LimeWire Creator Brings Open-Source Approach to Urban Planning | Epicenter from Wired.com

Yule Heibel's personal annotations on this page

Lampertina bookmarked on 2009-02-01 wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation

Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
QUOTE
You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative -- these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
UNQUOTE
Yes!

"P2P-to-people" initiative
The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.
"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he's in talks with the city
to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do
a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and
figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid
greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that
barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of
a private company that provides sub-par support.
- Lampertina on 2009-02-01
  
  Yes!
The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.

While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.

"It didn't really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are.

This link has been bookmarked by 17 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Jan 2009, by Joseph Schaeffer.

04 Mar 09

Drew Gatlin
Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools.

sustainability urban planning open source web 2.0
12 Feb 09

Michel Bauwens
great profile of the living cities movement

P2P-Cities P2P-Transportation P2P-Urbanism P2P-Architecture P2P
03 Feb 09

Michael Staton
founder of limewire builds grassroots public planning site.

grassroots public planning open planning project limewire
pollo te
ideas opensource
02 Feb 09

mailforlen yahoo
01 Feb 09

Carrie Ashendel
Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools.

Bookmarks_Menu Articles Potential_Jobs_Careers
Yule Heibel
Mark Gorton, software entrepreneur, turns to urban planning (transportation, specifically), using opensource to revolutionize planning.
QUOTE
You might call it a "P2P-to-people" initiative -- these efforts to make cities more people-friendly are partly funded by people sharing files.

That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

"99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
UNQUOTE
Yes!

wired_magazine mark_gorton open_source local_government urbanplanning cities limewire transportation
- "P2P-to-people" initiative
- The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.
- 3 more annotations...
- - "99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym," Wright says. "Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards... [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field."
  - San Francisco, whose MUNI bus system is a frequent target of criticism, could be next to get the treatment. Gorton says he's in talks with the city
    to supply transit routing software for MUNI that will do
    a much better job of keeping track of where people are going and
    figuring out how best to get them there. San Francisco "overpaid
    greatly" for a badly-supported proprietary closed-source system that
    barely works, according to Gorton, putting the city under the thumb of
    a private company that provides sub-par support.
    Yule Heibel on 2009-02-01
    
    Yes!
  - The quest to bring open-source software to real-world urban planning continued, following the clearance of a key hurdle: Before you can build a transportation model, you need to know where the roads are.
    
    While public, that data was locked by private software used by public organizations and suffered from an overall lack of standards. Thus was born GeoServer, an open-source, Java-based software server that lets anyone view and edit geo-spatial data. Road information can now be painstakingly imported once from proprietary systems or entered from scratch, double-checked by other users, and rolled out to anyone who needs the data.
    
    "It didn't really exist before," said Gorton. "Most of the data was run on software from a company called Esri. Government agencies have this data, but it's all running on proprietary systems and you couldn't get access to it, or it was very hard to get access to it." GeoServer now runs in thousands of places around the world for all sorts of reasons, according to Gorton, whenever an online app needs to know where roads are.
31 Jan 09

czapigaj
Business books Publishing
30 Jan 09

Eric Rice
Jessen Felix
open government crowdsourcing educ538
James de Haan
Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools.

Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them into projects to make urban transportation safer, faster and more sustainable.

wired.com limewire epicenter open source urban planning
Joseph Schaeffer
Entrepreneur Mark Gorton wants to do for people what he already helped do for files: move them from here to there in the most efficient way possible using open-source tools.