I agree with hugh though, we have it pretty good here. In fact I would go as far as to say that Montreal’s underdog status is what makes this place livable. The kind of significance and international appeal you’re thinking of comes at a heavy price, unless you like Toronto culture and lifestyle (!).

Places like New York and Paris are always nicer in movies and on tv, but once you try living there you quickly come to grips with the nauseating smell of “success”. The first thing to fly out the window when a city becomes big is its identity, replaced swiftly with a handful of stereotypes that you can print on a t-shirt, or worse, the place gets labeled after a crumbling landmark or nicknamed after a fruit.

Yeah Montreal is all over the place, yeah people smoke too much weed and drink too much beer. The artistic community continues to be confused and counter-productive, while the intellectuals and dreamers abandon their pursuits for a reassuring business/commerce degrees. Meanwhile the criminals and cheats keep flowing in freely while educated immigrants repeatedly suffer the humiliation of having their university degrees rendered obsolete by xenophobic Quebec politics.

You want to get the smart people together to create something worthwhile? Here’s some advice. Do it in secret, keep your group real fucking small, and kill the whole project the second someone proposes that you put out merchandise.

This is Montreal…

And now for something completely different, Montreal, it would seem, is responsible for 50 % of “cam” movies found on p2p networks. Now, if that’s not an honour, I don’t know what is ;)

On the down side: we tend to be appathetic – too much coffee, talk and pot smoking, not enough doing. Our local mainstream press is clueless – totally unconnected with anything new, esp on the Anglo side. We have no money, so projects are harder to get rolling. We are risk adverse, so people do lots of little stuff on their own, but shy away from anything big and ambitious. that, maybe is part of what you are saying. there needs to be more of an environment to start big projects.

Oh, aslo, I agree with Boris: lots of designers, arty folk, and good ideas. Few back-end coders in this hacker envrionment. At least few that I know of who are willing/able to work on stuff. If there are any, please contact me.

OK: I am in to help Podcamp Montreal. Here’s the question: who cares how many people show up? 10? 15? 20?

Jesus, the day a Montrealer starts envying Toronto is a sad day – no offense to Torontonians ;) But seriously, you need to spend some real time elsewhere and see what the rest of the world is like. it ain’t all gravy, and all good things come with tradeoffs.

Anyway, I don’t think the problem you have is community. it’s something else, maybe mainstream interest in what we do? speaking of which: tetesaclaques … try to walk two blocks in montreal without hearing someone talking about the willie waller.

re podcamp: I guess it depends what you are aiming for. Can it easily be as big as the one in Boston? I doubt it, you’d probably need a lot more effort to achieve the same results, first and foremost because they are in the states, a 1-2 day to Boston from pretty much anywhere in the states can be somewhat inexpensive, getting the the same person here is more expensive. And to my knowledge you’d need the americans to get the numbers of that podcamp (I’m guessing it was big from what I’ve heard from you but really, I didn’t pay attention to it much)

If on the other hand you’re satisfied with a smaller version, I think you and Casey and Mitch just to name 3 have plennnnnty of visibility to make it happen at a BarcamMontreal level (30-40 people) if you reach out to Boston, Ottawa and T.O.. By the way, I know RoCoCo camp was initially (not sure if it’s still the case) planning a thing for the whole week, maybe match your podcamp with it.

Finally, I’d like to see which signs you’ve got in mind that makes you believe Toronto is that much ahead of Montréal in web 2.0 (god I hate writing that) stuff.