Living PlanIT (pronounced “planet”) is the brainchild of Steve Lewis and Malcolm Hutchinson, a pair of IT veterans who met when Lewis was still a top executive on the .NET team at Microsoft. Their ambition is twofold: to build a prototype smart, green city in Portugal that can be rolled out worldwide, and to drag the construction industry into the 21st century.

This is undeniably interesting to me. My first co-op gig as an undergraduate in Communication was at a company making software intended for construction project management. It was straight-up digitization: the metaphors, analogies and systems of the paper systems construction companies were used to, duplicated straight-up into bits instead of wood fibres. It makes a lot of sense — there’s a lot of comfort in a familiar system that can make the bits less scary. But it felt like a model on borrowed time.

Given my current interests, however, this part of the article deeply disturbed me:

PlanIT Valley is the first city conceived by technologists, for technologists, in which the architecture and urban planning are all but beside the point. (“Architects are missing a big trick not thinking they need to be more engaged with the business and technology communities,” Eccles says. “The world is passing them by.”)

Statements like that really irritate me, even as I sometimes find myself saying things not entirely dissimilar. It just strikes me as entirely dismissive of the fact that people go into urban design and architecture exactly because they aren’t software programmers. I will say that the myopia is a little annoying at times, but there’s also small and growing and, dare I say, progressive swath of the profession engaging with broader technology and design concepts.

The kinds of things that get labelled ‘innovative’ in planning I’ve heard so far (which is fairly focused on the Western world following its legal systems and conventions, etc.)? Zoning. Density bonusing. Collaborative resource management. These are institutions intended for people, their rights, and which have grown out of many iterations of trial and error in the lived urban experience of a city, that either persisted because they worked for a large enough number of people to succeed within a democracy, or because their proponents had access to the political power to keep their preferences in place.

People. That seems to be what’s missing from the hand-waving about Living PlanIT. I realize I may be reading with some institution-tinted glasses on. But I’m sensitive to whether or not this is being driven by the kind of technologically-deterministic thinking that casts people and their messy systems as inelegant solutions for technology to fix outright or root around. It was probably this statement that raised my hackles as well:

[...] the city’s residents will experiment on themselves. “They don’t want a campus, they want a city,” Lewis says. “They need to send their kids to school; they need to be entertained. You end up with [PlanIT Valley,] a brilliant R&D platform – you live in it, you improve it, you market it. If [a customer] says, ‘I want a medical clinic,’ we already have one. We backed into building PlanIT Valley based on customers’ demands.” It’s purely a prototype for the instant cities Living PlanIT hopes to sell in China and India – which need new ones by the hundreds, built faster and green and smarter than any city that’s come before.

My optimistic reading of this is that the Urban Operating System mentioned in the article is an attempt to design, from the ground up, a baseline of technological services for managing a city with the best computer practices in mind, such as modularization, etc., and to have this be a little plug-and-play (how many bets Living PlanIT’s long-term plan is to get into the hosting or customization business? Your city’s own Amazon S3 cluster), and to have these tools support the work of city service providers and planners. They are building a box of tools that coming generations of civil servants can deploy for the management part of their jobs, and to make that part as seamless and integrated as possible.

My concern, of course, is whether these tools are being built with particular this class of professional users in mind; or whether these professionals, like so many others, will have their domain knowledge set aside to accommodate what works or is elegant from a system perspective. Skimming Living PlanIT’s executive team and board of advisors, people who seem to have experience to articulate this seem in the minority — but I’m glad they are there at all.

I stumbled upon this article while skimming Planetizen’s front page. I’m going to further highlight my concerns on this technological vision of the city with another story on their front page: about how city-building is happening in China. I use the word happening instead of planning because according to Christina Larson, planning in China is looking a little like “ready, fire, aim”:

In today’s China, it is most accurate to say there is a profound appearance of planning. This holds true for urbanization, as for much else. “Planning is really a form of publicity,” one researcher at the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development in Beijing told me. He explained: “It’s a paradox. Things here are very planned, in that lots of plans are being made. But in practice, it’s a lot messier. It has to do with the way that plans are used — or not used.” As for the megacities now rising across the country: “In theory, all development has to be guided by plans. But cities across China are operating without plans being approved — plans don’t have that constraining effect. ‘City planner’ is an aspirational title; mainly it involves approving plans that are already in the process of being built.”

What I’m finding interesting also is how the beginning of the article on Living PlanIT seems contrasts it with the existing movement towards open data and open standards, described thusly:

[...] someone is working on it  [a city OS, a single platform managing power, water, traffic, security and any other urban system you can think of]. But it isn’t Cisco, IBM, HP, Microsoft, or any other tech heavyweight. In fact, in the course of reporting my story on New Songdo City last fall, representatives of each company pooh-poohed the idea of a purpose-built urban operating system. They believed one would emerge eventually, albeit as the result of a messy convergence of competing standards – you know, the way things work in the real world.

My guess is that these two models — the city on open standars and the Living PlanIT city — will co-exist and very different cities, and city experiences will emerge. It will be interesting to see how this bifurcation might affect playing field career-wise for planners in 20 years, as the differences in the tools and methods underlying a city affect people’s behaviour in urban space. As Jarrett Walker so brilliantly put it recently, cities have to be usable in all the stages between the present and your vision. The Living PlanIT folks are starting from the ground up perhaps to emulate the experience of their market in China and India; but it sounds vaguely utopian to me.

