Denver's Beautiful Streets is an experiment in pairwise crowdsourced preferences.

At PlaceMatters, we’ve been looking for ways to test new platforms for civic engagement that use all the benefits of online technology to explore physical places and what we love about them (read some more about this concept as it relates to Planning 3.0).  At APA 2012, I was on a panel on data literacy with Frank Hebbert of OpenPlans when he showed off a project called Beautiful Streets.  I was instantly enamored with the simplicity and beauty of being able to do quick pairwise comparisons using Google Street View.  We saw an opportunity to take an experiment done in Philadelphia and apply it in Denver ahead of our summer hackathonto generate a test case for simple engagement methods and generate a large amount of data.

In partnership with OpenPlans, we are proud to announce Denver’s Beautiful Streets.  Over the next couple of months we will be asking the city to answer the basic question: which street is more beautiful?  We hope to generate a large database of crowdsourced data on preferences for streets throughout the city.  The choices have been randomly generated across the city.  This dataset will then be available for coders and designers at our summer hackathon to visualize and interpret using other available datasets in the region.  We are very excited about this because it will help us test an interface that could be used in the future on specific planning and civic engagement processes here in the region and across the country.  All of the data will be transparent and even the source code is available as an open source project on GitHub, and if you want to get an idea of some next steps, check out the public issue tracker.

Please join us in this experiment by participating and getting the word out to your friends and colleagues.  Share your experience on your own blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.  We know there are and will be flaws, but with your help we can kick the tires and squash some bugs to make this an even more useful platform for civic engagement.  Let us know what you think in the comments below and on twitter with hashtag #beautifulst.  Also, read more about the original genesis of this project as a Valentine’s Day gift to the city of Philadelphia.  Looking forward to your participation and feedback!

P.S.  Additional specific credit to Aaron Ogle (@atogle) and Mjumbe Poe (@mjumbewu), and the Civic Works team at OpenPlans!

Image: Co-Design Group

About three years ago, prior to entering UBC’s School of Community and Regional Planning, I had a chance to attend a demonstration of the co-design method pioneered by architect Stanley King. This article will give a brief rundown of the major activities involved in a co-design process, This will be followed by some links to other resources about co-design, examples of projects that have used the co-design method, and how King is moving forward with integrating co-design methods into current work.

What is Co-Design?

Broadly speaking, co-design brings members of the public together with artist-facilitators to dialogue and collaboratively produce a community vision. These visions can guide and inform planning and design activities as a project unfolds. Stanley King has been using this method with communities since 1971 through The Co-Design Group, an informal association of architects, designers and researchers based in western Canada.

The bulk of these activities occur during an event commonly known as a co-design workshop (although, depending of course on the circumstances of the project, this may be paired with other activities such as an ideas fair). Members of the public are invited to the workshop – often, a day-long event. As with many participatory activities, broad representation — by age, background, activity — is key, although groups within the broader community may need special consideration.

As with all dialogues and participatory activities, setting expectations and boundaries is key. As explained in the report of the use of co-design in Vancouver’s Woodwards Project:

Participants were asked to observe 3 rules during the visioning: 1. Speak for yourself – say “I” not “We”- let others speak for themselves. 2. Avoid negative criticism – if you don’t like an idea suggest your alternative. 3. Don’t attempt solutions – think of the life of the place, consider possibilities.

Co-design Agenda

A co-design workshop often starts with a Site visit and Walkabout, allowing the facilitators and members of the community to jointly learn or re-discovering salient features of the site, like lighting, topography or existing infrastructure.

With the atmosphere of the space fresh in everyone’s mind, the public is asked to brainstorm an Activity Timeline. As a group, the public discusses what kinds of activities they envision taking place in the space over the course of a day. I sometimes refer to this as, “A Day In the Life.” This brainstorming serves as an opportunity for people to give voice, in a large-group setting, to how a place would fit into their daily lives.

Next comes what is referred to as the Image Creation phase, and the heart of the co-design experience. The artist facilitators take what is said in the brainstorm and categorize it into general guiding themes that they will be focusing on for their drawing. Members of the public are then broken up into smaller groups and assigned to work with the artist-faclitators on those themes. The artists then begin to sketch an image of the place, in close discussion with their group as they discuss specifics. It can often result in a dialogue process rooted in the constructive: what should be here? What will the people here be doing, and how will they be doing it? (Artists, King notes, cannot draw absences — at best they can draw two desired things co-existing.)

Once all the groups have completed their images, the specific elements that have been included and highlighted in the image are listed. The images are displayed and the larger group is invited to view all the images produced and to express their preferences for the qualities and features in the images, as well as their suggestions for what might make them work or not work in the particular place.

Co-Design in Action

• This site from the City of Vancouver has three co-design reports for the Woodward’s Project in Vancouver, and can give you a good idea of the output of a co-design process as well as the way a co-design workshop might be coordinated with other community engagement activities.
• I was fortunate to get to see King and the artist facilitators at work as part of my course work focused on a community visioning process for Britannia Community Centre in Vancouver. See him speaking about co-design in this video on the Britannia community engagement process. (Disclaimer: I shot and edited this along with two colleagues in my Multimedia for Planning Engagement class in 2010, and also participated as a student in the urban design class.)
• This video is from Stanley King’s work on the Little Mountain Project. It has been edited together by a local community group and provides an overview of the workshop and shows some of the resulting images.
• My blog post of a co-design demonstration from 2009 also contains some images of the consensus process where people vote on the features in the images.
• Here is a photoset of images from an adaptation of the co-design workshop adapted for the City of Vancouver’s Transportation 2040 transportation plan update public consultation activity.
• See more about the co-design method in this 1973 film called Chairs For Lovers. (Note: Dial up the National Film Board nostalgia.)

Co-Design Moving Forward

Stanley King and his colleague Susan Ng Cheung are applying their experiences with co-design to better engaging youth in planning activities. They recently released a book called Youth Manual for Sustainable Design:

Together they created a Co-Design Youth Program to help youth participate in the ecological design of the spaces they will ultimately inherit.  Recently, the program has enabled youth to participate in school garden design, architectural design of a waterfront and also in transportation planning. Currently, Stanley and Susan are researching the connection between co-design and the ecological interactions of communities.

As you can tell, I’m a big fan of the method, because I think people inhabit a different frame of mind when they are in engaged in constructive processes of making things together in addition to the usual talking, discussing and deliberating.

It’s been pointed out to me that it may be challenging to some for relegating planners in a seemingly passive role, of recording and notetaking the public’s interests rather than more actively applying planning skill. I would respond that by hypothesizing that an awful lot happens in those conversations while the artist-facilitator is drawing. Furthermore, I’d be interested to see what role the images created in the process might have in identifying community assets for implementing what is brainstormed, and coordinating that with more formal activities involving developers, architects, designers and planners.

This post was contributed by Karen Fung, a researcher from Vancouver, Canada, examining the potential of social media and technology tools for expanding participation in planning processes. She advocates for user-centric approaches to placemaking and technology. She occasionally speaks on the impact of open government and open data on urban planning and she maintains the blog countably infinite.

“Unemployment is down!”
“Imports are up!”
“The price of coffee skyrocketed last month!”

News headlines scream data points at us each day assuming we understand their meaning, source, and context. Although we see the same greatest hits of data each month (unemployment rate, inflation, job openings, GDP, imports/exports, etc.), many people do not realize much of this data is available not just at a federal and state level, but is available for their town. The sheer quantity is sure to induce information overload and it takes great care to find exactly the right points. Local and comparison data from other cities, states, or a federal average can and should be used in community decision-making, but it is a bit of a challenge wrangling data without misleading people. Graphs provide enormous rhetorical power and should keep near the question at hand. Given the terabytes of possible data series we can explore, today we will explore some ways to frame and contextualize one metric: unemployment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks data regarding employment, prices, and consumer spending habits and they have well over 10,000 data series ranging from standard headline numbers to narrow measures like the prices of intercity bus and trains. Most of their major data sources contain federal, state, regional, and city/metro sub-series which can be used to provide endless curation opportunities. Using their unemployment data alone we can produce a number of discussions.

Consider the dramatic contrast of the unemployment rates of California and North Dakota. North Dakota has an unemployment rate of 3.1% while California clocks in at 10.9%. Why? Theories range from North Dakota’s use of a state bank to their extensive oil reserves. The answer, to keep correlation from causation, does not matter as much as the framing of the visual question. Seeing such a great disparity in North Dakota prompts a lot of compelling civic questions and can be easily used to start a discussion, although this is still a narrow context. In order to better inform the unemployment discussion, we need more numbers—some of which are equally dramatic.

The newspaper headline unemployment rate and the “real” one are often pretty far apart. The headline rate measures people actively participating in the unemployment system (i.e. on benefits, etc.), but not people who have dropped out of the formal economy or work less than they’d like. The broadest unemployment rate, the U-6 or “Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons” measures all people on the employment fringes and is over 14% compared to the narrowest measure at 8.2%. Now we have some sense of measurement disparities, but these numbers do not tell the whole story.

One must look at the Labor Force Participation Rate and the Civilian Employment-Population Ratio as well. These two figures tell you the rate that people are participating in the economy. If the unemployment rate drops and these measures drop, then one of three things probably contributed: a whole lot of people retired, went to prison, or dropped out of the labor force. Dropping out means their unemployment insurance ran out and they are no longer part of the 8.2%, but if they’re still looking for jobs they’re part of the 14%. When trying to make sense of unemployment’s ups and downs and how they might affect your town, keep these in mind to make better decisions.

Bringing this closer to PlaceMatters, following is some data about Denver which we will unpack in a minute. Local unemployment has more lag than national numbers. Denver’s unemployment rate was 9.2% as of January, which is .9% higher than January’s national average. Payroll in Denver grew from 1990-2000, but has been essentially flat since then though the unemployment rate changed drastically. Third, the percentage of government employees in Denver has been stable at about 14% since at least 1990.

From these figures we gain some interesting insight. First and foremost, the unemployment in Denver should be addressed, as it is well above average. But we would be remiss to blame it on the crash of 2008. Why? Payroll in Denver has not substantially changed in more than ten years. How very odd—who are these unemployed people? The city’s population has expanded dramatically since 1990. There is a serious discussion to be had in Denver since people keep coming, aren’t getting jobs, and haven’t been for a decade.

As a final example, the last graph on this page shows the percentage of people working for the government in Denver. In an age where claims about “bloated” government size, we can show with some quick calculations that these arguments are untrue (in Denver). Taking some time to dig into employment statistics can help to track where your city has been, where it is, and where it is going.

By adding context at a federal, state, and/or local level we can gain greater understanding and start asking better questions—and framing the questions we do ask—with data. As seen when comparing the two big unemployment measures and their supporting participation rates, it takes more than one number, carefully curated, to successfully and fairly employ data graphs. Using these and other contextualized figures, we can help take government data out of the headlines and into our civic discussions where they belong.

For more information, see also:

• Data360’s Employment Report
• Data360’s Monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover (JOLTS) Report

This post was contributed by Daniel Saniski, the managing editor at Data360.org and an associate consultant at Webster Pacific LLC. He catalogs, writes news about government data, and guides site development for Data360 and provides business intelligence and information systems design services at Webster Pacific LLC.

