The Bytown Mechanics' Institute is an Upper Canada example of a knowledge transfer organization aimed at encouraging grassroots participation.

These institutions were Victorian and moralistic in tone and class-oriented in structure which, in part, explains their failure.

[clarification needed] These institutions attempted to include the working class, French Canadians and women, where the British social model did not support these inclusions.

The Bytown Mechanics' Institute differed from the newsrooms in that the founding fathers were not clerks or members of the working class; they were employers and professionals.

Local francophones formed their own similar organization, Institute canadien français d'Ottawa, in 1852.

The Province of Canada[clarification needed] provided the incorporation, and fees were set at one pound annually.

[1] Donations to the new BMIA included a recently shot heron, a hawk, a crow and a box of Indian stone implements.

Public libraries became the norm in Ontario after the private funding of the Carnegie Institute began.

Lord Elgin opened the first BMIA exhibition held in the West Ward Town Hall on July 28, 1853.

[6] This type of inclusion was not common across Upper Canada or, later, the province of Ontario and it speaks to the numbers of Irish immigrants and the relatively large francophone population in the area as a whole.