Articles

Hidden Gems and City Tours From Your Neighbor’s Perspective at Trover.com

admin — Mon, 07 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

A new mobile discovery network, Trover, gives users the chance to introduce local explorers to hidden gems right outside their door. Trover is a free smartphone app, which is also accessible from its web site at Trover.com. The app is designed for sharing discoveries, interesting things to see or do, in your city or a city you happen to be visiting, in order to help someone else enjoy the discovery just as you did. In other words, it’s a place exploration tool.

Take Back Your Taxes: Bring Participatory Budgeting to Your City

admin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Tax day has come and gone. You’ve paid your dues. And you probably have very little say over how those federal dollars are going to be spent. But at the local level, an increasing number of cities and towns are turning to their residents to propose projects and make important budget decisions.

Using Volunteered Geography Information to Improve Transportation Services for Low-Income Communities

admin — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

How can we understand the travel behaviors and mobility barriers experienced by low-income populations? The answer is both simple and complex at the same time, since it requires considering the entirety of individuals’ lives, not only their travel to and from their workplace. My research team and I gathered data from a relatively small sample of low income individuals through focus group interviews. We augmented the focus group data using additional detailed information provided by key individuals who participated in the preliminary discussions.

The Triangle Region: Joins 180 Independent Groups Taking Advantage of LocalWiki’s Free Open-Source Software

admin — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Whether you’re new to a city or a long time resident, you almost certainly have knowledge and perspectives you can share with and learn from your neighbors. If cities had one spot where they could collect and capture the spirit of a thriving area, they might just increase collaboration and knowledge dissemination across an entire region.

Paint The Town Green

admin — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Hundreds of communities have trash pick-ups or recycling initiatives, tree planting and energy conservation. But just a handful are writing comprehensive sustainability plans or reinventing themselves as meccas of green economic development. Kaid Benfield writes frequently on the NRDC Switchboard blog about some of the best of the best, and here are a few more, along with the tools that have made them successful.

Mapping Main Street: Showcasing Local Character of Our Country’s Unique Main Streets

admin — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:15:42 +0000

What comes to mind when you think of the term “Main Street”, especially when you hear it from politicians or the media? Was it an actual street in your small town in Colorado? How about in a large urban center in Hawaii or New England? What should that term even mean? Does it actually evoke one location and population?

Crowdsourcing Platform Enables Citizens to Document Crisis Information

admin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

These days, communities with great ideas are utilizing technology to improve their neighborhoods. Crowdmap is one such pervasive platform that allows users to crowdsource information like citizen protests or crisis information (ie. natural disasters) and view it on a map and timeline.

The Complete Package: Four Community Toolkits You Can’t Live Without

admin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

The web is chock-full of community planning tools, resources, websites, and guides. The biggest challenge sometimes seems to be sorting through them all to find the resources that are truly valuable. Here are our picks for three comprehensive guides and toolkits that every community ought to bookmark. They’ll take you through the whole process of building stronger, more engaged communities, from communicating with the public to making sound decisions and then taking action.

Developing Digital Commons for Cities

admin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

There is a little-known struggle going on right now over how a new series of “top level domains” (TLDs) on the Internet shall be used by cities of the world. TLDs are the suffixes at the end of Web addresses, such as .com, .org and .edu. The international body that oversees TLDs is expected to announce a new series of TLDs in 2012 that would give cities their own TLDs (e.g. .nyc or .paris). The new TLDs could make it easier for people in the same metropolitan areas to find each other and interconnect on the Internet and in physical spaces.

Civic Commons Marketplace Offers New Perspective on Which Engagement Software Really Works

admin — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

New apps are coming out every day, but how does a local government find out about the latest technology? How do they gain access to the newest, most innovative ways to improve the lives of their citizens? Civic Commons has recently launched the Civic Commons Marketplace. The marketplace is a database of civic software brought together to help government personnel find the online engagement tech tools to best fit their city’s needs.

OhSoWe: Helping Community Groups Share More, Consume Less, & Save Money

admin — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Solutions to the problems associated with over-spending, clutter, and mass consumption just may lie within our own neighborhoods. One easy way to explore exactly how we can share skills and services locally comes to us through the online collaboration platform for neighborhoods, OhSoWe.com.

New Toolkit From MobileActive.org Encourages Citizen Outreach Through Mobile Apps

admin — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

For our friends at MobileActive.org, the idea of using mobile technology to support social change among people and organizations around the world is nothing new. MobileActive.org has long been on a mission of connecting citizens; providing resources to NGOs that will enable them to enrich and serve their communities. Many may be surprised to learn that in today’s technologically advanced world, there are still roughly 5 billion global citizens without reliable internet access. However, as mobile phone usage continues to rise, resources like the MobileActive.org’s new Mobile Media Toolkit, may just be the answer these offline communities need to activate their public engagement efforts.

