Photo by Flickr user kmakice.

Involve explores a related theme, suggesting the value of crowdsourcing may be more about generating ideas and enthusiasm than generating consensus.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation offers some great tips for designing a successful online collaboration or deliberation process.

Engaging Cities summarizes the highlights of an online discussion (on Cyburbia) about increasing public participation in rural communities.

Intellitics writes about a new IBM report called “A Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation.”

Digital Urban posts a characteristically cool Twitter data visualization.

Ascentum reports on German Chancellor Merkel’s web-based national engagement effort, “Dialogue about Germany’s Future.”

Museum 2.0 explores the challenges of designing interactive activities that work for both adults and kids.

What did we miss?

• Unified interface
• Improved user experience
• Batch copying of ideas
• Quick reporting and data export functions for administrators
• Quick filtering of ideas across multiple groups
• Instant wordle creation

OpenIdeo is poised to announce the winner of their “restoring vibrancy to cities” crowdsourced challenge, winnowing down an initial list of 331 concepts to a short list of 20 finalists and now to a single winner.

YPulse reports on Sesame Street’s new augmented reality app unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show last week.

Civic Commons launched the Civic Commons Marketplace to help government folks find the best online engagement tools for their own community’s needs (h/t to EngagingCities for the heads up).

Cooltown Studios reports on a city-led “crowdsourced placemaking” project in Hilo, Hawaii.

Spatially Adjusted reported on Urban Airship’s decision to kill SimpleGeo.

Digital Urban shows off a clip they made using Lumion, a quick and easy 3D engine allowing you to import models from Google SketchUp.

Digital Urban also described a new research paper comparing the quantity of information in a proprietary set of maps to those available through the OpenStreetMap, an open source map dataset.

EngagingCities points to a vibrant discussion on the LinkedIn “Community Engagement” group and a list of some of the participants’ go-to websites for community engagement information.

The Entrepreneur.com blog has some social media predictions by some marketing and social media luminaries, including Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk.

This is from last month but still worth posting: Intellitics offers an early glance at a forthcoming book by Tom Atlee on citizen deliberative councils.

Newswise reports on five new research projects at the University of Illinois at Chicago focused on improving citizen participation in government services. They include developing better tools for citizen participation in government budgeting and an exploration of the role of digital libraries in civic life, among others.

What did we miss?

Brad comes to us from Texas, where he recently completed a Master’s in Community and Regional Planning at University of Texas-Austin. As a planner, his focus is on connecting planning goals to measurable strategies and outcomes, from how regulations influence urban form to how social equity is addressed within plans and policies.

In addition, Brad brings a background using GIS and spatial analysis as tools to better understand complex planning issues and help communities make more informed decisions. While at UT, he was part of a team at the Center for Sustainable Development working to develop a software tool that allows Central Texas municipalities to model the impacts of land use and transportation investments as they work towards implementation of a regional plan.

Prior to PlaceMatters, he was on staff at AIA Seattle, an architecture non-profit, where he managed the office’s web presence and developed an appreciation for the importance of design on the sustainability of the built environment. An Alabama native, he has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Alabama-Birmingham.

Join us in welcoming Brad, leave a comment or share a nice word on Twitter and Facebook!

Eric is the Director of the Engagement Game Lab and a professor at Emerson College.

Over the past year, we were really excited (here & here) about the prospect of gamification in planning. Dr. Eric Gordon, professor at Emerson College and founder of the Engagement Game Lab (EGL), gave us some of his time to answer some questions about EGL and the past, present, and future of gamification. We really think Eric and his team are doing fascinating and fun work, we hope you do too!

Tell me a little about yourself and how you ended up doing this work?

My Ph.D. studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts focused on emerging media and urbanism. I was interested in how new media forms constructed the idea of the city in American popular culture. My dissertation work was the foundation of my first book, The Urban Spectator: American Concept-cities from Kodak to Google. But this work led me to consider just how new media not only shaped the idea of the city, but was capable of shaping the practice of the city. When I moved to Boston in 2004 to take a job as a professor at Emerson College, I began talking to people in City Hall about some of these ideas. In 2007, in partnership with the City and Gene Koo at Harvard’s Berkman Center, we got our first project off the ground. It was called Hub2, and it sought to use the virtual world Second Life to engage local communities in Boston in thinking about urban planning. I explored these ideas in depth in my most recent book, co-authored with Adriana de Souza e Silva, called Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. From there, I began to do many other projects and in 2010 formed the Engagement Game Lab.

What was the highlight of 2011 for you at the Engagement Game Lab?

In 2011, we implemented our most recent game, Community PlanIt, with the Boston Public Schools. Through this mission-based online game system, we engaged about 500 people throughout the city to discuss what makes a quality school. It was great to see it in action and to understand how these sorts of systems can scale up.

How do you think the field of planning is responding to your approaches and gamification in general?

It depends on what you mean by the field of planning. There are lots of people very interested in this approach. But, as large organizations are inherently conservative, there has certainly been some push back. The main criticism is the validity of the data that an approach like this creates. If it’s a game, it must not be serious. And if it’s online, it must not be equitable. So, overcoming these hurdles of perception will be a challenge. There is considerable evidence to suggest that this general approach works. That people, if given the time and incentive, will participate more often and more thoughtfully. There is also evidence to suggest that games can create a productive context for problem solving and learning. So to answer your question, I think people are interested, but unconvinced. I feel like it’s my job to do some convincing.

Where are there places for growth in this approach as it relates to planning and civic engagement?

