you know houses that they might have and so we've been managing to do that quite well just within our own network oh cool okay great thank you very much and there if there's more questions for rose at the end that they'll come up and uh if we don't get time for them then i can always pass them on you can let me know when you ask your question if it's okay for me to give rose your your information if you want to connect with her or have her connect with you she seems to be i would say a person good at connecting that seems to be a talent rose thank you very much sharing that with us thank you very much i'm going to turn it back to Steve now to introduce our next speaker Steve you got yourself muted i think oh no there we go here we go there um so so thank you Susan uh next up we have got Jim Gibson um Jim is a seasoned technology entrepreneur and technology executive from Calgary um he's also the author of a new book called tip of the sphere where he talks a lot about the intersection of the impacts of technology and society and he's one of the co-founders of a fascinating technology movement in alberta called rainforest alberta uh while jim is working with a larger city in larger cities um and with established technology ecosystems um he'll share a bit about why community and culture was an important place for reinforced alberta to focus their efforts so with that jim all right jim morning everybody sending you the presenter controls good good morning everybody thanks thanks very much Steve and and all for having me um what i'd like to do is is walk through the the experience that we've had over the last couple of years in an amazing social experiment that you know to echo some of rose's comments about driving economic change and innovation through the grassroots and understanding what that looks like and feels like and and so forth i've been i've been just blessed by a group of people that have been extraordinary in in this journey so what i'd like to do is just walk you through our experience and just again as Calgary is a larger community steve had asked me to make sure that that i look at some of the common themes that that are expressed in the movement that we are that that are really universally applicable and and i think i think having reflected on this for the last couple of years i think i think there's some common things and and i'll circle back to some of rose's excellent points on community building which i think are resonant in in what we've done in Calgary so just some context in in how we got started steve mentioned his consulting groups approach to looking at metaphors of rainforest we chose the an actual book called the rainforest which came out of a group in in silicon valley greg horowitz and victor wang who i've had the pleasure of meeting and they're just amazing people greg horowitz is actually a biologist by by training and an observer of ecosystems generally um and then specifically around technology and and you know the urban legend in calgary goes that our assistant deputy minister of innovation had had bumped into this book at some point in time in late 2015 early 2016 and and it's an extraordinary read on complex adaptive systems and and and why we need to pay attention to nature to teach us about what it is that systems of innovation need to do and and so our assistant deputy minister justin rhymer read this book bumped into one of probably calgary's leading keystones in innovation brad's on wall so brad is a serial entrepreneur successful on many many fronts and also a social entrepreneur gives back in many many ways so one of the keystones of the calgary innovation community and he read the book as well and brad and i are long time colleagues and he passed it to me long story short we ended up reading this book and and we said this is something that calgary needs and and the challenge in calgary is most of you can imagine is as a technology ecosystem and a diversification ecosystem we're in the shadow of a single commodity in a very successful trillion dollar energy industry and so diversification while always top of mind has rarely been able to be executed at the scale that we need it and so in this latest downturn the technology and innovation folks like myself and brad and a number of others really were lamenting that that we we were not acting as a as a single tribe and with a single voice and so the rainforest gave us a voice and a methodology to talk about ecosystem building and so you know there's a long story to it but basically in the summer of 2016 we reached out to the original authors of the book and the consulting group that had formed we raised capital privately so this was all in a private initiative and we brought the authors and 65 people from the ecosystem of alberta together in banth um and in a privately funded symposium asked the fundamental question what's what is it about the rainforest concept that works for us and what are the gaps in our ecosystem and and it was an extraordinary serendipitous event of of government people entrepreneurs at your capital folks and just people we knew as as people and they came together in this amazing session in in september of 2016 and was just thrilled to be a part of this and so the long what happened was we just simply started to meet we created something which i'll talk about a little bit more called something called the social contract and since that time we've had over 2100 people from the premier to the mayor to somebody just recently unemployed to all range of people in our ecosystem and signed the social contract we've met 102 weeks in a row since that time every wednesday something called lunch without a lunch where