Planning 3.0

What? Why? We were just getting used to 2.0?  Well Google Chrome is on version 18 and Firefox is trying to catch up at 12, and we’re only on 2?  All false analogies aside, let me explain myself.  A lot of the 2.0 monikers imply the application of web and mobile, networked technologies to a particular subject or field.  3.0, at least in my basic conceit, is about convergence and emergence.  It’s not so much a paradigm shift as a way of thinking about things already happening.  Now 3.0 plays out differently in different subject areas, but in the planning field we have 2 very basic areas converging: the built and the virtual environments.  Instead of one influencing another, they both operate in mutually reinforcing ways.  One very simple illustration of this concept is Chris Harrison’s map of the Internet, which reminds us that this virtual network is still tied to geographic location.

Chris Harrison produced this visualization of global internet connections based on data from the Dimes project. (c) Chris Harrison

But this isn’t just about the infrastructure and where it’s situated in place and subsequently who has access and who doesn’t (although that is important), it’s about the sometimes awkward ballet being played out between the built and virtual environments where one informs the development of another.  For example the geographic cluster of Silicon Valley generating billions of dollars in global, online businesses, which have changed supply chains and skillset needs, which have affected the global distribution of labor, which produce our iPhones, which allow us to check in to physical places in the cities more of us are moving to because…my brain could spin in circles on this one forever.  Each of these relationships has a set of benefits and consequences that the planning profession ought to consider.

So Planning 3.0 is not about something new.  Arguably, it’s something that’s been happening since we started drawing on cave walls (these were very asynchronous ways of communicating, but they’re still around).  We see the echoes of this idea today in everything from Richard Florida’s creative class to the work being done by MIT on WikiCity (among many projects from the Senseable City Lab).  We also see it in the recounting of the impact of timekeeping monks and later the watch on the “synchronous city” in Technics and Civilization (order here or read more about it here) by Lewis Mumford.  Those of you that follow me on twitter may have just noticed something, if not, follow me @synchronouscity.  What’s exciting (or scary) now is that we see these relationships among the built environment and the virtual at a faster pace and at incredible scales.  And this has ramifications for those of us on the grid as well as those of us off.

An End to False Dichotomies

So where am I going with this?  We set up a lot of false dichotomies, one of which I have become increasingly annoyed with: technology: good or bad?  To me that’s akin to the topic food: good or bad?  I understand the point of that conversation, but we always end up talking about the nuance of technology anyway and coming to about the same conclusion: it depends on what you’re talking about.  This food is better to eat with a fork, this one with a spoon.  Well then let’s talk about something else.  In a convergence and emergence worldview we can start talking about the ethics of the use of social media in civic decision-making (there’s one to chew on) OR how how does government need to change in a world where anyone can hold up the bullhorn, or does it OR will we ever be able to sit and breathe again?

The primary reason I am most excited by this way of thinking about planning’s future is that the conversations get more interesting and we get to peel back layers.  It leads to questions that may help us design better interfaces (physical and virtual) for people to interact with civic decision-making and in turn cities that respond better to the needs of her residents.  It lets us get at the fundamental issues of technology use among different groups and design solutions that are appropriate to context, place and need.  Ultimately, rather than being passive observers of this phenomenon, we, in the planning profession, begin to put theories, words and actions to being progressive problem solvers with ever better tools and perspectives.  Planning 2.0 is so 2005, let’s move the conversation forward (sheesh, I know, no patience).

The Shoulders of Giants

These thoughts have been brought to you by many thinkers, far smarter than I.  If you don’t know these references, check them out:

Emergence: the interconnected lives of ants, brains, cities and software by Steven Johnson (the book that had the most influence on my perspectives on planning)

City of Bits, e-Topia, and Me++ by William Mitchell

Technics and Civilization and The City in History by Lewis Mumford

Splintering Urbanism by Steven Graham and Simon Marvin (actually a textbook from my Digital City class years ago at Penn State. Very in depth exploration of the impacts of globalization and technology – among other topics – on urbanism)

So what do you think?

Photo Credit: Matt Santomarco via Compfight

Just posted an appeal for your ideas about apps we can build in Denver on local, regional and national data to support economic vitality and sustainable communities.  Just to get the ideas floating, think of some of these questions:

• What app would make it easier for you to engage in local government and decision making?
• What app would help you connect to your neighbors and neighborhood organizations?
• What app would help you make important decisions about where to live in Denver?
• What app would help you start a business in a transit accessible neighborhood?
• What app would allow you to track your own carbon footprint?
• What else?

Head on over to Denver Code For Communities and submit your ideas there.

Amy Halverson photo (Flickr).

Her business card says Candy likes to make cities more comfortable for people. Many of her projects close the gap between the public and the often almost intangible stuff that surrounds them. Her work connects people and asks for their contribution. Here’re three of her projects I’m sure many of you will appreciate:

Photo by Candy Chang.

What to do with abandoned buildings? There’re hundreds of them in every city (especially once you start looking for them). For one specific building, the Polaris Building in Fairbanks, people were asked just that question. Plus, they were asked to tell their stories about the building. There’s also a website attached that asks for contributions in a refreshingly simple way. The number of contributions is overwhelming and I’m sure this will influence the future of the building.

Photo by Jason McDermott (Flickr).

This project also takes on vacated buildings with the help of the public. People can leave special stickers on empty storefronts to express their wishes for specific businesses or services. Policy makers can use the input to make policy (obviously), or even better: entrepreneurs can find a place to start their business. The website collects examples of people’s wishes.

Ed Merritt photo (Flickr).

Another similar project, but aimed much more at the public themselves, Before I Die tries to get people to focus on the things that are important to them. Originally it was installed on an abandoned house in New Orleans. Also, you can buy one of the chalkboards in limited edition to wake up everyday remembering you need to do what you love.

I’ve been using the Before I Die project in workshops ever since I discovered it to illustrate some key characteristics of good participatory design: it’s simple, accessible and there’s an urgency in the project.

The urgency is the most obvious: life’s short and there’s so much we’re postponing that we might miss out on the things we really want. Urgency doesn’t have to involve death, though (a topic you might want to avoid in participatory design), as I wish this was shows. Urgency compels people to participate.

Before I die is accessible both in the choice of location (really public) as in the make up of the project: everybody can answer the question. Accessibility is important in many ways, both physical and “psychological”. Accessibility allows all people to participate.

And finally, simplicity. All of Candy Chang’s work is simple in the way that it uses simple materials and tools (there’s no need for a manual) and addresses simple issues (no need for inside knowledge or long studies). Simplicity facilitates people in their choice to participate.

Urgency, accessibility and simplicity are just three take aways from Candy Chang’s amazing work. Another one (bonus!) is that participation is open and fun. It’s interesting to discover what your friends would like to do before they die. Certainly, there’s more to discover in her work. Be sure to check out her website to find more great projects.

This post was contributed by Jasper Visser, a cultural innovator and cofounder of Inspired by Coffee, an agency for digital strategy and innovation. He helps cultural organisations discover new ways to reach and engage people with a special focus on new media, technology and innovative business models. Jasper regularly speaks internationally about cultural innovation, gives workshops and keeps the blog themuseumofthefuture.com.

The What's Next California "Deliberative Democracy" project resulted in a PBS documentary.

What’s Next California charts a new path. The first statewide Deliberative Poll® in California demonstrates how the people can take control of the agenda for direct democracy. If it succeeds in this pilot project in charting a path to a successful initiative, it should be institutionalized. The basic idea is simple.  A scientific random sample of registered voters is surveyed about an extensive agenda of possible reforms. The sample is then recruited to travel to a single place for a long weekend of intensive deliberations, evaluating competing proposals for a ballot measure based on carefully balanced and vetted information materials about the competing proposals. The sample should be representative in demographics and attitudes of the entire electorate. Their deliberations consist in small group discussions and then questions from the small groups directed to competing experts in plenary sessions. The entire process is supervised by a non-partisan advisory group who certify the balance and accuracy of the materials detailing the proposals and the balance of the expert panels who respond to the public’s questions. This process was conducted early this summer by a coalition of eight organizations with broadcast around the state of a PBS Newshour documentary about the process and its results. An excellent scientific sample of more than 400 registered voters attended the weekend. The whole state was, in effect, placed in one room to deliberate about priorities for fixing the state. The participants, who began as a representative microcosm, became more knowledgeable and changed their views. Some of the 30 proposals they considered went up significantly with deliberation, some went down.

Most importantly, six of the proposals that started high and went even higher with deliberation have been crafted into a ballot measure, the California Governance and Accountability Act, which is going on the ballot now. This initiative brings transparency and accountability to the state government’s budget process and helps bring local control of some services provided at the local level.

The six proposals all started with majority support and went significantly higher with a minimum of 72% support after deliberation. The Deliberative Poll revealed how and why these proposals speak to the people’s priorities. The deliberations of the microcosm enable the people to take ownership of an agenda setting process for the votes of everyone else.
In Ancient Athens there was an institution chosen by lottery or random sampling, the Council of 500, that deliberated and set the agenda for what everyone would vote on in the Assembly. In a similar way, the Deliberative Poll has set an agenda for what everyone will vote on in a ballot proposition in 2012. In Athenian democracy, this was a regular institutionalized occurrence. If this were institutionalized in California, it would not only speak to very ancient democratic values, it would also live up to the aspiration of the Progressives, a century ago, to empower the people to determine what they vote on. Is this a practical possibility in a mega state like California?

What’s Next California and the resulting ballot proposition is a pilot of this idea. Institutionalizing it would face a series of challenges that all seem eminently practical but that all need careful thought. Where do the proposals come from that the people choose between? How, if at all, are they vetted before the people deliberate? How are factual materials to explain background on the issues developed? How are experts chosen who can respond to questions from the sample? How are the results of the Deliberative Poll-like process connected to the wording or revision of the ballot proposition? What threshold of support would qualify a measure to go on the ballot? Would measures go directly on the ballot or could they go on the ballot with a lower signature threshold after this process? All of these issues merit public debate and careful institutional design. Some of them might be made the subject of another Deliberative Poll. But all of them were faced informally by the pilot phase. And many issues, such as information materials have to be faced anyway by ballot propositions.

Deliberative Polls in various contexts around the world show that the people are, collectively very smart, and fully capable of dealing with complex public issues when they think their voice matters. The challenge for reviving California’s direct democracy is to design institutions where the collective intelligence of the public can be harnessed to initiate the people’s agenda.

This post was contributed by James Fishkin, is a professor Communication and Political Science at Stanford University and the director of Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy.

A new “collective online urban planning platform” is hitting the streets. Grist describes Neighborland, the latest in a growing ecosystem of promising tools for enabling community members to collect and organize ideas (with a hat tip to the Guggenheim/BMW LAB blog). The project grew out of Candy Chang’s amazing (but simple) participatory art installations in New Orleans (and now elsewhere), and Candy Chang posts about Neighborland on her blog as well. If you don’t know Candy Chang, well, you probably should.

Museum of the Future draws a useful distinction between outreach (communicating with people unknown to you and connecting them to your institution) and engagement (converting people from passersby to enthusiasts). Outreach can lead to engagement, but it’s a mistake to conflate them. Gov 2.0 Watch cites a TechPresident story exploring at a similar distinction between feedback and engagement.

EngagingCities argues, through two case studies, for a “blend of moderate technology venturing (in terms of scale), the readiness to look abroad for inspiration and solutions, and … deep engagement with their citizens throughout the process.”

EngagingCities also writes about Denver’s new participatory budgeting process and tool (Delivering Denver’s Future). It looks promising, and the team behind it is a capable group (we are fans of Urban Interactive Studio), but we’re also looking forward to the next generation of participatory budget tools that help constituents better understand the on-the-ground implications of the various budget options. It’s one thing to give constituents budget allocation options, which is what most participatory budget tools do, but it would be quite another if the users understood how levels of service or the quality of life in their community would actually be impacted by those various options.