We are just in the beginning stages of all this. We need to figure out how to translate online interactions to offline engagement most effectively. We need to figure out how to make these sorts of projects sustainable, by getting legitimate buy-in from partner organizations and support from funders. We need to figure out how to create the appropriate pathways for sharing and scaling, so that a great project in Boston can be implemented in Chicago for half the price.

What are some of your favorite tools or games that haven’t come out of the Engagement Game Lab?

There are a number of recent projects that I think are quite good. There are organization tools like CommonDeeds that have great potential. There are games like Spent out of Durham, NC, that effectively communicates the everyday hardships of poverty. And then there is the community conversation software, Engage Omaha, that is really promising. But, the promise is not in the single tool, it’s in an emerging ecosystem of tools for planning and civic engagement, where there is real promise to change what it means to be in a city and a community.

I want to thank Eric for being our first interview of the 2012 and responding very thoughtfully. I’ll second the last notion about the importance of building an emerging ecosystem of tools for planning and civic engagement. This is the exact conversation we’re having with our partners in the Open Source Planning Tools group (which is more about open source, open data, and collaboration creating opportunities for such an ecosystem). You can read a little more about that here in a previous blog post.

PlaceMatters' Ken Synder using his smartphone as part of a Walkshop demonstration. We expect to see increasingly cool and robust ways to use smartphones in community decision-making in 2012.

Five trends I’m excited about for 2012:

1) Mobile Everything
It’ll all be about mobile in 2012. Smartphone sales continue to grow, and consumers are increasingly shifting from PC-based web activity to using smartphones. Because of the pervasiveness of mobile devices and the growing sophistication of both native and HTML-based apps, many of the tools that groups like PlaceMatters use will rely increasingly on versions that run on mobile devices. This will present some terrific opportunities, but it will also mean we need to be even more mindful of digital divide problems, ensuring that individuals without mobile devices and communities with lower mobile penetration are still able to fully participate and contribute.

2) Social Media Goes Even Bigger
Although Facebook use has already reached mind-boggling proportions (more than 800 million active users, according to Facebook), we expect that Facebook and other social media products will become even more universal and essential as engagement platforms, web portals, and discovery engines. Civic participation will increasingly rely directly on Facebook and social media and on tools that themselves are built on social media platforms.

3) All Politics is Hyperlocal
With apologies to Tip O’Neil, local just isn’t good enough anymore. As location-based apps like Foursquare continue their impressive growth (now at 15 million), as location-based services more generally continue to explode (Gartner projects the total user base of consumer location-based services to hit 1.4 billion by 2014), and with location-based functionality more deeply integrated in pervasive social media platforms like Facebook, we’ll increasingly see opportunities for community decision-making to tap into the local. Combine all of this with the growing use of smartphones, and we’ve got a recipe for community engagement tools that take full advantage of location data. The integration of near-field communication (NFC) capabilities in the next generation of smartphones, although largely limited to mobile commerce applications at this point, will only add to the range of opportunities, since this will add a substantial level of location precision.

4) Making Sense of Data
Although data visualization tools have become steadily more robust in recent years, the “big data” movement is likely to force big gains in the analytic and visualization tools that make these data useful.

5) Augmented Reality Gets Real
Last year we noted the continued evolution of augmented reality tools for mobile devices. As the augmented reality software becomes more sophisticated, expect to see more diverse and more interesting implementations, some of which may lend themselves to civic participation strategies. We are already seeing tools that provide information about buildings you are viewing through your mobile device camera and that allow you to superimpose information (e.g., kitchen appliances, furniture, clothing) to help you make purchasing decisions. We expect 2012 will be the year we see augmented reality tools become much more pervasive.

Honorable Mentions:

The Broadening of Broadband
Although broadband penetration in the United States is already around 80%, there are still sizable pockets with either low quality broadband or without any broadband at all. This is changing, however, and the availability of fat, stable broadband connections will continue to grow across the country. This should make it easier to conduct virtual public engagement meetings with real-time connectivity even in the more rural parts of the country.

Gestures Get Big
Gesture-based interfaces like the Xbox Kinect will grow in sophistication and market share, and don’t be surprised if they begin to integrate with mobile devices (including Gigaom’s prediction that: “A smaller version for the Xbox will arrive before the 2012 holiday season and Microsoft will demonstrate an integrated prototype that works with Windows Phone or a Windows 8 tablet”).

We're more optimistic about 2012 than some...

2012 could be the end of the world as we know it. Or not. Either way, some things definitely will be ending–for example, funding for the Sustainable Communities Initiative program hasn’t been renewed for 2013.  Despite the end of funding this year, or perhaps because of it, I’ll point again this year (as I did last year) to the SCI program as something I’m excited about for the coming year.  2012 is our chance to get as much information out of these processes as possible and apply lessons learned to future regional or local sustainability projects (in whatever way they are funded). The projects that were begun in 2010 are well underway, and are already providing a slew of lessons learned for the 2011 grantees and sustainability planning in general.  Grantees have been tackling problems like data acquisition, equitably engaging citizens, managing large groups of partner organizations, and working collaboratively with groups opposed to the SCI process.  PlaceMatters is working with several 2010 grantees, and will be starting work with two more 2011 grantees (the Denver Regional Council of Governments and Erie County, PA).  We also are Technical Advisors around equity and scenario planning for the full program, so we will be sharing our continued lessons learned throughout 2012.

