While at New Partners for Smart Growth, I had Matthew Baker of ESRI show me a couple of neat tricks for sketch based feedback in ArcGIS.  Using a series of free add-ins and some customizations [link forthcoming], he is able to get some nice feedback directly inside ArcGIS.  He does this using a Wacom DTU -2231 Tablet made for GIS applications.

If you like sketch based planning applications, also check out our interview with Doug Walker of Placeways, the creators of CommunityViz.

Cross-posted on PlaceMatters’ blog

Tonight, I realized a very important part of public process and civic engagement that struck me: chaos.  No, the meeting didn’t break down with people yelling at each other.  Rather, the opposite, the agenda seemed to break down toward the end, but in a way that seemed very organic and genuine.  After over an hour of intense table work that ran long, there was supposed to be time for every table to circulate and hear what the other tables had done.  Although we still did this on an accelerated schedule, I was struck by the conversations that happened in between the scheduled event.  What seemed to be a break from the agenda was actually an informal sharing among participants of the work that was done that night.  These in between and side conversations, while not part of the agenda, are very important to building the community around the process that will own this work long after the meetings are over.

While it is important to respect people’s time, I would argue that allowing for these occasional breaks in the “official” agenda is not a failure of process.  In fact, it can point to the exact opposite.  A complete failure tonight would have been exhaustion and fatigue to the point of frustration.  This is not the energy I felt in the room tonight.  Being flexible in a process is probably as important as being well prepared (and really they are one in the same).  Levity, humility, and honesty are important things to embody in any process and can keep a facilitator from the insanity of process fatigue.

Sometimes the agenda doesn’t follow the plan, but that’s okay, I think.  As facilitators of any process around some of the most pressing, complex issues of our time, we need to cultivate a little chaos.

These images were used in public meetings, reports and applications for funding around mixed income development projects.

We currently run most of our meetings using web-connected laptops, a note-taker, a facilitator, keypads, and lots of tape and power cords. That last part is what we want to get rid of. We have been using AnyWare (an internally developed brainstorming tool) to collect feedback from a large group of people and poll on issues on the fly. Our interest in this is to reduce the level of public meeting fatigue by making the meetings iterative and productive toward a set of next steps or actions. We want to reduce the cost per participant in a public process while increasing the quality of the feedback and interaction. As such, our goal is not to remove the public meeting altogether but to augment it with innovative web applications that can help move a meeting toward real results and lower the amount of recording, synthesis and reporting that normally happens after a meeting.

Right now, the live collection of notes has been working well for us, but it lacks a group view of the notes as they are entered. We have worked around this by either having people gather around the computer screen when finalizing notes, or by having a facilitator work off a flipchart.

Our ideal vision of the electronic public meeting is to go completely battery powered and add pico projectors to the mix for visual feedback of what is happening on the computer. We believe we can accommodate up to 100 people for less than a one-time $10,000 investment. This investment involves 10 $350 netbook computers (9 to 11 hour life on one charge), 10 pico projectors, 20 projector battery packs (at 1.5 hours a charge), and 10 replacement netbook batteries to extend the life of the investment. Altogether, the cost of this investment is $9,549.

This is our ideal setup, but throw away the extra batteries and you can get the investment down to about $7,769. Don’t need to run 100 person public meetings, that cost can go down even further to $3,639 for 50 person meetings.

Our goal at PlaceMatters is to push the interactive public meeting into common practice and make the barriers to entry low enough that any planning department can run one with a very low amount of friction. With a completely wireless setup, there will be no more taping and running cords in complex arrays just to get every table powered up.

In an effort to upgrade our public meetings we are beginning a small capital campaign to fund this investment. We believe in ground testing our theories and will use the equipment to enhance the work we do around the country and to develop materials that other planners can use to do this on our own. We believe in developing and sharing best practices and your tax-deductible donation will help us contribute to the community of practitioners that are advancing effective and efficient public meetings.

Fill in the box below to donate to this program. $25 is just suggested, but you can fill in any amount.  This is cross posted on PlaceMatters’ blog.

Our primary focus has been in creating a tool that can help us reflect back the common themes that emerged from everyone in the room to a much larger group (and in real time).  The ability to show people that their ideas aren’t so different is incredibly powerful.  Early indications in our own work show it has the ability, when used correctly, to re-introduce honesty into typically broken processes.  It can help bridge groups of people who typically don’t trust each other (i.e. local governments and neighborhood groups) and it can excite people about the possibilities.  I wish this tool were far more developed during national conversations about health care.

Every time we’ve used AnyWare in our own work, I’ve grown increasingly excited about the tool’s potential.  AnyWare will be focused around three major features:

1. Collection of unstructured ideas
2. Analysis of unstructured ideas to provide meaning and context
3. Evaluation of ideas by large groups of people through polling and other methods

The second point is still under a lot of development, but using emerging web APIs allows us to parse text for semantic meaning and add a whole new level of understanding to thousands of unstructured comments.