Participatory budgeting is getting plenty of attention these days, including a New York Times article several weeks ago providing a detailed account of a participatory budgeting project covering four City Council districts in New York and and an Intellitics post mapping participatory budgeting projects around the world.

The concept, specs, and implications of Google Glasses are slowly working their way through the pundit/observer/technologist-o-sphere. We share Digital Urban’s sentiment: “With technology it always seems like one is waiting for the next big thing, but this takes it to another level….”

The Denver Post covered the Box City event here in Denver, sponsored by the American Institute of Architects Colorado, enabling 200 kids to design and build a mock city (another h/t to BMW Guggenheim LAB).

Finally, Planetizen writes, now that everyone is back home from the American Planning Association conference in Los Angeles, about the “winds of change” blowing through the APA.

What did we miss?

Download the report "Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools" from the Lincoln website.

Having come off of a really great APA 2012 in Los Angeles, I’m very excited about the energy and momentum building for some of the topics I’ve devoted a lot of my professional and personal energy to.  One of my main roles at PlaceMatters is to open up the tools available in planning by supporting and building a community around tool development, use and experimentation.

While we’ll still build and experiment with tools at PlaceMatters in our on the ground work, we are turning things inside-out here and making tool development an exploratory and collaborative process as much as we can.  We’ve started this through our involvement with the Open Source Planning Tools group, which has regular monthly calls and, so far, 2 annual workshops [join our discussion on Google Groups] supported by a joint partnership of the Lincoln Institute and Sonoran Institute.  While I am excited about the tools we can build together as a community, my ultimate passion lies in the possibility for paradigm shifts and transformations about how we think of planning and the mechanisms we have for implementation.  The scenario tools that we want to open access to are a means and not just an end for me.

You can see a little preview of where all this is heading in the Lincoln Policy Focus Report Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools [download] [and read more about the report here, here and here].  The final recommendation addresses “advancing new concepts to address future challenges.”  Maybe a bit vague and open ended at this point, but this is where the exciting transformations could occur if we move this conversation.  This recommendation speaks to the conundrum we have if we are successful at making scenario planning tools more adaptive and flexible and yet have static implementation mechanisms like zoning and subdivision ordinances that do not reflect emerging realities captured in our explorations of many possible futures.  Tools and ways of thinking are now catching up to the pace of change in our dynamic world.  We stand at a milestone in a conversation that arguably traces back to Christopher Alexander and early systems thinking, where technology, research and policy can converge to give us a regulatory system that is more adaptive and responsive to the needs and challenges of modern cities [see also: earlier blog post on a Pattern Language].

We haven’t formalized this discussion yet, but you can track it at ScenarioPlanningTools.org.  Ray Quay, who has many more intelligent insights into this topic, will help us shepherd this conversation into something more robust over the coming years and I’ll be prodding us along as much as I can in my role at PlaceMatters.  This is an important and exciting conversation to have and I think it will bring a number of folks together from many fields and interests.  It will also bring about a number of challenges we’ll have to figure out together as a community and profession like:

1. What does a planning education look like in the future?
2. What does the planning profession look like in the future? How should it change?  What are the unwavering core skills of the profession?
3. What’s the right amount of flexibility in planning regulations (for example, some of the inflexibility is by design to save us from externalities of rapid and overwhelming development; what inflexibility can we cede if we have better systems for tracking change?)
4. What are the challenges in fitting this into a democratic, representative decision-making process?
5. How do we keep the process of planning and city-making human in light of these new tools and vast amounts of data?  Can we or should we avoid positivist approaches to planning and how can tool design keep us from marching down the path of metrics and data without human context?
6. And many more…including more insight from Rob Goodspeed in this past blog post referencing E.S Savas’s 1970 Science Article Cybernetics in City Hall

Would you like to join us in the conversation and community building?  What other questions do we need to consider in this possible future?  Who are the early predecessors of this movement that we should bring out into the light again?  Help us shape the conversation.

Cross-posted on ScenarioPlanningTools.org

The Denver Metro region's light rail system is undergoing a major (albeit slow) expansion. Photo by Flickr user ercwttmn.

These types of projects present a range of challenges, including the challenging of equity … relatively new in the space where federal housing, transportation, and environmental policy converge but with substantial on-the-ground implications, including those that Denver Post columnist Tina Griego wrote about last week.

Some of the equity challenges embedded in this project are regional in scope, such as thoughtfully and fairly distributing the dollars across multiple planned lines, and ensuring that development around transit stations affords people from a range of incomes the ability to use the transit system. Other challenges are more localized but no less important, such as protecting the integrity of neighborhoods that have a new transit line and transit stop (or that soon will have these). In the abstract, it’s easy to dismiss these types of concerns, since support for transit and for neighborhood revitalization is so widespread. But the quick escalation of property values that often accompanies new transit lines can be extremely disruptive, destroying local businesses and forcing people from their homes. And changes in land use around new transit stations can have a huge impact on the character of existing communities.

This is a tough project (and I’m very glad to see my extremely capable colleague Jocelyn Hittle as our point person), but it’s an important one, and if managed well the result will be good policy outcomes and community members along these transit lines that feel they contributed meaningfully to decisions that will impact their lives in complicated ways.

One of the most common questions we field from existing and prospective clients is “Once our site is up, how do we get participants?” It’s justifiably the most important question of any engagement effort – online or offline. There seems to be a common misconception among Gov 2.0 companies and public agencies that technology will solve engagement woes. The reality of course is much different. Technology doesn’t solve problems, people do. Technology should facilitate better and deeper engagement, enabling citizens to become contributors to their community, but not be viewed as the sole predictor of success.

Our answer to that question has most certainly changed over the course of the last two years. Two years ago we were admittedly apart of this camp – put up an interactive website and droves of people will instantly become engaged. However, we have learned through experience and data that technology is only one part of the equation of successful (total) engagement. Total engagement comes when technology is combined with two C’s. Content and Context.

First things first, let’s start with technology, because it’s still very important. Technology should allow the government agency a diversity of functionality. Crowdsourcing ideas is an important functional element, but so is functionality that supports prioritization, interactive budgeting, and traditional survey questions. Equally important, the public facing design of the technology plays a key role in success. Together, functionality and design provide the foundation for total engagement.

Assuming an agency has adequate technology (preferably MindMixer ) success is contingent on executing the two C’s. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times, content is king. Creating and presenting compelling content is difficult for lots of government agencies. Why? Typically the most successful content is either controversial emotional or non-technical. Government agencies often times fear the emotional and operate in the technical (by requirement). Helping these entities understand the importance of creating and presenting content that yields interest and maintains simplicity is critically important.

Compelling content can change the trajectory of engagement effort instantly. Combining compelling content with context can take a community to even greater heights. Offering participants contextually relevant opportunities to participate makes engagement personal. Context should be driven by demographics, location, and interest. Asking a citizen for ideas about a new streetscape works. Asking a citizen for ideas about a streetscape in their neighborhood works better. Asking a citizen about ideas for a streetscape in their neighborhood, while they are walking on the street brings engagement to an entirely different level. Context creates ownership. Ownership leads to action. Action solves problems.

In summary:

The engagement technology you choose is important, but it’s only one predictor of success.
Make your content interesting and emotional. Emotion drives interest.
Add context to the conversation. It creates personal ownership.

This post was contributed by Nick Bowden, Co-founder and CEO of MindMixer.

Biddeford, Maine had a story booth at a local festival.

There are many examples of how stories have been used to understand community, such as Why Here Why Now or Saving the Sierras, and there is also great potential to apply personal story in community planning efforts.

The Orton Family Foundation’s Heart & Soul Community Planning approach uses personal stories to identify what people value in their community. We rely on personal stories for three key reasons:

• Stories draw in new people. Most planning processes are not inviting to people who may not have experience with land use issues or who do not feel comfortable speaking up at a typical public meeting. By starting with story people share their perspectives in their own words and often on their own turf. It’s also a great way to engage youth or create an opportunity for a multi-generational project.
• Story sharing reveals common values and builds relationships. Stories reveal common community values and also allow us to understand our differences. Listening to someone else’s story lets us be more open to their views; it gives us a space to reflect on their perspective and grow to see new possibilities. This process can build relationships among individuals who typically do not connect or who in the past presented opposing positions.
• Stories bring community change to life. Tired of looking at yet another graph of population change or listening to statistics about how employment has shifted in your town? Stories complement the numbers with the experience of those who lived through those changes. They can deepen our understanding of what is important to our quality of life and whether it is perceived as eroding or improving. Stories can also speak to our aspirations for the future in a way that invites others to feel connected to that positive vision.

You may be thinking, “Sounds great, but how do I actually incorporate personal stories into my planning project?”

Three key steps are critical to using story in planning: gathering stories, sharing them and identifying community values from them. Some story methods allow you to do all three at once whereas some may focus more on gathering and require complementary methods for dialogue around community values. How you use story and the form it takes depends on your project’s goals and community capacity.

Orton has produced a number of resources on how you can introduce story into planning projects. In general, you’ll be considering one of three broad approaches:

1. Group story: Bringing people together to share stories can be a powerful experience both for identifying community values and for building new relationships. Group story experiences can be designed so that you get from people’s individual stories to community values in one session. For instance, story circle is a method where people share stories in small groups focused on a specific question and from those stories identify commonalities.
2. Paired story: Often stories are gathered by an interviewer who may interview many people in a community. These story interviews are typically recorded conversations between two or more people where they can share memories, personal experiences, and connections to a place. This approach can be designed so that the interviewees are explicitly identifying community values or it may rely on follow-on activities where others listen to stories to identify those values.
3. Solo story: There are many options where individuals create their own stories. Locative media, like Toronto’s Murmur project, or essay contests through the local paper or schools are just two examples. This option can is attractive because people can contribute on their own time and in creative ways but it can be more challenging to identify values or create opportunities for community dialogue.

Wondering how communities have already used stories in planning? Here are a few examples:

A story circle in Story circle in Damariscotta, Maine.

Block party interviews in Golden, Colorado.

Biddeford, ME used story in very creative ways in its Downtown Master Plan Project. Two hundred fifty stories were collected using a combination of storytelling fellows, high school students and Downtown Heartspots. Themes from these stories, captured as five core values, informed a series of neighborhood meetings and community workshops that resulted in a Downtown Master Plan. The power of story is in its ability to get at what really matters to people about where they live and to build the personal relationships that are essential for collaborative community action. The possibility for story in community planning relies on the creativity and courage of practitioners and citizen planners to try out this age-old tradition in a new context.

This post was contributed by Ariana McBride, a Senior Associate (Northeast Projects) with the Orton Family Foundation.

Combining GIS and design presents an opportunity to merge art and precision, geography and graphics, the human mind and creativity. The software that has resulted continues to redefine how we work with a GIS—not just cartographically, but how we capture the many processes and workflows any designer might undertake.

When building a new plan for a community, there will likely be multiple stakeholders, each with their own vision and ideas. These plans all have their own importance, and each needs to be captured, analyzed, compared, and evaluated.

The new Community Planning web application from Esri (the documentation is also online) demonstrates how GIS and the web can provide a collaborative design tool that can be used to capture the visual qualities of a design, capture multiple scenarios, and save them to a central location. From there, the design lives as data, and with that comes the full ability to perform the spatial analysis and evaluation available in a GIS.