we get 90 people every week from all walks of life um 30 plus or minus new every week so we're touching parts of our ecosystem that we can't imagine we've kicked off and supported 10 major initiatives from education to space to a range of things we've held subsequently we've had six immersion sessions following that first one in both Calgary and Edmonton and then we're and we're measuring our ecosystem progress and and we'll talk more about this in a couple of weeks on the seminar but we've moved our our ecosystem innovation score from an f 5540 out of a thousand to 650 in our measurement so we're slowly making progress in a measurable way towards success so as a private entrepreneur i'm a venture capitalist i'm built to sold six companies and and i'm i'm a true participant in this economy what what really got me was the fundamental equation of the rainforest book was this concept of of building trust and so the message of the book was very very simple um and there's it's a rich read it's very complex but at the end of the day if there was one message that the book delivered to all of us in Calgary and and and and Alberta was that innovation as a concept the ability to move forward quickly was natural in a culture of trust and and so you have to be very careful when you use words like this because it feels very squishy and touchy feely and and so forth but we were able to demonstrate in our weekly meetings in our immersion sessions actual progress and significant velocity change in our innovation system because human beings had signed a social contract we looked each other in the eye and said um i haven't met you i don't know you but i i will i will start with a with with the openness of trust and that was a very powerful change in attitudes and behaviors because previously what we had found was that you know in a world of scarcity our innovation ecosystem was scarce resources there was there was only so much to go around most of our talent and energy and capital was going to the energy sector in in in a world of scarcity trust is the first thing that disappears and we had to break that down if we were going to move and and that and and the the subsequent message of the book was as you start to build a network of human beings who simply are able to relate to each other you know coherent calm social contract you build connections exponentially and what that what that does is that as you watch people start to make a connection from bob to sally and sally or fred and the indirect and direct connections between human beings that trust enables very magical things to happen including capital to flow talent to be acquired space to be given people to pay it forward and so on and so forth so while the concept is super simple its impact is actually an exponential effect in the network and and so with that the book taught us something else was that and the reason why we called it a rain force and steve notes this very well given his his vision is that complex adaptive systems like an ecosystem of of innovation are really just are really analogous to biological systems and the famous economists you know ball breaks basically said it that that all living systems and economic systems are very similar and so with that kind of concept we we we took it to heart that we needed to think not in terms of tax policy and venture capital policy but we really had to understand the principles of what we call complex adaptive systems and in fact rose is talking exactly about that as she was talking about her her experience she didn't call it complex adaptive systems she called it you know making Nelson come alive and and but all of the words that you she could have written the book on on the rain force it's exactly what they say and so the number one evidence of of this complex adaptive system is this thing called the social contract and I just excerpt excerpted I've taken the very opening paragraph from our social contract and it's a it's it's quite tongue-in-cheek in the sense that it it feels like a bit of a rap music but as it as it says we are an inclusive silo busting sector agnostic all industry open source ego-freaking weak ecosystem building an entrepreneur focus wide open social barriers fashion community we say that and people laugh but but and we included all of those words because we wanted to to a b as inclusive as possible but we also didn't want to take ourselves so serious that that that we couldn't find ways to to share you know uniqueness about all of us and so it was a very powerful moment when we wrote this social contract and it and in the book you if you get a chance to read it you'll see that one of their number one deliverables of the rainforest approach is to create this social contract and and it just looks like this and I'll never forget we we met on the September of 2016 and then two weeks afterwards we've got a group of our 65 we got probably 15 of us from the room and within 10 days we had written this explicit social contract that talked about the very principles of how we needed to behave and it and and and what we've learned since is that in a world of scarcity where there's competition and win-lose there's an there's a breakdown of the implicit contract of how we really want to behave and by making it making it explicit writing it down making people sign it physically not digitally physically sign it with a pen and paper we really changed the narrative we changed the way people behaved and and I can tell you that I was in dozens of meetings in the subsequent six months in the last year where people would call each other out respectfully and with without passion but call people out on you know are you