I also want to highlight the increasing focus within community decision-making on equity–not only equitable engagement of citizens in decision-making, but also how spatial analysis can help us understand inequity in access to various resources like healthy food, education, and transportation. The tools that can help us do this analysis about equity are increasingly available at low or no cost, which helps all communities have access to better, clearer information to support robust decisions. In 2012, PlaceMatters’ Decision Lab will continue working on increasing the availability of low cost or free tools, while the Sustainable Solutions Group is focusing on applying a low-cost toolkit on the ground. We’re also teaming up with PolicyLink to provide equity Technical Assistance to SCI grantees, and we’re looking forward to learning more from their extensive expertise.

I’m interested in how the U.S. Open Government National Action Plan will shape best practices around public engagement.  The White House recently asked for input on “metrics that will allow agencies to assess progress toward the goal of becoming more participatory.” In other words, what should we measure to gauge success at engaging citizens in government. Number of people at a meeting? Diversity of those people? How many people vote?  We don’t yet know how much input they got (I’m guessing/hoping it was quite a bit) but I’ll be very interested to see how they synthesize this input and what they recommend.

Lastly, we are constantly improving our own touch-tables and have talked before about tech (like our Kinect) that reads gestures.  2012 might be the year we figure out a way to use this tech to create a lower cost option for times when gesture-reading makes sense for public engagement and decision-making.  In the meantime, just enjoy the coolness of Traveler’s Insurance’s ads at various airports.  They’ve been around for awhile, but they are still fun. Here’s MSP: MSP Traveler’s Ad.


Decision support systems that take massive data sets from multiple public and private entities and synthesize the data into valuable cross-discipline information for city and regional decision making is clearly becoming big business. Television, online, and magazine ads are populated with ads from IBM, Cisco, and Siemens, to name a few, that are promising to improve our communities with sophisticated data management, synthesis and analysis. This fall I was struck by a large nine-screen interactive wall created by Siemens prominently displayed at National Airport in DC. The interactive touch screens invited travelers to experiment with different strategies to improve a city’s mobility and energy efficiency. The Decision Labs at the University of Washington has been experimenting with applications first developed in the gaming industry to combine dynamic data with scenario planning and visualization. They are creating a decision-making framework for the Seattle region that can be tailored to a wide range of public and private users for the different stages of planning and development.

A nine-screen touchscreen display at Washington's National Airport.



On the low cost end, Google has improved the API for graphs in spreadsheets posted on Google Docs. You can now easily embed them into websites with nice hover features to view the details within the graph. More importantly, anytime new numbers are added to the cloud-based spreadsheet, the graphs get updated on your site. This opens the door for a wide range of interactive technologies where participants can push data to the site. PlaceMatters is using this functionality in the next iteration of the Omaha’s Comprehensive Energy Management Program website for tracking the progress on project indicators. Another company providing a more packaged deal for viewing data linked to maps is Geowise and their cool InstantAtlas indicator interface. For example, the Council of Community Services incorporated InstantAtlas into their website to display county and census data in a multi-county region in the Roanoke region of western Virginia.

Collaborative Problem Solving

This year PlaceMatters is collaborating with the Environmental Protection Agency to host a second round code-a-thon in pursuit of new and/or improved applications for data collection, analysis, and project implementation around sustainable development. Universities and software developers will join planners and practitioners to identify shortcomings with existing tools and highlight opportunities to create new tools that improve decision-making in communities. The first code-a-thon will take place in Washington, D.C. on January 22. PlaceMatters will take the lead in organizing the second code-a-thon to take place in Denver during summer 2012. This approach to collaborative tool development is in part inspired by past successes in the field of citizen science. Foldit is one such project that emphasizes the wisdom of crowds for certain types of problem solving. Scientists recruited volunteers to assist in the predicting where to expecting folding to occur in protein and RNA strands. It turns out this is the type of problem where collective brainpower excels. Untrained online gamers outperformed even the best computer programs.

Another great example of collaborative problem solving can be found at OpenIdeo, where an individual, group, or organization poses a challenge and various participants contribute to various stages of problem solving (including inspiration, concepting, and evaluation). Last month, one of the posted challenges was: “How might we restore vibrancy in cities and regions facing economic decline?” Nearly 900 ideas where submitted at the inspiration stage with twenty final concepts emerging to the top. This week the project will shift into evaluation of the winning concepts.

OpenIdeo's status screen on the 'How might we restore vibrancy in cities and regions' challenge.

Shareabouts is an open source app from OpenPlans that makes sharing ideas on a map simple. Applications like this will make 2012 a year of more usable apps and better data for community decision making.

This past year, we’ve seen the growth of community decision making tools around planning.  In my estimation, 2012 will continue this trend and bring more usable, integrated apps to the world of community decision making, giving planners and community leaders a broader and more efficient toolkit for engaging stakeholders in a decision-making process.

In the world of mapping, we’ll see more ways for people to easily contribute to maps about the places they live.  These apps have been around for a while, but now they’re getting easier to manage and deploy.  For example, our friends at OpenPlans have an emerging platform called Shareabouts (blog | git repo), that is open source and has a clean, usable interface.  MindMixer just added maps to their web-based community idea platform, and these guys have given a lot of thought to user-centered design.  These more usable apps will increase our ability to crowdsource relevant geographic data. The mapping interfaces of yore were pretty clunky, but this will be less the case in 2012.

