Lists, crowds and searches - ways to build up a planning toolbox

Do open planners need toolboxes? Ian Bicking has an interesting post over on the Civic Hacking blog, arguing that all attempts to make curated lists of organizations will fail:

One of the ideas that comes up frequently when talking about activism, civic involvement, non-profits, etc., is the idea of some new index. Who are the environmental activists in my area? What are the organizations dedicated to bicycle advocacy? What are the government organizations around me? Each of these generally involves finding a whole bunch of organizations and categorizing and indexing them.

…

There’s a lot of investment in creating a new index. You might take the work on yourself and try to fill the index, or you might crowdsource it – let everyone add themselves, spreading the cost around to everyone else.

But does it work? Can you convince people to invest time in it? Can you convince people to use it? Experience would indicate no. Not a definitive no, but a kind of lingering lack of success, where the only death is a slow realization of obscurity.

Are things different for lists of tools? Maybe. I read Ian’s article right after throwing together RPA’s new contribution to the heap of failed indexing attempts, an Exhibit-google spreadsheet* planning tools catalog (mega-beta, fails in IE).  Have been pondering the impending slow realization of obscurity ever since.

Watching various half-maintained lists fading away all over the web reinforces Ian’s point - e.g. seems that GIS people were really keen on them about five years ago. And you have to agree with his conclusion: ultimately it’s all about search.

But -

• the list itself has value. Being able to point to five examples of plain language planning guides is more useful than telling someone to google for it. In a discussion about different approaches to planning, it’s very helpful to have a raft of examples. Queries about technology in planning education are often questions: does anyone know an example of X? The act of listing is a deliberate one - the list is more than the individual items on it.
• listing gives adjacency. It’s easy to search for pedestrian walkability toolkits, and transit direction apps. Search engines will find good examples of both. Having these items co-mingled in a single list (with beautiful faceted searching) helps to show the range and diversity around a topic, something that a search enginge is working to avoid.
• lists can be slices. Making a list is a good way to understand the state of the art. Making the list in plain sight with contributions from the crowd helps build a better understanding for that snapshot.

And being aware of that slow slide without maintenance is important. Obscurity doesn’t just apply to making lists. Humble listing is ok. Setting out to singlehandedly create the Master List of planning tools is bound to fail, but gently collecting a few good examples might succeed.

* list-making dork note: Perhaps Delicious is a better approach (if you can pick the right tag), since it is genuinely crowd-sourced. But scraping delicious and faceting the content is not yet as easy as setting up a quick Exhibit. Exhibit is really terrific.