This application uses a combination of ArcGIS Server and Adobe Flex. With the release of ArcGIS 10 came the feature service—essentially a map tied to a database published to the web. Once a service has been published, The ArcGIS API for Flex allows for the creation of an interactive rich internet application consuming an ArcGIS Server feature service. Web collaboration is born!

Creating a Plan

Begin by clicking the “Create My Plan” button (as seen on the photo above). This reveals a panel of features that can be drawn on the map, as well as a field to enter a Plan Name and your email address—which will serve as your identifier in the design collaboration process.

When you click “Submit My Plan”, you are creating a space on a GIS server that stores the features and attributes you draw on the map.

Sketching and Modifying Features

From the Create My Plan palette, click a type of land use to enable it for sketching, and click the map to add the shape of the polygon. As you click, you can see the feature being added to the map. Double-click to finish the sketch. If you want to change its shape, click the feature to select it, which reveals handles at each node you added. Drag a node to move it, and hover over an edge to reveal a ‘new’ node you can add to the shape.

Drawing Data and Measuring Impact

What makes this application powerful is the ability to draw data. As features are added to the plan, the area, length, and location are already known by the GIS.

When you click a feature you just drew, a pop-up displays the total values of several indicators.

Planners know from researching existing plans that certain indicators – environmental, economic, and social – can be measured based on the area of a particular feature. With the use of Flex and a simple expression, a value for an indicator can immediately be calculated as a function of the area of the feature it represents on the map. For example, if I assume that an acre of Commercial can generate 150 jobs, 4.5 acres will generate around 675 jobs.

Clicking the “Community Impact” button along the top menu reveals a charting widget, giving the option to compare the areas of all the land use types, and each indicator, giving a visual measure of proportion to the land use plan.

The indicators chosen for this application were pulled from various planning manuals and guidelines, such as the APA’s “Planning and Urban Design Standards,” and “The Smart Growth Manual.”

Submitting your plan

Clicking the “Review My Plan” button reveals a widget that will reveal all plans you have already submitted that are tied to your email address. Clicking each plan retrieves the plan from the server, allowing you to re-evaluate, and even edit features, then re-save the plan to the server.

Sharing your plan

This application also gives the ability for you to share your unique plan with the rest of the world. Clicking the “Share My Plan” reveals a widget with options to share a link to your plan via Twitter, Facebook, or E-mail.

When the user on the other end clicks the link, they’ll be taken to the application and a map showing your plan.

What’s it all mean?

As citizens expect up-to-the-minute news about their community, so will they expect updates on plans for future development. Today’s web technology gives us instant communication through so many channels and data types. ArcGIS server gives our maps and GIS data the chance to participate in this exchange, giving planners and designers the ability to instantly post a design, share an idea, and receive feedback from other stakeholders and community members as instantly as we receive tweets from friends.

This post was contributed by Matt Baker, a product engineer with Esri.

We believe in collaborative process for better, enduring outcomes around community decision-making. But the collaborative process is really an overlay on any decision-making approach that needs many interested parties to negotiate and design a solution. One type of collaborative process that has come out of the programming and software development world is the hackathon.

HackNY Student Hack-a-thon hosted in Fall of 2010

 Photo Credit: hackNY.org via Compfight

Think of a dance marathon, but instead of being on your feet for 48 hours, you are furiously programming and designing with a team over a similar period. And instead of raising money for a cause, you’re donating time and code to a needy nonprofit, civic group or public agency. Hackathons have also been used as testing grounds for great ideas, with investors looking for strong teams and offering capital or other rewards to help build viable businesses as featured in a recent Wired article by Steven Leckart. Even if not the explicit goal of a hackathon, new businesses can emerge from these events just from the concentrated creative power gathered in a single room.

Hackathons have become very popular among civic-minded folks in areas like transportation, government transparency and clean energy.  In the world of planning related data, transportation has probably gotten the most love. OpenPlans has really helped build a movement around opening up transportation data to build really cool apps like OpenTripPlanner and MTA BusTime (based on the open source project One Bus Away from the Puget Sound region). And Google gave open transportation apps a great big push when they released the General Transit Feed Specification (a standard format for publishing transit information in a way that computers can read and understand).

Hackathons form one piece of a larger network of activities and people that support civic hacking. Behind each hackathon are a bevy of organizations and people cheering on and supporting the effort. They host GitHub repositories, provide space, host data catalogs, volunteer time, manage listservs, build partnerships, and so on. The ecosystem of data, tools, people and organizations provide the necessary input into really successful hackathon events. It turns out that, in the end, these events are just one visible piece of the civic hacking culture. What happens before and after is just as, if not more, important to sustaining apps and solutions to really complex problems.

It was out of this realization that the PlaceMatters Decision Lab was born about 2 years ago. Nothing really changed here at PlaceMatters except adding a level of intention and strategy behind the work we were already doing.  Now, we are working on some specific projects for this year that are very exciting.  One of these projects is  a hackathon around the livability principles outlined by HUD, EPA, and DOT as part of the sustainable communities initiative, which follows on the first of these done in DC in January.

The event will be in Denver and use local, open and available data to address issues of sustainability for organizations, agencies and individuals. For example, what if you were shopping for a house in the Denver metro region and could pull up data on Zillow about your potential transportation costs in addition to your housing costs? Or what if you could know and understand your neighborhood’s transportation cost burden and use that to find, fund and advocate for alternatives? Those may not be the apps that get built, but hopefully you get the gist.

The role of PlaceMatters before, during and after the hackathon will be to sustain and build the energy locally and push apps out into other cities with similar challenges. We are looking for partners both in Denver and across the country. We want to empower people with data and information that helps move communities to better outcomes for future generations. My hope is that through the planning of this event, we can catalyze a group of developers locally and plug into other groups nationally to build the next generation of sustainability apps.

I’m already inspired by many good organizations doing related and similar work. I mentioned OpenPlans already above, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Code for America as well. Their recently rolled out the Brigade will give us and many others the ability to redeploy great new apps in other cities with much less effort than required before (read more here).  If you are interested in this, I encourage you to sign up and to get involved on the developer list serve if you are more technically inclined. This will also let you get in touch with the many region specific groups too many to mention right now that are also doing great work in their hometowns (check some out at the brigade here).

There will be a lot more to say over the coming months about this summer’s Denver hackathon and about civic hacking more broadly. For now, I encourage you to reach out to us on Twitter, by email or in the comments if you want to contribute.

Jason Lally heads up the PlaceMatters Decision Lab, PlaceMatters’ inside-out R&D lab, building a community of tinkerers, hackers, designers, coders, and practitioners dedicated to building the next generation of tools and techniques for better decision making around planning and sustainability.

The Fairmount School Project

Fairmount Elementary School 3rd graders were City Planners for a day when they visited the City of Golden Planning Department. They learned the basics of the City Planning profession and tried their hands in organizing a city from scratch as a team of planners.

The Planning and Development Department works with citizens and businesses to ensure that land use complies with the City of Golden zoning and land use regulations. The department works through a Planning Commission of appointed citizens to further the goals of the comprehensive plan and to create more localized neighborhood plans that reflect the citizens’ values and priorities. Historically, the role of a Planning Department has been to handle development issues regarding land use, transportation, community facilities, urban design, and housing, as well as encouraging the separation of incompatible uses and the proper mixing of complementary uses.

For the Fairmount visit, 5 different classes visited and each class broke down into smaller groups of 4 or 5 and practiced collaboration and deliberation with one another over where to place businesses, housing and other town necessities and the reasons why. They practiced prioritization and found that forming consensus over a vision for the city can be a difficult task to pull together.

The students had creative ways of looking at the city as a blank slate. They named their towns, developed stories to support the towns’ history, and designed both neighborhoods and Main Streets with everyday civic buildings clustered. They went so far as to locate grocery stores and other necessities near housing for ease of access, water treatment plants near the river and industrial uses that might cause a nuisance farther away from residential uses.

Their take away was that civic discussions are the place to get involved. Local government may be the smallest form of government that we see, but it is the one that affects us most in our day to day lives; so becoming a part of the discussion is the key to a greater city!

The activity was a success and the kids really enjoyed themselves!

This post was contributed by Augusta Prehn, a City Planner with the City of Golden, Colorado.

This summer, Sasha, Lorrie and I started brainstorming the sorts of events we wanted to host at the Center for Civic Media this fall. The first I put on the calendar was a session on “mapping civic media”, a chance to catch up with some of my favorite people who are working to study, understand and visualize how ideas move through the complicated ecosystem of professional and participatory media.

To represent the research being done in the space, we invited Hal Roberts, my collaborator on Media Cloud (and on a wide range of other research), Erhardt Graeff from the Web Ecology project, and Gilad Lotan, VP of R&D for internet analytics firm BetaWorks. On Wednesday night, I asked them to share some of the recent work they’ve been doing, understanding the structure of the US and Russian blogosphere, analyzing the influence networks in Twitter during the early Arab Spring events and understanding the social and political dynamics of hashtags. They didn’t disappoint, and I suspect our video of the session (which we’ll post soon) will be one of the more popular pieces of media we put together this fall. In the meantime, here are my notes, constrained by the fact that I was moderating the panel and so couldn’t lean back and enjoy the presentations the way I otherwise might have.

Hal Roberts is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he’s produced great swaths of research on internet filtering, surveillance, threats to freedom of speech, and the basic architecture of the internet. (That he’s written some of these papers with me reflects more on his generosity than on my wisdom.) He’s the lead architect of Media Cloud, the system we’re building at the Berkman Center and at Center for Civic Media to “ask and answer quantitative questions about the mediasphere in more systematic ways.” As Hal explains, media researchers “have been writing one-off scripts and systems to mine data in haphazard ways.” Media Cloud is an attempt to streamline that process, creating a collection of 30,000 blogs and mainstream media sources in English and Russian. “Our goal is to get as much media as possible, so we can ask our own questions and also let others ask questions of our duct tape and bubblegum system.”

Hal’s map of clusters in popular US blogs.

(An interactive version of this map is available here.) Much of Hal’s work has focused on using the content of media – rather than the structure of its hyperlinks – to map and cluster the mediasphere. He shows us a map of US blogs that cluster into three main areas – news and political blogs, technology blogs and what he calls “the love cluster”. This last cluster is so named because it’s filled with people talking about what they love. Subclusters include knitters, quilters, fans of recipes and photography. The technology cluser breaks down into a Google camp, an iPhone camp and a camp discussing Android Apps. Hal’s visualization shows the words most used in the sources within a cluster, which helps us understand what these clusters are talking about. The Google cluster features words like “SEO, webmaster, facebook, chrome” and others, suggesting the cluster is substantively about Google and its technology projects.

While we might expect the politics and news cluster to divide evenly into left and rightwing camps, it doesn’t. Study the link structure of the left and the right, as Glance and Adamic and later Eszter Hargittai have, and it’s clear that like links to like. But Hal’s research shows that the left and right use very similar language and talk about many of the same topics. This is a novel finding: It’s not that the left and right are talking about entirely different topics – instead they’re arguing over a common agenda, an agenda that’s well represented in mainstream media as well, which suggests the existence of subjects neither the right or left are talking about online.

Building on this finding, Hal and colleagues at Berkman looked at the Russian media sphere, to see if there was a similar overlap in coverage focus between mainstream media and blogs. “Newspapers and the television are subject to strong state control in Russia – we wanted to see if our analysis confirmed that, and whether the blogosphere was providing an alternative public sphere.