In geographic decision making, we are ready to begin the conversation about how to build the next generation tools for communicating complex planning concepts with compelling visuals.  The development of the Decision Commons platform, the acquisition of Procedural and their flagship product CityEngine by Esri (see our previous blog on this), and the work of Paul Waddel and his team on Urban Vision all point to this.  We will also begin to figure out how to bring geographic decision making platforms (scenario planning) to people in their homes and on their smart phones.  Desktop tools have been the mainstay of running geographic analyses on plans, but I think we’ll begin to see simple tools that run in the cloud that can do things like site suitability analyses, demographic trends, and utility usage estimates based on planning assumptions.  2012 will not be the end of the desktop in this regard, but the beginning of something really cool and transformational.

The overarching trend for me, while less sexy than crowdsourced geographic data, compelling visuals, and cloud and mobile geographic apps, will be the increase in data availability, creative apps that use that data, and increased interoperability and usability among the many tools for community decision making.  At PlaceMatters we are looking forward to helping coordinate efforts to bring the benefits of open source and collaboration to community decision making.  This will show up as a webpage for tracking and understanding the various emerging and existing tools available to communities, the coordination of code-a-thons and other events, and the continued efforts around open source planning tools.  We look forward to the opportunities and challenges over the next year and invite anyone to join us in this conversation.  Let us know what you’re working on and never hesitate to drop us a line.

Augmented reality applications haven't yet reached their potential as a community decision-making tool, but they are maturing quickly.

Way back in January of 2011, I asked my colleagues here at PlaceMatters what they were most excited about for the new year. Here’s a quick look at how our expectations for 2011 tracked to what the year actually held:

Ken was excited about how the rumored addition of a camera on the new iPad would enable very cool augmented reality apps that might include, for example, information like bus routes, Walkscores, and zoning proposals. As it turns out, the iPad 2 rocks but the augmented reality technology still has a ways to go before it really plays a role in community decision-making. Nonetheless, augmented reality technology is advancing, including implementations by Bosch Home Appliances, CASA, and Wikitude Drive. Ken was also excited about integrating interactive touch tables into public meetings (which we’ve been doing a bunch), about emerging online community dashboards (which are more and more common now), and about the PlaceMatters Decision Lab, which in 2011 started to find its sea legs and is poised for some great work this year.

Jason pointed to mobile apps. He was excited about the growing smartphone adoption rate (Pew reported 35% mid-year) and technological advances in the apps themselves enabling low-cost and high-value engagement tools. And he was right in his prediction about the expanding use of game-based approaches to civic participation, as well, like Crowdsourced Moscow 2012 and those Jason described in a May blog post (“Can Games Save the World?“).

Jocelyn’s enthusiasm was more focused on federal policy and funding rather than technology, in particular the ramping up of the HUD Sustainable Communities Grants program. Forty-five regions and communities across the country begin implementing HUD grants, kicking off a fundamental shift in the way the federal government tackles regional planning. PlaceMatters has long championed the integration of transportation, land use, housing, and environmental considerations in regional planning, and to watch this integration begin occurring in so many places across the country was truly exciting. And in September, HUD announced the recipients of a second round of grant awards, including two that PlaceMatters will work on (Erie County, PA and the Denver Metro region).

Cooltown Studios describes Popularise, an unusual private sector approach to crowdsourcing development plans. I’m not convinced the “long tail” metaphor makes sense here, and it’s not clear how the developers will actually use the crowd-supplied preferences given all the other considerations that the developers have to take into account, but it’s an intriguing idea.

Museum 2.0 has a great list of lessons learned over the last year about designing for participation (and links to another great list on The Museum of the Future blog).

Gov 2.0 Watch points us to a fascinating online, multiplayer city-building game called “Crowdsourced Moscow 2012.” Although we haven’t had a chance to play the game, a few things stand out in the promo video: players adopt one of several roles, each with specific interests and strengths; making tradeoffs is embedded in the gameplay; background information relevant to the various choices players must make is part of the game experience; and the game is intended to help participants imagine a wide range of possible futures.

As Intellitics reports, the New York Times launched another crowdsourced budget cutting project, this time focusing on the planned $450 billion in Pentagon spending cuts over the next decade. The problem, common to budget calculators, is that it’s very difficult to determine the real impacts of any of the choices. While those impacts are often the subject of fierce debate (e.g., just how valuable is the V-22 Osprey or the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter), without this context it’s not clear how well participants understand the trade-offs between the options they are presented with.

Intellitics also reports on a new study exploring online deliberation design. The study evaluates a range of design considerations and the empirical evidence on their utility and effectiveness.

What did we miss?

The unlikely winner of the 2012 TED award: City 2.0. This marks the first time the award is going to an idea instead of an individual.

Intellitics explores an element of the White House e-participation effort, “best practices and metrics for public participation.”

Intellitics also mentions a “Social Cities of Tomorrow” conference focusing on ‘flattening’ civic engagement to be in neither “local bottom-up fashion, nor in institutionalised top-down fashion, but in peer-to-peer distributed ways.” We don’t really know what this means, but we’re game for exploring different paradigms for structuring civic participation in community decision-making.

EngagingCities mentions the same conference and asks some of the same questions and thinks through how some models for mobile apps might make sense in a civic participation context. One example: combining the SeeClickFix type of citizen reporting tool with a crowdsourcing and engagement model enabling people to collaborate and vote on each other’s ideas.

EngagingCities posted another blog on The Planning Van, a mobile community outreach program around urban planning and land use in southern California.