The Revel Challenge: Creatively Strengthening Community Relationships

admin — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:00:00 +0000

We recently learned of a cool new interactive mobile app designed to initiate the discovery of public spaces and their hidden potential for meaningful and fun exchanges between people and their cities. Revel turns sets of instructions, called challenges, into adventures and experiences that can be shared by friends or strangers. You can write your own challenges in any of Revel’s seven categories: Appreciation, Exploring, Fitness Traning, Games, Neighbors & Networks, Photography, and Storytelling. Players are simply encouraged to be creative with their interpretations of these fields! One main ground rule for the game: challenges have to take place in public space, such as a city street, sidewalk, or park.

Create, Collaborate and Discover with AllOurIdeas.org

admin — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Last month, you may remember that we highlighted our favorite civic engagement apps and tools from a list published by Next American City. Among our top picks from the list was a crowd sourcing website, AllOurIdeas.org - a survey platform enabling groups to collect and prioritize ideas in a transparent and democratic fashion. AllOurIdeas.org is gaining momentum, recently reporting more than a million votes being cast since inception, as groups such as the Junior League, Catholic Relief Services, the city of New York, and other big projects have begun utilizing this tool to collect valuable data and feedback from local citizens from around the globe.

Change by Us NYC: Fostering Collaboration Between Community Groups

admin — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Recently, New York City Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, announced $15,000 worth of private grants to community groups to fund gardening, composting and stewardship of the city's community gardens and other green spaces. The 19 community groups who were awarded funding for their projects, applied for grants the city’s new community collaboration platform, Change by Us.

Seeing the Future: Three Tools for Visualizing Change in Your Town

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Architects’ models and line drawings used to be the only tools we had to help us visualize a proposed building or major streetscaping project. These days, a host of high-tech tools can help us see the changes in 3-D, compare scenarios, fly or walk through a mock-up of the new design, and even interact with a model through an avatar.

Crowdsourcing the Walkability of Streets in New York and the UK

admin — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

It’s generally agreed that walkable streets, neighbourhoods and cities are a good thing. Walkable areas produce a whole range of benefits that include less obesity and healthier residents, boosting property values and the economy, fewer traffic accidents, reduced CO2 emissions and maybe even more people walking!

Our Picks From Next American City's Top Apps & Tools for Civic Engagement

admin — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

As mutual advocates of issues central to the future of cities, Next American City is just one of the resources that EngagingCities staff refers to from time to time in search of the top trends and tools related to socially and environmentally sustainable economic growth in America’s cities. Recently, Next American City Magazine published a comprehensive list of best apps, websites and software for enhancing and improving urban life. The list included tools affiliated with everything from city governance, mapping and transportation, to “living well”. Our favorites are...

Never Ride The Bus The Same Way Again

admin — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 07:00:00 +0000

What if there was a tool for developing local public transport improvement plans that helped explain complicated, traffic concepts to the everyday common citizen who actually is most likely to use public transportation? BusMeister was created with this in mind and is now available in beta.

Participatory Planning Game Brings Diversity and Transparency to Citywide Visioning Process

admin — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0000

When it came time to engage citizens in a recent Master Planning process, the City of Lowell, Massachusetts opted for an unorthodox approach: an interactive online game. In order to engage a diverse population, the city partnered with Emerson College researchers to debut a newly developed participatory planning tool for the first time in June 2011.

Playing Games: Three Fun Tools for Planning Your Community’s Future

admin — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been to a typical community meeting or zoning hearing, you might not guess that planning can be fun. But a suite of new games and activities are making it more interactive, exciting, and enjoyable than ever to help plan your community’s future. These three tools represent a range of games and activities for planning, from cardboard models to high tech platforms.

System Dynamics: Planning for Smarter Cities

admin — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:12:45 +0000

Smart cities don’t happen by accident. To help planners and policy makers better understand and manage the dynamic behavior of cities, IBM Global Business Services is introducing new analytics software and services based on their “smarter cities” strategy. System Dynamics for Smarter Cities is an interactive model that allows leaders to observe how the core systems of a city -- such as the economy, housing, education, public safety, transportation, health care, government services and utilities -- work together and affect one another.

Scoville: Location-based tool for community asset mapping?

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Some of you might be familiar with Foursquare, a mobile service that lets you “check-in” to locations and see who is nearby. Recently, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley opened its API to anyone who wanted to build layers on top of Foursquare. This invitation inspired a new location based app called Scoville, currently available in beta mode to Foursquare members and Facebook users.

Exploring the shortcomings and pitfalls of Gov2.0 platforms

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 21:32:38 +0000

Many municipalities across the country have been exploring recent Gov2.0 tools, including “ideation” platforms, in hopes of finding ways to help combat common issues of towns losing money, property revenues declining and jobs going away. Such ideation platforms like Ideascale and Spigit, create a place for citizens or employees to submit, rank, and follow up on ideas that can save money and improve services.

Betaville: The Radical Democratization of Urban Planning

admin — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:00:00 +0000

In small towns, citizens can attend town hall meetings, and vote directly on major changes to the community, while in larger cities, allowing every resident to have a voice in shaping his community’s built environment can be quite complex. Coincidentally, the sheer number of new projects that arise in large cities, like New York for example, can overwhelm residents, and leave folks with the impression that they have actually do not a voice in the decision making process. However, an interesting new open-source urban planning program is now available that could change the way in which architectural projects move from design to reality.