April 5, 2013
"

We recently kicked off in earnest a project in Louisville to develop a piece of technology aimed at engaging low-income Millennials (young adults ages 18-30) in city planning processes. This project comes as part of a broader Living Cities effort to better understand the potential for tech to deepen civic engagement and improve the lives of low-income people, and to help us explore roles we might play in maximizing this potential in the future.

We came into this process with a few questions in our minds:

Who exactly are Millennials and what does it take to engage them in civic process?

How might a new technology solution aid us in this work in a way that is meaningfully different than what existing tech does?

What are the deeper issues underlying the “presenting problem” of engaging low-income young adults?

Here are some things we are learning.

"

— Tamir Novotny reports back from Louisville: Millennials, Civic Engagement and Civic Tech

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April 4, 2013
"As the city puts gigabytes of free data online, one chunk remains conspicuously missing: a database that reveals the vital details of every piece of real estate in the city."

— PLUTO out of orbit | The New York World

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March 28, 2013
"Reinvent Green was a city initiative in NYC aimed at having technologists improve sustainability in New York. Winners of this hackathon included an app to help cyclists “bikepool” together and a farmer’s market inventory app. These apps are great on their own, but they don’t solve the city’s sustainability problems. They solve the participants’ problems because as a young affluent hacker, my problem isn’t improving the city’s recycling programs, it’s finding kale on Saturdays."

— Great article by Jake Porway — You Can’t Just Hack Your Way to Social Change.

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March 25, 2013
"TL;DR: Adopt-a-sidewalk is a flawed, under-utilized application with enormous potential. By refocusing the user experience on addressing actual needs of people in Chicago and showing meaningful activity, it could be a powerful tool for engaging citizens in supporting and improving the civic infrastructure in their community."

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This is great. Every civic tech project should do this, stepping back and sharing a critical look at what worked and what didn’t. 

Improving Adopt-a-sidewalk

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March 14, 2013
"In an age of a million Facebook-invites a week and Eventbrite sending me recommendations, it would be nice to see public meetings get the attention they deserve."

— @internetrebecca on Making Meetings Matter, @OpenPlans’ Knight News Challenge submission.

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March 7, 2013
"Visualizing Neighborhoods is a day-long event to bring together neighborhood leaders, technologists, data visualizers, designers, artists, scientists, civil servants, and anyone else interested to explore how data can be used for research, analyzing, mapping, outreach, engagement, and communication in our neighborhoods. The goals are to start conversations, build community, experiment, and prototype projects for neighborhoods. And for those that may not have the time to be at the event all day, we will be creating spaces so groups can consult with each other. Are you a neighborhood organizer that needs some tips on technologies to help communicate with your neighborhood better? Are you a developer that has the coding chops but not quite sure what problem to solve? Are you a storyteller, but just not sure where a good dataset is?"

—

Visualizing Neighborhoods: a Hackathon for Good - Eventbrite

Sounds excellent.

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February 22, 2013
"So why build an open zoning data standard? A zoning data standard would allow for zoning visualization apps, like those developed for NYC, to be used across jurisdictions. In cities that sprawl across zoning jurisdictions (or even states, as in DC), a zoning standard would allow for an easy analysis and comparison of how, for example, different cities in the DC metro area are supporting transit oriented development. More broadly, standardizing the way zoning data is shared would allow for it to be mashed up and analyzed with things like public transport accessibility analyses like those for NYC done here, possibly providing an analytical input to the way zoning densities are ultimately set."

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All true, but fundamentally, we need to make compelling reasons for producers of zoning to use the standard. Ideally, without talking about standards.

If the people who write zoning are using OpenZoneBuilder because it’s easier than the current tools, and it just happens to produce structured data as well as the clunky PDFs, we win.

Let’s Build an Open Zoning Data Standard

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February 19, 2013
"We have decades of “orderly but dumb” projects to deal with, a burden that is insurmountable even in an expanding economy. Our economy is contracting, however, and so we are going to be forced to deal with all these low productivity investments with very limited funding. We won’t be successful unless our “orderly but dumb” approach transforms into one that is “chaotic but smart”."

— Orderly, but dumb - Strong Towns Blog - Strong Towns

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February 15, 2013
"Overflow at civic meetings doesn’t have to mean silence … In this way, communities deploying digital technologies for forum participation don’t aim to replace time-honored methods of civic engagement, but instead gather insight into ways to improve in-person events"

— Great thoughts from Geoffrey Hing about digital tools and public meetings, in the Knight Foundation News Challenge.

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February 11, 2013
"All of these tools have taught the city, Headd says, that municipal data is most valuable when people can parse it down to the level of their own communities. “In a city like Philadelphia, the story on crime can be starkly different neighborhood to neighborhood,” Headd says. “People want to be able to ask their own questions, or present their own take on this data."

— 5 Ways of Visualizing Crime in Philly in The Atlantic Cities

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