I don’t remember quite what I said in my pitch, so until the video playback is available, this is what I think I said the session would be about:

Governments at the local municipal, provincial and (hopefully) federal level are starting to make data about what they do for us open. Let’s talk about how non-profits might make use of open data as part of their advocacy and convening conversations on what is important to us in improving our neighbourhoods and daily lives.

The session was nice and small, about 8 people at the end. I started by describing the brief history of open data, starting with Apps for Democracy but also mentioning the closer-to-home Apps for Climate Action contest, as well as the absolutely staggering amount of work that started even before “open data” caught on and has still continued to go strong.

What I was really enthusiastic to talk about in the session, however, was what role non-profits can play in the open data movement. It’s one thing to just make data open, and, as Michael Gurstein put it, solve or surmount the question of access. It’s quite a stretch to go from that to actual, tangible, meaningful social change. While it’s a good start, there’s plenty of other hard work to follow: not only making the data relevant and interesting and legible and understandable, but also connecting what the data says and means to us, to the people whose work is relevant to that data in some way — where I would categorize non-profits.

In other words, the next step is convening the conversation around datasets — a goal, I’m happy to say, has been echoed and identified by other open data advocates and those I’ve heard speak on the topic  from government. I’m ready to be wrong about this, but I imagine their challenge is, is what exactly goes into convening that conversation, given specific constraints they may be facing either legally, politically, or from existing internal culture in government.

A couple things I remember mentioning that I’ll link to in case the participants wanted to follow up with me on some things of interest:

• Green Building Brain — directed specifically to the attendee interested in visualizations related to architecture. This project, bootstrapped by the Vancouver Design Nerds, is an excellent resource. It isn’t open data in the sense that it’s not centered on a government service, but the Cascadia Green Building Council and a number of other organizations contribute data to it, and it is intended as a crowd-sourced resource for sustainability professionals and community groups, and definitely contributes a lot of values to the conversations about buildings and their surroundings.
• Geek feminism — I didn’t mention it in this session but I did talk to others over the course of the day, and I still think it’s extremely important even to this topic. One of the participants was a volunteer for the organizational Women Against Violence Against Women, and when she mentioned her non-profit, I reflected that data analysis can be very intimidating as an extremely technical and male-dominated field. Given my interest in acknowledging and incorporating local knowledge, I think the awareness of the open data movement by others working towards progressive causes, especially where data helps us have the conversation about what is actually happening in our cities and neighbourhoods, is vital. I don’t remember where I first heard about this blog, but chances are extremely good it has to do with one of the geekiest feminists in my life, one Leigh Honeywell, who, I just learned, contributes to writing there!
• Toronto Star Maps of the Week — one attendee to the session had a particular interest in war veterans, and I mentioned that this blog once posted a map of where in the Toronto area military recruits came from. I’m sad to see that the writer of the Maps of the Week blog, Patrick Cain has since moved on from the Toronto Star and is no longer posting, as I really enjoyed that work, and am grateful to The Star for sharing it. Fortunately, he seems to share data geekery on his blog regularly!
• Apps for Climate Action — bears repeating, given that the submitted apps are now open for voting on.

I may continue to add links to their post, as I remember what we spoke about. Thanks again to everyone who attended, and please let me know in the comments if you want to mention something else you enjoyed or wanted to know more about from the session.

As I read Judith Innes and David Booher’s chapter in Planning With Complexity, and start to reflect on the experience of Transit Camp with what I’ve been learning since becoming a student of planning, the outlines of what my friend was really asking with his question are becoming more apparent.  There’s a sub-section in the chapter on Using Local Knowledge simply titled  Anxieties, and it describes why planners, urban designers and public agency staff find it difficult to incorporate local knowledge into public decision making. Innes and Booher identify three anxieties:

• epistemological anxiety: anxiety about who gets to create knowledge, why and on what grounds. Drawing on the writing of Daniel Yankelovich, this form of anxiety is rooted in how closely knowledge can be bound up in issues of status, professional process and identity, and what the acceptance of local knowledge complicates that, and strikes at the heart of deep-seated feelings about the value and role of dominant culture. “In contemporary Western societies the positivist way of knowing with its emphasis on objective measurable variables and instrumental rationality remains dominant, despite the challenges that have been made to it.”
• anxiety about difference: the fact that people with different cultural backgrounds, who look different, speak differently and who value different things may want their views acknowledged or given equal weight or hearing.
• anxiety over uncertainty: the fact that things don’t always happen as planned, and that because things are complex and always changing, there can never be certainty. “This anxiety over uncertainty typically leads to a demand for control, as if control techniques could eliminate or reduce uncertainty. Policy professionals, regulators, and public administrators seek control through standardized bureaucratic procedures, carefully limited agendas, use of specialized discourses, carefully defined problems frames, and invitations for participation to individuals whose contributions are predictable. [...] These practices have implications that run counter to the creation of a resilient society.”

What I’ve been reading also resonates with fears I’ve heard expressed in a number of venues. For example, when I attended a workshop on co-design, there was some question of how drawings created in collaboration with community members would figure into the actual design process, and whether they would restrain the designers’ freedom to imagine new flows and spaces through being visually prescriptive.