Museum 2.0 made us think, as usual, with a post on pop-up museums. Predictably, it got us thinking on ways to use adapt the pop-up museum model for community decision-making processes (much as a post on inquiry-based learning did back in October, another worthwhile post that I don’t think we ever linked to). More on that later.

And Digital Urban has a couple of helpful posts, one on a 3-D visualization tool for architects and urban planners called Lumion (that offers a free version!) and another on a beta of a map mashup tool called GEMMA.

Finally, Jason posted on the PlaceMatters blog about his recent open source planning tools meeting in Salt Lake City.

What did we miss?

One of the diagrams generated during the meeting in Salt Lake City

I recently returned from a gathering in Salt Lake convened by the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy and Sonoran Institute in concert with partners including us (PlaceMatters), OpenPlans, Fregonese Associates, the University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning (our gracious host), and Decision Commons. The agenda was ambitious but the conversations were deep and meaningful.

This convening (the Open Source Planning Tools Symposium) was just about 2 days of rolling up our sleeves and figuring out what it will take to move mature and emerging tools to greater use and refinement to tackle the greatest challenges of our day.  There were 36 people in attendance representing non-profits, regional and local government, scenario tool developers, private firms, and universities.

Part of the agenda included working on edits and recommendations to a Policy Focus Report on this topic that will be published right around the National APA conference by Lincoln with contributions from OpenPlans, Sonoran, PlaceMatters, Decision Commons and Fregonese among many others helping with edits and filling in gaps.  Additionally, this group talked about a range of topics to really advance this effort into the next year.  These topics included ways in which university curricula could prepare planners with scenario planning skills, data standards and interoperability among tools, sample work programs for regional support, indicators for social equity, and developing clearer approaches to linking planning needs to available tools.

The group was action oriented and very excited to keep the work going before another convening sometime next year.  We will continue to support that conversation using the Open Source Planning Tools Ecosystem (OSPT-Ecosystem) Google Group.  If you are interested in getting involved, feel free to join the group and peruse previous notes from our calls.  Materials will also be available online that came out of this meeting and we will want to engage a broad and deep network of people as we move this effort forward.

On a personal note, I am very excited about all of this and this has become my “extracurricular” work for now as we figure out how to build out the Decision Lab’s capacity to support open source planning tools and scenario planning practice across the country.  We will be building a basic page on the PlaceMatters’ website as a hopeful precursor to something bigger.  Check back for that soon.  This will be a place where you can learn about the ongoing activities and events related to Open Source Planning Tools and will eventually have a compendium of open source tools.

If you have a perspective on how open source can improve planning tools, let us know on Twitter or below in the comments.  More results and documents will follow, so check back on our blog or sign up on the Google group to stay up to date.

We love online technology here at PlaceMatters, but it doesn't replace offline, in-person engagement.

EngagingCities does a nice job making the case for the importance of merging online and offline engagement strategies.

inCommon links to an op-ed arguing that transparency and information, while essential, do not alone constitute public engagement. We’d argue, for similar reasons, that there’s more to accountability than just transparency.

James Fee, on his Spatially Adjusted, blog gushes on SketchUp and its new “Making Things Real” project. We share his enthusiasm . . . we find SketchUp to be a a powerful tool for visualizing land use and design options (that happens to be free, with thanks to Google).

All Points Blog reports that Flickr added “geofencing,” which creates a privacy option based on the location of a photo. Photos geotagged as being taken with geographic areas designated by users are only shared with specific, pre-selected people. Although this particular tool may not be very useful from a civic participation perspective, it is suggestive of functionality that Flickr might eventually add that could be.

Digital Urban reviewed Instant City Generator for Cinema 4D.

Digital Urban also posted a visualization of “urban complexity” data in London. We always enjoy the videos Digital Urban digs up, including this one. What we found most interesting about this one: the way the visualization highlights the corridors and satellite urban hubs around the central city.

Our friends at the National Charrette Institute posted a list of charrette-oriented resources on their blog.

Some food for thought on Gigaom: the continued evolution of QR codes and the emergence of NFC (near field communication) technology. This post focuses on the offerings of one specific startup called Social Passport, but it offers a sense of the potential for these technologies (especially NFC) in community decision-making, especially projects that involve community members actually out in the community through asset mapping, walkshops, or other participatory activities.

We stumbled across this dated but enjoyable video of Bobby McFerrin leading an “audience participation jam.” It’s an impressive call-and-response participation model that results in some very cool music. We aren’t sure you’d want to structure an entire community participation process on this model, but we can imagine some ways that this could work for pieces of a process.

Snurblog provides a useful overview of crowdsourcing in public participation processes.

PlaceMatters‘ Ken Snyder offers his take on the emerging field of geodesign on Planetizen (and reposted on the PlaceMatters blog).

What did we miss?

Governor Hickenlooper and other Colorado VIPs celebrate the Denver Metro region's $4.5 million HUD grant.

HUD just announced its latest round of Sustainable Communities grants, and PlaceMatters is thrilled to be part of two projects teams. One is a $1.8 million grant in Erie County, Pennsylvania and the other is right here in our hometown, a $4.5 million grant for the Denver Metro region. On both of these projects, PlaceMatters will focus on the public participation element, helping to design processes that bring all the interested constituencies to the table and make sure they are all able to contribute to the process and outcomes in a meaningful way. The issues are complicated and critically important, including economic vitality, environmental sustainability, and equity.

