Humbled by all these #bitcity conference speakers crediting @openplans for helping them. @NYC_DOT @fruminator @rachelsterne@philipashlock
(and we’re just getting started…)
Right.
changenear.me
Quick beta project, built in my Friday Civic Works projects time at OpenPlans:
changenear.me is a simple way to find community-led projects. Pull out your phone, and see what is going on around you, where-ever you are (as long as you’re in NYC, for now). Your phone’s geolocation (gps or cell-based) tells the map where you are, so you see projects around you right now.
changenear.me uses Scraperwiki to collect info on projects from ioby and Change By Us. You can check it out on github. I’m itching a long-standing scratch here - wouldn’t it be cool if you could get all your planning info like this?
This is a beta.. Lots of potential to improve it — in particular, the Change By Us projects are clustered by neighborhood, so all the markers are piled up. I’ll maybe add some jiggle so they are all distinct and easier to reach. Comments and feedback please.
Don’t forget open source
Mr. Holloway said he would direct city agencies to seek commercial, readily available software before trying to develop their own.New York Times: City Hall Admits Mishandling Technology Projects
Friendly, open, and in demand
Thoughts from Daniela Capistrano about the potential of the NYC Data Mine, and some suggestions for making it a true community resource:
In the spirit of evangelizing shared public resources, I’m sharing my opinion that the reason you don’t know about the awesome potential of the Open Data site is that it was designed for developers, not the average person. This makes sense — NYC government wants to partner with techie people to use their data to improve civic engagement and transparency. That’s awesome. What’s not awesome is that in this iteration of the site they didn’t empower everyday people to use the data or make the data very people-friendly, which means the only people evangelizing this resource right now are government officials, developers and data practitioners — but it doesn’t have to be this way.
She offers a handy list of steps that NYC needs to take (plus lots of other great ideas, read it all):
- Create Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and YouTube channels that highlight data sets, how people are using the data and share resources
- Create and maintain an official blog that offer case studies, best practices, user guides, human-interest stories and solicits feedback on initiatives
- Implement an email subscription/SMS+text alert system that allows you to sign up based on different interests (specific data categories, overall updates, events, etc.)
- Implement community features
Agreed on all counts – but maybe we (the people/users/hackers/occupiers/data nerds) should go ahead and start telling those stories and showing the value ourselves. We could set up a stackoverflow-type site to discuss those different datasets, and we need to collaborate on cookbooks. But most of all, we need to build community capacity to use all this great data — community in the neighborhood, neighbor sense. I don’t think the city can spread the good news on this as effectively as those of us outside government, even though most of us are also in the same (vibrant, well-intentioned) echo chamber. Let’s get the word out.
Challenges and ideas from day one at the #cfasummit
Sketch notes of a few project ideas, and some challenges from the first day at the Code for America Summit.
Kickstarter for community projects. meaningful micro-volunteering, taking the simplicity of Adopt-a-Hydrant and scaling it up. You commit a bounded slice of time, not money. Get tech people involved, without becoming the web manager for the soup kitchen (in the words of Peter Corbett).
We need cookbooks! I want to get started, I have some of this data and a bit of that tech, plus some of these skills. What can I build, where do I start?
Let’s run rotating fellowships! Take people inside and outside government, and rotate them through each others’ offices. Not a life-shifting fellowship like becoming a Code for America fellow, but an incremental, local swapping of ideas and energy.
Unlock government energy and skills. Catalyze the enthusiasm of people inside government. Not just the top brass who can come to summits, but everyone.
Challenges (in no particular order, to mull over and fix in the coming year!):
- How do we get the word out?
- How do we get on the curve to fix hard social problems?
- How can our efforts support the street-level narrative?
- What’s the neatest way to “tip people into community engagement” (as Kip Harkness puts it)?
- Why aren’t planners into this stuff?
- Who writes the documentation?
- How can outsiders be better allies to CfA?
Technology for planning is much more than optimization
Technology for planning is way more than optimization. We need to create a new civic fabric around the collective process of coming up with cities. Of course, we must make cities more efficient and find the best ways to spend our taxpayer dollars, but that’s the easy part. The difficult but rewarding challenge is to use technology to plan together, in a way that has never been possible before.
With that hope, I’ve been keeping a running list of challenges, frustrations and opportunities around tech, open source, and planning. It’s not a comprehensive list of every contemporary ache and pain, and it’s biased towards things “over the horizon”. The tools that many of us are working on are already attacking these problems, but maybe we sometimes get blinded by immediate concerns.
The charges:
- Build tools for all those other cities
- Don’t forget poor people
- Talk to someone new
- Shun fake engagement
- Create tools as varied as cities
- Reclaim the smarter cities conversation
- Make region governance possible from the bottom up
- Be the openness you want to see
This isn’t a manifesto. It’s a list of charges. Who is this list aimed at? You, hopefully – the technically-minded activist, or the socially-minded software developer. Are these challenges actionable? Can you pick up this list and do something different tomorrow? I’m not sure. I don’t think the issues are well-expressed enough yet, but hopefully they will get there. I have thoughts for each item, which I’ll post here over the coming days.
The tools we’re creating as a society are reshaping how we communicate, travel, our work and our time off. By extension, these tools already affect how cities function, their finances and social patterns. We can and must consciously harness these tools to break apart the hard problems that cities are dealing with.
Hack4Reno
This repository is the source code for the Hack4Reno 2011 eventhttps://github.com/hack4reno
Hack4Reno organizes an entire event using github. Not only is this method of organizing amazing and truly open source planning, but the event itself also has all the right messages:
demonstrate the value of Open Data and Open Government
serve as a model of engagement and participation for other Nevada cities
foster an open, expansive local government that listens to its people and their needs
connect people and their government through a shared purpose
take Reno one step further down the road to a smarter city and populace
empower citizens to help the city work better
give citizens tools and information to understand the larger context in which they live
show that Reno is full of talented, creative people that love their city
allow people to use their skills for civic good
spark innovation and new business startups
redefine hacking as a constructive term with a beneficial outcome
Racing to open up city data in Philly
OpenPhillyData’s “data race” is a cool model for getting city data into the hands of non-profits and communities. Groups identify the datasets they need, and people vote them up.
Right now, the top three are: vacant land data, aggregated data on people using homeless shelters, and construction permits. And don’t overlook the requests further down the stack — bike thefts, paving schedules. morbidity, and more.
Information in a crisis or a crisis of information?
Some muddled thinking and half-formed ideas (made better by Alexa Mills‘ great editing).
Matt MacDonald, Watertown’s civic data hero
Super excited to find Matt’s website, where he’s documenting his open data projects with a particular focus on Watertown MA. Including He Said She Said, a tool to work out what actually took place at town council meetings.
Matt’s work is especially exciting because he’s helping a town in a major metro*, but isn’t in Boston itself. All the open gov and open planning work in big cities is essential, but it needs to be complemented with activity town by town for the many municipalities making up metro areas around those big cities. We need tools and approaches that create effective, inclusive planning in those places too. (more…)