I’ve also heard it expressed that city governments are expected by citizens to act more like customer service and less like professionals and decision-makers working towards an objectively greater public good. While there is some justification for governments to do this (in their service-providing capacity, for instance), this fear is often described through analogy to doctors: that professionals know what’s best even if people don’t, and that one doesn’t go to a doctor for customer service, but for an objective truth about what’s good for someone. Aside from the fact that doctors are most certainly subject to a similar crises in authority, it assumes that people who disagree with decision-makers are in opposition purely and only out of self-interest and only want to be told what they want to hear, and to bully staff into submission to get what they want. I don’t doubt that there is a sizable contingent for whom this is true; indeed, the people who I’ve talked to on this have seen much of this up close and personally, serving in official capacities.

There was some of this echoed in this passage (still about local knowledge) as well (emphasis mine):

Many public agencies see their role as finding out what the public’s goals are so they can use them to prepare plans in the classic rational planning style. Citizens, especially the marginalized, are not apt to think in terms of goals but rather of daily life. Technical planners are so embedded in their own discourses that they typically do not recognize what citizens have to offer. One of the few ways planning and policy making can tap into the lifeworld, rather than relying solely on the world constructed by professional discourses and colonized by technology (such as the survey method with its closed ended questions) and by powerful state and private interests, is to hear these citizen voices and respect their knowledge and experience.

To bring this back to that issue close to my heart, public transit, I attended an enlightening talk by Jarrett Walker (who writes a great blog at Human Transit), where he talked about the differences, strengths and challenges embedded in two varying approaches to transportation planning: an emotional, visionary and (often) people-centric or emotional approach, and a cold, rational, geometric approach. While he was advocating for a balance of the two, his talk focused in on critiquing an over-enthusiasm to the former that disregarded those unsexy fundamentals of transit geometry. (I suspect there’s a lot of people arguing for the opposite and he perhaps felt no need to add himself to the chorus of people bemoaning the ills of overly rational agencies. Walker himself did describe his experiences at places like TriMet where such mindsets dominated.)

Those unsexy constraints, again, need not have carte-blanche on the design or implementation of a system. The key word to all of this, in my view, is the word integrated. I don’t think anyone has argued (or if they are, I haven’t read them yet, so I am open to correction) that local knowledge is to supercede professional knowledge. As I learned in another section, even scientific knowledge isn’t always a perfect fit, given that science asks questions that may not obviously flow into policy direction. This indicates to me that the process of making the decision is paramount. (Happily, I am taking a class on decision-making in the spring.) That said, from what I can hear the processes that were done really well took an extraordinarily long time.

This brings us back to the process being all. Someone once told me that because you cannot satisfy all the people all the time, the people that are most dissatisfied with outcomes will critique the process, because it is so often defenseless due to skill, time or budget constraints. Not all critiques or calls for improving public engagement are sore loser noises, but it is difficult to tell the difference, and the details of a specific case is typically difficult to separate from the general approach.

In narrowing myself down from a paper topic, to a research question, to a problem, I find myself thinking about the “problem” of participation in planning. Like flossing, participation “feels” like the right thing to do — and yet there’s something about the actual way that participation happens that makes it feel stinted and awkward.

The act of curating what comes out of a public engagement workshop is often left to someone who is not the entire public in the room. It is generally considered too time-intensive to crunch what 5 to 7 people said for an hour into something digestible, unless it is a very rigorously-defined format (such as that seen in TransLink’s Be Part of the Plan game technique). There’s a gap between the “what we did tonight” and “what’s next.” Am I just too impatient, lacking faith that what people say can ever be readily conveyed back to them in a decision that shows their input was considered? I’m not sure I’m ever able to take a statement like “We’re not doing what you want but we’ve decided this is the best thing for us to do, and we really did think about what you said, honest!” seriously in my life ever again. It strikes me as inadequate. It leaves the curating, the definition of the problem and the definition of who can act in a black box.

The game of, “We’re going to ask you what you think and your comments are very important to us!”, customer service grin implied and all, makes me feel pandered to. It reeks of paternalistic, “We Know Best,” whether the ‘we’ is government writ large, politicians, or a set of professionals or stakeholders with specific interests or status. I tend to believe these groups all know something, very important somethings — that there isn’t a conspiratorial plot that these people have to see large swaths of humanity suffer.

And yet I also get the feeling that even the people running them are uncomfortable in public workshops. They’re often wearing the image of their organization. It’s the culmination of a huge amount of effort, to prepare talking points and printed boards and to winnow down their message into something that captures the complexity while staying within the boundaries and constraints of time. It’s admirable, but I know if I were in the position of having to work as a planner, I’d probably loathe public workshops as they are run now. There’s an edge in the air, the possibility of everything unraveling into unproductive nattering, turf wars, NIMBYs, etc. A shoring up for defenses. “Don’t show any weakness!” the flipchart stands scream.

This is particularly interesting time to be thinking about this in Vancouver as well, based on some recent moves by council here. There is a sense that, while obviously well-meaning and certainly entitled and encouraged to express the impact of actions to their lives, many groups are undoing a lot of work by City staff, who are often doing their best to bring the best of their respective fields into the conversation, while remaining sensitive to locals’ needs — to the extent that they are empowered to.

To bring in another strand of thinking on this, these workshops occasionally feel like holdovers from what Tim O’Reilly has referred to as the “vending machine” model of government (which I referred to when I last thought about collaboration in planning).

Update: Rob Cottingham has kindly allowed me to include his drawing from the recent OSCON — a great visual representation of what the “vending machine” looks and feels like to most citizens right now.

Excerpt from Rob Cottingham's OSCON toonblog. Used with permission.