PlaceMatters CEO Ken Snyder attended today’s press conference for the Denver Metro project and snapped these photos (which include a bunch local luminaries, including DRCOG board chair (and Littleton City Councilor) Jim Taylor, Governor John Hickenlooper, Congresswoman Diana DeGette, HUD Regional Director (and former Denver City Councilor) Rick Garcia, Congressman Ed Perlmutter, and Senator Michael Bennet.

Here were a couple of my thoughts:

GeoDesign is about decisions connected to place. It’s about context sensitive process, perspective, action, and implementation – nature and nurture integrated. The interplay of the two words offers a framework and paradigm for decision making. Geo can be as simple as 2 coordinates pinpointing location or as complex as the geological, biological, social, economic, and built elements associated with a park, city block, neighborhood, town, region, or watershed. Because the word Geo is often associated with the earth and its natural components – natural systems are given appropriate prominence in GeoDesign decision making. Design adds intention to decisions. It can lead to art, economic strategies, building construction, environmental mediation, or conservation priorities to name a few. It can be a single event but is more often an iterative process of continuous improvement. The GeoDesign movement represents a broad range of professionals interested in making the world a better place with belief that location-based decision making provides a valuable framework tackling a wide range of challenges.

Others out there, reading this, active in the GeoDesign movement, what does the term mean to you?

Visit the website if you’re interested in learning more about the GeoDesign Summit hosted by ESRI.

This blog was first posted on Planetizen.

Read about us in this month's Planning Magazine, Metropolis, or ArcNews

This fall, PlaceMatters is in three publications!  We were part of the Metropolis Technology Issue on page 71 (online link to the article will be available next month).  You can read a brief on community outreach technologies including our own Brainstorm Anywhere.  A more in-depth article on High-Touch/High-Tech Charrettes is in this month’s Planning magazine on page 27 by Bill Lennertz of the National Charrette Institute (and a board member).  You’ll get a hardcopy in the mail if you are an APA member, and it is also available online here. Finally, a nice writeup of the work we did with Placeways in Cape Cod is in the Fall issue of ArcNews and is available here.  This is also a preview of a book chapter in an upcoming book on GeoDesign.

We are really excited to see our work and our partners’ work featured in the press.  Let us know what you think in the comments or on Twitter.

A crowdsourced 3D reconstruction of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City.

Digital Urban also shared a link to some amazing 3D video renderings of a massive complex of caves underneath homes in Nottingham. The surveyors used LIDAR technology to create the images.

Digital Urban – again! – also found a link to a promotional video on “articulated naturality web.” We share their skepticism about the claim that augmented reality is going to fundamentally reconfigure the world, we do think AR technology has a lot of potential as a tool for helping people visualize potential changes in a community: architecture or design alternatives for a building, alternative zoning schemes for a neighborhood, and the like. One example of a useful (if modest) augmented reality technology implementation developed for Bosch focuses on kitchen appliances.

The challenges of creating effective civic participation processes mirror the challenges of architecting participatory museum exhibits, which is why we often find the Museum 2.0 blog so worthwhile. Her recent post on the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History’s “Race Through Time” scavenger hunt is no exception: an innovative effort to engage folks that don’t end up participating through conventional engagement pipelines.

PEP-NET writes about a new civic dashboard in Birmingham (UK), noting the irony of the cost of building an IT infrastructure that enables widespread access to civic data.

The Case Foundation blog summarizes some lessons learned on conducting a virtual convening. Although it’s more oriented toward convention meetings done virtually, the lessons are largely applicable to community engagement efforts of all types.

EngagingCities blogs about a web-based crowdsourced tree inventory application that throws in estimates of the impact of inventoried trees on stormwater retention, carbon sequestration, and air quality.

EngagingCities also posted a short primer on some basic flavors of architectural visualization: photosimulation, 3D simulations like CommunityViz, and virtual reality environments like Second Life.

Noah Raford posted his completed PhD dissertation. We can’t claim to have read it, but it’s very on point – “Large Scale Participatory Futures Systems: a Comparative Study of Online Scenario Planning Approaches” – and look forward to browsing.

The Institute for Local Government is making available a tool for assessing the effectiveness of public engagement efforts (h/t to inCommon).

The Goodspeed Update contemplates the art and science of designing urban planning processes, focusing largely on Detroit.

Gov 2.0 Watch describes the CommunityPlanIt platform, a web-based social network intended to create deliberative discussion on school performance in Boston. PlaceMatters’ Jason Lally discussed this tool among others in a blog post earlier in the year on the use of game elements to enhance engagement.

What did we miss?

Among the potential challenges of architecting a good community engagement and decision-making process: participants who are intent on disrupting and sabotaging the process. inCommon reflects on an article in the California Planning & Development Report highlighting efforts by Tea Party activists to disrupt regional and statewide engagement around climate change and livability.

Engaging Cities has a solid post on participatory budgeting, and inCommon describes an ongoing participatory budgeting effort in New York City. We love the approach, but helping communicate context and trade-offs is critical.

Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space comments on an LA Times column about the “sorry state of public dialogue and civic engagement in the U.S.” His suggestion: “The solution to the corrosive spirit of U.S. politics is not more politics.” Instead, columnist Gregory Rodriguez, suggests we should focus on building empathy. “There’s certainly a crisis in civics today, but it’s the product of a profound disconnect between our political engagement and our moral engagement. Democracy is great, but citizens still need inspiration and empathy to make it flourish. If we really want to promote civics, maybe we should skip the town hall in favor of the concert hall.”

