Hohoto 3.0: The one year anniversary edition

One year ago, Toronto’s Twitter crowd came together to raise money for the Daily Bread Food Bank. In the summer, it happened again. Yesterday: a third edition of Hohoto!

For a lot of us, this was an anniversary of sorts. Sure, this community didn’t come out of nowhere but Hohoto was where so many of us met for the first time.

For example, compare and contrast the old Jaime Woo:

As a relative Twitter neophyte—illiTwitterate, if you will—we were slightly overwhelmed: it was like sneezing with your eyes open. The party felt like a high-school reunion. You know a few people, sorta recognize a few other faces, and there’s a sea of faces that do not compute at all.

…with the new Jaime Woo.

It was also the event that helped show Twitter is a Big Deal: a group of near-strangers organized a huge event in only three weeks.

In the last year, we’ve met a lot of people, had a lot of events, and sometimes made a difference — and at least some of this has been thanks to the community that formed around last year’s event. So to Toronto, cheers to a good year.

But enough with this sentimentalism.

Keeping it oldschool

Like last year, Hohoto was held at the Mod Club.

Similarly, these guys took care of the music.

With upstairs help from this guy:

(And this guy — except I didn’t get any photos of him. But Lee, thanks again for rescuing my camera bag!)

An anniversary gift

Traditionalists have come up with a big table describing which type of gifts are suitable to celebrate various anniversaries. For first year anniversaries, we’re told to give a gift of paper. Do banknotes count?

Let’s hope so — Toronto sure gave a lot of them: a whopping $48k was raised for the Daily Bread Food Bank.

@jaygoldman: Final #hohoto total: $48,424. Absolutely incredible. Our community is amazing.

(British people are told to go with gifts of cotton and as a Commonwealth country, we probably have this option too. Incidentally, banknotes are made out of a blend of cotton and paper. But this is an overcomplication of an already overcomplicated thought so now I’ve made it sit within these parentheses.)

And what good timing:

More Canadians than ever before are turning to food banks to make ends meet in recession-ravaged households, Food Banks Canada reports: 794,738 Canadians used food banks in March 2009. That’s an 18% increase over the previous year

Some surplus photos