That said, having only looked at it from the outside, and only for a very short period of time, I think it’s important to consider whether the benefits that the model conveys to public servants permits things that other models might impede. I suspect it has something to do with the freedom to explore half-baked ideas without communicating expectation. This sort of thing happens off-the-record all the time, after work-hour conversations. The informal often has value, and the informal is vital for its difference from the formal.

What I am perhaps projecting onto my vision of Twitter-or-something-like-it for collaborative rationality is a socially acceptable process for formalizing the benefits that can accrue from that which is systematically framed as informal, which right now gets very little traction within the public engagement process. The challenge is that the field of informal players is uneven — some either are perceived as or actually are confrontational, insular, or doing nothing to elevate the discourse. Some are capable, constructive, making connections where none previously existed. And the relationship of the media to these groups vary, because some stories are easier and more interesting to tell than others.

Participation in a community of inquiry has benefits and obligations. I suspect the obligations — such as the fact that you might not “win” or get exactly what you want from the people that one perceives to have it — will make it uninteresting and unpalatable to the purely self-interested. And we generally give a lot of leeway on these obligations, because we recognize there’s a skills and knowledge deficit.

What I’m hearing from skeptics of open government and collaboration is the fear that the mechanisms that governments make available for dialogue, will be hijacked to undermine the process, by focusing on lowest common minutiae and insisting on micromanagement. I don’t think it’s unfounded. I do think the re-engineering of the machine has started to happen, while many if not most of those who could contribute to making sure it’s done well, write it off or are justifiably unable to put time to thinking about it, and that strikes me as worrisome.

Each brought both the strengths and the biases of their fields and experiences to their responses. But in that sense, I also found it unfortunately predictable and lacking a lot of the nuance that really delights me about the study of technology — although I am, of course, limited by what the author of the article deemed worth for inclusion in the piece. Haque took a proactive stance that views the city as a process by which people shape their environment, and considered data as a part of that overriding project rather than anything special in and of itself. Armstrong, as the sci-fi author, must have used the word ‘Singularity’ in order for it to have been included in the article, expressing excitement over the possibilities of interweaving biological and non-biological (digital? electronic?) data — what she later described as components of cities being made responsive through active or passive systems powered by feedback vis-a-vis data. Davis, meanwhile, brought a place-making perspective with the questions she was asking. Can “data connect us digitally, while grounding us in reality”?

But I must admit, what spurred me to write this blog post was the brief write-up for Susannah Hagan’s position, which I’ll just quote in full from the article:

Susannah Hagan, Head of Research into Environmental Design (RED), [...] began by mentioning how hard it was to speak against the subject considering the location of the event. Despite this, Hagan went on to call digital devices a form of escapism from reality, asking what is it about the traditional city we are trying to avoid by using these devices?

The environmental impact of technology was also raised as an issue, saying that the resources involved in production and energy required to maintain them meant that our iPhones, Laptops and other computing devices were bellowing invisible black smoke before our eyes.

I think the reason it got me fired up is because I think this is the reaction I get from most people in urban planning when I tell them I study online collaboration and use Twitter; so I’m used to getting my back up or reaching for my verbal probes to determine what about the sound of my work is so instinctually distasteful to the person I’m interacting with.

But let’s pry a little deeper than my knee jerk reaction. I think Hagan’s question about what in the traditional city we are trying to avoid is actually a pretty good one — even if I think the framing of “avoidance” is a broad-sweeping. Nowadays, we do use devices in cities to avoid a lot of things. Transit at rush hour (or Vancouver during one of those spectacular lengths of rain)? It seems like iPods are the only things that make those experiences the least bit bearable to large swaths of people. So I’m not going to argue that we aren’t doing any avoiding with it.

But I’d argue that the specific wording — digital devices — makes me think that Hagan’s understanding of what data in cities means is limited to a particular conception of what they are being used for that ignores the meaning of a large swath of other activity. They were in an Apple Store, so I can understand why “gadget” might have been the primary interpretation of “data in cities”, while things like The Vancouver Fruit Tree Project and its equivalents might not be at the top of mind. It feels to me that Hagan was zeroing in on one purpose for which we find the digital devices useful: consumption. We’ve used them mostly for that up until now; again, understandable. But what about the use of devices for creating; for reflecting; for connecting? Is my listening to the CBC Ideas podcast (or, more typically, Spacing Radio) supposed to be deemed a detriment to my participation in the life a city instead of passively giggling to myself at the content of the conversations between the people sitting within earshot of me on the bus? I doubt that’s what she really meant — perhaps she meant larger time displacement effects like not volunteering for the local school or something.

It’s really the essentializing of technology down to only one of its uses for the purposes of constructing a case against it which really frustrates me — especially considering people do the exact same things to cities all the time, and I’m pretty sure it pisses urbanists off too! Until cities became all the rage again, weren’t they being written off by large swaths as being dirty, uncouth, and unpleasant due to all that rubbing up you had to do with people you didn’t like? I think the typical reaction to people who live in or who like cities is, “Yes, but…” followed by all those things that cities enable that people value. So it goes with technology. The design process for the two look really different but, to me, has a lot in common. There’s a sensitivity that’s required, that what one is designing will be used by those who necessarily will be wholly unlike one’s own self. We’re really still in the learning process of what it looks like to create a web that is inclusive, useful, safe, and not geared strictly for mindless consumption.

In that same way, there are insular, anti-social or downright sinister uses of cities, and then there are community and civic-oriented, productive uses of them. And there are insular, anti-social and damaging uses of the Internet or Internet-enabled devices, and then there are community and civic-oriented, productive uses of them. And for both there are levels for which individual personalities fare better or worse. (And on the note of the environmental impact of technology: yes, but what, cities don’t have negative externalities? We didn’t use that as an excuse to stop building cities. Should we use that as an argument to stop engaging with technology altogether?)