Open Source Planning writes about a new project called Civic Pheromones (formerly Ether). It’s an interesting idea focused on aggregating feeds from civic websites. We can’t help but wonder, though, if the real challenges are around curation and discovery. Just to use one pertinent example, there’s a huge difference between creating an aggregated stream of news and information about civic participation (easy) and creating a curated roundup of especially interesting blog posts (harder).

Engaging Cities describes a collaboration between the Emerson College Engagement Game Lab and the City of Lowell, Massachusetts: an interactive web-based game as a community input tool for a recent community master plan process. Their goals included – as you might expect – engaging a broader spectrum of community members. We’d find it really interesting to hear more about how well it actually worked. Did a wider range of community members participate? Were the online participants the same or different individuals from those that participated in the traditional in-person meetings, and if different did they actually add to the diversity of participants, as well?

National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation writes about a new PBS special on the “What’s Next California Deliberative Poll,” a documentary on the use of a deliberative polling process engaging 400 California residents to think through and make policy recommendations on a range of critical issues. Any approach to civic participation relying on shared learning and thoughtful discussion is worth some attention, and the deliberative polling process fits the bill.

Good Cities describes “Give a Minute,” a virtual suggestion box that’s expanding to New York City (building on their current operation in Chicago). They write: The coolest thing about Give a Minute is that it gives big-time politicos and heads of government agencies a chance to actually respond to the suggestions from city residents. So Mayor Mike can actually ‘endorse’ an idea that he likes and offer feedback that goes directly back to the person who suggested it. We think he’ll actually comment, too, since Bloomberg is totally behind the idea . . . ”

On the PlaceMatters blog, Jason highlights Esri’s call for geodesign case studies and celebrates a HUD grant to our friends at the Center for Neighborhood Technology (and their partner Manhattan Strategy Group) to develop a national housing and transportation affordability index. This project will build on their earlier H+T Affordability Index for 337 metropolitan regions across the U.S. Jason makes the case for making all of those data available through a public API.

What did we miss?

Digital Urban shows off a cool augmented reality implementation: incorporating 3-D content, overlaid on the iOS video feed, that can be manipulated through user interaction in real time.

EngagingCities thinks through hackathons and some of the opportunities and challenges of government app-creation efforts.

More from EngagingCities: three fun tools (games?) for community planning.

And another post from what is our favorite blog this week: EngagingCities describes an awesome art-heavy “collaborative mapping” process in Tokyo.

There’s a really nice Nick Grossman interview courtesy of the Open Plans blog.

A new study: federal agencies need to improve public participation standards.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab created an “Urbanology” web site. Answer a series of questions and the site will create your own ideal “future city” and compare it to other cities around the world. It’s an interesting idea but the execution isn’t very strong yet. For instance, the trade-offs – an essential element in any future scenarios type of tool – just don’t make a lot of sense.

As reported on a bunch of blogs over the past couple of weeks, the White House launched a new “We the People” initiative inviting citizens to submit e-petitions seeking federal action on presumably just about anything. The system allows anyone to create a petition; if at least 150 people sign the petition it becomes publicly searchable on the White House site. The White House committed to reviewing and responding to any petition receiving at least 5,000 signatures within 30 days. You’ll find some thoughtful comments on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation blog, and a couple of more skeptical reviews on Intellitics (“White House Petitions: The Need for Robust FAQs” and “White House Petitions: a Small Sample of Popular Feedback“).

We are technology enthusiasts at PlaceMatters, but we agree with A Planner’s Guide that technology needs to be used thoughtfully and in ways that are appropriate to the audience and the context.

A cool, sticker-based engagement project on Grist.

StreetsBlog reviews the book “Visualizing Density,” which includes photographs and descriptions of 250 neighborhoods across the country. The goal: “provide an impartial and comparative view of the many ways to design neighborhoods.” Actual photographs of actual neighborhoods aren’t what we usually think of when we talk about visualization tools, but it seems like one pretty obvious and useful approach.

What did we miss?

Plan Fort Collins had an extensive public engagement process to update the City’s land use and transportation plans, both of which were already recognized as excellent plans with a focus on sustainability.  The public engagement process included a large kickoff event and several smaller events that PlaceMatters helped to facilitate, using Brainstorm Anywhere and keypad polling, as well as other facilitation techniques and tools.

We are proud to have been a part of another award-winning project.  Personally, I look forward to seeing the results of Plan Fort Collins in the coming years whenever I am visiting home,  since Fort Collins is a Place that Matters very much to me.

Americans traditionally consider housing affordable if it costs 30 percent or less of their income. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, in contrast, offers the true cost of housing based on its location by measuring the transportation costs associated with place.

The H+T Affordability Index allows users to see the true cost of housing and transportation where they live in 337 different regions.

This is an exciting announcement for many tackling this issue on a planning level, not to mention for personal decision-making, business decision-making and policy making.  Our hope at PlaceMatters is that the data that comes out of this 2 year study is made available through an API.  It looks like that’s in the works for Abogo, another tool by CNT built on top of the H+T data and centered more around individual decision making.  By making this data easily consumable on the web through a service architecture, people could develop all sorts of new tools on top of it.  Imagine a scenario planning tool (on the web or desktop) that let you populate the data in your analysis of a neighborhood or region.  And I’m not talking about shapefiles or zipped downloads (although that would be great too).  I’m talking about a truly accessible API that allows mashups in the same way that Google’s APIs have inspired hundreds of innovations.