The technique he and Bruce Etling usedis “the polar map” – put the source you believe is most important at the center, and other sources are mapped at a distance from that source where the distance reflects degree of similarity. The central dot is a summary of verbiage from Russian government ministry websites. Right next to it is the official government newspaper. TV stations cluster close to the center, while blogs cover a wide array of the space, including the edges of the map.

It’s possible that blogs are showing dissimilarities to the Kremlin agenda because they’re talking about knitting, not about politics. So a further analysis (the one mapped above) explicitly identified democratic opposition and ethno-nationalist blogs and looked at their placement on the map. There’s strong evidence of political conversations far from the government talking points in both the democratic opposition and in the far right nationalist blogosphere.

What’s particularly interesting about this finding is that we don’t see the same pattern in the US blogosphere. Make a polar map with the White House, or a similar proxy for a US government news agenda, at the center, and you’ll see a very different pattern. Some right wing American blogs flock quite closely to the White House talking points – mostly to critique them – while the left blogs and mainstream media generally don’t. However, when Hal and crew did an analysis of stories about Egypt, they saw a very different pattern than in looking at all stories published in these sources. They saw a tight cluster of US mainstream media and blogs – left and right – around the White House. The government, the media and bloggers left and right talked about Egypt using very similar language. In the Russian mediasphere, the pattern was utterly different – the democratic opposition was far from the Kremlin agenda, using the Egyptian protests to talk about potential revolution in Russia.

The ultimate goal of Media Cloud, Hal explains, is to both produce analysis like this, and to make it possible for other researchers to conduct this sort of analysis, without a first step of collecting months or years of data.

Erhardt Graeff is a good example of the sort of researcher Media Cloud would like to serve. He’s cofounder of the Web Ecology Project, which he describes as “as a ragtag group of casual researchers that has now turned in a peer-reviewed publication.” That publication is the result of mapping part of the Twitter ecosystem during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and attempting to tackle some of the hard problems of mapping media ecosystems in the process.

The Web Ecology Project began life researching the Iranian elections and resulting protests, focusing on the #iranelection hashtag. With a simple manifesto around “reimagining internet studies”, the project tries to understand the “nature and behavior of actors” in media systems. That means considering not just the top users, or even just the registered users of a system like Twitter, but the audience for the media they create. “Each individual user on Twitter has their personal media ecosystem” of people they follow, influence, are followed by and influenced by.

This sort of research rapidly bumps into three hard problems, Erhardt explains:

• Did someone read a piece of information that was published? Or as he puts it, “Did the State Department actually read our report about #IranElection?” It’s very hard to tell. “We end up using proxies – you followed a link, but that doesn’t mean you read it.”
• Which piece of media influenced someone to access other media? “Which tweet convinced me to follow the new Maru video, Erhardt’s or MC Hammer’s?”
• How does the media ecosystem change day to day? Or, referencing a Web Ecology paper, “How many genitalia were on ChatRoulette today?” The answer can vary sharply day to day, raising tough problems around generating a usable sample.

The paper Erhardt published with Gilad and other Web Ecology Project members looks at the Twitter ecosystem around the protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt. By quantitatively searhing for information flows, and qualitatively classifying different types of actors in that ecosystem, the research tries to untangle the puzzle of how (some) individuals used (one type of) social media in the context of a major protest.

To study the space, the team downloaded hundreds of thousands of tweets, representing roughly 40,000 users talking about Tunisia and 62,000 talking about Egypt. They used a “shingling” method of comparison to determine who was retweeting whom ad sought out the longest retweet chains. They looked at the top 10% of these chains in terms of length to find the “really massive, complex flows” and grabbed a random 1/6th of that sample. That yielded 774 users talking about Tunisia, 888 talking about Egypt… and only 963 unique users, suggesting a large overlap between those two sets.

Then Erhardt, Gilad and others started manually coding the participants in the chains. Categories included Mainstream Media (@AJEnglish, @nytimes), web news organizations (@HuffingtonPost), non-media organizations (@Wikileaks, @Vodaphone), bloggers, activists, digerati, political actors, celebrities, researchers, bots… and a too-broad unclassified category of “others”. This wasn’t an easy process – Erhardt describes a system in which researchers compared their codings to ensure a level of intercoder reliability, then had broader discussions on harder and harder edge cases. They used a leaderboard to track how many cases they’d each coded, and goaded those slow to participate into action.

The actors they classified are a very influential set of Twitter users. The average organization in their set has 4004 followers, the average individual 2340 (which is WAY more than the average user of the system). To examine influence with more subtlety than simply counting followers, Erhardt and his colleagues use retweets per tweet as an influence metric. What they conclude, in part, is that “mainstream media is a hit machine, as are digerati – what they have to say tends to be highly amplified.”

The bulk of the paper traces information flows started by specific people. In the case of Egypt, lots of information flows start from journalists, bloggers and activists, with bots as a lesser, but important, influence. In Tunisia, there were fewer flows started by journalists, more by bots and bloggers, and way fewer from activists. This may reflect the fact that the Tunisian story caught many journalists and activists by surprise – they were late to the story, and less significant as information sources than the bloggers who cover that space over time. By the time Egypt becomes a story, journalists realized the significance and were on the ground, providing original content on Twitter, as well as to their papers.

One of the most interesting aspects of the paper is an analysis of who retweets whom. It’s not surprising to hear that like retweets like – journalists retweet journalists, while bloggers retweet bloggers. Bloggers were much more likely to retweet journalists on the topic of Egypt than on Tunisia, possibly because MSM coverage of Egypt was so much more thorough than the superficial coverage of Tunisia.

While Gilad Lotan worked with Erhardt on the Tunisia and Egypt paper, his comments at Civic Media focused on the larger space of data analysis. “I work primarily on data – heaps and mounds of data,” he explains, for two different masters. Roughly half his work is for clients, media outlets who want to understand how to interact and engage with their audiences. The other half focuses on developing the math and algorithms to understand the social media space.

This work is increasingly important because “attention is the bottleneck in a world where threshhold to publishing is near zero.” If you want to be a successful brand or a viable social movement, understanding how people manage their attention is key: “It’s impossible to simply demand attention – you have to understand the dynamics of attention in the face of this bottleneck.”

Gilad references Alex Dragulescu’s work on digital portraits, pictures of people composed of the words they most tweet or share on social media. He’s interested not just in the individuals, but in the networks of people, showing us a visualization of tweets around Occupy Wall Street. Different networks take form in the space of minutes or hours as new news breaks – the network around a threatened shutdown of Zuccotti Park for a cleanup is utterly different than the network in July, when Adbusters was the leading actor in the space.

Images like this, Lotan suggests, “are like images of earth from the moon. We knew what earth looked like, but we never saw it. We knew we lived in networks, but this is the first time we can envision it and see how it plays out.”

When we analyze huge data sets, we can start approaching answers to very difficult questions, like:

• What’s the audience of the New York Times versus Fox News?
• What type of content gains wider audiences through social media?
• What topics do certain outlets cover? What are their strengths, weaknesses and biases?
• How do audiences differ between different publications? How are they similar?
• How fast does news spread, and how does it break?

Much of media and communications research addresses these questions, though rarely directly – as Erhardt noted, we generally address these questions via proxies. But Lotan tells us, we can now ask and answer questions like, “How many Twitter users follow Justin Bieber and The Economist?” The answer, to a high degree of precision, is 46,000. It’s just shy of the number who follow The Economist and the New York Times, 54,000.

Lotan is able to research answers like this because his lab has access to the Twitter “firehose” (the stream of all public data posted to Twitter, moment to moment) and to the bit.ly firehose. This second information source allows Lotan to study what people are clicking on, not just what media they’re exposed to. He offers a LOLcat, where the feline in question is dressed in a chicken costume. “We can see the kitty in you, and the chicken you’re hiding behind.” What people share and what they click is very different, and Lotan is able to analyze both.

This data allowed Lotan to compare what audiences for four major news outlets were interested in, my measuring their clickstreams. Al Jazeera and The Economist, he tells us, are pretty much what you’d think. But Fox News watchers are fascinated by crime, murders, kidnappings and other dark news. This sort of insight may help networks understand and optimise for their audiences. Al Jazeera’s audience, he tells us, is very engaged, tweeting and sharing stories, while Fox’s audience reads a lot and shares very little.

Some of Lotan’s recent research is about algorithmic curation, specifically Twitter’s trending topics. Many observers of the Occupy movement have posited that Twitter is censoring tweets featuring the #occupywallstreet hashtag. Lotan acknowledges that the tag has been active, but suggests reasons why it’s never trended globally. Interest in the tag has grown steadily, and has a regular heartbeat, connected to who’s active on the east coast of the US. The tag has spiked at times, but remains invisible in part due to bad timing – a spike on October 1st was tiny in comparison to “#WhatYouShouldKnowAboutMe”, trending at the same time.

At this point, Lotan believes he’s partially reverse engineered the Trending Topics algorithm. The algorithm is very sensitive to the new, not to the slowly building. This raises the question: what does it mean to “get the math right”. Lotan observes, “Twitter doesn’t want to be a media outlet, but they made an algorithmic choice that makes them an editor.” He’s quick to point out that algorithmic curation is often very helpful – the Twitter algorithm is quite good at preventing spam attacks, which have a different signature than organic trends. So we see organic, fast-moving trends, even when they’re quite offensive. He points to #blamethemuslims, which started when a Muslim women in the UK snarkily observed that Muslims would be blamed for the Norway terror attacks. That tweet died out quickly, but was revived by Americans who used the tag unironically, suggesting that we blame Muslims for lots of different things – that small bump, then massive spike is a fairly common organic pattern… and very different from the spam patterns he’s seen on Twitter.

When we analyze networks, Lotan suggests, we encounter a paradox that James Gleick addresses in his recent book on information: just because I’m one hop away from you in a social network doesn’t mean I can send you information and expect you to pay attention. In the real world, people who can bridge between conversations are rare, important and powerful. He closes his talk with the map of a Twitter conversation about an event in Israel where settlers were killed. There’s a large conversation in the Israeli twittersphere, a small conversation in the Palestinian community, and two or three bridge figures attempting to connect the conversations. (One is my wife, @velveteenrabbi.) Studying events like this one may help us, ultimately, determine who’s able to build bridges between these conversations.

Ethan is a blogger, media researcher, and the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media.

“Lie” #1: Not everyone has a smartphone, so the benefit of using them is very limited.
While no one would be wise to argue with the fact that not everyone has a smartphone, there are several ways that smartphone apps create significant benefits as supplements to public meetings. One of those reasons is “reach.” While not everyone has smartphones, the number of those who do is certainly greater than the number of people who regularly attend public meetings – so based on scale alone, the potential ability to engage citizens goes up. Another benefit is allowing citizens to provide feedback in real-time, during their commutes and recreation time (on topics that they may forget details of by the time the public meeting comes around). The best apps also allow those who may prefer using internet access and a web browser to provide feedback in a similar manner, which can also be useful during public meetings in a kiosk strategy.

“Lie” #2: Smartphone apps will only make work for me, as it’s more data that I have to mine.
The best apps allow citizens to provide geo-coded photos, video, and/or audio files about issues, and allow them to categorize that issue from a list that you define – this allows a simple export from the smartphone app database to MSExcel for general use and to shapefiles (.shp) for GIS analysis. The best apps make it easy for citizens to provide their feedback in real-time, and they should make it easy for professionals to take that data and bring it to bear in planning projects. The contrast is the more common strategy of plotter-printing a large map that is placed on the floor for citizens to walk over, and then having them provide comments via Post-It notes adhered to the map – imagine the time it will then take to simply compile, categorize, and confirm specific locations of that data.