I’m open to the idea that I’ve only glimpsed the arguments of each of these speakers; I’m much more inclined to take their observations as all applicable to a spectrum of reactions to technology, which means in the end all of their statements have some contribution to illuminating the truth. I personally agree most with Davis. Her approach did not focus on what appears to be inherent to the technology itself, but more how its uses would be value-laden: renewing commitment to places or promoting homogenization. Like every single piece of forerunning technology, the answer to whether we can make use of technologies without letting them lead us to our collective ruin in one way or another, comes right back (clichéd as it may be) to Marshall McLuhan and the Laws of Media, and what we think we are enhancing in our search for better. Individuals can and will always choose, and it’s expanding the realm of choice, and the thoughtfulness to make those choices with full knowledge, that determines the tone in which our society will shape this debate on data in cities.

I’ve been accused of being overly polite before. Spending a week in the United States, attending a conference on social justice, reminded how different the subtleties of culture can make perceptions. For instance, Canadian and West Coast can often mean a large skew towards conflict aversion. Chinese often means some conflict-aversion and guessing-type negotiation — and on the double for children; adults get full hearing no matter how wrong they are. And the stereotype is that Americans will say whatever they want to without pulling any punches.

Culture can, as the Higher Ed article demonstrates, extend beyond regional norms and also into those defined by professional practice — I’ve encountered very different ‘cultures’ just being in different departments for my undergraduate and graduate degrees. And in the event there’s someone out there reading living in perpetual terror of how culture might manifest in preference for research methods, I’m also happy to declare that, though extremely rare, kind stats teachers/quantitative researchers do exist, and I personally love taking their classes and working with them. A lot more than less-kind quantitative researchers.

While this is anecdotally interesting to think about, and I’ve written about this before as an east coast-west coast thing, I think it’s important to think about as we broaden the criteria for participation in communities of inquiry on issues of import. More people will be exchanging and testing ideas through discussion. Doing this requires some skills which, I would argue, can most certainly be taught, but aren’t, or sometimes people become convinced that they are not important. These include:

• tolerance for and acceptance of complex phenomena instead of defaulting to oversimplification
• listening and respect for giving people the time to express what they do
• acceptance and willingness to be facilitated in a discussion
• effective questioning
• willingness to (respectfully) call out bad behaviour
• taking the right things personally

The distribution of being able to do these things at all, never mind if it is online or offline, is uneven. I would also wager that it is an interaction of nature, nurture and culture — shy or introverted people, or talkative or extroverted people, develop different coping mechanisms based on the norms of their culture. If they are placed into a different culture or context, those mechanisms may have a very different effect.

The Noisy Idiot dilemma also persists — what to do with people who aren’t receptive or remotely interested in to being told they aren’t contributing in a way that is constructive or effective, or who won’t be persuaded by either logic or direct address of the emotional? Is troll hugging the only way to go, for some individuals, who participate not to make change or to allow for change but for reasons in an entirely different ruleset and motive altogether?

So back to my walk over the weekend. One thing I find interesting about the Internet is that we currently use it as a source of information — often biased, but information nonetheless — on things like products, experiences, places, and increasingly, people. The conversation turned towards what to do when someone’s behaviour warrants a red flag to others. If you have a negative experience with someone — and you are clear about your bias or possible skews in judgment, but also honest in your perception of the experience — should you add it to the pool of search-indexed, persistent information in order to aid those engaging in future interactions, even at the risk of being harsh to the person you’re speaking of? Should we all have eBay ratings for who we are as people, tacked onto our annual personal IDPs pushed to our blogs? At the moment, it seems like for a lot of the interpersonal information that really matters, we rely on a shadow commons increasingly aided — transaction-wise, not content-exchange wise — by social networking. It’s what happens what you do when you call or talk to someone — information like personal references or anecdotes about that time she burst out in the cafeteria with a really awkward accusation to her coworkers of conspiracy.

At the moment, I think most people are erring on the side of not doing this, not burning bridges. Others still may be paying some monthly fee for a service like ReputationDefender to keep one’s online presence in view and in the clear — the moral equivalent of taking risks on the bike because you wear a helmet, in my view. We can’t be perfect but we can make amends and strive to be better team members, better communicators, better friends; and our reputation is never all of who we actually are. Perhaps that’s the skill missing from the list above — giving the benefit of the doubt, that past behaviour isn’t a failproof predictor of future behaviour.

Update: Since this post unwittingly came to gather a whole bunch of links on this topic, I’m going to extend it into one more tangent by pointing on this post by bcholmes, called To Awesome and Awesome Not, describing the experience of being publicly called out for using oppressive language. (Thanks Leigh for the link.) There’s a great account of the presenter’s story, which essentially described the most graceful way to accept being told that they are being insensitive: as if one were being called out for not wearing pants.

There’s a lot of interest on how to do public engagement online, for a number of reasons:

• there’s a sense that the people who attend traditional public engagement events are the “usual suspects” and there’s a desire to do outreach with a broader cross-section of the community.
• online can scale to include larger numbers of people for the effort involved.

But there’s also a lot of reticence and reluctance:

• the conversations people have with online tools don’t seem nearly as rich or thoughtful; it’s easier to objectify people and their concerns as “others.”
• there’s questions around accountability, relationships to anonymity, etc.

