Each year an advising team of industry thought leaders come together to co-create the year's focus, agenda, and community outreach plan.

We use a highly participative model to produce a conference that serves the needs of the community and pushes us to evolve. In 2014, 26 volunteer advisors helped shape conference content, raised money for our largest scholarship program ever, and recruited a remarkable roster participants to experience Web of Change, many for the first time. 

We operate in an enterprising model, supported primarily through participant revenue, private sponsors and discounted and volunteer labour. With a low overhead, most of the revenue raised are turned back to support attendee scholarships, or planning for future years.

Since 2001, we have convened 13 successful gatherings and supported over a thousand established and emerging leaders to deepen their skills, network, and commitment to the social change movement. Some selected impacts from Web of Change include:

• Projects: Dozens of unprecedented collaborations have been spawned as a result of WOC, producing world leading work across borders, sectors, and industries.
• People: WOC has Inspired numerous consultants and agencies to commit full time to the social change industry as a career track or company focus. Our events have helped frame this work and its unique contributions.
• Diversity: We've engaged in active silo-busting by introducing non-techies (campaigners, senior execs, funders) into this space for cross-pollination and relationship building.
• Community: A vital and growing community of WOC alumni often self-organize at larger conferences or in cities where they live. WOC inspired the Social Tech Brewing events, which in some cities have become “Net Tuesday”.
• Networks: In 2008, an event was held consisting of a dozen leading social change focused agencies to understand how they could better collaborate and support the movement.
• Personal: Testimonials from dozens of participants calling Web of Change “transformative”, “highly restorative”, and generally one of the most powerful and fun events they’ve ever been to.

Top photo by Jordan Lewin