A Truth: Smartphone apps are not fields of dreams – they require promotion and communication to achieve high adoption.
You can rest assured that the most tech-forward of your audience will not need reminders about the ease of downloading an app and then immediately contributing to a planning project, but in 2012 they will likely still represent a minority of the audience that you hope to engage. Reaching and involving the larger group will require active communication by whatever strategies will be most effective for your specific audience – gameification (to add interest to participation), project-specific websites, email blasts, partnerships with local groups (casual and professional), transit advertising, TV spots, social media, press events, and others can all be appropriate strategies.

Case study: Reno Sparks Bicycle & Pedestrian Plan.
The Reno Regional Transportation Commission (RTC) set out to create this region’s first-ever comprehensive bicycle and pedestrian plan – public engagement was essential. There was also desire to be in as many “places” as possible to help citizens engage in the project. A first-of-its-kind smartphone app was created to allow for this enhanced engagement. Citizens could download this app for free (on iPhone, Android, and Blackberry), and use it to submit photo- and typed-comment-based feedback about the bicycle and pedestrian environments in the region. Those submissions were then automatically illustrated on an interactive map at the project-specific website – this allowed anyone to browse the detail of the feedback that their neighbors were providing, simply by going to the website. Social media strategies were put in place and resulted in a significantly-larger number of engaged citizens (than had been common in similar efforts), and the ability for project messages to be shared virally. To streamline management, these social channels were integrated so that a message/update in one would automatically propagate to the other, and to the custom website for all citizens to see. From a partnership standpoint, the Reno Wine Walk group was identified as a casual group to provide good participation and reach, as it hosts weekly walking events that involve popular wine merchants in the downtown area and neighboring streets.

This post was contributed by Corey Connors of Fehr & Peers, a California-based transportation consulting firm.

Lots of museums these days have video comment booths to invite visitors to tell their stories, but how many of those booths really deliver high-impact content? Last week, I talked with Tina Olsen, Director of Education and Public Programs at the Portland Art Museum, about their extraordinary Object Stories project. They designed a participatory project that delivers a compelling end product for onsite and online visitors… and they made some unexpected decisions along the way.

The project arose from a grant announcement from MetLife Foundation around community engagement and outreach. I knew I didn’t want to do something temporary—a program that would last a year or two and then go away. And I also knew we wanted to connect with the Northwest Film Center, which is situated in the museum. There hasn’t been a history of collaboration between the museum and the film center and we wanted the chance to partner more deeply, and build a platform where we could continue to do so.

In the education department, we have some key values around slowing down, conversation and participation around art, and deep looking. And so this concept of asking visitors to spend some focused time thinking about their relationships with objects and artworks really made sense to me.

Also, on a personal level, I had this really powerful experience with my mother in a Storycorps booth in Grand Central years ago that had a profound impact on me. She had revealed things I’d never known, and I kept coming back to it. There was something in there that I wanted to play with in a museum concept.

What did you end up with and how did you get there?

Our first notion was all about something mobile, something that would go out to the community. We imagined an cart at the farmer’s markets where people could record stories. But we couldn’t figure out how we were going to sustain that with our staff.

We ended up with a gallery in the museum instead. It’s in a good location, but it’s also kind of a pass-through space to other galleries. It has a recording booth that you sign up in advance to use, and you go in and tell a story about an object that is meaningful to you. The other parts of the gallery are for experiencing the stories, and for connecting with the Museum collection. We have cases with museum objects that people told stories about, with large images of those storytellers adjacent to the object, and in the middle of the gallery is a long rectangular table with touchscreens where people can access all the stories that have been recorded.

Your recording booth asks participants for audio stories plus photos of themselves with their objects. Why did you choose this format instead of video?

We had planned on having it be video. The proposal to Metlife was all video. Then we started working with our local design and technology firms — Ziba Design and Fashionbuddha — and in the prototyping, it became clear we had to go another way.

We partnered with the Film Center to conduct workshops with community organizations around personal object storytelling. These really informed the project, and helped get the word out about the gallery. We rigged up a video recording booth in Fashionbuddha’s studios. We found people would go in, do their story, come out, say it was so powerful and cathartic, but then the videos would be really bad—boring, too long, unstructured. They were often visually uncomfortable to watch. And some participants were turned off by the video recording—they found it too scary, and being on camera distracted them from telling their story – especially older people.

We had this moment where we were going to sign off on design and move to fabrication, and I was really worried. We had participants who loved the experience, but the watchers were really lukewarm about the results. And we realized of course that the majority audience would be watchers, not storytellers. We invited a cross-section of artists, filmmakers, and advertisers to join us for a think tank. We all sat down and looked at the content and we said, “this is not good enough, this is not watchable enough.”

So what did you do next?

We came up with a system that was much more structured and is based on audio, not video. In the current setup, you walk into the booth, all soundproofed and carpeted, and then you sit down on a cozy bench. You can come alone or with up to three people. You face a screen, and the screen is close enough to reach out and touch without getting up. The screen prompts you, with audio and with words, and it’s in both English and Spanish, because we really wanted to reach out to the Spanish-speaking community in Portland.

First, the screen asks if you want to watch an example story. If not, it says “let’s get started.”

There are five prompts that follow, and for each, you get 45 seconds to record a response. Each of the prompts was really carefully written and tested to scaffold people to tell a great story. People don’t necessarily walk in the booth knowing how to do that. For example, the first prompt, which is about discovery, asks, “When and how did you first receive, discover, or encounter your object? What was your first feeling or impression of it? Who was there?” This prompt really gets people sharing specifics, sharing details—the things that make a story successful.

Another good example is the final question: “If you had to give it to someone, who would it be and what would you say to them?” This question really makes people focus on the meat of what’s important about their object, and it’s a natural summarizer… but in an interesting, personal way.

After you record your audio, you get to take the photos and give your story a six-word title. We experimented with when in the process to take the photos, and it’s nice at the end—it’s a kind of reward. The recording is often very intense—people cry, it takes something out of them. Photos are fun. We prompt participants to hold the object in different ways: close to camera, pose with the object in your lap, hold your object as close to your face as possible, hold it in profile.

How do you edit the stories?

Fashionbuddha built a backend content management system where you can choose audio segments, reorder them, and choose photos. This is made to be sustainable with current staffing– while we have the ability to edit within a 45 second chunk, 99% of the time we don’t do it—we just pick the segments and photos we want to use and put them in order.

The gallery also features objects from the museum’s collection with people’s stories about them. Who are the people who record stories about museum objects?

That is more curated. The first testing we did there was very much the same as Object Stories – anyone could sign up and get involved, pick an object in the museum and tell a story about it. Those stories were, frankly, often very banal. There was an imbalance between stories with people’s own objects, with which they have profound relationships, versus museum objects that they might come see once or twice and like, but not really have a deep connection with.

So we realized we had to have an equivalence–the museum stories had to be profound too. And it couldn’t all be curators, but these storytellers had to be people who had profound relationships with museum objects. We have four stories up now: from a guard, a curator, a longtime museum lover, and an artist. In the future, I’m thinking of really mining our membership, putting out a call to them, building some programs that might help us seed and support the museum stories.

The website for the stories is beautiful. You also got some prime physical real estate for this project. How did you get the gallery?

That was really hard-won. At first, it was going to be a little booth tucked away somewhere. As the project progressed, our prototyping showed us we didn’t want a shallow experience–a photo booth where you could just drop in and do it. We wanted something where people could spend the time and focus deeply on the experience at hand. That required more space.

And it was really important to the director and to me that Object Stories connected to our mission and to our collection. That led me to feel strongly that we needed to have museum objects in the space. It couldn’t be an educational space with no works of art in it. I wanted to integrate this experience into what you do in the rest of the museum. We ended up with a very multi-departmental team, and that helped too.

The big goal is to activate your connection with objects in the rest of the museum, that Object Stories models the idea of having deep relationships with objects for any visitor who comes in.

What do you know so far about the non-participating visitors to the gallery?

I only know anecdotally. People are really entranced with the stories, browsing them on the touchscreens, and with the museum objects as well. They even spend a long time looking at this big case we put up that just features 8×10 cards with photos of people with their objects.

I was surprised at how long many visitors will spend at this case. It’s just graphics. Why would people look at that? I think it may be because people are visually included in the space, and that’s rare in an art museum. They’re very interested and maybe even moved by it.
You can browse stories online and sign up to record one at objectstories.pam.org. Object Stories is funded by the Metlife Foundation, the Kress Foundation, the Lehman Foundation, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the PGE Foundation.

This post was contributed by Nina Simon, Executive Director of The Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, CA, author of the Museum 2.0 blog, and author of the book The Participatory Museum. Nina has published a number of other blog posts in recent years that would have worked really well for this blog series. They include “Fifteen Random Things I’ve Learned About Design for Participation This Year,” “How to Design From Virtual Metaphor to Real Experience, and an Example,” “The Johnny Cash Project: A Participatory Music Video That Sings,” “Adventures in Participatory Journalism: An Interview With Sarah Rich About 48 Hour Magazine,” and “The Psychedelic Experience.”

Getting people involved in long range planning presents a significant challenge for planners and policymakers. Doing so can be especially difficult when the geographic scale is large. Consider the challenge for the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) as it developed a public engagement process for its 50-Year Transportation Vision – Minnesota GO in the spring of 2011.

Motivated by an interest in enhancing public involvement in its long range planning, MnDOT worked with us through the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) to develop a comprehensive engagement strategy. A key aspect of this strategy was a creative participatory scenario planning process intended to foster public interest and help explore alternative futures that might influence future transportation decision making. The scenario planning exercise was developed for use in public workshops held across Minnesota and as part of a web-based scenario exercise available through the Citizens League’s (a local non-profit) Citizing online tool.

Focused 50 years in the future, the scenarios offered a narrative and visual description of various economic, social, environmental, and political conditions in 2061. The first step in developing the scenarios was to conduct a series of interviews with University of Minnesota and other experts around key topics that intersect with transportation, such as technology, economics, climate change, governance, health, and supply chains. High quality videos of the expert interviews were recorded and edited for public viewing online. The expert perspectives provided in the videos were central to developing the scenarios as we reviewed the raw video footage to identify (1) trends and (2) impacts that might be present in 2061. These trends and impacts were integrated into three (very Minnesotan) alternative scenarios:

You Betcha! (going from global to local). Middle-of-the road scenario. In this version of MN, the majority of goods and food are produced within 350 miles of where people live; some industries such as water exporting and wind energy are successful; technological innovations in communications and manufacturing occur; and small towns thrive as people move there from urban centers.

Uffda! (learning to succeed in a time of energy crisis). Most challenging scenario. In this version of MN, all forms of energy are in short supply, resulting in blackouts and fuel rationing; agriculture and manufacturing struggle to survive – though low energy bio-engineering crops and algae-based fuels make MN a national leader; and urban areas and regional centers grow but rural communities decline.

Lake Wobegon (where all Minnesota towns and neighborhoods are above average). Most positive of all scenarios. In this version of MN, there are many technological and medical breakthroughs to improve our lives, education, and environment; tourism increases; and population grows due to increased life expectancy and new residents attracted by the state’s high quality of life.

Nine public workshops were conducted across the state, with 233 people participating in meetings and another 3,490 unique visitors to the project website. In an effort to provide meeting participants with multiple ways of immersing themselves in the scenarios, we provided three pieces of information to each participant: a scenario narrative that verbally described what life would be like in 2061; an illustrative map visually communicating how some changes might play out on the landscape; and a scorecard that showed how 2061 would stack up against 2011 in various areas.