The classic text on this topic is Shelley Arnstein (1969)’s ladder of participation, which conveniently steps up eight different levels of citizen involvement, starting with non-participatory approaches such as manipulation and mere informing; to tokenistic inclusion through consulting and the formation of partnerships; ending with what Arnstein thinks of as full participation, through delegated power and citizen control. Anecdotally, at least a couple practicing planners have respect but also reservations about how helpful this model actually is in practice. In the intervening years, more nuanced models have emerged in an attempt to reconcile experiences of what has worked for both decisionmakers and citizens. Innes and Booher (who I’ve blogged about previously) describe the potential for participation being rooted in recognition of interdependency and commitment to collaborative rationality. I’ve heard the collaborative planning approach critiqued for not providing much of a roadmap for what planners can actually to do, despite its many valuable insights.

Meanwhile, on top of the theories about participation, there are a dazzling array of methodologies and tools. I just learned about structured public involvement. ParticipateDB is attempting to catalogue tools, resources and projects (though at time of writing it’s a rather unremarkable list). Then there are the really neat experiments and activities that I’m interested in, like open government data as a form of civic engagement, and engagement through social media. David Eaves wrote a couple weeks ago about open data as equivalent in this century of the movement to build libraries in the 19th, in order to literacy among citizens on policy issues. We’re guessing that those with community or solution-oriented inclinations, or enough emotional involvement (but probably not everybody) would likely devote their cognitive surplus to doing this.

My somewhat-baked take on this, is that the kind of literacy Dave refers to also gets built through participation in communities of inquiry, whether they involve tech and data, or not (though the tech is certainly helpful, valuable and a whole lot more interesting on Facebook). This is fundamentally challenging for existing public engagement approaches because they still feel sponsor-centric. If the “consultation” is about transit, it must be coming from the transit agency, and seldom (i.e. during a Transit/TransportCamp) not.  When we try to frame social media through the lens of public engagement, more often than not there’s a campaign-consult paradigm still at work, where the agency’s only really intently listening when they’ve declared that it’s time for talking. The goals and the steps are still framed using the terms and ideas of the experts and professionals.

That’s OK, but not excellent, if we’re actually wanting to scale contributions from sub-zero (i.e. contributions that are actually draining effort for one reason or another) to contributions that have a net positive. That’s why it was really heartening for me to see Brad Ross frame the Toronto Transit Commission’s use of Twitter as a tool for listening as well as broadcasting. I think every complaint, comment and piece of praise for a system like public transit on Twitter has within it the seed for potential participation in a community of inquiry, whether that’s in a highly engaged way or a merely interested onlooker way. I think for 80% it may be run-of-the-mill, but there’s a small percentage for whom the importance of that response goes beyond mere public relations.

Ideally, in my mind, we would have organizations who see outreach as part of their core activity, not just at the periphery of their work. Right now, I see it often framed as something that gets in the way of other, more important, (often) more technical work, a formality, a hindrance. If our role is as contributors to the overall design of services and experiences resulting from policy, I don’t think we can afford to think of it that way for much longer, given how complex the problems are, and how equally complex our solutions will need to be in order to contribute meaningfully to the issues.

I was talking to a friend about something I was sure she’d either be interested or know about. “It’s this event about cross-cultural approaches to sustainability, ” I said. My tongue stumbled over the name, rendered crisp and clear in my textual mind’s eye. “I think it was called, ‘RAN-Gee CHAN-Gee?”

She smiled, “Yeah, we were wondering what to do with the name. It used to ‘Intercultural Alliance on Climate Change’…so boring, so we changed the name to Rangi Changi,” she elaborated. Ran-jee Chan-jee. Soft G. Sense-making. “It means vibrancy.”

We smiled. At the beginning of the Pecha Kucha night, the Cause and Affect awesomekinds had joked about the confusion caused by the name of their event too. Japanese slang for chit-chat, befitting the event’s genus in a Japanese architecture firm. Wikipedia IPA pronounciation guide writ high on the wall. Mayor Gregor Robertson changed it slightly every time he said it, either pulling our leg or really running with the statement that however you said it was the right way to say it.

And then it all made sense.

“It’s perfect,” I told her. “We should name everything we do weird things, to remind people what it’s like to be uncomfortable with how to refer to something, the way newcomers and immigrants are when they are here too.”

This is how we can be inclusive and tolerant: by being willing to relate to the all-too-common experience of being new, outside and powerless, however slight, to remind us we are blessed, and to extend those blessings when we can.

I’m looking forward to learning more about URBZ, who shared some of their approach, interests and projects with us over Skype during a monsoon in Mumbai (!). That was an excellent Skype experience: the wifi was fast, the sound was hooked into the auditorium sound system, and the microphone was good from their end. Skype-in conference presentations need to take a note from the way International House and the JM crew set it up. Despite the tumultuous detail juggling, it pretty much went off without a hitch. They even did very effective screensharing!

The organizer’s brief speech about the teaching of the urban and the injection of community into the teaching model was interesting. I see a lot of this happening in our program but, sadly, not in the way I am actually interested in. That’s been unfortunate. But I also know that part of the reason I feel that way is that I am highly embedded into the community I’m interested in — those interested in open data advocacy. I’m always going to be disappointed that I can’t hang out with them for credit.

I’ve handed over my poster on Twitter in Public Transit to the conference organizers, and I’ll be presenting tomorrow at lunch. It looks like the posters will be hung in a hallway, so I’m not certain how much space there will be to converse, but I’m excited to be talking about how I’ve seen Twitter used with people who haven’t had a chance to dabble with it yet. Live iPod touch demos for the win (wifi willing!)