I’d even love to host an H+T hackathon someday where we get a bunch of programmers, developers, and UI designers in a room and dream up innovative uses for the data.  What about a real estate search with H+T data embedded in the results?  Or a site that invites you to track your actual transportation and housing costs against the average with “rewards” or bragging rights for beating the region?  If the data is open, these are all real possibilities that could be designed not just by contractors but people with passion and interest.   We’ll be tracking this and hope to report that someday this data will be accessible so the benefits can multiply and really help individuals, communities and regions understand the true costs of their decisions.

How would you use this data?

Esri is actively seeking GeoDesign case studies for possible publication. The objective is to demonstrate GeoDesign principles in practice as a way to communicate these concepts to folks who are interested in learning more about GeoDesign. The cases need to be actual cases, not theoretical demonstrations. Cases may qualify for use in a GeoDesign Case Study book (currently being written), or they may be used as GeoDesign stories for ArcNews.

The stipulation is that the GeoDesign case studies involve some aspect of:

• ArcGIS technology
• design in geographic space
• identification of issues
• process evaluation and analysis
• impact simulations
• fast iteration
• alternative scenario generation and comparison
• decision making

Additionally, the case study could involve but are not restricted to demonstrating:

• Sketching
• Workflow integration
• Collaboration
• 3D and 4D visualization
• Holism and interdependency
• Science- and value-based decision making

All materials (e.g., written contributions, images, photos, maps, models, data) must allow permission for use in publication. If you are interested in sharing your GeoDesign solutions or have questions, please contact Shannon McElvaney at smcelvaney@esri.com.

Thank you in advance for your interest!

The South Lawn.

Presenting at the White House (photo by J. Urdaneta/Urdaneta Photography).

The short version of our White House story: inner ring suburbs have to be a central part of the conversation about sustainability in metro regions.

The longer version . . .

PlaceMatters had an unusual and exciting opportunity last month to spend a day at the White House, presenting on a panel during the Forum on First Suburbs, Inclusion, Sustainability, and Economic Growth. During my presentation, I offered three observations about metropolitan policy and the challenges faced by inner ring suburbs. First, I pointed out that the policy discussions about metropolitan areas sometimes focus heavily on the urban core, and sometimes on the outer ring suburbs, but rarely focus on the unique challenges and opportunities of inner ring suburbs. Second, I noted that sustainability policy discussions are often sidetracked by fiercely ideological conversations, and that finding less charged ways of talking about these issues will help us tackle those conversations. Finally, I highlighted the difficulties but great promise of regional collaboration, as exemplified by our regional collaborations here in the Denver Metro area. Imperfect, to be sure, but important and powerful nonetheless.

What are the implications of these observations? I noted three:

1) Federal policy matters. Federal transportation policy in the last century enabled and encouraged traditional suburban land use patterns. The decisions that the White House and Congress make now will continue to shape those patterns well into the future.

2) The White House and Congress have a wealth of options for promoting stronger metropolitan regions. Through policy, funding, and legislative efforts they can support a range of helpful goals: encouraging more compact growth, investment in transit, diversity in housing options, and access to jobs among them.

3) If we are respectful of the potential ideological differences and mindful of the challenges of regional thinking, there is a substantial intersection between the constituencies focused on the challenges of metropolitan region vitality and the challenges of environmental sustainability, housing diversity, social equity, and job creation.

Inner ring suburbs offer a potpourri of contradictions. They are increasingly diverse (ethnically and economically), they are easy to bypass in building out regional transit systems but are often cheaper to accommodate because of their proximity to the inner core, they face declining property values yet they provide consideration redevelopment potential.

In other words, the development of inner ring suburbs often epitomized a suburban sprawl land use paradigm, yet they now can offer exceptional opportunities to integrate smart growth with a thoughtful vision around housing, jobs, and sustainability. Indeed, given their significance in terms of area and population, any metropolitan strategy that overlooks the unique challenges and opportunities of inner ring suburbs is likely to fail.

Rob Goodspeed, also reflecting on the new IBM tool, posted some ruminations on the use and limitations of big models for city decision-making.

Although working from a different prompt, Ethan Zuckerman earlier in the summer described an Adam Greenfield (of UrbanScale) presentation on the same set of issues. It’s worth a read.

Gov 2.0 Watch discusses how the field of UX (user experience) might apply to government agencies and staff. They link to an interesting article in UX Magazine outlining a way of thinking about the Gov 2.0 – UX problem. We share the sentiment. The best-run local governments, in our experience, tend to be very good at managing infrastructure, financial management and long-term financial planning, and providing high-quality community services. Even the best, however, don’t tend to understand design or UX, and the Gov 2.0 community would do well to focus some energy on helping government folks redesign points of interaction with UX in mind.

MIT’s Technology Review has a nice video interview with Metaio showing off the state and potential of their augmented reality applications. We’ve noted before how much potential AR applications have for community planning and engagement. It may be a while before we see these tools hit their stride, but they offer a lot.

inCommon writes about an engagement process with some unusual elements, including a “Deliberative Theater” performance.

inCommon also notes that a participatory budgeting process seems to have helped the City of Chesapeake, Virginia, maintain strong credit ratings.

The National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation announced the launch of their new “Idea Incubator.”

TheCityFix blogs about crowdsourcing, especially in the context of community services like transit.

On the PlaceMatters blog, you’ll find posts about Angry Birds and community decision-making, mapping the community decision process, improving the connections between the community decision-making world and folks who focus on other types of community engagement (e.g., museums, architects, social networking experts), and sharing the lessons from our experience with the Creating Resilient Communities hazard mitigation project in South Carolina.

What did we miss?