Each meeting kicked off with a presentation to get participants motivated for the meeting activities, including asking them to initially rewind to 1961 for a little perspective. For example, 1961 cost of living information was presented including the cost of a gallon of gas ($0.27), the cost of an average home ($12.5k), and the cost of a dozen eggs ($0.30), compared with today’s prices. In addition, cultural and historical information was presented, including the top song and movie of the year, as well as reminding participants that the first human went to space and the “Ken” doll was introduced in 1961.

At each of the workshops, small groups of participants were assigned to discuss one of the scenarios. To help immerse them in the 2061 scenario, participants filled out a “Day in the Life” worksheet, and were then asked to consider what transportation systems would be necessary to succeed in the future scenario and what principles should guide MnDOT’s decisions.

As the workshops concluded, a detailed summary of the findings was developed in effort to help MnDOT understand what Minnesotan saw as key components of a transportation system no matter what the future. This work helped lay the groundwork for the principles identified in the Minnesota GO 50-Year Transportation Vision.

Cindy Zerger

Carissa Schively Slotterback

Participants playing the Community PlanIt game during the final meeting.

Digital media have irreversibly changed communication patterns within most communities. People are increasingly accessing local news on mobile devices, reading the newspaper online, interfacing with government websites, and sharing opinions on social networking services (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter. That these forms of communication are not widely incorporated into planning processes demonstrates a bias of one exclusionary tactic over another. It is typically understood as more effective and equitable to have 20 people in a room discussing the recent school board decision, for example, than to have 200 people online discussing the same thing. The assumption is that the “digital divide” excludes people. And it does. But the assumption is also that limiting the engagement process to face-to-face town hall meetings does not exclude. And it does as well.

There are limitations of access to both physical meetings and technologically mediated connections. If there were a spectrum from totally mediated to totally unmediated, there would be power differentials on either side. The solution, as with most solutions, is found somewhere in the middle. But public agencies, from governments to school boards, continue to err on the side of the unmediated. The fact that the majority of planning processes rely disproportionately on the town hall-style meeting suggests a real lag between public process and the public’s process.

Introducing Community PlanIt

For this reason, we developed Community PlanIt, an online platform designed to re-imagine the process of engagement through the logic of games. Community PlanIt is a mission-based game that asks people within a local community to “map the future.” The game lasts anywhere from 3 to 5 weeks and is designed to culminate in a face-to-face meeting where players can debrief and meet decision-makers. Players earn points by answering questions about themselves and their community. The more questions they answer, the more influence they gain in the overall planning. The logic is to reward learning with the amplification of voice.

We pilot tested Community PlanIt with the Boston Public Schools (BPS). The school district was interested in engaging the public in a conversation about their “accountability framework.” In recent years, BPS has undertaken a series of broad district-wide reforms aligned to its Acceleration Agenda goals and strategies. The Agenda’s targets are appropriate district-wide aims; but BPS had not yet created a set of uniform performance expectations for individual schools, nor devised a way for the district and external stakeholders to evaluate schools based on performance and on the opportunities they offer students.

The “School Support and Accountability Framework” was created for this purpose. The Framework’s goal is to align all school stakeholders around a common definition of school excellence and to empower school leaders, teachers, and parents to strive toward this shared standard. After an initial public engagement process that included a series of face-to-face meetings, that garnered a total of 70 participants, BPS was interested in expanding the reach and effectiveness.

Made possible through a partnership between the Boston Public Schools, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College, Community PlanIt was implemented from September 15 to October 20, 2011. The game culminated in a face-to-face meeting on the evening of the last day. The objective of the game was to engage students, parents, and other community stakeholders on aspects of the proposed BPS support and accountability framework. Students were to be a special focus of the engagement – and to this end Home, Inc,a local non-profit organization that teaches video production and media analysis to educators and youth, was brought in as a new partner. Seven students working with Home, Inc. served as “technology interpreters” for the game – leading discussion within the game by posting videos and engaging with other participants, and using social media and face-to-face outreach to encourage their fellow students to enter the game and the conversation.

The BPS game was comprised of seven five-day missions – each with a set of activities related to a theme or priority in BPS’s accountability framework. The BPS Office of Accountability chose the six priorities (growth, proficiency, achievement gaps, attendance, school environment and safety, and student/family engagement) as well as “opportunities to learn” – as the themes for each mission. Users completed activities, created and responded to “challenges” – questions or tasks posed by other users in the game, and earned points and PlanIt Tokens. All game content was translated into Spanish and Haitian-Creole, the two most prominent languages (besides English) spoken by BPS families.

Outcomes

Over the course of the 35-day game, over 400 community members signed up to play and set up user profiles – indicating a user “type,” gender, race, income and education level, and any custom “affiliations.” 260 users completed at least one activity in the game and left comments. Of these users, 104 were students, 64 parents, 19 teachers, 26 administrators, and 44 classified their user type as “other.” Only five played in Spanish, and zero played in Haitian Creole. As a percentage of all users, 40% (181 users) earned zero points, 29% (129 users) earned between 1 and 100 points, 18% (81 users) earned between 100 and 500 points, 7% (30 users) earned between 500 and 1000 points, and 6% (25 users) earned more than 1000 points. These 1000+ point “super-users” completed more than 40 activities each on average. And in many cases, their response to a single activity contained multiple-paragraph answers to extremely complex questions. It is noteworthy that there was no overlap between super-users and participants in the previous engagement process.

Feedback generated through Community PlanIt was significant. Over 2600 comments were entered into the system and hundreds of conversations started about everything from social media policy to racial bias in teaching. The Community PlanIt pilot provides evidence of the effectiveness of the general approach. The feedback generated by the system will factor into the decision-making process. And despite its failures in reaching difficult-to-reach populations, by a number of other measures, it surpassed expectations of non-technological approaches.

The game is currently being redesigned and redeployed in other contexts. On May 1, it will launch in Detroit as part of the Detroit Works Project’s efforts to engage the public in long-term planning. On May 3rd, it will launch in the City of Quincy, MA. And it is likely that the game will be used again in the Boston Public Schools as part of the district’s efforts to engage the public in issues of school assignment. Community PlanIt is illustrative of an approach to local community planning that incorporates the affordances of the web by focusing on networks, collaboration, and sharing. Planning is more than just a solicitation of feedback from the community. It is about creating conversations that are productive, sustainable and enriching.

This post was contributed by Eric Gordon, associate professor of new media and director of the Engagement Game Lab at Emerson College in Boston.

A visioning exercise at the beginning of an opportunity mapping project in Merced County, California.

The Communities of Opportunity model advocates for a fair investment in all of a region’s people and neighborhoods–to improve the life outcomes of all citizens, and to improve the health of entire regions. The Institute utilizes mapping and our Opportunity Communities model to address racial/social equity challenges, to promote community development for marginalized communities, and to affirmatively connect those communities to critical opportunity structures, such as successful schools, safe neighborhoods and sustainable employment.

Our organization’s signature approach based on this model is our Opportunity and Asset Mapping strategy. Opportunity and asset mapping creates composite maps based on numerous neighborhood indicators of community opportunity and vitality. Opportunity maps have been utilized in policy advocacy, litigation, applied research, community organizing, coalition building and to inform service delivery.

Opportunity mapping can delineate the needs, capacity and opportunities of marginalized communities, giving local partners and advocates a collaborative space for strategic planning and a communications tool. Mapping can provide an invaluable lens for identifying strategic points of investment, which is critical given the great needs (and limited resources) of marginalized communities. Mapping assets and need can also spur new thinking. This approach requires extensive engagement, involvement and participation of the various local community partners to be realized.

Our opportunity mapping projects have evolved over the past decade, originally centered on providing data-driven tools for policymakers. Our experiences doing this work in more than twenty states has illustrated the utility of utilizing opportunity mapping to also build capacity within communities. The impact of opportunity and asset mapping has been documented by many of our previous project partners. As described by our partners in Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts and Oregon:

“From an institutional perspective, involvement with this project has required us as an organization to reach out to potential partners we have not interacted with before. We have developed relationships with organizations working on issues such as smart growth, health disparities and education which have helped to inform and direct our fair housing work.”
-Erin Boggs, Deputy Director, Connecticut Fair Housing Center

“We have program outcome data on every program we fund, but we have never had a way to show impact upon a population or neighborhood. Opportunity mapping is a powerful tool that demonstrates the value of our work in a graphic and easy to understand way … our city budget continues to shrink but as we go forward we’ll be working on ways to refocus some of our investments.”
-Linda Lanier, Executive Director/CEO, Jacksonville Children’s Commission

“Within legal services, the mapping data is the foundation for a new place-based advocacy that seeks to bring intensive and comprehensive legal resources and social services to change outcomes in several low-opportunity zip codes or neighborhoods.”
-Fran Fajana, Director of the Race Equity Project, Massachusetts Law Reform Institute

“The story of how our maps were created resembles the children’s story Stone Soup, in which a hungry community started out with nothing but a pot of water with stones and ended up with a rich soup that fed everyone because each person contributed something. Creating these maps was a community building experience that promises to have benefits that go beyond the maps themselves.”
–Andree Tremoulet, Ph.D. Housing Services Specialist, Washington County, OR, Department of Community Development

(The quotes are from The Kirwan Institute Annual Report 2010/2011 and Poverty’s Place Revisited: Mapping for Justice & Democratizing Data to Combat Poverty, published in the July/August 2010 issue of the Clearinghouse Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy.)

Through collaboration with local partners, the Institute has utilized opportunity mapping initiatives to produce policy change and new investments to assist marginalized communities and promote community development. Some of these recent policy impacts include:

• Establishment of a minority business accelerator in the greater Cleveland region.
• Development of the Thompson v. HUD fair housing remedial proposal.
• Utilization of opportunity maps to target affordable housing investments in the City of Austin, TX.
• Establishment of a $5 million gap financing program to produce construction of affordable rental housing in high opportunity areas in Massachusetts.
• Targeting of $20 million in Neighborhood Stabilization Program investments into high- need, low- opportunity communities in Massachusetts.
• Adoption of a Community of Opportunity policy framework as guiding principles for the Connecticut Department of Housing and Community development.
• Adoption of a Community of Opportunity model for the Department of Community Development in Washington County, OR.
• Expansion and targeting of the Affordable Housing Trust Fund in Columbus, OH.
• Targeting of more than $10 million in revitalization program funding directed by the philanthropic community in Columbus, OH to marginalized neighborhoods.
• Adoption of opportunity- based school desegregation plans in Montclair, NJ and Louisville, KY.
• Revision of Ohio’s Equal Education Opportunity Policy to reflect contemporary legal parameters, including recommendations for diversifying K-12 schools and reducing racial isolation, all unanimously approved by the State’s Board of Education.
• Utilization of the opportunity and asset mapping framework to HUD funded regional sustainable communities’ plans in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, the Puget Sound Region and Connecticut.
• Adoption of the opportunity mapping methodology by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to assist with fair housing goals.

Opportunity mapping provides a framework and “space” for engaging a broad number of community stakeholders, while simultaneously focusing on the equity concerns of marginalized communities. To paraphrase Van Jones, sustainability means assuring we do not have a disposable society, meaning not only preservation of our natural resources, but also supporting our most important resource, people (and our human capacity). By understanding pathways to opportunity and seeking to open pathways to opportunity for all people, we assure that we support all people and a sustainable society.

This post was contributed by Jason Reece, Director of Research at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity.

A screenshot from the Engaging Plans software tool.