The conversations I’ve had so far have been interesting. I think about politics and political participation a lot, but perhaps not to in the same kind of way as those either those who are reading and writing theory on an ongoing basis, or those working in direct action organizations like Causa Husta. I feel like part of my desire is to help suss out a new politics of the centre, that can speak to opinions across the spectrum without excluding or alienating — that idea of the low-barrier participation wedge (that gets increasingly participatory) writ political. In some situations (but not all), working and being together is more important than being right or winning. So, leaves the question, where do we need to be together?

Today I’ll be at a workshop in Oakland on regional transportation. I’m going to veer off my blogging tack of late, which has been to attempt to inject a bit of craft into my blog posts, and for the next couple days, I’m going to write things down and let them be posted, rambling and unvarnished.

I’m currently in the midst of reading Planning With Complexity by Judith Innes and David Booher. I was never really able to give quite enough attention to their 2004 paper, Networked Power in Planning, which outlines the DIAD (Diversity, Interdependence, Authentic Dialogue) model that is central to this book, so I was very happy to get my hands on this volume, which says a lot of things that jibe with the experiences that have spurred and underpinned my entire approach to planning. In some ways, it feels kind of ironic yet appropriate that this is my first engagement with planning theory.

It’s also encouraging me to recall that I use some terms in my speaking and thinking that I really ought to flesh out and write down somewhere, so here they are:

My favorite descriptions of planners currently are “stewards of process” and “gatekeepers of information for decision-making.” The former is probably wildly idealistic and the latter is perhaps a bit more pragmatic and realistic. “Stewards of process” came about when I was thinking about what role planners might take in an altered arena of planning activity which involve open data. Planners and a number of professionals specialize in analyses contributing information and wisdom that (we hope) guides the decisions about what happens in our cities. If the people contributing analyses are individuals or loose agglomerations who make them at hackathons or ChangeCamps, how do planners deal with this? We want to keep believing that our certifications and other bells and whistles making us feel like experts will continue to matter — and I think they will continue to, but the tone of the conversation will necessarily be different than it is now, which is fraught with the power differential of, “I do this for pay for 8 hours a day,” versus, “I take this bus and see what happens when it’s late.” It shouldn’t have to be a versus.

Innes and Booher describe interpretive knowing as the foundation for collaborative dialogue:

Many aspects of collaborative processes mesh well with interpretive way so fknowing. They focus on particular situations rather than look for general principles; participants offer knowledge for their experience as well as from research; they challenge statements of fact and causality; and they build shared meaning around issues. Indeed collaborative dialogue is, more than anything else, a process of negotiating meanings — of problems, of evidence, of strategies, of justice or fairness, and of the nature of desirable outcomes. If meanings and values were already shared, bureaucracy could handle the issue in a routine way and experts could use established positivist principles and methodologies to solve problems. In collaborative dialogues participants listen to each other’s information and to that of experts and engage in joint learning.

This is where “gatekeepers of information for decision-making” comes in, which is my way of describing what I’m seeing now, without any official process for collaboration. Some information (i.e. the opinions of experts) matters, and some doesn’t. The problem is, is that that information that seemingly doesn’t matter in some parts of the process, becomes instrumental when the matter at hand is different — say, when you are trying to get community buy-in or when you are thinking about what makes the difference in people accepting a change in their surroundings or altering their daily habits in some way.

Why does this interest me? Frankly, because I’m hearing a lot of people who are talking and thinking about collaboration say similar things for different reasons. Gordon Ross highlighted Beth Noveck’s chapter in the O’Reilly Open Government book (which can be purchased here; or the chapter is also available for download in a free PDF), where she writes about a collaborative democracy instead of a deliberative democracy — what they are and how they differ:

Deliberative democracy has been the dominant view of participation in contemporary political theory. At its center is the Habermasian notion that the reasoned exchange of discourse by diverse individuals representative of the public at large produces a more robust political culture  and a healthier democracy. [...] The weakness of the deliberative approach is not that it reaches too far (as direct democracy may) but that it does not reach far enough. By making talk the centerpiece of its normative aspirations, deliberative democracy’s proponents assume that people are generally powerless and incapable of doing more than talking with neighbors to develop opinions or criticizing government to keep it honest. [...] The desire for civilized discussion and dispute resolution lead to a requirement of demographically balanced representation in the conversation. This may ensure inclusion of all affected interests but does not, as Alexander Meiklejohn said, necessarily result in an airing of all ideas worth hearing. Deliberative democracy relegates the role of citizens to discussion only indirectly related to decision making and action. The reality of deliberation is that it is toothless. Perhaps it is, as Shaw once said: The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

This speaks to me because I feel this split, between who’s talking and what comes out of the conversation, describes another situation that I’m having difficulty reconciling: namely, that between a public consultation process — which seeks to be inclusive and hear from a diversity of people on how something might affect them (and are very important things to do, please don’t get me wrong) — and the collaborative and participatory spirit infused in things like CityCamps, ChangeCamps, and TransitCamps. I’m drawing on my recent experience with a TransLink public consultation as part of a study on a rapid transit corridor, which I’m guessing does not stray far from the character and manner of most public engagement exercises. The BarCamps and their derivatives ask people a whole different set of questions and propositions, such as:

• what has your experience been?
• what can you contribute to improving a situation?
• who do you know that can help you/us in making our ideas reality?