really listening are you being truthful um or have you thought of diversity as as from from the get-go and so this social contract played a huge role in and us being able to um simply say to our network that we were behaving in a way that was trustworthy and if you remember from the beginning trust was the key to that and so this social contract has gone all over the place I actually had been working out of London England I brought the contract and and gave it to the head of head of sustainable development for Barclay's bank who is looking at global thoughts around changing their behavior at the bank and they are starting to use this and I've taken this all over the place and it's it's a it's a very powerful tool and I'll just I'll just conclude with with just really a reiteration of what of what he had said at the beginning his firm has a methodology this is a similar methodology this is right out of the book but the point of of of this slide is to really emphasize the the weighting in a true ecosystem between culture and leadership and the rest of the things we often think about as as elements of our innovation ecosystem policy tax infrastructure role all of those things that we normally assume and so in the in this picture it's a reminder that culture and leaders as the rainforest people talk about is 50 percent of the battle and we we assign that to the word sustainability in the absence of a culture of trust in social contracts and leaders you can't sustain the velocity you can get it started you can get everybody excited and all of that but you can't sustain it if you want to increase the velocity capacity those are the other elements of it but in the absence of those two things none of this can happen and we've learned that time and time again over the last two years and it's very powerful and encourage everybody here to to probably more importantly is to respect the culture change and people's behavior takes time it's not something that's prescriptive it's actually takes the time for human beings to be in the same room to share ideas and stories and move those forward so I encourage you to as Rose had indicated that those meetups and those places where people can connect are extremely important to sustain a long-term innovation culture versus trying to fast track it through artificial means such as the introduction of new capital ideas or you know you know when when Calgary went to go and try and bring in amazon we were really really nervous because that was the exact economic development wrong approach which didn't allow for fertile soil to grow amazon would have come to Calgary and absorbed all of the work and changed the culture of our very very fragile and nascent ecosystems so with that I'll stop and I really appreciate being able to have a chance to share the Calgary story we are at rainforestab.ca our twitter handle is rainforestab i'm also very active in the space given my writings and the work so there's there's my stuff we've just published a very interesting blog post with myself and Greg Horowitz who is the original author of the rainforest book it's about an hour long blog post on really the genesis of this story and where Greg talks about other global examples of rainforest so I'm really delighted to be a part of this and look forward to any questions that you may have thanks very much Jim what I'm going to do is I'm in a launch or second poll which will give people a chance to vote and then think about questions for you so it'll be coming up on your screen which of the following most closely reflects your community's stage of technology community development so as it's coming up if you've got questions for Jim about the rainforest social contract feel free to add those in or hey he gave you his twitter handle so you can tweet him as well I found it really interesting to go and look at the social contract being in Victoria of course we've got a very robust and energetic tech sector and there's a lot of gatherings and stuff like that but I don't think I've actually seen something like this which makes it um particularly explicit that that the culture is at the heart of things so I really appreciate Jim bringing this to our discussion here so all right we've had the poll open for a minute um Jim I think people are just really impressed with you we don't have questions for you right now but uh they they do know how to get a hold of you so here are the poll results I'm hoping you guys can see this because for some reason it's disappeared uh from my screen uh audience view let's see what we got yes you're seeing it okay great uh so for many of you you are thinking about thinking about developing or planning to plan your develop your technology community strategies or currently developing your plan and then nine percent actively assisting and attracting businesses uh oh and we have some questions coming in yay I knew I could count on you guys uh here's a question for you Jim uh if trust builds community exponentially does a break in trust destroy it exponentially as well um super good question um what what we found is it's not as fragile as that um what happens is is the behaviors that are recognized in social contract are are off are used to bring kind of that that virus if you will so so if somebody breaks trust what happens is that the people are comfortable and trust worthy to call it out in a respectful way so well we we haven't seen the explicit major breaches breaches of trust but we have seen areas where people haven't been as open or forthcoming as we felt was necessary and people call it out right they call it out again respectfully and the and what happens in networks is that it kind of