Providing an interactive website that encourages stakeholder input on public policies is a critical aspect of policy development. Historically, these systems have been expensive and time-consuming to set up. In spite of recent advances in the computerization of the public input process, planning officials still have had to rely on pricey custom-designed websites with features that were not always user- or manager-friendly.

One approach, exemplified by a new app designed by Urban Interactive Studio of Denver, is to use a website platform to create a customized website for each urban planning project. The Urban Interactive Studio app enables local planning agencies and planning firms to develop a customized micro-website tailored to specific projects to efficiently facilitate all of the external communication related to any project requiring public input.

The tool, EngagingPlans, is a hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that starts at a low monthly subscription price. It comes with extensive “out-of-the-box” functionality that can be enhanced with a number of optional modules. EngagingPlans has a smartphone app and can be integrated with social media sites. A user-friendly interface allows for easy content updating and activity monitoring.

EngagingPlans Public Engagement Features

You can think of EngagingPlans as a toolkit to help coordinate nearly any required or recommended element of public and stakeholder communication, including:

• sending announcements
• posting information
• collecting, managing, and responding to public comments
• managing surveys
• mapping
• displaying a project timeline and interactive calendar
• housing a document library
• maintaining a newsletter and blog

Renewing Will County, IL

Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Will County Illinois Land Use Department had the opportunity to update the County’s zoning and building ordinances with an eye toward encouraging environmentally sustainable practices including energy conservation. They chose to use the EngagingPlans web platform to engage the community and stakeholders in the process.

The website not only is attractive but is extremely robust with a wealth of project information, education material, event information, a project timeline, a contact sign-up feature, links to the project’s newsletters and blogs, and an annotated copy of the draft language under consideration in a format that allows for section by section public comment.

This annotation feature was used to collect public feedback throughout the comment period, supplementing the input from two open meeting workshops. Staff added comments of participants during the meetings, and they found it extremely useful to be able to download all the comments into a spreadsheet format in order to review, compare and process them.

Project coordinator David Dubois noted that, “EngagingPlans’ document annotation feature was a valuable tool to help us solicit and then address public and internal comments. We didn’t see it as a replacement for traditional public input through letters and public comment. But elected officials want us to go the extra mile to gather stakeholder input and this particular feature of EngagingPlans clearly did that.”

The EngagingPlans public engagement platform has been used by numerous municipalities across the country, most recently in Cincinnati; Burlington, Vermont; and Dunwoody, Georgia. It will soon be rolled out for a project by the City of Denver.

Chris Haller heads up Urban Interactive Studio, a technology consulting firm specializing in web and mobile solutions for urban planning agencies and firms. He is also the founder of EngagingCities where he helps urban planners understand and use the Internet and gives practical advice.

Balloon mapping kits are a good example of collaborative development in action.

Public Laboratory is made up of a diverse group of contributors, some working from their homes or garages, some from their workplaces or even university labs. What brings us together is the idea that open-source, collaborative development can result in inexpensive and accessible environmental sensing.

But to many, the way our community operates can be disorienting. We’ve approached these unique challenges in several ways.

Most people are familiar with collaborative development of textual works, such as co-authorship, or even mass co-authorship in projects such as Wikipedia. Software development is textual as well, and such communities are made possible by carefully tailored open-source licenses, which effectively stop any individual or organization from controlling the whole project.

By contributing to these works — say, an open-source web browser or an article on gumdrops — authors are assured attribution but cannot stop others from building upon their work, improving or adapting it for new uses. This works in part because each time programmers or Wikipedians contribute, their name is explicitly entered in a registry of sorts. By publishing their contributions, they give up a certain amount of control — of course, they’d almost certainly built upon the prior contributions of others who made the same choice.

Now imagine applying that system to non-textual works, such as a new kind of camera or a tool for detecting air pollution. The way Public Laboratory works, these designs are developed, tested and improved slowly through dozens of meet-ups, workshops, field events, and brainstorming sessions. At each meeting, participants agree to share their contributions in an open-source manner — but there is typically no explicit record of every contribution.

To compound this, journalists (not to mention partners and even funders) prefer hierarchical organizations so they can say things like “developed at MIT,” and they really love citing individuals, not nebulous groups of “contributors.” We’ve often had to insist on group attribution in the media, and developing a so-called “attribution infrastructure” is a major focus on our website.

Design for attribution

We recently launched a small set of new features on our website, PublicLaboratory.org, to address these challenges. While many people make use of our tools, as a community we’d like to highlight those who contribute improvements and share their knowledge with others. With that in mind, we’ve come up with some ways to track when Public Laboratory contributors actually post about their work on the PLOTS website.

Taking a cue from socially oriented open-source website Github.com, we’ve posted small graphs of the amount of activity on a given project over the past year. A quick look at these graphs shows how much activity they’ve seen in recent weeks, and gives visitors a sense of how dynamic a research community is involved in a particular project.

This box is shown on every Public Laboratory tool page or place page.

Above that graph, we’ve listed contributors and the number of posts they’ve made (which are tagged with the tool, i.e. “thermal-photography”. The intent here is not to make things competitive (though that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing) but to give people a sense of satisfaction that they’ve been a part of a communal effort, and a glimpse (to outsiders) of the number of people who have made the project happen.

By placing emphasis on the posting of content, we hope to highlight attribution for those who do good documentation and share it in a public venue — though anyone is welcome to use, adapt, repurpose, and improve upon Public Laboratory projects.

In order to be an active participant in our grassroots research efforts, you’ve got to reach out to others and share your work. This may not be natural for many people; contributors from many backgrounds are often accustomed to sole authorship credit, while others wonder who will care whether they publish or not. In a collaborative effort such as ours, however, success is gauged by how many others are able to leverage your work and reproduce or improve upon a set of tools you have contributed to. In an open-source context, seeing someone else replicate or adapt your work is a gratifying affirmation that your documentation and development work have resulted in legibility and accessibility for a potential collaborator, not an instance of plagiarism or infringement.

A network graph for the OpenStreetMap project shows the complex web of distributed contributions to a typical open-source project.

ShareAlike and Free Hardware

“Open source” means different things to different people, and with the above challenges in mind, it’s important to make some distinctions. Strictly speaking, open source just means that you publish the source files of your work — and in the case of hardware, the associated design files. A good open-source project will provide legible documentation and support for others who wish to read and understand those files. If you’ve heard of “free software” (we’ll invoke the refrain “free as in freedom, not as in beer” here), you might be familiar with its more stringent requirement that users have the right to “run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve” the software. This is the basis of our approach to open source, public, civic science — and it underlies our community’s aversion to proprietary non-free (in both senses of the word) software such as Photoshop or Google Earth.

The noted lack of such freedoms in the area of scientific equipment and instrumentation — and the barriers that creates for a more legible and participatory approach to science — is a major motivation for our work.

Finally (for now) there is the idea of requiring anyone who takes advantage of these freedoms (by downloading, adapting, modifying and improving) to share their work in turn, under the same license. This requirement, known variously as a “sharealike” or “copyleft” clause, can be controversial, as it explicitly requires people (and companies) to become producers, and not just users, of open-source works. With some exceptions for datasets and privacy considerations, we have adopted sharealike licenses across all Public Laboratory content, and are in the process of releasing even our hardware designs under a sharealike license, the CERN Open Hardware License.

While these ideas may be unfamiliar for many, they make it possible for diverse communities such as ours to develop complex technical systems in a way which attributes and protects contributors’ work, and ensures that these shared efforts remain public, accountable, and open to newcomers. They allow anyone to use PLOTS tools and techniques without needing to seek permission, while encouraging newcomers to contribute just as they benefit. They offer a public and grassroots alternative to closed, expensive, and proprietary systems of technology production which have resulted in a science that serves powerful and wealthy corporations above local communities and the underprivileged.

Such considerations are an important part of the PLOTS approach to building participatory environmental science collaborations. Ideally, our community’s works will inspire readers or viewers to apply civic science ideas to their own lives — adapting tools to local issues — and with luck, they will become active participants in our research community by sharing their work publicly. In time, some may go on to organize local civic science groups, further the development of PLOTS’ open-source tools, innovate new technologies or approaches to environmental monitoring, and challenge and refigure the very structure of participation.

This post was contributed by Jeffrey Warren, the creator of GrassrootsMapping.org and co-founder and Research Director for the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science.

Participatory mapping in action (the from TheCityFix blog, is by Lee Shiver.).

Engaging Cities blogs on a similar theme, writing about the use of maps in community decision-making.

The New York Times has a lengthy piece on IBM’s Smarter Cities implementation in Rio de Janeiro and IBM’s vision of a data-driven city.

We keep coming across more info about the new crop of massive, multi-touch, multi-user tables, including a promotional video from Ideum on their MT55 Pro 55″ (with a “vandal-proof case”), starting at $22,000. Yes, we are drooling.

NCDD reports on a Chris Quigley presentation about using gamification to support digital engagement.

Augmented reality technology continues moving forward. Although the tools they use here – a promotional app for a hotel – are pretty advanced, they give a sense of where AR technology is headed and the types of applications that might be useful in a decision-making context.

Open Source Planning offers some thoughts on open data and on the hype around City 2.0. It’s helpful to us in thinking about our upcoming “Community Engagement in Intelligent Cities” panel at the American Planning Association conference in April.

Ascentum makes an argument about validating the economic case for public involvement in policy decisions.

InCommon mentions a new e-commenting system adopted by the City of Arcata, CA. The Granicus system allows community members to submit comments online in response to the agenda items listed for the next public meeting of the City Council or other public bodies. We’ve been using the system in Golden, Colorado for a couple of years now, and while its functionality is pretty basic and use by Golden residents is pretty minimal, it does offer another channel for providing comments. It’s really just a web-based commenting system, though, and doesn’t break any decision-making ground.

And this time-lapse video from the International Space Station made the Roundup just because it’s cool.

What else did we miss?

Participants worked in small groups to explore potential outcomes of various scenarios. Here they are using CommunityViz to compare alternatives.

An innovative planning process in Medford and Somerville completed last year demonstrated the power of new tools to facilitate an informed discussion, such as keypad polling, 3D modeling, and interactive workshops. The process utilized a broad outreach strategy featuring a variety of traditional and new outreach methods including city and community mailing lists, outreach to local television and print media, social media, and community meetings.

The Green Line Extension is a planned extension of an existing subway line in Boston that would result in new transit stations in Somerville and Medford. Although questions about financing remain, the major engineering and design of the extension is largely complete. The prospect of new transit stations has raised concerns about the challenges — and opportunities — it will create for the neighborhoods it will serve.

Although the current phase is planned to end at College Avenue in Medford, there is continued interest to extend the service to Mystic Valley Parkway. MassDOT contracted with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council to conduct a community visioning process for this potential new station. (Disclaimer: I work for MAPC but was not involved in this project directly).

Through several public workshops, community members explored topics of opportunity and concern and provided MAPC staff with ideas about what they would like to see developed in the station area. MAPC staff used this community input to develop alternative visions for four focus areas around the station. A model was developed in CommunityViz containing 3D models along with benefit and impact assumptions for each alternative.

An example of a CommunityViz visualization.

The process resulted in a vision for the station area that emphasizes neighborhood connections and housing, jobs, and tax revenues from new mixed-use development.

Learn more about the project and review meeting materials on the MAPC website or the MassDOT website.

This post was contributed by Rob Goodspeed, a PhD student at the M.I.T. Department of Urban Studies and Planning with the Urban Information Systems program group and part-time research analyst at the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council.