Noveck again:

Deliberation measures the quality of democracy on the basis of the procedural uniformity and equality of inputs. Collaboration shifts the focus to the effectiveness of decision making and outputs. [...] The distinctions between deliberation and collaboration become even more pronounced in the online environment, whose characteristics are increasingly making collaboration easier. New technologies make it possible to join ever more groups and teams.

Part of the proposition for collaboration is asking citizens to take responsibility for their role and contributions to the process in shaping the quality and value of the outcome. Public consultations preserve the power structure of Sponsoring Agency Doing Something; and the framing of the event as, You As Rider/Citizen Having Your Chance To Say Something About It (And If You Miss This, The People On This Project Will See You Next Time With Their Next Deliverable). Whether I went or not, it feels quite distant as to whether anything I said trickled down into any kind of a tangible impact. Isn’t there still a sense of feedback going into a black box process from which certain choices or options emerge Victorious and Mandated?

There’s two things that I predict some might find problematic about the idea of collaborative democracy, which I’ll describe as 1) the quality of participation affecting standing in conversation, and 2) the vending machine mindset.

Quality of Participation Affectts Standing in Conversation

One fear is that collaborative democracy seems to privilege some forms of input and participation over others. In open source software and many other communities, it may be called a Do-Ocracy (to contrast with a meritocracy) which can be problematic because some forms of doing may be given disproportionate weight and value over others which may serve to narrow the diversity of contributors — either in a skill sense or a demographic sense. On this, Noveck writes:

[...] Collaboration is a form of democratic participation that is egalitarian—but egalitarian in a different way than the traditional understanding of the term. Typically, mass participation like voting is thought of as being quite democratic because everyone can participate in the same way.
[...] People do not have to participate in the same exercise. One person may want to work on Peer-to-Patent, another may want to get involved in health care debates. One person may want to work on energy policy, another may want to organize a corps of energy “scouts” to go door-to-door and help neighbors evaluate their energy usage. The ability to self-select to participate in the arena of one’s choosing is what makes collaborative democracy egalitarian. A person may be an expert on wetlands because she possesses professional credentialing. Another person may be an expert on wetlands because she lives near one. Perhaps it is a level of know-how or the enthusiasm to commit more time that generates status in other domains. For every project, there is a different kind of expertise, which could be sought. Experts will flock to those opportunities that exploit their intelligence. In this choice lies the equality of opportunity.

Sounds good, but I’m not sure this does it for me on this question of meaningful collaboration from a diverse skill set. Open source software development communities are working on this question of diversity and inclusivity all the time, as this recent podcast on the topic of diversity from the company Lullabot in the Drupal project demonstrates. Not every project will be a Dreamwidth and, I have a sneaking suspicion, not everyone might want to contribute to a project that is as open and inclusive.

So what do Innes and Booher have to say? For their part (which is centred on public policy, which I’m safely assuming is a fairly different beast from “working code”), they propose community of inquiries as the basis of a dialogue process and the heart of collaborative rationality, tidily described thusly:

A process is collaboratively rational to the extent that all the affected interests jointly engage in face to face dialogue, bringing their various perspectives to the table to deliberate on the problems they face together. for the process to be collaboratively rational, all participants must also be fully informed and able to express their views and be listened to, whether they are powerful or not. Techniques must be used to mutually assure the legitimacy, comprehensibility, sinerity, and accuracy of what they say. Nothing can be off the table. They have to seek consensus.

No forking going on here, and in some ways that’s the way it should be — it’s one thing if you run Ubuntu and I run Red Hat, but there’s only so much earth, air, water and energy to go around, and the environment makes us interconnected and interdependent in ways that may not be applicable in the software sense. Innes and Booher do get around to describing how collaboration interacts with democratic governance, in Chapter 8.

Vending Machine Mindset

My use of the phrase “vending machine” mindset comes from Tim O’Reilly’s chapter in Open Government, where he attributes the Donald Kettl with the “vending machine” model of government:

We pay our taxes, we expect services. And when we don’t get what we expect, our “participation” is limited to protest—essentially, shaking the vending machine. Collective action has been watered down to collective complaint.

Why is this an issue for collaborative democracy? For one thing, on straight-up time and effort budgeting. If we are expected to attend Camps, read documents, organize, blog or write, tweet…what time is left for not being an active, engaged, connected citizen? Some of us have dishes to wash, jobs to attend to, tasks to volunteer for, and, that other Kinda Important Civic contribution, children to raise. This is up for debate, but from where I’m sitting, the do-ocracy favors those who have time to participate, and time is definitely unevenly distributed and skews to favor experts, students with gobs of time, and those who are already being paid for it, and those who are committed enough to prioritize it (which means they have the ability to do so). But the other fun thing I seem coming out of it, is that we have to make our participation do dual duty in actually meeting some of those other needs. One example is celebratory activism — let’s figure out how to have fun while we’re doing our civic things. Another might be community service learning.

I don’t want these two points to be interpreted as me believing these things to be dealbreakers for collaboration — because I don’t think they are. I think it just means we have to be aware and mitigate for it. I also think there’s a whole bunch of this discussion that is relevant to questions about our current education system, which IMHO doesn’t engage meaningfully enough with the whole range of students on what their contribution to knowledge can be. If we’re already doing that when people are kids, how can we possibly ask them to want to participate in civic life? See Sir Ken Robinson’s talk at TED for more on that.

More on this when I, erm, actually finish reading Innes and Booher’s book.