self selects if people don't fundamentally agree or or believe in the principles of the social contract they just kind of disappear they don't become involved in the ecosystem and and so people who are looking for souls solely their advantage and trying to create a win-lose situation just just simply don't gravitate but what's happening in Calgary is that the majority of those who are doing really interesting profitable and exciting work are kind of members of this this this tribe if you will and so itself selects okay thank you uh now someone has asked uh it would be helpful to know if anyone else from my community is on the session that way we can uh continue the conversation locally and Tom I know that I know where you're from and I'm drawing a complete blank on it because well I know where you've talked about things but if you can just send a message back to me then I can call it out I feel really embarrassed right now that I don't know but I'm going to carry on uh we've got some announcements uh of upcoming things I'm also going to unmute Steve in case he's got anything he wants to add just at the end here Steve do you want to add anything uh no I just want to thank again our our speakers for joining us today um I both have been are are extremely busy and I know it's it's always one of those cases that when you need something done ask somebody who's busy because they're the kind of people that do it and I think you've seen that with with Jim and Rose so um a big thank you um I can't say enough about uh you know the rainforest Alberta and the con social contract of course being uh located here in southern bc uh southeastern bc we're very tied economically to Calgary um uh Jim alluded to to Brad and we consider him at california because he does um spend some time uh here in fernie or the fernie area um but uh yeah again just generally um the social contract is a is a fabulous tool and I know after I read it and and saw that this emphasis on getting out of the zero-sum game mentality that if I if if I win you have to lose um and vice versa and getting into a community where you're like we all have to pull together um I think is incredibly valuable so thank you everyone thank you and thanks to Rose as well I'm just going to go through some upcoming things we have because if you're interested in this uh this technology development thing you're going to love these upcoming webinars so September 27th that's next Thursday we'll be joined by Colleen McCormick and Yvonne from network bc they're going to talk about how a small community can develop a compelling business case in support of investments and connectivity uh this is sort of business case it's going to help draw support from government and private sector partners we've been talking about this and I'm very excited because they're tying together economic development and connectivity with a broader scope of community sustainability and then on October steve uh October 3rd steve will be back with us for more tech dev 101 exploration and this time he'll be bringing two experts on benchmarking robert bell of the intelligent communities forum and nelson is an intelligent community and uh joe sterling from rainforest strategies uh he'll they will together be looking at some different methods for benchmarking or measuring your community's progress on tech and innovation related indicators and they're also going to talk about how to avoid some mishaps or missteps with benchmarking there's lots more webinar scheduled for the rest of the fall I will be sending out invites to these upcoming webinars to everybody who's registered on this webinar and also I have a a big long list so if you've been seeing stuff from me already you're probably going to get some more but just if you want to make sure you're on it you can go to this email list sign up unfortunately you can't click the link but it's really easy to copy down cm.pn slash three i n j you can sign up there and make sure you don't miss any of the announcements also add the economic development at gov.bc.ca to your safe senders list if you're external the government and you can also go i'm just going to go back up here you can go to our gov.bc.ca slash economic development site uh under bcids exchanges where you'll find the webinar section and that has all of the upcoming webinars as well as you can look at our past webinars you can go back to june and watch the first tech dev 101 webinar and you can also look at what's coming up this fall so and you can get links there to register for things and once you've registered you will get the invitations and the reminders from go-to webinar so after this webinar is complete you'll get there will be a pop-up survey so please complete that it'll also get sent to you in your email just to give you another shot at it and it's 11 o'clock Tom Bulmer is in Vanderhoof so if anyone in that direction wants to get together with him you can reach out to him through community futures and thank you very much to the presenters and to all of you for joining us and for to Steve for hosting we will oh i'm just going to check there oh right Steve you were going to mention something else is happening in the Fraser Valley yep just a quick mention for anybody who's in the Fraser Valley this week on Thursday September 20th is the second annual Fraser Valley Regional Tech Forum taking place in Mission at the best Western Plus and probably the best thing is just Google Fraser Valley Tech Tech Forum 2018. Great thank you Steve that's another way for people to get together and build their tech communities without further ado I'll just I'll end our webinar thanks everyone and see you next time thank you