Our basic collection system works well and we can poll ideas on the fly using a web based polling interface that works with traditional audience response keypads, text messaging, smart phones, and the web.

Here’s a 2 minute introduction:

AnyWare Planning Brainstorming and Keypad Polling from PlaceMatters on Vimeo.

If you work in any field where this would be useful, please sign up for our closed beta over at http://www.anywarepolling.com.  Click on the “Request an Invite” button and fill out your name and email address.  Invitations are not guaranteed and are limited.  If you know someone that would find this useful, please forward this on to them. And leave me a comment below.

While the efforts of the administration are acknowledged and praised, many in the transparency movement (including Sunlight) want to make sure these efforts are enshrined in law and culture.  To accomplish this, Sunlight outlines at least three things needed for an open government:

Transparency Laws requiring public government data to be published online and in real time – accessible to any citizen, at any time from any location.

Transparency tools harnessing the latest online and mobile technology, allowing citizens, journalists and bloggers to search, sort, mash and make use of government data.

A Transparency Movement of citizens advocating for online, real-time access to public government data, and engaging with government in new ways to hold government accountable and make it work better for them.

The first point was recently addressed with the announcement of the Public Online Information Act (POIA), which is being introduced by Rep. Steve Isreal.  Basically, the POIA:

requires Executive Branch agencies to publish all publicly available information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats. It also creates an advisory committee to help develop government-wide Internet publication policies.

Here is a brief video describing the law:

As for tools, the Sunlight Foundation sponsors an open source lab where government data is mashed up in all sorts of ways.  For example, over at the labs, they used Socrata to share a list of White House visitors (released by the administration) cross referenced with lobbyist logs provided by the Center for Responsive Politics.  You can also download an iPhone app, Real Time Congress, to see what’s going on on the House and Senate floors throughout the day, including reading the text of bills under consideration.

On the final point about a transparency movement, Sunlight is launching their national campaign this Thursday, March 18.  This is a grassroots movement to educate and inspire people around what transparency can do for open government.

I like the approach that Sunlight is taking because they acknowledge that a more open government requires not just legislation, but an informed citizenry equipped with the right tools to make use of the data to create powerful information.  They are attempting to create an ecosystem of transparency that could have profound effects on government.

Free data is not in of itself a good thing without the skills to interpret and extract value from that data.  Many would rather keep government data locked away in paper formats that are hard or expensive to get at.  Many organizations, including lobby groups are in a better position to manipulate that kind of data.  Data that is free and online will not rid us of spin altogether, but it will be easier to hold the spinners accountable.  That’s why the “Campaign for Transparency” is so important, because it begins the process of shifting our culture to understand how to act and respond to a transparent government.  Imagine, as Daniel Roth did in Wired Magazine, if SEC data were accessible in easy to use online formats that allowed anyone to peer into public financial reports.  Would someone sitting at a desk in Topeka, KS have discovered a flaw early enough in the system to bring national attention to it?

Why do I care so much about this?  Because it fits perfectly into my life ambition to bring people more wholly and effectively into civic engagement.  It aligns well to the work we do at PlaceMatters as good data is incredibly important to an informed planning process.

I realized immediately that I wanted to put my thoughts into words when I walked up to the gate at DIA and saw the word “Philadelphia”. Just the word gives me comfort; I like the way it’s spelled, the way it sounds, and all the memories it conjures. This is when I realized that place is more than a location. Place is all the experiences, smells, tastes, sights, and sounds. Place is love lost and love found, lessons learned, laughter and tears. Place is a movie and blanket on a cold day in your downtown apartment; place is a kiss on Walnut Street; place is children’s laughter on an early fall day in Rittenhouse Square.

I will carry with me forever the taste of a real Philly Cheesesteak, memories of disinterested customer service, the way people say “Fuladelfia,” the rabid sports fans (more rabid than most places on this planet, save soccer fans in Europe), and the hot, humid days of summer that make you want to shower three times a day.

Philadelphia, whether on the periphery or in the center, was part of my life for 24 years. Arguably, it still is part of my life. As I’ve realized, you can take the boy out of Philly, but you can’t take the Philly out of the boy. My new home, Denver, is not any less important, just newer. After a week of travel for work, coming back to Denver is comfort. The skyline and mountains are imagery that will be imprinted with me whenever I decide to take the next journey. And the friends I’ve found there have built new memories that will make this place yet another so hard to leave but exciting to return.

Planners often boil place down to the basics, forgetting the intangibles that make a place. It is a tough balance though. Tearing down grandma’s house may open up the building of new memories for 100 new people, but tearing down a memory is an awful struggle we see play out over and over at planning meetings and in courts all the time. Planners look at streets, setbacks, uses, and transit. These are all possibly dry topics, but a good planner connects these to the very real interactions we have in a place. Planning is about building the infrastructure of memories and experience. It is an exciting prospect, but one that planners miss in the process of planning.