Canada 3.0 Moves From Small Town To Big City

July 5, 2012 by Dave Haynes

I quite liked the Canada 3.0 digital media forum and trade show I went to this spring, though I wondered what on Earth it was doing in a small town’s recreation centre.

So were some others, apparently.

Stratford is a beautiful little town (and known widely for its Shakespeare theatre), and the venue and people running things were actually great. But it’s also about two hours from Toronto and even 30-40 minutes from the digital hub of Kitchener-Waterloo.

So Canada 3.0 is moving to Toronto for 2013, May 14-16, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, right in the heart of the Toronto beast.

The show is co-locating with something called  GRAND 2013 – described as an annual conference for researchers in graphics, animation and new media.

The news:

The Canadian Digital Media Network (CDMN) today announced that its annual digital media forum, CDMN Canada 3.0, will be held next year in Toronto for the first time in the conference’s five-year history. Having outgrown the Stratford, Ontario venue that’s traditionally housed the conference, Canada’s digital media forum will be held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, May 14-16, 2013.

The MTCC, situated in the core of downtown Toronto, can accommodate the growing conference, support a variety of conference configurations, and is easily accessible by both land and air for both domestic and international attendees. A Toronto venue will enable closer ties with the GRAND 2013 conference which will further increase industry-university networking at Canada 3.0. 

“Staging CDMN Canada 3.0 2013 in downtown Toronto will provide greater capacity for attendees and will put us at the heart of Canada’s largest city where there is a concentration of ‘digital natives’ who want to join the conversation and influence the future of digital media in Canada,” said Kevin Tuer, CDMN Managing Director.

The CDMN, which has been ramping up its online engagement with industry, government and academia from across Canada and the world through its websites and social media accounts, wants prospective attendees, speakers, partners and sponsors to play an active role in shaping CDMN Canada 3.0 2013.

Today is the official launch of the Canada 3.0 2013 SoapBox, the deployment of a crowdsourcing application that links into the Canada30Forum Facebook Page and can be accessed at http://ideas.canada30.ca. Created by HitSend, a startup incubated at CDMN node Ryerson Digital Media Zone, the SoapBox platform allows users to offer, gather and share ideas, which can be voted on by other users using a simple click of a thumbs up or thumbs down icon. If the idea resonates within the group, it is then forwarded to the decision makers at CDMN who can implement user ideas. CDMN is then able to respond, pushing a message back out to the community that submitted the original thought.

“HitSend has already partnered with Indigo Books & Music, The Walrus Magazine, Vitaminwater Canada and Ryerson University to help these organizations listen to their communities and implement positive change,” said Valerie Fox, Executive Director, Ryerson Digital Media Zone. “This inspiring team from the DMZ is an example of Canadian digital media innovation. It’s very fitting that its SoapBox tool will now be gathering the voice of the country in regards to this year’s Canada 3.0 event.”

Brennan McEachran, Co-Founder of HitSend adds, “The attendees of the Canada 3.0 forum include some of the greatest minds in Canadian digital media and this year, our SoapBox platform will be used to propel their ideas into tangible action. We are very excited to see our tool as the frontrunner for Canadian innovation.”